Learning Objectives
- Examine African musical culture and history by considering music in the community as an integral part of social and religious activities (i.e. the belief system of the Shona people of Zimbabwe and the initiation rites of the Mende people of Sierra Leone).
- Analyze how and why music plays an important role in sustaining social values and maintaining the continuous relevance of traditional African institutions.
- Distinguish the regional similarities and differences between African musical instruments not only in terms of construction and performance, but also in terms of the symbols they represent (i.e. African drum languages and the Mbira).
- Analyze the role the human voice plays in displaying variety in form, such as call and response, as well social organization in African music.
- Identify the variety of African drum languages and their function to imitate the speech contours of words from various African cultures.
- Analyze the functions of modern popular African music, a relatively new musical idiom that developed in the early part of the last century.
Vocal Music II
Listening Guide: Lesotho Circumcision Songs
This song, titled "Lekoa e Khele Banna" ("Hey in the Valley, You Men"), is taken from a CD titled Music of Lesotho, recorded by Bill Wood in the 1970s while he was teaching at the Roulin Secondary School in the Mafeteng District of Lesotho.It is part of a repertoire that is associated with circumcision rites of young boys among the Basotho people of Lesotho. As you might expect, only male voices are featured in these performances.
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"Lekoa e Khele Banna - (Hey in the Valley, You Men)"
00:00-00:05
A solo voice (the song leader) starts the song, singing lekoa e khele banna, a phrase that recurs throughout the song
00:05-00:07
The leader is joined by another voice singing the word banna.
00:07-00:23
The chorus joins singing lekoa e khele banna. They sing lekoa e khele (In the valley) twice and close with banna (men). This pattern is sung two times, using the word "hey" at the beginning of each repetition, in preparation for the leader's entrance.
00:23-00:52
The leader starts the first stanza. He is almost immediately joined by the chorus. The stanza is repeated once, after which the entire group sings more repetitions of the recurring response lekoa e khele banna.
01:22-01:53
The leader starts the third stanza. He is followed almost immediately by the chorus. They all repeat the stanza once before singing the recurring response lekoa e khele banna. A shaker is played briefly to punctuate the singing.
01:53-02:18
The performance draws to a close with ululation. Here ululation helps to elevate the rhetoric power of this song while providing a dramatic closure to the performance.
Some Important Features of This Song
- The dichotomy between the lead singer’s call and the chorus is undermined by the fact that both parts often overlap and interweave.
- The type of call and response pattern featured in this song is known as overlapping call and response pattern. This is because the call and the response sections often overlap.
- At such overlapping points, both the call part and the response part sound together to produce counterpoint—the simultaneous combination of different (independent) parts. But this may be an accidental case of counterpoint, since the singers were probably not trying to sing contrapuntally. This form of involuntary counterpoint is however very common in African music.
- The combination of speech, chant, and song as featured here, illustrates the juxtaposition of multiple vocal resources in African performances.
The Vai have professional musicians--both men (manja) and women (kengai)--who receive training in the secret societies and provide music for social activities and events.
