Bangwe

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Bangwe , also pango, bango , is a board zither with usually seven and up to 14 strings, which is played for entertainment in Malawi and central Mozambique . Male storytellers from the Sena, a Bantu-speaking ethnic group in southern Malawi, accompany their songs and moral stories with a bangwe , which is placed in a tin canister or a calabash bowl to reinforce the resonance.

Origin and Distribution

Board zithers are stringed instruments whose one or more strings are stretched parallel over a solid, straight board, whereby the wooden board contributes just as little to the sound amplification of the string vibrations as the thin string support of a rod zither. While a calabash is often tied to the underside of rigid stick zithers and elastic musical bows as a resonance body , the musician holds the bangwe in a half-open vessel for the same purpose when playing. This combination also occurs with lamellophones .

A single or multi-string flat bar zither known under the name zeze (also sese ) on the East African coast spread in the 19th century with the ivory and slave trade in large parts of East and Central Africa as far as Malawi. In India, stick zithers ( vinas ) have been known from illustrations since the 7th century, but have practically disappeared in the form and playing position of that time (except for the tuila and in Cambodia the kse diev ). A probable origin of the African flat zithers from India or Indonesia have been discussed on various occasions by ethnomusicologists in the succession of Arthur Morris Jones . According to the propagation theory that is common today, the stick zithers came to Madagascar via the East African coast. The bamboo string carrier commonly used in Asia was apparently replaced by a solid wood stick. The best-known materialization of cultural communication from Indonesia to Africa are tubular zithers: the third group of zithers, divided according to the shape of the string, as they occur with the sasando in Indonesia and the valiha in Madagascar. If the string holder is a tube (made of bamboo, for example) or a wooden box, as is the case with European zithers and chopping boards , it itself functions as a resonance body. Instead of the box zithers, which do not require a separate resonator, there are trough zithers in East Africa in which the strings are stretched over a bowl ( inanga in Burundi).

Design

The string carrier of the bangwe consists of a long rectangular hardwood board , for which East African padauk ( Pterocarpus angolensis , Chichewa mlombwa ) is used. The board is at least one centimeter thick with dimensions between 15 × 45 and 20 × 65 centimeters. The strings running parallel across the board consist of a single long wire, which is pulled through a row of holes drilled on both ends and knotted at the ends. With most instruments, a thin wooden stick or strip of bamboo is pushed across under the strings as a saddle close to the rows of holes in order to limit the free swinging length ( scale ) of the strings and to keep them 3–4 millimeters away from the board. In addition, small pieces of wood can be pushed under individual or all strings on one side for tuning. With other instruments, pieces of wood placed under each string on the side remote from the player determine their length. Because the plucked strings of an unamplified bangwe only produce a thin sound, the board is held over or partially into the opening of a cut open five-liter oil canister ( bekete ) or a large calabash ( dende ). Some crown caps fixed to the metal canister make an additional rattling noise.

The ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey recorded a blind singer with a seven-string bangwe on tape in central Malawi in 1950 . The string carrier of his instrument consisted of eight papyrus stalks connected to one another, and the far end was placed in a calabash. Such a connection of parallel tubes (of different lengths as in the panpipe ) turns the bangwe into a raft zither, which is thought of as several single-stringed rod zithers tied together. Multi-string raft zithers made from blades of grass with and without calabash reinforcement are known from West Africa (Benin, Nigeria). For the musical bow the equivalent would be the Pluriarc .

The usual number of strings is seven. Some bangwe on the lower reaches of the Shire in the south of Malawi have 14 wire strings, and numbers in between are also possible. The highest string as seen by the player is always on the right and the lowest on the left. The strings are tuned down from the highest note by moving the pieces of wood underneath. In a bangwe in the Hugh Tracey collection, a bag made of plant fibers and hung with a crown cap is used to amplify the resonance. It is connected to the board and covers almost half of it at the near end.

