page_title: Andrew Tracey
section_title: Ethnomusicology
hierarchical_section_title: Andrew Tracey / Ethnomusicology
caption_attribution_description: English: My son Tim Holdaway took this photo for me in 2005, and we release this photograph into the public domain.
context_page_description: Andrew Tracey, born 5 May 1936, Durban, South Africa, is a South African ethnomusicologist, promoter of African music, composer, folk singer, band leader, and actor. His father, Hugh Tracey, pioneered the study of traditional African music in the 1920s–1970s, created the International Library of African Music in 1954, and started the company African Musical Instruments which manufactured the first commercial kalimbas in the 1950s. Andrew Tracey continued and complemented the work of his father Hugh Tracey in a variety of ways. With brother Paul Tracey, he co-wrote and performed in the world musical revue Wait a Minim! which travelled around the world for seven years. With his father and brother Paul, Andrew wrote the first instructional materials for the Hugh Tracey kalimbas which were being sent around the world in the 1960s. Upon his father's death in 1977, Andrew took over his father's role as director of ILAM, which he filled until his retirement in 2005, and his wife Heather Tracey took over the role of director of AMI until 1999.
context_section_description: When Andrew returned to Africa in 1969, he quickly got back to his research on African music, carrying on as an associate at ILAM under his father. His field research centred on Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Uganda, South Africa, and Namibia, focused on the playing technique of members of the mbira and xylophone families. A highlight of Andrew's research was the identification of the lower course of tines on the karimba (i.e., Jege Tapera's mbira nyunga nyunga) as the logical ancestor of essentially all mbiras. Those eight notes can be traced through every mbira and karimba played in the Zambezi Valley, and those eight notes form the core of all kalimba music in that region, which is considered to be the birthplace of the metal-tined kalimba about 1300 years ago. Andrew Tracey asserts that the first written account of the kalimba by Portuguese missionary Father Dos Santos, in Mozambique in 1589, was in essence these eight notes. Other instruments, such as the mbira, or the modern karimba (mbira nyunga nyunga), are based on those eight notes, with other notes and other courses of notes having been added over the centuries. While it is impossible to say when those eight notes first started appearing in kalimbas, Andrew's work convinces that the note layout of the karimba is truly ancient and gave rise to all other kalimbas in the region.
  In the 1980s Andrew made a design for a 17-note karimba, based on Tapera's 15-note instrument, using the same hardware as the Hugh Tracey treble kalimba, and AMI began selling it as the African Tuned Karimba.
  While Andrew's seven-year stint performing in a Broadway musical did not leave any time for ethnomusicological research, Andrew's studies at ILAM did allow him to perform. In 1969 when he returned to Africa, he started the Andrew Tracey Steel Pan Band, which performed around Grahamstown and South Africa and in festivals such as the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown until 2007.
caption: The Hugh Tracey Karimba, made by African Musical Instruments.
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