Mendzan

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Mendzan , also mendzang, mendzaŋ, mendjan, medzang, mebiang and menjyang, refers to large spar xylophones lying on the floor without resonators and smaller carrying bracket xylophones with a calabash resonator under each sound plate in the Fang in southern Cameroon and in northern Gabon as well as in the Beti in the Center region in Cameroon. While the spar xylophones traditionally played at transitional ceremonies, ancestral cults and other rituals are rarely used, ensembles with often four differently tuned handlebar xylophones are part of entertainment at family celebrations and other social occasions.

Support bracket Xylophone mendzan in Cameroon, 1914

Origin and Distribution

The bars of xylophones are usually movable on two parallel bars or bars; in Southeast Asia they are rarely hung on two strings. The instrumental classification is based on the type of support and - if there are resonators - according to their shape. The simplest xylophones, mainly found in the south of Africa and Madagascar , are thigh xylophones . Children, and women in Madagascar, sit on the floor and have a row of chime bars across their outstretched legs. Gerhard Kubik documented an ensemble with thigh xylophones played by male musicians in 1973 with the Igbo in eastern Nigeria . A man had a xylophone made of four wooden sticks ( ano mgbe ) placed over his thigh, two other musicians each used two wooden sticks ( mgbe etiti ). They hit the xylophones with club-like mallets on the occasion of the omabe mask cult to conjure up the leopard spirits.

Xylophones are nothing more than a row of different sized bats that are struck individually and used as rhythm instruments. The Igede speakers in eastern Nigeria use a round wooden osisi that is laid across two banana trunks and that is beaten like a log drum with two sticks, but has no slot. The osisi is played like the slotted drum ekwe , the single- tone bell made of iron obele ogene and rattles to accompany dances.

The combination of such strikers and leg xylophones leads to the spar xylophones, in which several, differently tuned woods are supported on two cross members. With larger spar xylophones, the sound bars lie on long banana trunks or sometimes on tied tufts of grass. To fix their position, dividing bars are inserted between the sound bars or the plates are fixed at the support points with pins in holes in the plates. A special type of attachment occurs with the small dimbila of the Makonde in southern Tanzania and in northern Mozambique . There the sound bars are fixed on one side by a pin in the hole and on the other side by separating bars.

In Africa, spar xylophones are used on very different cultural and social occasions from the central region through East Africa to the south. With a few unusual exceptions, they are among the instruments played only by men. In Uganda the kponingbo of the Azande with 12 to 13 bars is played by two musicians sitting next to each other, the entaale or amadinda in the kingdom of Buganda with 12 plates and the embaire with 15 plates is played by two musicians who sit opposite each other, while a third musician the highest sound bars served on one side. Such xylophones were part of the courtly music of the rulers in the area between the lakes and in their manufacture, sacrifices to the ancestors were occasionally necessary.

In the highlands in western Cameroon, the Bamileke spar xylophones made from banana trunks and very heavy sound plates play. According to JN Lo-Bamijoko (1987), Ngelenge is a spar xylophone among the Igbo in eastern Nigeria with 10 plates. Herbert Pepper (1952) describes an equally roughly worked spar xylophone among the Igbo in the area of Owerri with 12 plates, which lie on banana trunks and whose tuning corresponds to the overtones of an arch of the mouth . It was played by two musicians seated opposite each other.

Neither leg xylophones nor spar xylophones have resonators, but the largely closed space under the plates has a certain sound-enhancing effect. In order to take advantage of the resonance of a cavity, the sound bars of the earth pit xylophones are placed at the ends on a plant base and over a hole dug in the middle. Earth pit xylophones are known from West Africa ( Guinea , Benin , Nigeria) via East Africa ( Uganda , Kenya ) to the Congo Basin . One such earth pit xylophone is the lengasho of the Central African Banda , which has only three bars that are struck by two musicians at the same time. The fact that the Banda use mallets with rubber heads shows the contact with ethnic groups in the area who play their handlebar xylophones. The Igbo call an earth pit xylophone made of two rods that are placed on a ring of plaited plant fibers over a round hole in the ground , ndedegwu . At the Alur in Uganda, the earth pit xylophone ndara, made of eight very large tonewoods lying on a bundle of grass, is suitable for playing melodies. The three original xylophone variants contain the essential, tone-forming properties of the instrument type in the simplest of their craftsmanship.

