Tag Archives: Dance

Traditional Ghanaian sampling

The Ewe of Ghana have a long history of incorporating musical elements from other cultures into their traditions.

Recent developments among the Tagborlo family in the master drumming for agbadza funeral dancing (above), influenced to some extent by contacts with Western popular music, involve humor (including graphic sexual jokes), taunts, and quotations from popular songs in a manner resembling sampling procedures in rap music. These innovations are entirely within the tradition—the basic rhythmic structure, cultural context, and instrumentation remain the same.

This according to “’My mother has a television, does yours?’ Transformation and secularization in an Ewe funeral drum tradition” by James Burns (Oral tradition XX/2 [October 2005] pp. 300–319). Below, agbadza drumming and dancing at a funeral in Atsiekpui, Ghana; the master drummer on the far left conveys verbal messages through references to speech rhythms and tones.

Related post: Dagomba dance-drumming

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EVIA Digital Archive Project

The EVIA Digital Archive Project is a collaborative peer-reviewed digital archive of ethnographic field videos for use by scholars and teachers; it is also an infrastructure of tools and systems supporting scholars in the ethnographic disciplines, including ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology.

Since its founding in 2001, the project has been developed through the joint efforts of ethnographic scholars, archivists, librarians, technologists, and legal experts, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Indiana University, and the University of Michigan. There is no charge for access for educational purposes. Above, the videographer James B. Weegi assists the ethnomusicologist Ruth M. Stone with materials that are now part of her EVIA collection.

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Filed under Africa, Ethnomusicology, Resources, World music