No small triumph

The ancient polyphony and polyrhythmy of central Africa will collide on stage with Western music next week. Michael Church meets the man who for decades has championed the songs of the Pygmies

There are many reasons for attending Gyorgy Ligeti's 80th-birthday bash at the Barbican next week - ranging from pieces which featured in the soundtrack for 2001: A Space Odyssey to his rarely performed opera Le Grand Macabre - but the most compelling is an unprecedented event: a workshop stage will be shared in turn, and on strictly equal terms, by a pianist playing Ligeti's ferociously complex Etudes, and by a Pygmy ensemble from the forests of Central Africa. No allowances will be made for the latter: the audience will find - and there's a CD to prove it - that, despite their dramatically differing provenance, the two musics are equivalent.

The nomadic Aka Pygmies make small encampments on the edge of settled villages, and work as labourers for their "tall" neighbours. Music is an inextricable part of their life, and not only as entertainment: they drum, clap, and yodel during their rituals for hunting and honey-collecting, for striking camps and for inaugurating new ones. Their music was noted by an Egyptian chronicler in 2,500 BC, and recordings have long passed from hand to hand among Western connoisseurs, who marvel at its multi-layered complexity: Ligeti's own compositions have been deeply influenced by it. Simultaneous melodies create a dense web of sound, while rapid rhythms cut across each other to create new "implied" rhythms, and it's all done without the assistance of written notation or a composer - both of which were essential to Western music's lift-off five centuries ago.

The modern discoverer of this miracle - the Israeli musicologist Simha Arom - will introducing the Pygmies and commenting on the links between their music and Ligeti's compositions at the Barbican next week. For this former orchestral horn-player, the event marks the culmination of a 40-year crusade which began when he leaned out of his hotel window in Bangui and heard some visiting Pygmy musicians in the garden below. "It was a shock," he says. "It made my spine tingle. How could these people play such complex music without a conductor? For me, that was as deep a musical experience as first hearing the music of Bartok. Right from the beginning, I sensed that this music existed in us all, like some Jungian archetype." He got to know the musicians, learned their language, and began to analyse what they did. "I noticed that they knew instantly when a wrong note was played. That meant they had rules. And if you have rules, you have a theory. But their theory was implicit - they didn't know they had one, because they couldn't express it in words. I made it my job to discover that theory, to establish the grammar of their music." To notate it, he hit on a strategy which is now finding many uses: first he recorded the full ensemble, then he played the tape (through headphones) to each musician in turn, getting them to perform (for his recorder) their particular part in the whole. Yet his discovery has taken many years to be recognised in the West.

The current collaboration was inspired by that most adventurous of classical pianists, Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Offered carte blanche to stage any event of his devising at the Châtelet theatre in Paris, he decided to make a present to his mentor, Ligeti, of a concert by the African musicians Ligeti adored, but had never seen. Their pieces would alternate with pieces Ligeti had written under their inspiration, which Aimard himself would play.

Aimard is a one-off. The Messiaens made him their "adoptive son" when he was just 12; Boulez installed him as house pianist to the Ensemble InterContemporain when he was 19; Brendel sees him as his alter ego; and Ligeti has chosen him as the ideal exponent of his horrendously difficult music. Aimard's tutor Maria Curcio attributes his pianistic genius to the combination of his "profound musicality and very special brain", and cites his ability to read the most complex score as though it was a mere sonatina.

Surrounded by the Western scores and Eastern instruments which fill his house in Paris, he exudes bright-eyed evangelism: "That invitation from the Châtelet offered a unique chance. I thought, right, we're entering a new century, so let's see what new cultural connections we can make. Ligeti himself first made me listen to the Pygmies; a treasury where I least expected to find one. It was extraordinary to find so-called primitive music had the complexity we ourselves were striving for. And it was a valuable lesson for us - for whom music has been commodified - to see how refined it can be when its function is purely social." And the contrasts between these parallel worlds spoke volumes. "A Western composer consciously applies a principle: the Pygmies embody it unconsciously. We produce music on stage for listeners; they sing for themselves, and for the spirits. The Pygmies don't have the capacity to criticise and compare, they have no notion of professionalism. But as we know to our cost, professionalism can kill the artistic spark."

Aimard's first collaborative concert with the pygmies was recorded and put on CD: "It involved much cutting and editing, since nobody quite knows when one piece ends and the next begins." This concert at the Barbican, at which his student Tamara Stefanovich will be at the keyboard, should put the Pygmies centre-stage. "But this is not a show," Aimard warns. "It is simply something to be heard." What message would he like the audience to take away with them? "That's not for me to say. I am not cooking them a ready-made meal. They will draw what conclusions they want."

Ask Simha Arom the same question, however, and the glint of battle comes into his eye. "This has been my dream for years. Nobody before has ever wanted to have this combination of "contemporary" and "primitive" on the same stage, or on the same record. People have always said "What a fantastic idea", but they have always found some reason not to do it. Composers themselves have refused - I will not name them, but they know who they are. This concert should help to change people's ideas about "primitive" people's capabilities. To put it bluntly," he asserts, "we're working against racism."

Ligeti himself has issued a ringing endorsement, extolling the paradoxical nature of Pygmy polyphony and polyrthythms: "What we witness in this music is a wonderful combination of order and disorder, which in turn... produces a sense of order on a higher level." Yet Arom is right: there are still plenty of Western-classical pundits around who regard non-Western music as unworthy of serious scrutiny. This battle is not yet won.

But there's another battle, of greater importance, that may, sadly, be lost. The Pygmies' environment is being systematically destroyed by war and the timber trade, and insofar as their hunting and gathering activities come to an end, so will the associated rituals - and so, therefore, will their music. Unesco is considering designating Pygmy polyphony a "world heritage" art, but governmental support from the Central African Republic - ironically vigorous under the reviled Emperor Bokassa - has dwindled to nothing. There are no Pygmy musicologists; and those Pygmies who forsake their poverty-stricken roots for a life in the mainstream are unlikely to return with a mission to preserve their culture.

So we're looking at a priceless but doomed phenomenon. Mock the world-music romantics all you like, but accept that conserving this music, even out of context, is a hugely valuable thing to do.

'African Rhythms', by Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the Aka Pygmies, is on Teldec records. The Pygmies are at the Barbican, London EC2 (020 7638 8891; www.barbican.org.uk), on 19 October at 3.30pm, and at 6.30pm in the foyer