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AFRICAN STRINGED INSTRUMENTS

The richness of African musical styles is matched only by the continent’s enormous variety of musical instruments. While most instruments in Africa serve roles that go beyond simple entertainment, stringed instruments in particular have long played a role in maintaining oral traditions, preserving genealogies, and accompanying religious and ritual ceremonies. Although there are hundreds of different types of stringed instruments across the continent, they can broadly be divided into into bowed (fiddles), plucked (harps, lutes, zithers, harp-lutes, harp-zithers) and beaten (musical bows, earth-bows) types.

The kora, the long-necked harp lute of the Mandinka people, is by far the most well known in the West, and since the 1970s its ethereal sound has conquered the global stage. The orutu is one of many bowed string instruments played across Africa. By far the most common is the goje or “Hausa Violin” and its many variations, a one or two stringed fiddle traditionally tied to pre-Islamic rituals in the Sahel and Sudan. Lutes are found in many different parts of Africa. Lyres are most typical of northeastern Africa, both as traditional instruments and in their updated, “modernized” versions. The krar (a five-or-six stringed bowl-shaped lyre tuned to the pentatonic scale) for example is still commonly played by traditional storytellers.
Zithers are another instrument with plucked strings but, unlike the lute, they have no neck. Different types of zither can be found in various parts of Africa, but are by far most common in Madagascar, where the valiha tube zither, constructed with 21 and 24 strings made by unwound bicycle brake cable tied through nails, running the length of a long bamboo pole, is considered a national instrument.

Many stringed instruments across Africa play specific social roles: some serve ritual or religious purposes, while others can only be played by people of a certain age, s*x, or status. In the Luo community from Western Kenya for example only men are traditionally allowed to play the orutu, while among Moorish griots of Mauritania the ardine is only played by women. But music is living and breathing, sounds are constantly evolving and traditions are being challenged. In Kenya Labdi Ommes has taken up the orutu, combining it with electronic music and jazz, and exposing a whole new generation to this traditional instrument. And while some ancient string instruments have been lost, others are being “rediscovered” by younger generations, modernized and incorporated into different genres.

Citation

African musical instruments". Contemporary African Art

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We know about true JOY benifits!

But look at the brain benifits of drumming 🪘🌿

Drumming gives you a full brain workout… join one of our 2 weekly classes and join our Drum
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WESTERN MUSIC ISN'T WHAT YOU THINK

Or how my views on culture proved to be all wet

/// Around 1990, I started researching the social history of music. I knew this was a big topic, but I had no idea how big.

As it turned out, this project kept me busy for the next 25 years.

I was crazy to do this. I was trying to understand the role of music in human life going back to prehistoric times, and hoped to follow its evolution until the present day. This demanded intense multidisciplinary research at a scope beyond anything I’d attempted before.

Nobody wanted me to take on this mission. In fact, I’ve never faced such resistance in anything I’ve ever done.

Every publisher and editor I met during that period asked me to write about jazz—because my book The History of Jazz was a big seller and they wanted another book just like it.

When I tried to enlist their support for my bigger project, speaking in rapturous terms about music as a source of enchantment and change agent in human life, their eyes glazed over.

They didn’t want to hear it.

But I was persistent. This project was my obsession, and my motivation kept getting recharged—because I was learning things about music that other experts had missed.

Most of my breakthroughs came through sheer perseverance, and relentless digging into primary sources (usually outside of the music field) that my peers had never even considered consulting.

Even today, I reap benefits from this intense work. I gained a deep understanding of how culture impacts actual flesh-and-blood people—that’s the core of my expertise. I often draw on it for what I publish on The Honest Broker.

But it took me fifteen years before I was ready to share the first results of this massive research project—Work Songs (2006) and Healing Songs (2006). Almost a decade elapsed before I was ready to publish the final installment of this trilogy, Love Songs (2015). These works, encompassing the entire history of human song, prepared me to write Music: A Subversive History (2019).

I believe this is the core of my life’s work.

The book I’m currently publishing in installments on Substack, Music to Raise the Dead, is the culmination of this enormous endeavor. It presents nothing less than an alternative musicology—a powerful way of transforming songs into sources of enchantment and a life-changing force for individuals, communities, and entire societies.

