Traditional Musical Styles
Hausa, Beriberi, Songhai, Djerma, Dendi, Fula, Wodaabe, and Tuareg traditions, most of which existed quite independently in the colonial period, have begun to form a mixture of styles since the 1960s. While Niger's popular music has had little international attention (in comparison with the music of neighbors Mali or Nigeria), traditional and new musical styles have flourished since the end of the 1980s.
In the north, the Tuareg are known for romantic, informal sung/spoken love poetry performed by both men and women, with voices accompanied by clapping, tinde drums (in women's songs) and a one-stringed viol (in men's songs). The Fula and Wodaabe (largely a nomadic desert subgroup of Fula) keep alive traditions of group singing, accompanied by clapping, stomping and bells. The Wodaabe Gerewol festival is one of the more famous examples of this style of repeating, hypnotic, and percussive choral traditions. The Beriberi too are known for complex polyphony singing.
The region around the capital of Niamey is inhabited by Djerma and Songhai who play, generally solo, a variety of lutes (Molo), flutes and fiddles, and like the Fula, carry on the griot tradition of caste-based praise singers and musicians. Djerma and Songhai traditional music was the topic of extensive study in the late colonial and early independence period.
The Hausa, who make up over half of the country, use the duma for percussion and the molo (a lute) in their Griot traditions, along with the Ganga, alghaïta (shawm) and kakaki (trumpet) for martial, state, and ceremonial occasions. These uses are typified by the ceremonial usage of large trumpets to mark the authority of the Sultanate of Damagaram in the southeast Zinder area.
Read more about this topic: Music Of Niger
Famous quotes containing the words traditional, musical and/or styles:
“There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his activities in the learning process, just as there is no defect in traditional education greater than its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in construction of the purposes involved in his studying.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if we are led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, “You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn’t it lovely?””
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)