now welcome back to music 239 today we continue uh with the lecture by dr buckner she has a such a wealth of information that she is going through into another segment here and we hope you enjoy her work as much as you did the last time this is a new one this year because actually i just discovered it last year when i was in france i got the picture i still go back to france every year because that's where my professor was and that's where all his recordings are and i'm still going through all his
recordings and all his pictures and i've just found some more recordings and some more pictures of of another kind of orchestra that the women do and these are women in in in courtly um well in members of court like princesses and ladies in waiting they'll they'll play these instruments those are bells for one thing they're um double bells some of them are single but these happen to be double bells and they're made of iron and they are symbols of royalty okay so that you only find them in households where there's royalty and so only ladies
or women growing up in those houses will have access to them and then as you can see she's playing it she's beating it like a musical instrument often these kinds of bells when the men use them they're used to make like kingly pronunciations and they accent speeches when the women use them the very same instruments they're used as musical instruments so there's a lot of like sociology of music going on in here now at the same time this woman is playing this bell which is made of iron other women are playing what is called i
don't even know how to call it in english it's called a top crease in french which means literally hit your thigh okay and it's made out of pots and or gourds and i'm not exactly sure the the translator called them pots but do those look like pots to you they look like they're made of gourds and they don't sound like pots but when you put those two together you get an orchestra of women playing the bells and women playing the the tap decrease okay the pots and you get an otherworldly kind of music and again
this is something new that i've just been discovering so this is the the bells and the pots by princesses and they also sing songs along with them although i didn't get a good recording of one of those have you heard anything like that before okay okay now we're moving on to the the epitome of zonde music and that is the zonde harp the harp is now spread pretty much around the world my professor was trying to show that even the heart from egypt could very well have spread from central africa eons ago because these harps
are so well made and because the music that are made with these harps is just so eloquent and and so developed it's a five-string heart and um he spent like 20 years tracing down all of these harps that are found now in european museums and comparing them and measuring them measuring the the resonance box measuring the angles between the strings measuring the angles of the of the neck the distance between the where the strings are attached everything about those harps and came to the conclusion that they're probably about the best made harps you know in
a traditional society and he actually has hypothesized that harps may very well have developed in central africa and then spread elsewhere um i have a harp it is not an all not at all a zombie harp it's a harp um that uh luth i want to say luther but that's not the right word is it yeah that's it yeah um a musical instrument maker if you will in los angeles an ugandan version so this is a californian ugandan harp okay it has nothing to do with the zombie harp except it has strings and it's kind
of a little bit in the same shape now the one of the big differences is the ugandan heart has this piece of wood going down the middle okay and the strings are attached to the wood well the zombie harp the strings are attached to the leather okay and of course the rest of it it just looks totally different and the angle and then all the rest of it but this was the best i could do for getting my own harp so um when the lady said well she had two of them made and she said
well you can have one if you want well i had to reimburse her for the cost of it but and it has too many strings i thought about taking off these strings but i decided they'd be too hard to ever put back on so i left them but this is the more or less the scale of these harps and that's more or less how the zombie would tune their harps now this is all of the notes and it's not perfectly tuned right now do those notes sound familiar what are you know what they are okay
does this sound familiar how do you play that what how do you play it on the piano the black keys on the piano that's exactly what all this stuff is it's the black keys on the piano and all the music you've heard so far has all been using only the black keys on the piano okay now the original zombie harp only had five strings and it's absolutely amazing the way that they can make so many very complex rhythms and stuff with their hands and still come out with new songs people nowadays even in zondeland have
added strings because now they're using the harps to play xylophone songs okay so they want to have all those extra notes so they can really kind of jazz up things and then they can use use the harps to party the purpose of the harps of the zombie harps were um they were they belong to like minstrels in the courts of the kings and they were poets they invented their songs as they went they invented their melodies each one would make up their own songs and it would be social and political commentary okay and it would
always be improvised and they would kind of make fun of people and they would express political opinions but because they were minstrels it was kind of accepted for them to kind of you know take jabs at people and they kind of kept people in line and they would tease people for like being cowards or whatever and the king would call them and they would sit and play in the courts okay so these were royal instruments the kings really didn't play them but they had professional heart players and that's all they did in the courts now