I’ve learned many things during the course of this work, but one of the most surprising relates to how musical innovations take place.

I repeatedly encountered exciting new song styles emerging in port cities, border regions, and the fringes of society—both geographical fringes and poor fringe population groups.

The best known examples come from the Americas. The dominance of US commercial music in the last hundred years relies, to an extraordinary degree, on African Americans. Their contributions led directly to jazz, blues, soul, hiphop, R&B, Afro-Cuban music, and a range of other important idioms.

Put simply, the most impoverished, marginalized people had the greatest impact on the music.

I always just took that for granted. But it’s surprising, no?

In the course of my research, I kept encountering the same influence of the outsider. I found it everywhere from the emergence of secular songs in Deir el-Medina in ancient Egypt to the rise of tango in Buenos Aires or reggae in Jamaica.

The outsider is everywhere in music history.

Consider, for example, the names of the musical modes—something else I long took for granted. They are named after population groups, but who were the Aeolians, the Lydians, and the Phrygians?

They were slave groups, conquered by the Greeks in Asia Minor. The Greeks also named some modes after themselves, but the more unusual or controversial modes were associated with slave musicians.

They don’t teach you this in music school.

So the next time you hear somebody talk about the building blocks of Western harmony, show them the map below. It’s not as Western as they think.

They will see that a dialogue between insiders and outsiders was shaping European music long before Europe even existed as a concept.

Now let’s examine the origin of the Western lyric song. The most significant innovator in the history of this idiom is Sappho, a singer-songwriter (if I can use the current-day terminology) who lived on the island Le**os, circa 600 BC.

But Le**os is on the absolute fringe of Europe, and is even today an entry point into the continent from West Asia. In 2015 alone, a half million migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq arrived on Le**os.

It’s safe to assume that Le**os was also home to a diverse population in Sappho’s day, with strong ties to West Asian musical traditions.

You might say that Le**os is like New Orleans, where jazz originated. The ingredients for innovation were the same in both instances:

- Located at a port on a major trade route
- At a border point or boundary between countries/cultures
- Boasting a diverse, multicultural population

New Orleans was the most diverse city in the United States at the time when jazz emerged. The population drew from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America—and this diversity was further supported by a constant flow of trade and visitors via the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s no coincidence that jazz happened here. This is precisely the kind of city where new musical styles evolve.

But let’s go back to Europe—because the story gets more interesting.

The most significant innovation in Western love songs after Sappho came from the French troubadours during the late medieval era. But how much of this music originated in France?

I was shocked to learn, during the course of researching my book Love Songs, that this deeply personal approach to singing about romantic love actually originated in Baghdad among female slave singers—slaves again as song innovators! And it only entered Europe via Spain after the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.

From there, the song styles came to the south of France, and then got disseminated throughout Europe. The French nobility took all of the credit, and most books still present the story from that perspective. But in reality, innovation took place at the fringes, and entered Europe via outsiders.

I’ve written elsewhere about Córdoba, which had the largest population of any European city in the 11th century. That surprises many people—but Córdoba had more people than London, Rome, and Paris combined.

Take a guess at answering this question: What were the five most populous cities in Europe in the year 1050 AD?

- Córdoba
- Palermo
- Seville
- Salerno
- Venice

Let’s put those cities on a map.

This is where secular culture emerged in Europe, laying the foundation for Western humanism and the Renaissance. But you’re gazing at Palermo and scratching your head.

Yet it’s true: Palermo had a population ten times as large as Rome back then.

I need to emphasize this point: the exciting centers of European culture during its formative years were port cities, or borderlands, or other multicultural centers. Innovation came into Europe from outsiders, especially via the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas.

Just stop and think for a moment about the importance of Venice in the history of music. Everything from madrigals to operas found their home in that bustling port city—a key connecting point between West and East in the modern imagination.

And what about Rome? In ancient times, Rome had been a dominant source of culture and innovation—but that only happened when all roads led to Rome (as the proverb goes). When Rome was a diverse, multicultural center, it exerted enormous influence. But when it lost its allure as a destination for outsiders, during the medieval era, Rome stagnated.

