Beyond the Classroom: Sub-Saharan African Music

     I thought the different kinds of drums we talked about were interesting, so I went and found another one that we didn't talk about; the Batá drum. This drum originates in Yoruba, Nigeria and actually consists of 3 different drums. These drums can come in all different sizes, but a typical batá drum ensemble has two low toned drums and a higher toned drum. If they are small enough, they can be tied together and the three can be played by a single person. In this video, the man on the right, in blue, is playing all three at the same time. The rest of the ensemble plays larger versions of each of the drums. 





As a string player, when I saw the Kora and all of its strings, my first thought was: " how do they tune all of those?" Well... lets find out. According to The Kora Cafe's website, Koras were traditionally tuned to best suit a singers voice. Based on the voice, the strings would usually be tuned into a heptatonic scale. The heptatonic scale does not fit neatly into traditional western temperaments and is also not notated easily either. The combination of these two things leads to a bunch of different tuning methods. Basically, it's up to the performer. The website provided these tuning diagrams. For the sake of simplicity, these tunings show western scales. The left is called F Silaba tuning, where the strings include the notes to an F major scale and the diagram on the right is F Sauta tuning, where the strings have the notes to an F Lydian scale. These are only a few tunings for the Kora. I find it interesting how there are so many more and how it is unstandardized.

Lastly, I'm not going to explain the rabbit hole I just went through to find the genre amapiano. Amapiano is a subgenre of South African house music. Rolling Stone Magazine describes it as "bright, jazzy dance music culled from local house flavors and global R&B." An artist I kept coming back to is Kabza De Small, who I kept seeing being referred to as "the king of amapiano." I'm listening to his music right now and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't dancing haha. This song is called "Nia Lo," and features South African singer-songwriter, Nia Pearl.
I love house music, so I can't resist putting in another song here, "Hello," also by Kabza De Small, featuring South African Artist, Mudamane. I am obsessed with this song.








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