Country in West Africa. The modern state, covering an area of 320,783 km2 and with a population of 15·14 million (2000 estimate), comprises about 60 different peoples whose diversity of culture and language is reflected in their music. The music of the peoples belonging to the four large linguistic groups recognized in Côte d'Ivoire is discussed here: the Dan of the Mande group, the Wè (Guere or Gere) of the Kru group, the Baoulé (Baule) of the Akan group and the Sénoufo (Senufo) of the Volta group (fig.1). The Dan inhabit the edge of the savanna and the forest in the west of Côte d'Ivoire and in the hinterland of Liberia; in the north-west they border on Guinea. The Wè, who live entirely in the forest, are also established partly in Côte d'Ivoire and partly in Liberia. The Baoulé live in the V-shaped wedge of savanna that cuts into the centre of Côte d'Ivoire, but originally came from forest areas in present-day Ghana. The Sénoufo live in the savanna in the north of Côte d'Ivoire, and in Burkina Faso and Mali.
HUGO ZEMP
The Dan do not have a single term for music in the Western sense, but have terms for three genres: tã (tan) designates dance-song, instrumental music and dance itself; zlöö refers to praise-song; and gbo (‘weeping’) designates funeral laments. These three genres are of varying importance. The tã shows the greatest variety of song types and instruments and is played most frequently, being used for many occasions, while the gbo genre is limited to a single type of song and to a single occasion.
For the Dan, music is not only a human concern: myths attribute the origins of musical instruments to animals or to bush spirits. The Dan believe that spirits are particularly fond of music and that they help musicians to play with vigour. Hunters believe that music gives them power over the guardian spirits of animals, and thus use music to assure themselves of good hunting. Masks, which are personifications of bush spirits, are often expressed through music. They are known as ‘dressed’ if a man wears a face mask and costume and sings in an unnatural voice, either very high-pitched or guttural. Masks known as ‘naked’ exist only through their voice: a man, though not in disguise, becomes a ‘mask’, with all the supernatural power that this implies, by borrowing the characteristic voice of a mask or playing the instrument that is dedicated to it. Music, apart from being a source of pleasure, can give strength, especially for tiring or dangerous activities such as work in the fields, the building of a house, wrestling, hunting or warfare.
Most musicians are attached to a person or to an association. A chief has an ensemble of drums and trumpets (fig.3), which plays at his public appearances and accompanies him on his travels. Other instrumentalists and singers may be attached to his court, and these may include professional musicians foreign to Dan culture such as Malinké musicians. Singers encouraged the warriors before their departure to war, and during the fighting itself, and glorified them on their return after a victory. In the south of the Dan region, singers are attached to great hunters and perform before and after a chase and on the death of the hunter. In the north, the hunters themselves are musicians and sing while accompanying themselves on the harp-lute (or bridge harp; see Kora, §2), which they borrowed from their northern neighbours, the Malinké (see Guinea). Singers and drummers for work associations give the workers the strength to fell trees, to clear a new field of bush, to till and to harvest rice. Secret societies have their own musicians who perform for the initiation of a new member or during certain public meetings of the society (fig.4). The musicians of recreational associations that bring together young men and girls perform at their dances. The wrestlers in the west of the Dan region have singers who urge them on before a fight.
While most of the Dan know how to sing in chorus, solo singing and instrumental playing are specialized activities. The musician is greatly admired, and his fame may be far-reaching. There used to be a number of professional musicians who were either attached to a person or association, or who travelled from village to village, but now there is only a limited number of professional drummers who are young members of a work association. Professional and non-professional musicians are paid for their activities. Anyone, apart from chiefs, may become a musician, but it is most frequently the children of musicians who choose to become musicians themselves.
Of the important stages in the life-cycle, it is initiation at puberty that, above all, gives rise to musical display. At the end of a period of reclusion in the sacred forest, which in the past lasted for several months, circumcised boys and girls dance separately in the villages. The period in the forest is the occasion for education, including musical training. Apprenticeship in a musical instrument generally begins before the age of puberty. Deaths are not marked by great musical display, except at funerals of chiefs or musicians. With the exception of women’s funeral laments, there is no specific repertory of funeral music, so music usually performed at other social occasions is played instead.