Rome later regained its luster. But that only happened when a new influx of outsiders showed up there. The same is true of Paris, London, Vienna, etc.

I’m focusing on music here, but the same forces shaped innovations in literature. For example, the sonnet—which we all associate with Petrarch and Shakespeare—actually originated in Sicily. It started on the fringes of Europe, and then migrated inland.

And if I had time, I could discuss how religious movements always entered Europe from outside—all those Roman mystery cults came from other countries and cultures. Even Christiantiy—which many people view as emblematic of European culture—arrived in Rome from West Asia.

This is the truth about Western culture nobody wants to tell you. People treat it like a monolithic system of established elites, but the exact opposite is true.

Let me lay it out for you:

1. Western culture only thrived because it drew on diverse outsiders.

2. The major sources of innovation are often located on the fringes of the Western world, because this is where outside influences enter the system.

3. Cultural historians rarely pay attention to water, but they really should. For example, the Mediterranean was a huge force in innovation and cultural transmission, but rarely shows up in your typical Western culture class.

4. It’s no coincidence that Greece—which has the largest coastline of any country in the entire Mediterranean region—was the epicenter of innovation in the classical world. Those 8,500 miles of shore land are a measure of Greece’s openness to the outside world.

5. The most innovative cities are also the most diverse, and not because diversity is a popular political slogan, but due to the simple fact that we evolve as a species by sharing and learning among others with different backgrounds.

6. Poor, disadvantaged groups have a huge impact on this process, because they make up a significant portion of the population in these borderlands. These include migrants, exiles, slaves, and other marginalized communities.

7. Given this process, even the term Western culture is misleading—because so much of it came from outside the West, strictly defined.

8. But this isn’t a flaw in the system. It’s actually a great strength. A culture that can assimilate the best of outside forces is stronger because of that skill.

9. I know this is true for music—because I’ve done the research. But we have good reason to believe that other spheres of culture follow a similar pattern.

I share this because I want to defuse some of the hostility to this cultural history. We don’t need to choose between ‘Western’ culture and diversity—they go hand-in-hand. The problems begin when we forget that important fact and start living (and thinking) in silos.

— Ted Gioia

Source:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/western-music-isnt-what-you-think

**os

Every school.

The arts are under attack in every possible educational environment. While anything concerning STEM, including manual coding is getting funded and pushed while the arts are getting decimated.

Not to mention AI is going to make much of manual coding obsolete soon enough. all you will need to be able to do is tell AI what you want to code and it will code it all for you and debug it. Faster than any human being ever could. Will people code in the future by hand for pleasure? I’m sure there are a few super nerds out there who will. But if we’re talking, reaching the human heart and organizing the Brain, there will be people playing piano for pleasure much more than there will be those writing C++ For for that dopamine hit by hand.

Manipulating a musical instrument for self satisfaction of the artistic heart will never be replaced. That relationship is often formed in primary schools. In public education.

Every study everywhere forever has always given us this data. Children who play musical instruments score better and do better on every test imaginable. Their brains are organized at a higher level and what they learn playing an instrument makes everything they do academically stronger. We’ve seen the data forever on this.

 A lot of people will say why can’t it be “and” instead of “or” and it’s because only one side of this equation is getting ripped out of schools. And it is not tech and coding. We’re going to have an apple to Apple discussion about accessibility let’s not pretend the arts are not being cremated right in front of our eyes. 

And this is coming from a nerd who loves everything to do tech.

But It won’t matter, because the adults jagoffs of today who run our education system - have turned the primary schools of today into college recruitment programs. They were the exact same anti art bollards of 30 years ago who weren’t in band then and they don’t advocate for band now. These are the people making decisions where the money goes.

They don’t understand and they never will because if they did, we wouldn’t be where we are right now—with band programs on life-support more and more every single year.