Handlebar xylophone with 14 chimes and resonators made from animal horns in the Nigerian state of Plateau .

Xylophones with individual resonators have significantly improved sound properties and represent the largest group of xylophones. In Africa, calabashes are mainly used as resonators, the size of which is carefully matched to the pitch of the plate. Presumably, xylophones amplified by calabashes have been known since the 1st millennium. Bamboo tubes, cattle horns or other materials serve as resonators less often. Obligatory for almost all African calabash resonators on xylophones, including the mendzan , is a small opening on the side, which is covered with a Mirliton . This is a membrane made from a spider's cocoon , a fish bladder or a thin paper, which is used to amplify the sound and add a rattling background noise to the sound of the record.

The support bracket xylophones are one of the best-known types of xylophone with individual resonators. They are distributed from southern Cameroon over the Congo to northern Angola . The oldest illustrations are of two Italian Capuchin monks who traveled to the ancient kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba in the 17th century . The name of this portable type of xylophone comes from a bracket that is attached on one side in the plane of the sound bars and allows the musician to hold the xylophone, which is hung around his shoulder with a shoulder strap, at a certain distance in front of his body. The xylophone mentsyā (a language variant of mendzan ) in the south-west of the Central African Republic consists of a row of around nine narrow rods with pointed ends. The standing musician wears this typical carrying bracket xylophone with an oval bracket leaning against the middle of his thigh and inclined slightly towards himself with the plane of the plate. The xylophone type belonged to the processional and representational music of kings and other rulers. Among the Ngbandi in the north of the Congo, a handle xylophone is called menza gwe . Its 10 chimes are separated from their board support by braided layers. A hole is cut from the board under each stick, to which a calabash is glued. From the territory of the Kingdom of the Congo , handlebar xylophones spread northward in pre-colonial times. Today they have disappeared in their area of ​​origin, but they have been preserved along with their - adapted - former social function as mendzan in southern Cameroon.

The namespace of the mendzan xylophones is the largest closed distribution area for handlebar xylophones. The word mendzan does not come from the Bantu languages , to which the Beti language belongs, but can be assigned to the Adamaua languages . This means that mendzan is related to the word manza for a xylophone type among the Azande people in the triangle between the Central African Republic, the Congo and South Sudan . This points to a historical connection between the xylophones. The Azande know three types of bracket xylophone : longo, kponingbo and manza . Only the latter type belongs to the representational music of the Azande rulers. The name manza , like mendzan, is not limited to a handlebar xylophone; before the introduction of portable xylophones, it may also have referred to spar xylophones. Linguistically, spar xylophones and handlebar xylophones are equated in Cameroon in the north-west in the language Bum ( njang ) and among the Mbum- speaking Fulfulde ( nzanga ). The xylophone type occurs in the north up to Lake Chad . A lamellophone like the timbrh old in Cameroon, which is only used ritually, is called mbø menjang .

When they spread from the Congo, the handlebar xylophones also reached the Baka in the Central African Republic , where xylophones, rattles and iron bells are used in an obsession ritual to heal the sick. With the Banda in the prefecture of Ouham-Pendé in the north-west of the Central African Republic, four strap xylophones ( mbaza ) with seven to eight chime bars play together with a two-headed drum ( kporo ), rattles, small bells and occasionally an animal horn ( goto ) in an instrumental ensemble. Each xylophone has a specific pitch and function in the ensemble, which is used for entertainment and ritual purposes. Another name for strap xylophones among the Banda is kalangba , a name related to kalangwa for an instrument with 5 sound bars among the Ngbandi in the Congo. Three to five kalangba play polyphonic, interlocking tone sequences in an ensemble, which are otherwise produced by single-tone trumpets or single-tone flutes such as the hindewhu of the Ba-Benzele.

