[Somali Democratic Republic] (Som. Jamhuriyadda Dimugradiga ee Soomaaliya). Country in the Horn of East Africa. It has an area of 637,657 km2 and a population estimated at 11·53 million (2000). The Somali Democratic Republic collapsed in a revolution in 1991, and no political state has been formed to replace it, although the Somali National Movement declared the secession of an independent country called the Somaliland Republic in the north-western region. Somalis are the primary ethnic group and inhabit neighbouring parts of Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya. These peripheral populations have been separated from the main population since the colonial partition of Africa. A small number of other Bantu-speaking ethnic groups live among the Somalis. Islam, language and ethnic identity unite all Somalis, but there are internal divisions into clan families, lineages and other subgroupings based on an agnatic genealogy. There are also three main linguistic divisions. Most Somalis are nomadic herders of camels, cattle, sheep and goats or small-scale subsistence farmers. The growing urbanization of the country was curtailed considerably by the civil war, which began in 1988. A large diaspora of refugees now lives outside the country in East Africa, Europe, the USA and Canada.
All Somali music is pentatonic, and there is a large variance of pitch frequencies and intervals, because they are not standardized. The characteristic, pentatonic gap between the second and third notes of the scale is absent in some poems in which intervals are equidistant. Indigenous Somali music functions as accompaniment to poetry and is limited by ‘language internal constraints’ (Bird, 1976), where music becomes predictable from scansion. A few melodies partially define each genre, any one of which can be sung to any poem in that genre. The genre will be perceived, rather than the specific poem, if one hears a Somali whistle a tune. On the other hand, the modern heello, influenced from colonial models, bears ‘language external constraints’, and each poem has a unique melody. Consequently, predictable rhythms in the heello provide prosody for the poem.
Both language and music depend on duration for rhythm: long and short vowels in prosody and long and short notes in music. The interaction between the two provides a polyrhythmic relationship in Somali scansion where two parallel rhythm systems are performed simultaneously in the same stream of speech.
The Somali word for music, muusiko (or muusiqo), is a loan-word from the English, Italian and French colonial languages, reflecting the primary use of music prior to the 1940s as accompaniment to poetic performance. In the indigenous Somali tradition, music and poetry (sung poetry) are really the same creative act, though poetry can be recited without singing. Music as a separate performance form became important only after colonial exposure to foreign forms.
Before the use of spoken poetry in the modern Somali theatre (Mumin, 1974), all Somali poetry could be set to music either as chant (melodic but not rhythmic) or as song (melodic and rhythmic). No extensive vocabulary for musical forms existed, but a specialized one existed for over 30 genres of poetry. Indeed, until the early 1940s poetic specialization by Somali artists resulted in music assuming a secondary role to poetry. Traditional melodies existed, as did traditional song and chant forms, but they were not associated with specific poems. Instead, groups of melodies were associated with particular poetic genres. Any melody in a group could be chosen, adjusted in minor ways to fit the words of a specific poem, and the adjustments could then be applied to any other melody of the same group. Thus, a specific poem of the wiglo genre could be chanted to a number of melodies associated with that genre, but a poem from another genre could not be used with wiglo melodies. The stock of melodies in each group was increased by regional variations and by the innovations of individual performers. Few poets are remembered as composers of this limited stock of genre melodies, though they are often remembered as composers of specific poems. A notable exception is Sayyid Maxamed Cabdille Xasan, the famous ‘Mad Mullah of Somaliland’.
The secondary role of music is also reflected in the paucity of musical instruments in Somali culture. The only instrument played by Somali pastoralists is the drum, and in the north it is used only by women, to accompany their serious genre, the buraambur, which is recited principally at weddings and festivals. No instrumental accompaniment of hand-clapping was permitted with the male classical genres of gabay, jiifto and geeraar. Hand-clapping and an occasional drum, very often a simple petrol tin, are, however, used to accompany the less serious and mixed-gender genres associated with Somali dancing in this area. The southern regions are different. At least four styles of drums are used (durbaan, yoome, jabbu and nasar), together with a variety of flutes (malkad, siinbaar and sumari). Buun oo caroog (conch shells) and antelope horns, especially of the kudu (gees oo goodir), are blown rhythmically. Clappers are also used to beat rhythms: a wooden, hand-carved pair (shanbal) and a pair of metal hoe-blades (shagal oo biro). Finally, one finds the shareero (a lyre) in southern Somalia, which is also common in other parts of eastern Africa.