The Dan are familiar with about 30 musical instruments. The most frequently used idiophone is the gourd-rattle with external rattling objects. The Dan use only bells with an internal clapper. Of the two types of slit-drum used, the first has a single broad slit through which the instrument is hollowed and one or two narrow slits (fig.2 above) and is always played in pairs. The second, hollowed through a hole at either end, has several slits, and is played solo. The skin drum generally played for dances is in the shape of a mortar and has a laced skin; virtuoso performers play sets of these drums of different sizes, striking them with their hands. Large cylindrical drums up to 2 metres high and with a skin fixed by means of pegs are used in the west of the Dan country. In order to strike the skin with two sticks, the drummer either stands on a platform or props the instrument at an angle on two stakes. Three chordophones are associated with hunting: the musical bow, the harp-lute (with gourd-resonator) and the ground-bow, the soundbox of which consists of a hole dug in the ground and covered with banana leaves. The most important aerophone is the side-blown trumpet made of ivory and played in hocket in sets of five to seven instruments accompanied by drums. Other instruments that are not classed by the Dan as musical instruments but as masks, since they express the voices of masks, are the mirliton, the bullroarer, the stone whistle, the whirling whistle, which imitates the twittering of birds, and the friction ground-drum the sound of which resembles the roaring of the panther.
Dan music is mainly pentatonic, although heptatonic songs do exist, especially among the solo zlöö (praise-songs). Most of the tã songs are polyphonic: the solo singer is usually partnered by a second voice a 4th lower, and a chorus often joins the two soloists in a responsorial form. In larger vocal groups two pairs of soloists, each pair singing in parallel 4ths, alternate with the chorus. The ideal of the dance-song is to maintain a continuous flow of sound, so the chorus begins its response before the soloists have finished their phrase, and individuals often fill in the song further with meaningless syllables. The songs in this genre are sung in a restrained voice, unlike praise-songs, which the singer has to shout. The texts and melodies of dance-songs are relatively fixed, while in praise-songs the singer improvises the words and matches them to a melody, since there is a distinct correlation between the tones of the language and the melody of the song. In those songs in which improvisation plays an important part, the second singer follows a little behind the first, generally finding the text and the melodic formula at the end of the line.
The Wè are the southern neighbours of the Dan; their language belongs to a different linguistic group, although the two societies are culturally very close. The functions of their music are similar and the instruments are of the same type. The Wè, however, use an instrument unknown to the Dan, the do or forked harp (fig.5), and they have an elaborate drum language, which is used, for instance, to summon people or to give out the praise-names of chiefs and great warriors. The greatest musical difference between these two peoples probably concerns tonal systems. In addition to the pentatonic scale, the Wè use chromatic intervals in both vocal and instrumental music. Intervals played on some Wè xylophones and a forked harp measure between 75 and 160 cents. Certain songs are purely pentatonic, others are characterized by a systematic use of chromaticism, and still others consist of pentatonic passages alternating with chromatic passages. 4ths and 3rds do occur in two-part polyphony, but Wè people seem to have a marked preference for an interval that is often close to a 2nd (200 cents) and often somewhat larger (230–60 cents), giving the polyphony its special colour.
Unlike the Dan and the Wè, the Baoulé are politically organized in a single system with village chiefs, provincial chiefs and a supreme head, the king or queen. All the important chiefs have court musicians, especially drum ensembles. The drums to which the greatest prestige is attached are the paired ones known as atungblan (called atumpan by other Akan peoples). The atungblan are the principal talking drums played by the chief’s master drummer. On certain days fixed by the chief, the drummer calls to the ancestors by means of rhythmic formulae and asks them to protect the community. The atungblan, like other less important talking drums, are also used to summon people to meetings. On the occasion of public appearances by the chief, they are used to drum proverbs. These proverbs may additionally be beaten with sticks on iron bells of different sizes.
Besides various drums and bells, the Baoulé use a large number of other instruments. In the Béoumi region in the north-west of the Baoulé country, about 50 types of instrument have been listed, and the inventory is probably not complete. The melodic instruments, such as the lamellophone, the xylophone (with keys laid over the stems of two banana plants), the forked harp and the harp-lute, are generally tuned to a heptatonic scale. The musicians, whether playing purely instrumental music or accompanying singing, usually play in parallel 3rds. This is one of the most prominent characteristics of instrumental and vocal polyphony among the Baoulé and is also prominent in the music of other Akan peoples, as well as those who speak languages belonging to the Lagoon group. As soon as two people sing together, whether men, women or children (fig.7), they sing in two parts in 3rds. In larger vocal ensembles, two soloists generally alternate with the chorus.