Design

The two main types of xylophones in Cameroon and Gabon are the simple spar xylophone and the bracket xylophone with calabash resonators, in which the chime bars lie on a frame made of two longitudinal pieces of wood connected to each other. Some xylophones with frames have legs and stand on the floor, but organically they belong to the bracket xylophones. At the beginning of the 20th century, a box or trough xylophone was introduced for Christian worship. The instrument, which has now disappeared, had 9 to 23 chime bars that were placed over a shared wooden case.

Spar xylophone

Holm xylophone with chime bars fixed asymmetrically on banana trunks by the Bamileke in western Cameroon.

The spar xylophones are set up outdoors for ceremonies and other public events. The chime bars, sawn from heavy, solid Padauk wood ( Pterocarpus ), are placed over freshly felled banana trunks. They are numbered or otherwise marked for quicker positioning, but the arrangement is not exactly linear according to the pitch and differs from that of the Azande xylophones. With the nzang, holes are drilled in the center of the bars on both sides of the support points. Iron pins, punched through the holes in the banana trunk and protruding about ten centimeters, secure the plates in place. In a nzang with 7 sound plates played by the Bamileke in the Ouest region , the frequencies were determined which correspond roughly to the following tones: c – d – e – fis – gis – a – ais. Two musicians seated opposite each other play the nzang with a mallet ( pù'u ) in each hand.

The ritually used xylophones call the Fang melane or medzang mebiang ( mendzang me biang, "cult xylophone"). When worshiping ancestors , the Fang play a mendzan with 8 and one with 15 chime bars made of Padauk wood. Holm xylophones have between 8 and more than 20 bars. Sometimes an instrument with 20 sticks is split between two banana trunks so that one musician plays a xylophone with 12 and the other one with 8 sticks. In contrast to the nzang , the iron pins are only struck through a hole in the bars on the side facing away from the player. On the player's side, the sticks are separated from one another by shorter pins that do not protrude above the surface in the spaces between them. After the performance is over, the Fang dismantle their xylophones and occasionally - according to an observation in the 1970s - pack the records in a sack, which is interpreted as a habit from an earlier period of non-sedentary life. The scale of the xylophones is hexatonic , the seventh degree is missing. Holm xylophones have disappeared from Gabon today.

Handlebar xylophone

The sound bars of the support bracket xylophones are tuned according to the same hexatonic tone system. For an ensemble called mendzang me yakaba five portable xylophones are required, which have a decreasing number of 9, 9, 8, 6 and 2 sound bars from the highest to the lowest sounding instrument. The 9 bars of the second highest instrument have the pitches of a measured specimen: g sharp (207 Hz) - a sharp (232 Hz) - c 1 (260 Hz) - d 1 (286 Hz) - dis 1 (310 Hz) - e 1 ( 330 Hz) - g sharp 1 (415) - a sharp 1 (459) - c 1 (513).

In Yaoundé the xylophones are named after the number of rods and the musical use. Omvek is a xylophone with 11 bars, akuda omvek is one with 10 bars and the nyia-mendzang is one with 8 bars. The endum with four particularly large sticks is only used as a rhythm instrument. The xylophones hanging around the musician's neck are played either with two sticks made of soft wood or with two mallets with rubber heads.

Style of play

Wooden idol figure of the byeri secret society during the catch.

Essential knowledge about the playing style of mendzan are due to the Cameroonian musician Pie-Claude Ngumu (1931-1997), who, while he led the church music in the Cathedral of Yaoundé, a mendzan ensemble founded to make music for the services. His study of mendzan and the music of this ensemble was published in 1976. Ngumu also worked on a documentary on the xylophone music of Cameroon, which was released in 1981 under the title Mendzang Beti . Fang, Beti and also Bulu are Bantu-speaking ethnic groups that were grouped together under the name Pangwe (French: Pahouin) because of their cultural affinity in the 19th century. The collective name is no longer in use.

