Country in East Africa. With an area of 93,679 km2 and a population of 3·81 million (2000 estimate), it borders the Red Sea to the north and east, Ethiopia to the south and Sudan to the West. There are nine major ethnic groups: Tigrinya-speaking Tigré, Tigré, Saho, Afar, Hadareb (Hedareb), Bilen, Kunama, Nara and Rashaida. The majority are Christian and Muslim and the official language is Tigrinya, but Arabic, Afar and Somali are also spoken. Approximately one million Eritrean refugees live in the Sudan, Ethiopia, Canada, the USA, Sweden, Italy and Saudi Arabia. Eritrea achieved independence from Ethiopia in 1993. Both countries retain close cultural ties, sharing similar musical traditions.
The Rashaida people are Muslims who live a nomadic life in the Sahel desert. Men and women celebrate life-cycle events separately and privately. However, some celebrations marking the end of Ramadan and Eritrea’s independence are performed in the public domain. These songs and dances, accompanied by a one-sided bowl-shaped drum, are performed in a group. Songs are responsorial and antiphonal, and dances are arranged in a large semicircle where women alternate two at a time dancing in the centre while men and other women clap and sing in parallel 4ths and 5ths, interspersed with women’s ululation. J. Jenkins recorded brief examples of Rashaida, Bedawi (Beni Amer), Nara (Baria), Tigré, Afar (Danakil), Asa’orta (Assaorta), Bilen and Kunama music (Ethiopia III, 1974).
The Tigrinya and Tigre peoples live primarily in Seraye, Akele Guzai and Hamasien regions. Their secular songs are influenced partly by Amhara (Ethiopia), Sudanese and Italian musics, and they share tezetā and bāti qeñet (interval sets of six pitches, including the referent pitch and its octave equivalent) with the Amhara, but they also employ other qeñet (or qəñət). The form is strophic in responsorial or antiphonal style, with an introduction, postlude or coda section and a refrain. Each verse uses a different text, but melodic phrase groupings are repeated in sequence, i.e. AABA, ABACA or AABBCA. A new song is defined by a different text, not by a new melody. Topics of texts can be personal, but they also often reflect the overall political climate. Melodic phrases are in litanic form, such as that of meditative songs. Skilled performers can modulate to different octaves or qeñet. Variations in style may include vocal slides, glissandos, interjections, ornaments, melodic variation and overlapping melodic lines between vocal and/or instrumental accompanying parts. The elements that give the music its special character include improvisation (most prevalent in the text) and rhythmic and metrical interplay. Vocal and instrumental parts often exhibit different metres and melodic variants that are linked by an obvious or implied timeline.
Traditional Tigrinya songs of the early 1960s still popular today include: Yafreki (‘I love you’), Fikiri (‘Knowledge’), Ghize (‘Time’), Tehagosei Nebsei (‘My Soul rejoices’), Misganan miftanin (‘Thanks and Encouragement’), Gruman (‘It is wonderful’), Adeie (‘My country’), Asmara, Negusse (‘King’) and Kadem modieyo (‘My sorrow is gone’). Songs are accompanied by the krar, a six-string lyre plucked with or without a plectrum, or masēnqo or cherawata, a single-string, bowed spike lute with a diamond-shaped resonating box, and/or kabaro or korobo, a double-barrelled cylindrical drum. Individuals who pray, meditate and sing praises to God often accompany themselves on the beganna (or bägänna) 10-string plucked lyre. Among Muslims, males and females perform songs and dances separately, often accompanied by tambourine, dube (one-sided, bowl-shaped drum) and kabaro.
Morphological, stylistic and distribution variances occur. For example, krars found in Eritrea and performed by Tigré- and Tigrinya-speaking peoples have six metal strings rather than five gut, plastic or metal strings used in krars among the Amhara in Ethiopia. Eritreans prefer a resonating box consisting of a round metal bowl covered with stretched hide rather than the rectangular wooden box found in northern and central Ethiopia. The diamond-shaped masēnqo resonating box of the Tigré and Tigrinya in Eritrea are larger than those of the Amhara and Oromo found in Ethiopia.