Style of play

The strings of the bangwe are plucked sideways with the fingernails of both hands. In southern Malawi, the player holds the board forward in front of his stomach like a lamellophone and plucks with both hands with his thumb and forefinger. In the rarer way of playing, which is more common in northern Malawi, the bangwe is struck like a guitar. With the fingers of the left hand, the player mutes some strings that are not supposed to sound by placing the fingers on the strings, while using the thumb and forefinger of the right hand in a circular movement to produce a rhythm with different chords. He holds his instrument like a guitar. This shows the influence of contemporary popular guitar music, which is also evident in the six-string board zither kipango played in the same way in the Iringa region in southwestern Tanzania.

The always male musicians appear as soloists; they play for entertainment at parties and occasionally at funerals. Generally in Africa, there is no valid translation for "a musical instrument to play ." In a Bantu language in Uganda, for example, both the ngoma drum and the endingidi spit violin are "beaten", while in Malawi the instruments are "sung" on Chichewa. Kuyimba bangwe literally means “to sing the zither”. The stories accompanied by the bangwe ( nthano ) are often aimed at young people whom they want to teach a good lifestyle in the form of proverbs.

The musical culture of South Malawi and Central Mozambique is distinguished as being independent from that of South Africa. In addition to the bangwe, the large xylophone valimba ( ulimba ) is characteristic of the Sena tradition there . Another style is the dances of the Nyungwe speakers in Mozambique, accompanied by pan flutes. The tuning of the bangwe , the xylophone and the Sena lamellophone malimba are approximately equiheptatonic , that is, the octave is divided into seven equal pitches with a calculated interval of 171 cents . In practice, this pitch is an approximate average. In contrast to this, the Shona mbira lamellophone has a harmonic structure based on fourths , fifths and octaves.

In northern Malawi who call Tumbuka the board zither pango or bango . In a pango with seven strings measured in North Malawi in 1971 , the four upper intervals roughly corresponded to the mean value, the distance to the sixth string was about a minor third and the musician did not play the lowest string. In his research for Vimbuza -Besessenheitsritual at the Tumbuka in the 1990s remarked Steven Friedson that the pango and lamellophone kalimba are considered endangered musical instruments and drum ensemble of Vimbuza ritual is the only well-kept musical tradition.

Hugh Tracey made numerous recordings with bangwe players in the 1950s . Gerhard Kubik and his students Maurice Djenda (* 1948) and Moya Aliya Malamusi (* 1959) have been researching the music of Malawi since 1967 . One of the most famous bangwe players was Limited Mfundo, whose songs Tracey recorded for the first time in 1958, Kubik among others in 1967 and 1984 and the Malawi radio in the 1970s and published them on phonograms. Mfundo's moral stories are about people's ruthlessness, everyday inadequacies and personal problems. Gerhard Kubik compares the mood with the blues and the described experiences of the extremely humble street singer with those of the American singer Blind Willie McTell .

In the 1980s, the blind storyteller and bangwe player Chitenje Tambala attracted large audiences. His songs were often broadcast on the radio. At the beginning of one of his songs ( Ellis ), Tambala talks to his instrument so that it may be ready to play. He addresses it with the word waya , which can be translated as a string and was also used for grammphones in the past, which had to be revved up with a hand crank before the game began. If older musicians cannot follow the pace of their ensemble, they also say waya .