Spar xylophone

The Missing in Gabon Holm Xylophone medzang mebiang were at initiation into the cult of ancestors byeri played. Byeri is a private cult within the family, in which a female wooden figure called byeri takes center stage, in which the ancestors are venerated. According to their myth of origin, the Fang brought the figure with them from its cosmic place of origin, ozamboga , and made contact with their creator god through its voice. These ideas are part of the bwiti cult practiced by the Fang in Cameroon and Gabon. The social structure that went beyond the family and with which the individual was integrated into the village community was the secret society melane . One of the rituals of the bwiti cult among the Ntumu, a subgroup of the Fang, is the ingestion of the psychoactive Iboga root .

The mythological origin of the Fang is related to their migration movements at the beginning of the 19th century, when the colonial penetration of Africa began and large numbers of Fang moved from Central Cameroon to Gabon. They brought the relics of their venerated ancestors with them in tubular vessels made of tree bark. A wooden figure byeri came with each container . In the patriarchal social order of the Fang, in the byeri cult , the father practices the veneration of the ancestors, which is strictly forbidden to women. According to descriptions from the 1970s, an initiation into the byeri cult was a large public ceremony:

After the initiators have carried out cleaning activities outside the village in the secrecy of the initiation huts and have taken hallucinogenic drugs, they are shown the ancestral figure byeri in an action accompanied by the xylophone ensemble. For the following ceremony, two spar xylophones medzang mebiang are set up in the village square. The ensemble also consists of the large slotted drum nkul and the cylindrical drum mbejn , standing vertically on three feet , which is beaten with the hands. The initiated boys complement the rhythm with large basket rattles ( nyas ), which they have tied around their ankles while dancing. They want to call on the ancestors with wooden masks attached to their upper arms.

Handlebar xylophone

The most widespread among the Fang and Beti today are portable xylophones, five or six of which are played in an ensemble that usually occurs at weddings. During the aforementioned initiation of the boys, handlebar xylophones were not used, but they were used for girls' dances. When the handlebar xylophones were used ritually in the past, the rasping sound of the Mirlitone was supposed to help them to get in contact with the spirits.

The Yaoundé ensemble with four handle xylophones can include the mvet bridge harp , which is mainly part of a narrative tradition characteristic of the Fang, clapperless iron bells as a clock and a basket rattle ( engis ). With the Eton , a group belonging to the Fang, four xylophones form an ensemble: The mon ("son") has 12 bars, the acoura ("thousand voices") 10, the nchan ("companion") 8 and the ndum ( "Bass") 2 bars. The snare drum ngom is often part of this mendzan- enselble . The Ewondo speakers in southern Cameroon call the four xylophones in this ensemble ololong with 11 bars, omveg with 10, akudu with 4 or 6 and endum with 2 bars. Gerhard Kubik noted the names in 1970 in the Est region : olulong ("the pipe") for the melody-leading xylophone with 13 bars, ebulu with 9 bars, which complements a rhythmic pattern, ombok ("the only one") with 5 bars only one tone is produced at a time and the bass xylophone endum with 4 bars ( onomatopoeic ndum, dum, dum ...)

The mood of the xylophones in an ensemble is based on the middle pitch of the xylophone, which is presented as the “head of the family” equated with a family. The octave bars are sometimes referred to as "wives". From the middle note 1, the bars are tuned with decreasing pitch up to the lowest note 6. Then the upper octaves 4 'to 6' are sought for the three lowest notes 4 to 6 on the other side. Some musicians have recently introduced a seventh tone ( esandi , " spoilsport ") into the hexatonic scale (placed between 6 'and 1), which results in an approximately equiheptatonic tuning. Although the tuning of the xylophones is not uniform, measurements in South Cameroon showed a preference for the “neutral third ” (320–370 Hz) between the next but one tone bars. As with vocal music, the melodic structure is based on thirds and octaves.