The Sénoufo people include several subgroups that are distinguishable culturally and linguistically. These subgroups have many musical instruments in common, but distinguish themselves by particular social functions and instrumentaria used in ensemble performance. For instance, while the collective playing of three two-string bow harps has been recorded among the Kassembele subgroup, an ensemble of one harp, one xylophone and one drum encourages collective hoeing in the fields among the Tiembara subgroup of the Kouto area, and up to 20 single-string harps still accompany singing for different circumstances, including funerals among the Fodonon subgroup. Like other peoples of the Sudanese savanna, the Sénoufo recognize castes of craftsmen, among them blacksmiths, brassfounders, leather workers and wood-carvers. But unlike many other peoples of this region, and especially their western neighbours the Malinké, the Sénoufo do not have a caste of musicians.
The initiation society, the Poro, is of the greatest importance to Sénoufo musical life. All Sénoufo men must belong to the Poro, and in certain Sénoufo tribes the women have their own secret society. The various activities of the Poro are accompanied by music, in particular the coming-out of a group of initiates and the funeral of a member of the society. The musical instruments of the women’s initiation society are, depending on the region, the handstruck four-footed drum, or the water-drum, formed from a half-calabash filled with water in which an upturned calabash floats, which is struck with a spoon-shaped half-gourd. The principal instruments of the men’s Poro are double-headed barrel drums, single-headed long and narrow cylindrical drums, large anthropomorphic trumpets with built-in mirlitons (fig.6) and small mirlitons held in front of the mouth.
At funerals, male musicians equipped with these sacred instruments, and accompanied by other men playing iron scrapers and gourd-rattles with external rattling objects, move round the body wrapped in many shrouds. Other instrumental groups, such as ensembles of trumpets or whistles belonging to chiefs, may play at funerals but must be silent when the instruments of the Poro are sounded. Ensembles composed of three or four xylophones with gourd-resonators and of three kettledrums play during the interment of the corpse. During the funeral of an important person, several ensembles may play simultaneously, but each independently of the others.
Other activities are accompanied by music, for example collective work in the fields. Once more, it is often the young initiates of the Poro who work together at hoeing, although the musical instruments used – drums, harp, trumpet or xylophone – are not among the sacred instruments of the Poro (fig.8).
Sénoufo music is characterized by the use of the pentatonic scale, complex instrumental polyphony (particularly in the music of the xylophone ensembles) and by monodic vocal music. The singing voice is frequently high-pitched and tense.
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Musique Guéré, Côte d'Ivoire, rec. H. Zemp, Musée de l'Homme Collection, Vogue LD 764 (1971); augmented reissue on CD as Côte d'Ivoire: Musiques des Wè (Guéré), Le Chant du Monde CNR 2741105 (1998)
Ivory Coast: Baule Vocal Music, rec. H. Zemp, EMI Italiana 3 C064-17842 (1972); reissue on CD as Côte d'Ivoire: Baule Vocal Music, Auvidis/Unesco D8048 (1993) [incl. disc notes]
Musique d'Afrique occidentale: Musique Malinké, musique Baoulé, rec. G. Rouget, Vogue LDM 30 116 (1972)
Percussions de Côte d'Ivoire (Dan, Guéré, Baoulé, Sénoufo, Malinké), rec. H. Zemp, Disques Alvarés C488 (1974)
Côte d'Ivoire: Chants et danses de Boundiali, rec. P. Augier, P. Dagui, A. Yapo, Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique ACCT 18211 (1982)
Côte d'Ivoire, Sénoufo: musiques des funérailles fodonon, rec. M. de Lannoy, Le Chant du Monde LDX 74 838 (1984); augmented reissue on CD, Le Chant du Monde CNR 274 838 [incl. disc notes with Eng. trans]
Musik der Senufo, rec. T. Förster, Museum Collection Berlin MC4 (1984)
Côte d'Ivoire: a Senufo-Fodonon Funerary Vigil, rec. M. de Lannoy, Auvidis D8203 (1989) [incl. disc notes]