*** this post has gone viral (unfortunately) and some people do not understand that I expect you to be able to do some of your own research but since some of you can’t just say into your phone “show me the MIT study on how music affects a child’s brain“ I’ll have to do the work for you. here is a link to an article that has even more associated links within it.

 you’re welcome.

https://awarenessact.com/if-you-want-smarter-kids-teach-them-music-not-coding-according-to-mit/?fbclid=IwAR3C3Pv6giFV9zpgZOyPJYjk4HBVCGb0MTj_dKhQ078C_2XooetcY7QoJwM

12 Steps to Becoming a Better Frame Drummer by
Layne Redmond
( Thank you Kadambari Maa for excavating )

1. RELAX AND CARE FOR YOUR HANDS
2. PROFESSIONAL INSTRUCTION
3. PRACTICE WITH METRONOME
4. SING YOUR RHYTHMS
5. PRACTICE IN FRONT OF MIRROR
6. SET PRACTICE SCHEDULE AND STICK TO IT
7. KEEP YOUR DRUMS ACCESSIBLE
8. RECORD YOUR PRACTICE
9. READ THE 5 KEYS TO MASTERY
10. DEAL WITH DISTRACTIONS
11. EXERCISE AND DANCE
12. MONITOR YOUR HEART RATE WHILE DRUMMING
PRACTICE PLUS PATIENCE EQUALS POWER

Let’s begin by getting to the root of the issue of being a drummer or percussionist or perhaps any type of musician: Repetitive Obsessive Behavior. I prefer Behavior over Disorder!
But just face it, if you are a drummer you are OCD: Obsessive-Compulsive Disordered tapper on table tops and steering wheels, pots, pans and anything else that has an interesting sound. However, lucky you, drumming is the perfect channel for this syndrome. In fact you must have some shading of this within your makeup to really excel at drumming! A conventional definition of this syndrome includes: repetitive, ritualized behaviors you feel compelled to perform. You are unable to resist them and break free.
Well, just pick up your frame drum and pour it all into practicing! Let the incredible harmonic overtones of your frame drum bring you into a balanced and relaxed state.
And speaking of relaxed, that brings us to the first rule.

1. Relax. Number one, figure out how to play tension free! Hah! I’ve always found that walking up to a fear stricken, tensioned out student and saying, “relax” serves to send them into total rock like paralysis. So I use the word soften. Focus on teaching your body to soften while you play.
If your fingers are cold, warm your hands and arms up before you play. I rub my hands and arms vigorously with a medicated dark roasted sesame oil, an aryuvedic yoga oil treatment, and then soak in a sink of hot water. Take a dark hand towel reserved for this purpose (sesame oil is persistent) and vigorously rub dry your arms, hands and fingers. If there’s not time for oil treatments, tackling that pile of dirty dishes works great also.
At first you’ll need to concentrate on relaxing your fingers, wrists, and arms as you play. But once you’ve accomplished that you’ll notice that perhaps your neck and shoulders, back or even your legs or hips are tense. Just know that tension, or tightness steals energy from you. When going for playing fast and clean for a long period of time you don’t want to waste energy by keeping unnecessary tension in any muscle group. When you practice for more speed or harder techniques, try for softer or easier. Your best performance will come when you are at your most relaxed. One of the ways I work at relaxing while playing is by taking long deep breaths timed to my rhythms.
And of course I’m practicing with my metronome. So you want to find a comfortable length of time for your deep slow breaths, perhaps four measures breathing in (or whatever is comfortable) and then four measures breathing out. I find that doing this type of breathing while working on more complex and faster material mysteriously changes my perception of time and actually seems to make time slow down. At first you’ll have to concentrate and practice to keep the breathing going but soon it will become automatic and you will just drop into your deep breathing rhythms while you play. This is so great for many reasons – it keeps you calm, relaxed and oxygenates your body to meet the energy needs of your muscles. One specific thing to watch out for when playing a frame drum held in your hand is: No death grip. Keep the holding hand as relaxed as possible for what it needs to do.
Olympic Gold Medalist track sprinter Carl Lewis’ coach said, “the faster you want to go, the more relaxed you have to be”. A quote from Bruce Lee on the subject of speed, “The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.”