In the period just after World War II, Somali musical life underwent drastic changes. The radio was introduced during the war, and Somalis were presented with English, Italian, Arabic and Indian musics. The British colony of Aden, where many Somalis lived or went for civil service training, also contributed to this exposure, with a radio station and several cinemas. In Hargeysa (Hargeisa), capital of the then British Somaliland Protectorate, several Somalis, notably Cabdullaahi Qarshe, formed a theatrical company known as Walaalo Hargeysa (‘Brothers of Hargeysa’). They introduced a newly emerging form of poetry in many of their productions and accompanied its recitation with a small orchestra composed of flute, violin, tambourine and drum. The growing drive towards independence, along with other factors, led to the development and popularity of this form, which is almost wholly responsible for the concurrent development of modern Somali music. The novel musical setting of this new genre resulted in the confusion over its naming. The long and powerful tradition that preceded it compelled many Somalis to call it the heello, a name derived from an introductory formula that was initially used with it but later dropped. Other Somalis called the new genre hees (‘song’) for several reasons: increasing numbers of foreign musical instruments were employed with its recitation; it had melody and rhythm; its extensive use of patterned refrains made it resemble foreign radio models; and, in distinction to earlier genres that drew from a common stock of melodies, each poem in the new genre had a specific melody, composed earlier by the poets themselves or by a musician.
In the period from about 1943 onwards, more and more innovations were introduced, both in the instruments used and in the music itself; these innovations were soon disseminated through radio stations in Mogadishu (Mugdisho) and Hargeysa, as well as by the burgeoning Somali theatre. An orchestra was formed and trained by an Italian military conductor and it performed on Mogadishu radio and at military parades, also giving public performances. In addition to the groups given official government support, private ensembles playing foreign music (i.e. rock and roll) and Somali music began to perform without texts. A form of the heello characteristic of southern composers, notably Axmed Neji, was developed, using still more musical instruments (electric guitars, electric organs and drum sets).
Despite the paucity of indigenous instruments, Somali music has a unique character and cannot be confused with the musics of neighbouring countries. Somali musicians state that a form of Western-influenced Sudanese jazz has been a major external influence on Somali music in recent times. During the period of the Somali Republic, members of the Radio Artistes Association made regular tours to Tanzania, the Sudan and elsewhere, and instrumental groups from abroad performed in the National Theatre in Mogadishu. This state-supported ensemble was retained with a new name Waaberi (‘Dawn Players’) after the 1969 coup d'état, and survived into the 1990s as a private troupe in the European and American diaspora after the 1991 revolution.
Extensive collections of tape-recorded Somali music were kept in the country's radio stations at Hargeysa and Mogadishu and at the Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ministry of Higher Education and Culture, in Mogadishu. The current state of these collections is not known, but other collections are located in the radio stations that broadcast in Somali in Addis Ababa, Nairobi, Djibouti, Cairo, Moscow and London. Extensive tape collections can be found today at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), the University of Rome ‘Sapienza’, and the Archives of Traditional Music (Indiana University).
Until the late 1970s ethnomusicological research was limited to the casual observations of scholars interested in such varied fields as folklore, linguistics and anthropology, and most of these observations were on the music of the pastoral Somali and the modern urban populations. Research in Somali ethnomusicology has increased dramatically since the 1980s, and several articles of substance have been published describing Somali musical context and the relationship between music and poetic scansion. Yet although there are over 30 genres of poetry among the Somali, all of which may be sung, only a few have been analysed. Moreover, since the break-up of the national government in the Horn of Africa, at least a million Somalis now live in the diaspora where their exposure to foreign musical systems is increasing. Much more analysis remains to be conducted.
MGG1 (K.P. Wachsmann)
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JOHN WILLIAM JOHNSON