Senufo-Balafon-Music-1-Hugo-Zemp.Pdf
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
RESOUND A Quarterly of the Archives of Traditional Music Volume 25, Number 1/2 January/April 2006 Senufo Balafon Music by Hugo Zemp Finding My Way Back to the Music of thing. I hated to leave, to go to the mission to listen the Senufo to some poor-quality recordings of Christian songs made on a little tape recorder. I never forgot my First encounters first encounter with live Senufo music. Korhogo, summer 1958. Someone had told I was a jazz drummer and a conservatory me that the Baptist mission had some sound student in percussion classes when I went to Côte recordings of Senufo music. So, one day, I found d’Ivoire to listen to (and watch) the playing of myself in the car of some American ministers who African drums and xylophones. I had purchased a were going to take me to the mission, located about little 45 titled Batteries Africaines (African drums), a dozen kilometers from Korhogo, the largest city in recorded in part in Côte d’Ivoire and released by the northern part of Côte d’Ivoire. Along the road Gilbert Rouget, who would later direct my research I noticed a crowd and heard music playing. I asked at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche the missionaries to stop, which they did, though Scientifique), something I didn’t dream of at the they stayed in the car so as not to legitimize by their time. At the museum in Abidjan I had been told presence a pagan funeral rite – as they explained that there was a musicologist and his ethnologist it. I walked up to the crowd, and then I had the wife living in Daloa, a town in the western central privilege of attending a musical event which was region. I stopped off there and was cordially literally unheard of, at least in the experience of welcomed by André Schaeffner and Denise Paulme, the young Western musician I was then: around an who would also eventually direct my studies, open grave, several ensembles, each one composed another thing I could not have imagined at the of two or three balafons and two or three timpani, time. Two months later, at the end of my Ivorian were playing, all at the same time, but each journey, I ran into the Schaeffners on the boat independently of the others. The air was buzzing back to Europe. During the voyage, which lasted with an incredible mix of sounds, and as I walked ten days, they gave me a reading list (up to then around the outside of the circle of people, I was I had not even known that there was a discipline able to hear now this tune, now that other tune, as called ethnomusicology). They invited me to do an played by the different groups. I was flabbergasted internship in the Department of Ethnomusicology by the vibrant sonority of the balafons, the sharp at the Musée de l’Homme, which would eventually clatter of the small timpani, and the deep boom be my place of work for 35 years. Later, in the of the big ones. Never had I heard or seen such a course of four field trips to Côte d’Ivoire I took during the 1960’s in order to study oral literature Balafon Terminology and musical life among the Dan, I spent several The balafon, as it is called in French and weeks at a time visiting other cultures: the Gere English, the signature instrument of the Senufo of (We), the Baule, and above all the Senufo1. Côte d’Ivoire, is a frame xylophone with calabash resonators. Not for nothing do Ivorians call their Return to the land of the Senufo land “the country of the balafon”. K. A. Gourlay In 1998, forty years after my first visit, I and Lucy Duran (1984:117) wrote that the term decided to go back to Côte d’Ivoire to make a film balafon was probably introduced by European about balafon music. In preparation, I delved into travelers, stemming “from the Greek root phono.” my old field notes and dug out my recordings from But the most widely accepted etymology is in the sixties to listen to them once again. Mande language: bala “xylophone” plus fo “to I also listened again to a double album with speak, playing a musical instrument.” excellent liner notes that had been published In his book, Mande Music, Eric Charry wrote: by Till Förster in 1987 [disc 4], and I read all “The Maninka xylophone, called bala or balafon, is his ethnological work, most of it written in the used wherever Maninka peoples have migrated…” language of Goethe. Unfortunately this work is still (2000:135). He observes that the word balafon not very well known among French Africanists and (or balafo) appeared at the end of the seventeenth Ivorians (a book in English is in preparation). His century in publications by French travelers (De la 1997 work, which brought together the results of