2. Professional instruction. See your teachers on a regular basis, don’t spend all your time playing with people not as advanced as you are. (Special warning for teachers!!) If you don’t live within reach of a frame drum teacher you can: Practice with instructional dvds. Play along with YouTube videos, there’s tons of instructional videos for many styles of frame drumming on YouTube.

3. Practice with a metronome. I always practice with my metronome, I love it! In fact it is hard for me to practice seriously without one. A metronome is essential for many reasons, including:
A. Developing memory of tempo
B. Developing your internal pulse, which gives you the ability to keep solid time
C. Developing the ability to record in the studio to a click track. When you get called for studio work you’re going to have to nail your part first time out to make the right impression.
D. It is a great tool for measuring and improving yourself systematically.

4. Sing your rhythms. This is such a powerful way of learning new rhythms. Make the rhythm into a mantra that completely captivates your conscious mind. Almost all traditional cultures teach you to sing the rhythm – if you can sing it, it won’t be long before you can play it!

5. Practice in front of a mirror. This is an incredibly powerful and somewhat magical way to improve your playing. You can notice strange ways the body is expressing tension or an out of balanced posture or tense facial expressions. If you are working with a video of a good teacher set a mirror up next to the video monitor facing you so that you can watch the video and then check your posture and technique against the posture and technique of the teacher.

6. Set a practice schedule and stick to it. It doesn’t matter what time of day you play. However, your body will respond the best if you choose the same time each day to train. I find that mornings, right after a cup of caffeine is a fantastic time to practice. Caffeine and drumming = perfect! Make your practice sessions important enough to be a sacred time slot reserved only for your drumming. BUT don’t limit your practicing to your scheduled practice sessions. Make practice “dates” with other serious frame drummers and if you find more time to play, use it. Got an extra five minutes, just grab a drum and fill it full of rhythms! And that brings us to the next step.

7. Keep your drums right near you, easily accessible. Don’t pack them away in their cases. Put one in every room you spend time in! The walls are the perfect places – just not over a heat vent or in the sun. Even if you only have five minutes, pick it up and play. I had a long hallway in one of the houses I lived in and the walls were covered with drums, it was like a tunnel of frame drums. I often stopped on my way to another room, took down a drum and played for five minutes. I listened to an interview with the comedian and serious banjo player, Steve Martin, where he talked about keeping a banjo in every room. He said if he had to walk to another room to get his banjo, he might not do it, but if it was right in sight he picked it up more often.

8. Record your practice. If you really want to know how you’re doing, record your practice session as you play along with the metronome. And then the next test is to video yourself. My karma was that almost every performance Glen Velez and I did in the early to late 80’s was video taped. I remember clearly the first time I watched myself on video. We had filmed a cable TV show. When we were playing, I thought I was grooving. When I watched it, I saw that my eyes were closed, my mouth was hanging open, I was sort of stomping my foot to keep time – I looked like Lorraine Newman playing a ju**ie! Well, that started an intense training of my whole body, mind and spirit playing that continues to this day. People always comment on my smile as I play and one very potent secret I discovered was that the more my mind/body smiled the more my drumming projected the essence of smiling energy towards my listeners, a true way of sweetening your audience!

9. Read 5 Keys to Mastery. And then read it again and again. There’s always room to improve, and this book shows you how to approach that mentally. I reread this book every year.
THE 5 KEYS TO MASTERY by George Leonard
1. SURRENDER TO YOUR PASSION
How can I describe the kind of person who is on a path to mastery? First, I don’t think it should be so dead serious. I think you should understand the joy of it, the fun of it. Being willing to see just how far you can go is the self-surpassing quality that we human beings are stuck with. Evolution is a whole long story of mastery. It’s being real. It’s being human. It’s being who we are. – George Leonard
2. PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE
I started Aikido at age 47, got my first black belt at 52. In the process, I learned what this business of mastery is all about. For example, it once was thought that talent was absolutely important. The Greeks talk about this “divine spark.” That’s why you can become great. But I’ve learned that practice is the magic formula. Practice will make you good at anything you do. And here’ s one of the insights I got after I wrote the book: we are practicing all the time. – George Leonard
3. GET A GUIDE
What if you are practicing wrong? Then you get very good at doing something wrong. If we don’t get good instruction, then we don’t notice when it’s a little out of round. Surrender yourself to your teacher. That doesn’t mean you turn over your life to the teacher – you don’t want a guru. You have to keep the autonomy within yourself. You are finally the ultimate authority of your own practice. The best teachers are those who model the whole thing. They give immediate feedback, it’s generally positive, and they avoid lectures. – George Leonard
4. VISUALIZE THE OUTCOME
You want to make it real and present in the realm of your consciousness. You don’t say “I’m going to do such and such.” – it already has happened. Now, is consciousness real? It exists and it is very powerful. The idea is to have this mesh between your consciousness – your visualization – and the so-called material world. – George Leonard
5. PLAY THE EDGE
There is a human striving for self-transcendence. It’ s part of what makes us human. Wit all of our flaws we want to go a little bit further than we’ve gone before and maybe even further than anyone else has gone before. So we want to play the edge. – George Leonard