The music and dance style Bikutsi ( bikud si ) is part of the mendzan game tradition among the Beti in central Cameroon. In pre-colonial times, the Bikutsi was part of nightly gatherings of women and included introductory songs for young women that were sung without instrumental accompaniment. This resulted in a Bikutsi dance music style for a male ensemble with xylophones, the slit drum minkul ( nkul ) and the rod zither mvet . Bikutsi and mendzan are part of social events and ceremonies in the Beti villages, such as weddings and the ritual dance essana performed at the funerals of important personalities . In the 1950s, labor began to migrate to the big cities, and the urban xylophone ensembles adopted the Bikutsi style for their appearances in beer bars. In the decades that followed, the xylophones faded into the background in favor of electric guitars, drums and other instruments of western pop music, including synthesizers . Since the 1990s, urban popular music has been dominated by bikutsi pop, which is also known as bikutsi porno because of its suggestive song content and the erotic dancers .

In addition to the Bikutsi, the merengue, introduced from the Dominican Republic , had the greatest influence on music in central and southern Cameroon in the late 1950s and 1960s . The early merengue groups performed with mendzan , accordion and guitars. A well-known group that popularized the xylophone game throughout southern Cameroon in the 1960s was the Richard Band de Zoetele , directed by Richard Nze. The group played Bikutsi, Merengue, Rumba and Cha-Cha-Cha and performed at the first pan-African cultural festival in Algiers in 1969 . Numerous xylophone groups that played at dance parties in the villages adopted Richard Nze's style around this time. A xylophone band called Miami Bar used these styles, which they had adapted from Cuban and Congolese records, to entertain the international sailors in the red light district near the port of Douala . The Miami Bar Band used box-type xylophones with their feet on the floor.

Church music composer and musicologist Pie-Claude Ngumu introduced a mendzan ensemble into Catholic worship in the 1950s . His ensemble La Maîtrise des Chanteurs à la Croix D'ebène included four mendzan , a double bell ( nzeme mmó , corresponding to the Ghanaian gankogui ), slit drum, rattle, drum and the mvet bridge harp . The ensemble performed at the mondial des arts nègres festival in Dakar in 1966 .

literature

  • KA Gourlay, Ferdinand de Hen: Mendzan. In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments . Vol. 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014, p. 442
  • Jos Gansemans, Barbara Schmidt-Wrenger: Central Africa. Music history in pictures . Volume 1: Ethnic Music, Delivery 9th German Publishing House for Music, Leipzig 1986
  • Claire Lacombe: "Fieldwork in Archives": A Methodological Approach of the Fang's Xylophone Music Through Sound Archives (1908-2000). In: Susanne Ziegler, Ingrid Åkesson, Gerda Lechleitner, Susana Sardo (Eds.): Historical Sources of Ethnomusicology in Contemporary Debate . Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, pp. 83-93