Courbe, Froger) as referring to either the xylophone almost twenty years of research, is a monument of or the xylophonist (Charry 2000:363, 365). knowledge concerning the cultural representations, The Senufo, who speak the Senari language the daily life, and the ritual life of the Senufo, (a language of the Voltaic family or Gur, and not especially as concerns the Kafibele sub-group. Mandé), know the word “balafon” as a word in Jula In addition, two unpublished writings by (the Mande lingua franca of Côte d’Ivoire) and in students, specifically focused on Senufo balafon French; but they have their own terms as well, that music, attracted my very great interest. The first had the advantage of an inside viewpoint, since it was written by a Senufo (Coulibaly 1982); the second, written in German, contributed the first in-depth analysis of the structure of this music (Ciompi R E S O U N D 1989). A Quarterly of the Archives of Traditional Music Back in Abidjan once more, I got in touch with Georges Niangoran-Bouah, like me a former Marilyn Graf, Editor We are pleased to accept comments, letters, and student of Denise Paulme. He had already played submissions. Please address your correspondence host to me during my earlier missions in the ‘60’s. to RESOUND at: He took me to see a show by an Ivorian dance Archives of Traditional Music troupe; the Ghanaian ethnomusicologist J. H. Morrison Hall 117 Indiana University Nketia was also there. These two African researchers Bloomington, IN 47405 had studied the drum language of the Akan [email protected] peoples neighboring the Senufo to the south and www.indiana.edu/~libarchm east; something closely related to balafon-playing, Daniel B. Reed, Director Marilyn B. Graf, Archivist as we shall see. One young musician, Sikaman Suzanne Mudge, Librarian Soro, who was playing for that troupe, and who Mike Casey, Associate Director for Recording Services was a member of the Kafibele Senufo studied by Megan Glass, Office Services Assistant Till Förster, became my research assistant. Thus, ISSN 0749-2472 my cinematographic project began under the best possible conditions. 2 differ according to dialects and especially according “are for the most part inanimate objects tending to 2 to the types of musical groups involved. be large in size”; the indefinite singular suffix is –g + vowel, and for the indefinite plural, -y + vowel jègēlē, jègbágì, kpōyē (Kienz 1979). Different authors write the word that During my visits in the 1960s to the Tiebara means timpani sometimes as kpōgō (indefinite and Nafara Senufo sub-groups in the Korhogo singular), sometimes as kpōgì (definite singular), region, I encountered jegele as the name of an and sometimes as kpōyē (indefinite plural) or instrument and as the name of the main ensemble- kpōyì (definite plural), or even kpōy, inasmuch as type of balafons and wooden-bottomed timpani. the final vowel is often not pronounced. On a mission sponsored by INSAAC (Institut The Kafibele Senufo of the Sirasso region are National Supérieure des Arts et de l’Action more likely to use kpōyē to refer to the typical Culturelle) [disc 3] to collect examples from the ensemble composed of from two to four balafons Western Senufo of the Boundiali region, Pierre and two or three timpani, of two sizes, both Augier, Paul Dagri and Adépo Yapo encountered with wooden bottoms. The balafon as a separate the terms jegele, jegbaa, jegara and jere (the instrument, not the music played on it – and differences are dialectal). Among the Kafibele without regard to the ensemble it is a part of – is Senufo of the Sirasso region, as I noted in 1965 called jègbágì, literally “bed of the keys” [of the and again in 1997-98, jègēlē refers to the keys balafon]. In speaking of balafon music in general of the xylophone, jègbágì to the instrument, and (not specifically of the ensemble kpōyē), the kpōyē to the ensemble made up of xylophones and Kafibele also say jègēlē. wooden-bottomed timpani. Förster gives the term kpōyē as meaning Oumar Coulibaly, a native of Ferké and a both the name of the instrument and the ensemble researcher among the Tiebara and Nafara musicians formation comprised of balafons and timpani of the Korhogo and Sinématiali regions, has written (1987: 29). In the course of preparing this article, that jegele designates the keys of the xylophone, I reread all the transcription of filmed interviews and kpoy, the timpani (1982:22). Since the that I have, and I was able to verify that Nahoua ensemble is made up of two groups of instruments, (who was one of Förster’s two principal informants idiophones and membranophones, the Senufo may as regards music) sometimes used kpōyē to refer to the whole formation by either name.