A term coined by George Montandon (1919) and adopted by André Schaeffner (1936) to refer to the Central African instrument also known as a bow lute (Hornbostel and Sachs, 1914; Wegner, 1984) of which there are two types. A pluriarc consists of a hollowed wooden resonator with strings running either parallel or slightly inclined to the soundboard. In contrast to harps and lutes, however, pluriarcs are not held by one string-bearer, but each string has its own flexible carrier. For this purpose, in the first type of pluriarc short arcs are inserted into a series of holes bored into the top wall of the resonator or, in the second type, they are attached to the back of the resonator and/or partly inserted. These differences affect the method of tuning.
The term ‘pluriarc’ for this class of instruments has been contested, as has the term ‘bow lute’, mainly due to the fact that both terms suggest an evolutionary sequence from musical bows consisting of ‘one arc’ to an instrument of ‘several arcs’. Jean Sebastien Laurenty was also reluctant but opted for the term ‘pluriarc’ (1960, p.117). Ulrich Wegner has maintained the term ‘bow lute’, while acknowledging that the French term ‘pluriarc’ represents an appropriate description of the instrument's most salient feature (1984, p.82). Any such evolutionary relationships between musical bows in Africa have not been confirmed.
Our earliest sources for pluriarcs include three Benin bronze plaques (Dark and Hill, 1972) and an illustration by Michael Praetorius (1620) of the front and back of a five-string specimen belonging to the second type, probably acquired in Gabon or the Congo from a Teke musician or from an adjacent ethnic group. The earliest source from the historic Kongo kingdom is Girolamo Merolla's 1692 illustration of a nsambi. For south-western Angola, the earliest illustration comes from Brazil: a detailed drawing by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira who, on his ‘philosophical journey’ of 1783–92 in northern Brazil, met a slave who played a seven-string pluriarc of the first type called cihumba in the related languages of Angola's Huíla province.
The contemporary geographic distribution of pluriarcs is largely confined to three areas that are now distinct:
1. South-western Angola: a representative is the cihumba, still popular in Huíla province. This area expands into northern Namibia where somewhat different varieties have been played by Khoisan language-speakers. Among the !Ko of eastern Namibia and Botswana a five-string variety has become an instrument associated with women.
2. West-central Africa from the ancient Kongo and Kuba states across the equatorial zone to the Teke in the Republic of Congo and into Gabon (see Gabon, fig.5); it is an area dominated by the second type of pluriarc, however, with great internal variety. Laurenty distinguishes no less than ten organological varieties for the area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone (1960, p.117). Among the Nkundo in western Congo and among the Ekonda, very large five-string lokombi (or Teke: lukombe) were used, while the Fang (Faŋ) of Gabon developed types entirely manufactured with materials from the raffia palm.
3. Benin in south-western Nigeria: an area where the tradition has survived since the days of ancient Benin. Music and poetry accompanied by the akpata (see illustration) have been documented in great detail by Dan Ben-Amos (1975). The akpata is characterized by a specific triangular shape of the cross-cut of its resonator, but the attachment of the arcs follows the system of the second type of pluriarc.
It is not possible to know where and when the African pluriarc was invented. But, since it was well established in all three separate areas outlined above during the earliest periods of European contact, its invention most likely occurred several centuries earlier. Invention in one location and diffusion to other places is the most likely scenario for the pluriarc's remote history. The Benin type shows relatively close organological links to the west-central African cluster, while the south-western Angolan types stand apart. Either the pluriarc was invented in Central Africa and spread with coastal contacts from Gabon or the Republic of Congo to ancient Benin, as well as south into Angola, or it was an invention of the ancestors of Edo (Ẹdo)-speaking peoples of Nigeria and spread the other way.
PraetoriusSM
G. Merolla: Breve e svccinta Relatione del viaggio nel regno di Congo nell'Africa Meridionale … (Naples, 1692)
E.M. von Hornbostel and C. Sachs: ‘Systematik der Musikinstrumente: ein Versuch’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, xlvi/4–5 (1914), 553–90
G. Montandon: ‘La génealogie des instruments de musique et les cycles de civilisation’, Archives Suisses d'Anthropologie Générale, iii (1919), 1–71
A. Schaeffner: Origine des instruments de musique (Paris, 1936)
J.S. Laurenty: Les cordophones du Congo Belge et du Ruanda-Urundi (Tervuren, 1960)
P. Dark and M. Hill: ‘Musical Instruments on Benin Plaques’, Essays on Music and History in Africa, ed. K. Wachsmann (Evanston, IL, 1972), 67–78
G.T. Nurse: ‘Musical Instrumentation among the San (Bushmen) of the Central Kalahari’, AfM, v/2 (1972), 23–7
D. Ben-Amos: Sweet Words: Story Telling Events in Benin (Philadelphia, 1975)
G. Kubik: Angolan Traits in Black Music, Games and Dances of Brazil (Lisbon, 1979)
U. Wegner: Afrikanische Saiteninstrumente (Berlin, 1984)
E.W. Müller: ‘Die Musikinstrumente der Ekonda in der Sammlung des Mainzer Instituts für Ethnologie und Afrika-Studien’, … und der Jazz is nicht von Dauer: Aspekte afro-amerikanischer Musik: Festschrift für Alfons Michael Dauer, ed. B. Hoffmann and H. Rösing (Karben, 1998), 135–44
GERHARD KUBIK