Discography

  • Mvet ai Mendzang. The music of the Beti in Cameroon. CD series Museum Collection Berlin , edited by Artur Simon . Wergo, 2005 (SM 17112)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerhard Kubik : West Africa. Music history in pictures . Volume 1: Ethnic Music, Delivery 11. Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig 1989, p. 64
  2. ^ Gerhard Kubik, 1989, p. 68
  3. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Xylophone game in the south of Uganda. In: Ders .: To understand African music. Lit, Vienna 2004. pp. 154–157
  4. ↑ Herbert Pepper: Sur un Xylophone Ibo. In: The African Music Society Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 5, June 1952, pp. 35-38
  5. ^ Sibyl Marcuse : A Survey of Musical Instruments . Harper & Row, New York 1975, p. 23
  6. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Xylophone. B Africa, Latin America. III. Pit xylophone. In: MGG Online, November 2016 ( Music in the past and present )
  7. ↑ JN Lo-Bamijoko: Classification of Igbo Musical Instruments, Nigeria . In: African Music, Vol. 6, No. 4, 1987, pp. 19-41, here pp. 22, 36
  8. ↑ Xylophone tuning. British Library Sounds. Klaus Wachsmann Uganda Collection (audio sample of Alur's earth pit xylophone ndara from 1950)
  9. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Xylophone. B Africa, Latin America. VI. Xylophone with individual resonators. In: MGG Online , November 2016
  10. ^ Ferdinand de Hen: Menza gwe. In: Laurence Libin (Ed.): The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments . Vol. 3, Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2014, p. 442
  11. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Central Africa: An Introduction. In: Ruth M. Stone (Ed.): Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Volume 1: Africa. Routledge, London 1997, p. 656
  12. ↑ Roger Blench: A guide to the musical instruments of Cameroun: classification, distribution, history and vernacular names. Draft, July 31, 2009, pp. 16f
  13. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Xylophone. B. Africa, Latin America. VI. Xylophone with individual resonators. 2. Support bracket xylophone. In: MGG Online, November 2016
  14. ↑ Jos Gansemans, Barbara Schmidt-Wrenger, 1986, p. 80
  15. ↑ Central Africa. Xylophones de l'Ouham-Pendé. Sylvie Le Bomin: Text booklet, p. 12. CD from Ocora. Radio France, 1996
  16. ↑ Jos Gansemans, Barbara Schmidt-Wrenger, 1986, p. 138
  17. ↑ Claire Lacombe, 2017, pp. 83f
  18. ↑ Claire Lacombe, 2017, p. 89
  19. ^ Brian Edward Schrag: How Bamiléké Music Makers Create Culture in Cameroon . (Dissertation) University of California, Los Angeles 2005, p. 125
  20. ↑ Jos Gansemans, Barbara Schmidt-Wrenger, 1986, pp. 136f
  21. ↑ Pie-Claude Ngumu: Les mendzan des chanteurs de Yaoundé: History, Organology, Fabrication, Système de Transcription . ( Acta Ethnologica et Linguistica, No. 34, Series Musicologica, 2) Institute for Ethnology at the University of Vienna. E. Stiglmayr, Vienna 1976
  22. ↑ Mendzang Beti (1981) . In: Internet Movie Database
  23. ↑ Jaques Binet: Drugs and Mysticism: The Bwiti Cult of the Fang. In: Diogenes, Vol. 22, No. 86, 1974, pp. 31-54, here pp. 38, 48
  24. ↑ Pierre Sallee: Gabon. 2. External influences. (ii) From the north . In: Grove Music Online , 2001
  25. ↑ Jos goose Emans, Barbara Schmidt-Wrenger, 1986, p 136
  26. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Cameroon, Republic of. 1. Ethnic groups, languages ​​and historical background. (i) Southern Cameroon. In: Grove Music Online, 2001
  27. ↑ Dennis M. Rathnaw: The eroticization of Bikutsi: Reclaiminf Female Space Through Popular Music and Media . In: African Music , Vol. 8, No. 4, 2010, pp. 48–68, here p. 53
  28. ^ Anja Brunner: Bikutsi: Cameroonian pop music apart from world music . In: Claus Leggewie , Erik Meyer (Ed.): Global Pop. The book on world music. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2017, pp. 366–372, here p. 368
  29. ↑ Richard Band de Zoétélé - Be Ngon (Les Jeunes Filles) . Youtube video
  30. ↑ Maitrise des Chanteurs à la Croix d'Ebène - duma ye zamba a yob e (la messe à Yaoundé - Arion 1971) . Youtube video (Xylophone ensemble by Pie-Claude Ngumu at a church service in Yaoundé 1971)
  31. ^ Gerhard Kubik: Cameroon, Republic of. 3. Modern developments . In: Grove Music Online, 2001