Worth repeating!

Worth repeating! (2011, 28’min) is a film about the music of the Ouldémé people in the Mandara mountains, North of Cameroon and the relation with daily life, especially the production of millet. Music which expresses their worldview: the unity of man and nature, the cyclical thinking and the importance of the group above the individual.

One of the characteristics of the Ouldémé music is the endless repetition of the polyphonic melodies, which are mainly played on flutes and trumpets of natural materials like reed, bamboo, wood and horns. At each stage of the agricultural cycle, there are different instruments and specific structured melodies played, in the rainy season, the dry season and during the time of flirting and marriage that culminates in the annual communal wedding festival.

The highly repetitive, polyphonic music is collectively performed on flutes and trumpets made of natural materials (bamboo, reed, wood, bark, zebu, buffalo and antelope horns). The special character of their flute music is that the melody is made as a group. The musicians takes turns playing one note of the melody, while the others rest. A melody is played together with the group in a lightning-fast alternation of notes. Only as a group the music is satisfactory.

Worth repeating! is an ultimate experience of minimal music. The film premiered on the opening night of the World Minimal Music Festival at the Muziekgebouw  aan 't IJ in Amsterdam on March 30, 2011, with the presence of Steve Reich, one of the most prominent composers of the twentieth century.

Dutch newspaper, the Volkskrant:

’A flute on its own doesn’t sound good’, says one of the members of the Ouldémé tribe in ‘Worth Repeating!’  In this fascinating documentary, Miranda van der Spek portrays a still pristine music culture in Cameroon…. It is ‘minimal music avant la lettre’ and therefore the film is the perfect opening of the World Minimal Music Festival…’

World Minimal Music Festival

In 2011, the WMMF took place for the second time in the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ, Amsterdam and in the Muziekgebouw Frits Philips in Eindhoven. The Festival focuses on developments within minimal music: a genre within composed music that is characterised by the prolonged repetition of – often short – musical motifs, with subtle variations and shifts. A style of music that originated in the late 1960s among Western ‘classical’ composers. The structural models of African (Steve Reich) and Indian (Philip Glass, Terry Riley) music were a great source of inspiration for these composers. The music gave the audience a trance-like experience, a sense of community, an important element in the culture of those years.

Percussionist and composer Arnold Marinissen programs the festival in collaboration with Tino Haenen. In his research into forms of minimal music, he came across the music of de Ouldémé. He discovered recordings made by musicologist Nathalie Fernando from Montréal, who spent ten years researching polyphonic music in northern Cameroon. Based on the local music of the Ouldémé people from Cameroon, Marinissen decided to ask two renowned ensembles (Asko | Schönberg and Lunapark) to perform compositions based on traditional music from the Mandara Mountains. Filmmaker Miranda van der Spek was approached to make the opening film about music by the Ouldémé as a prelude to the programme.

Filmmaker Miranda van der Spek

Miranda van der Spek trained as a visual anthropologist made this documentary based on the knwoledge and investigation of musicologist Nathalie Fernando, who studied the polyphonic music of the mandara mountains for a decade. With the help of Fernando’s knowledge and network, Miranda made this captivating documentary, about music that has hardly been influenced by the Islamization and globalization that is going on in the region. A musical portrait in which the filmmaker has managed to reflect the typical ’trance’ character of minimal music in the choice of images, the structure of the film and in the rhythm of the editing.

2011: Worth repeating!: newspaper Volkskrant en Parool