10. Deal with distractions. You need to train yourself to stay in time even while distractions are happening around you. Often something might go wrong in a piece while you are performing or recording, but you still have to stay on your part, be aware of the other musicians you are playing with, where they are on their parts and adjust if you have to without falling out of time. Basically this comes with rehearsing and performing with other players but a young musician friend of mine, started to play out on the streets, he credits it with completely transforming his playing through developing his ability to concentrate and project musically through anything that was happening around him. And there is another way of thinking about distractions – those distracting habits that keep us from practicing and from carrying through on our projects. It is always easy to find things WE HAVE TO DO, and do those things first and hope for time to practice later. Or how easy is it to sit down at the computer and have hours disappear!

11. Exercise and Dance. If you don’t die young you are going to get old. Exercise. You won’t be able to play with the speed of a 20 – 30 something year old when you are sixty, but you can gain great mastery of your feel and the flow of your energy through your hands, out through instrument and on out into the world. If each sound is infinite and endless then every sound you make is echoing out there in the universe forever. That should make you think about every sound you make! I have found practicing yoga and Qi Gong the best forms of exercise for maintaining overall health and particularly for keeping my hands and arms injury free. Actually drumming has become a form of qi gong for me. I’ve even worked with my teacher, Master Wei Len Huang, to help me channel the qi while I’m drumming. And another great way to stay in shape: dance!! Especially you males out there, I’m talking to you. Don’t give me this, I don’t dance, I drum. In Brazil all drummers dance. And just because you might play classical western music doesn’t mean that fully integrating your mind/body rhythmically is something perhaps beneath your serious approach to music. We all need an hour a day of aerobic exercise to keep our health. You might not think it at twenty but the older you get it becomes a necessity. Forget just getting the groove in your body, get it in your entire being. When you play you should be an expression of total rhythm. My favorites dance work out videos are Brazilian, but there are Middle Eastern, Bollywood and anything that has a killer rhythmic groove and makes you sweat.

There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.” ~Vicki Baum
Happy drummers are better drummers!

12. Monitor Heart Rate
And just to put this out here now, start exploring your pulse rate and the rhythms and tempos you are playing with a heart rate monitor, this has been an amazing revelation for me. To maintain our health and ability to continue to play the frame drum at top physical levels, I'm recommending Younger Next Year -- the latest info on the aging process and how to stay ahead of it by seriously exercising for the rest of our lives. It is the only way. And you reduce your chances of cancer, heart attacks, strokes and other diseases by 50%. This is my main anti-cancer routine at this time. Get your heart rate monitor and this book and go! Don't get put off by the best sellerish title, it is really a powerful book. Thanks to frame drummer and great source of wisdom on collaboration, Liz Williams, for putting me on to this! And the key to making this program work is getting your heart rate monitor. Really, I'm dead serious on this. Develop your relationship with your pulse!! It has been a revelation to tune into the different states of my heartbeat and how I feel during those states. Drummers, you get this right??!!! You can start monitoring your pulse rate while you are playing different rhythms at different tempos and explore how that makes you feel. It will change everything about your playing.


Thank you Kadambari Maa for excavating