Steve Mullins

West Africa

Music for this workshop

For this column, I've chosen to arrange an example of one of my favorite styles of music Senegalese Kora music. The Kora is a 21-stringed harp lute with a large gourd for a resonating body, played with the thumb and forefinger of each hand. It has a beautiful sound comparable to a mandolin crossed with a nylon-stringed guitar or a harp.

Variants are found throughout West Africa, played by the Mandingo, Bambara, Wolof and Fula peoples. Typically it is played by men known as Griots, who have the important role of oral historians, story-tellers and praise singers. They are a class of professional musicians whose ancestors were singers and counselors for the kings of the empires of West Africa as early as the thirteenth century.

History has special meaning and power in this culture and Griots, as the keepers of that history, wield a great deal of authority. In the past they were reportedly so feared that when they died they were buried inside Baobab trees so that their bodies would not touch the ground.

The music is usually based on a simple descending melody that is repeated over and over, interrupted occasionally with flourishes and virtuosic rhythmic variations. The piece I've chosen to arrange for mandolin here is an ancient tune called River Frogs.

As the story goes, the singing of the frogs along a certain river in Senegal was so beautiful that if a man or a woman were to awaken in the night and hear it, yet fail to awaken their spouse sleeping beside them, it was considered grounds for divorce.

I've arranged two versions of the ostinato melody. Keep in mind that an actual Kora performance would also feature improvised variations and contrasting sections interspersed at will. The basic melody is what we hear in the first six measures and what follows is the same melody embellished by doubling the pulse of the right hand.

Try to bring out the original melody in the variation as much as possible - i.e. play less strongly on the notes that don't belong to the melody, "ghosting" some of the up-strokes, etc., and accenting the important notes.

Enjoy the frogs and don't forget to wake up your spouse!

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