A singer who has preserved the tradition after the turn of the millennium and who accompanies himself on the bangwe is Labison Mpotandebvu, one of whom is entitled Tsoka la atsikana (“The bad luck of girls”). Otherwise, the bangwe learns the fate of many African musical instruments that have almost disappeared in the course of the 20th century. Existing in the place even in the 1950s in greater diversity in Malawi traditional string instruments like the mouth bow mtyangala , the musical bow kalirangwe or rod Zither zeze occurred in the rural popular music to Western models replica guitars ( gitala ) and banjo ( banjo ) and in the cities Electric guitars.

literature

  • Gerhard Kubik : Theory of African Music. Volumes 1 and 2. University of Chicago Press, London 1994
  • Moya Aliya Malamusi: Stringed Instrument Traditions in Southern Malawi . In: African Music , Vol. 7, No. 3, 1996, pp. 60-66
  • Mitchel Strumpf: Some Music Traditions of Malawi. In: African Music , Vol. 7, No. 4, 1999, pp. 110-121
  • Andrew Tracey: Bangwe. In: Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Vol. 1. Macmillan Press, London 1984, pp. 150f
  • Wim van Zanten: The Equidistant Heptatonic Scale of the Asena in Malawi . In: African Music , Vol. 6, No. 1, 1980, pp. 107-125
  • Wim van Zanten: Malawian Pango Music from the Viewpoint of Information Theory. In: African Music , Vol. 6, No. 3, 1983, pp. 90-106

Discography

  • Northern and Central Malawi. Nyasaland. 1950, '57 '58. Tonga, Tumbuka, Cewa. Field shots by Hugh Tracey. International Library of African Music / SWP Records 014, 2000, tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 13, 18, 25
  • Southern and Central Malawi. Nyasaland. 1950, '57 '58. Mang'anja, Cewa, Yao. Field shots by Hugh Tracey. International Library of African Music / SWP Records 013, 2000, tracks 1, 2, 16, 23, 24
  • From lake Malawi to the Zambezi. Aspects of music and oral literature in south-east Africa in the 1990s. Field recordings by Moya Aliya Malamusi. Popular African Music, pamap 602, 1999, tracks 9, 11

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ferdinand J. de Hen: A Case of Gesunkenes Kulturgut: The Toila . In: The Galpin Society Journal. Vol. 29, May 1976, pp. 84-90, here p. 89
  2. ^ Roger Blench: Evidence for the Indonesian Origins of Certain Elements of African Culture: A Review, with Special Reference to the Arguments of AM Jones. In: African Music, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1982, pp. 81-93, here p. 81
  3. ↑ Wim van Zanten, 1980, p. 107
  4. ↑ Mitchel Strumpf, p. 113
  5. ^ Andrew Tracey: Northern and Central Malawi. Nyasaland. 1950, '57 '58, title 1
  6. ↑ Moya Aliya Malamusi, p. 61
  7. ↑ Wim van Zanten, 1980, p. 110
  8. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Theory of African Music, Volume 2, p. 215
  9. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Neo-Traditional Popular Music in East Africa since 1945. In: Popular Music , Vol. 1, Folk or Popular? Distinctions, Influences, Continuities. 1981, pp. 83-104, here p. 87
  10. ↑ Gerhard Kubik: To understand African music . Lit, Vienna 2004, pp. 65f
  11. ^ John E. Kaemmer: Southern Africa. An introduction. In: Ruth M. Stone: (Ed.): Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Volume 1: Africa . Routledge, New York 1997, p. 711
  12. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Theory of African Music, Volume 1, p. 235
  13. ↑ Wim van Zanten, 1983, p. 92
  14. ↑ Steven Friedson: Dancing prophets: Musical experience in Tumbuka healing. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1996, p. 103
  15. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Africa and the Blues . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson (MS) 1999, pp. 30f, ISBN 978-1578061464
  16. ↑ Mitchel Strumpf, pp. 113f
  17. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Pathways to Invention. In: Ntama. Journal of Popular African Music and Culture, December 21, 2011
  18. ↑ Mayamiko Seyani: Chronicling endangered music instruments . The Nation, September 13, 2013
  19. ↑ Hugh Tracey described a large number of string instruments, drums, flutes, rattles. See: John Lwanda: The History of Popular Music in Malawi, 1891 to 2007: a preliminary communication. In: The Society of Malawi Journal, Vol. 61, No. 1, 2008, pp. 26–40, here p. 30