The wāshint, a hollow, end-blown flute with four finger holes, and embiltā (or əmbilta), a set of three and five end-blown flutes made of bamboo or thin-walled metal tubing, sometimes accompany dances of which the most notable is the eskestā whose trademark is the great variation of shoulder movements that correspond to the accompanying foot movement patterns. Overblowing allows the player to extend the range up to two octaves. More versatile and talented wāshint players own between six and twelve wāshint of varying lengths and diameters to accommodate various qeñet and pitch ranges. Embiltā are made of metal in the north due to proximity to industrial resource, but further south they are made of wood or bamboo. One set is usually played in triple metre using a hocket technique. Embiltā are played for social gatherings and wedding celebrations and traditionally not accompanied by other instruments.
Before 1974 there was a plethora of solo vocalist-composers who accompanied themselves on the krar or masēnqo. After 1991, due to changes in government policy and social restructuring, musical groups and bands with their own soloists appeared with greater frequency and were often affiliated with local and/or regional cultural centres that lent their support to the government. Also, increased recognition of individual ethnic groups was the impetus for documenting and compiling musical traditions of all ethnic groups. Music was understood to influence and change peoples’ attitudes, and was believed to be necessary for a community’s well-being, as a teaching tool, and as a socially sanctioned form of expression. Political education and cultural presentations, such as performing music for purposes of mobilization for war and maintaining the peoples’ morale, were the objectives of the Keyahti’ Embaba (Red Flowers) cultural troupes during the late 1970s. These troupes consisted of thousand of children recruited by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). Teachers of one group from Dekemhare composed songs and music for the Red Flowers. They participated in public festivities, conferences, mass associations and workers’ unions. As they gained public acceptance, they began to correspond with Red Flowers living abroad. During a 16-month period in 1983–4, they toured the front lines in the Sudan and in Eritrea in towns such as Karora, Marafit and Toker.
In the future, traditional music for life-cycle events will no doubt continue alongside burgeoning popular and traditional music groups, plus the growing recognition of the need for repositories of music and other art forms for which the National Museum of Eritrea in Asmara is a major advocate.
Few publications focus specifically on Eritrean musics; those that do include 19th- and early 20th-century Italian sources and occasional remarks in works published by the Red Sea Press. There are also numerous indigenous oral and written chronicles and recordings in local languages available in varying formats, such as orally transmitted stories and song texts, radio and television broadcasts, electronic media, government documents and private educational, political and religious archives. These sources form the core of Eritrean music and are often the only extant references. Harold Courlander commented briefly on Tigrinya music (1944) and Cynthia Tse Kimberlin has written about aspects of Tigrinya and Tigré music (1976; 1980; 1986). Indigenous descriptive information on aspects of music that focus on secular and religious events of various ethnic groups were compiled during the 1980s by the Research Branch of the former EPLF, the Department of Politicization, Education and Culture, and later serialized and published electronically in Eritrea Profile (beginning in 1995).
H. Courlander: ‘Notes from an Abyssinian Diary’, MQ, xxx (1944), 344–55
C.M. Kimberlin: Masinqo and the Nature of Qəñət (diss., UCLA, 1976)
C. Tse Kimberlin: ‘The Music of Ethiopia’, Music of Many Cultures, ed. E. May (Berkeley, 1980/R1983) [incl. discs]
H. Courlander: ‘Recording in Eritrea, 1942–43’, Resound, vi/2 (1987), 1, 3–4
Ethiopia III: Music of Eritrea, coll. J. Jenkins, Tangent TGM 103 (1974)
Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA (1980–83), No.xx (4089746.1) [22 commercial cassette tapes of political and nationalist songs relating to the Eritrean revolutionary separatist movement]
Ethiopia III: Three Chordophone Traditions, coll. C. Tse Kimberlin, Musicaphon BM 30 SL 2314 (1986) [incl. notes by C. Tse Kimberlin]
CYNTHIA TSE KIMBERLIN