when the courts went away the zonde harps more or less went away and i'm going to show you a little bit about the changes that took place but the original zonde harps this is what they look like and i said these are in like the louvre and the british museum and the st petersburg museum because they are just such excellent um instruments okay just from the point of organology they're absolutely wonderful i can maybe play one little song that i learned whoops i'm already blowing it oh i'm not gonna do it i did it yesterday
well you heard a little bit of it anyway now somebody who's on they would be doing that and would also be singing okay and would be changing the words around and singing different note different notes and stuff so anybody want to try it i got you to do it last time you want to try it shy people wow is that why you're taking music because you just want to listen well if you were in zander land you wouldn't be able to listen you'd have to participate and that would just be all there is to it
i have a couple of other pictures the the instruments themselves are absolutely gorgeously sculpted the zonde are not they don't really go into visual arts they don't make sculptures and they don't make paintings and they don't make things to look pretty but when they made a harp they did it right okay and um they were absolutely gorgeous heads and this is practically the only visual art among the zonde were the heads to the harps and they're absolutely beautiful here's a picture of an of uh one of the earlier explorers there was a german that went
through in like 1860s and this is a picture that he drew of zande playing harps now you noticed i played it this way but the pictures of the old zanders are doing it this way okay one of the things that happened when the courts kind of disappeared is that the harp got turned around and so now people play it upside down and that's the way i learned it um there were kings among the zonde and so there were princesses and the princesses could do anything they wanted and if a princess wanted to play a heart
by golly she could play the harp women in general do not play harps generally the men do but there were women especially in the in the royal families that had their harps and that played the harps as well and of course she's playing it the right way um this is a picture that was taken by my professor in the 1960s the early 1960s and you can see that he is still playing it the right way that his harp does have a head on it and that it it looks like a pretty pretty well-made instrument okay
it's not quite the caliber as some of those older ones but it's still a pretty decent heart and i'm going to let you listen now to a couple of songs so they're they're using two hands on the harp and they're singing at the same time okay this will be number 17 yes um they make up poems as they go these are poems but they're sung poems and they're sung to the kinds of rhythms in the heart music that you just heard so hunters caused the wild boar to stay in its den well actually you know
he's just talking about boars right and hunters but actually he's kind of taking a dig at the king because the king would be the hunter no the the the boar would be the hunter and the the boar is afraid to go out and fight so actually this would be a way for the harpist to kind of criticize the king without being because he's just talking about boars and hunters you know so it's a way for him to make to to criticize without getting blamed for it who can translate the message of the harp okay the
way the diviners translate the messages of the oracle so it's kind of like hidden meetings and the art is in is in those hidden meetings have i really sung so that afterwards someone comes calling me is he going to get in trouble for it our chief you nukusa i greet you warmly so on one hand he's criticizing him and on the other hand he's you know greeting him warmly um if you weave a net to hold back the words of your subjects make it a large weave not a small one let people speak you know
let their speech go through that net make it make big holes so that people can say what they want to say he who regrets a fertile land he who complains about his fate is not saved for having done so i'm not sure exactly what that's supposed to mean i'll let you guess maybe complaining doesn't do any good that you have to do more than just complain you have to actually act on it so these are the kinds of things that that and they don't repeat them the whole song is just more and more and actually
a lot of people have thought that you know this is where rap came from the idea that you've got a simple rhythm and you're making up the songs as you go okay now this isn't rhyming necessarily but that mental agility was certainly there and it's been there for for ages um also before i turn more on the music is actually if you listen to the rhythms the old style heart playing is absolutely fantastically complex now if you see seeing row row row your boat in a round you start and then the next group starts and
the next group starts well actually that's what they're doing but with one hand starting and then the other one so they're actually playing around with with one hand in the other okay so you can imagine what what they're trying to do by starting like row row row your boat and then row row with the other hand up a level and um he's kind of drawn that out the next one is i think the exact same music that this represents so see if you can read and follow and hear what you're seeing um me i want
to go back to the last one and see if you can hear it in that one too i don't think oh i can so this is the other one see if you can hear like the round that's going on inside the the melody foreign i can't even rub my stomach and pat my head so how they can do one hand doing one thing in one hand doing the other thing you know i don't know how and they're singing and making up words at the same time okay that's that's the key now there are other kinds
of rhythms not the ones that we've heard right here some of the rhythms get very very complicated also i don't know if you've noticed it's hard to tap your foot to these heart songs xylophone songs you know everybody's tapping away but the harp songs it's a little bit harder and that's because the rhythms aren't you know they aren't on on regular beats and that's one of the examples of you know two two three two three two two three two three so very individual kinds of styles and they're usually sung by individuals so that makes a
difference the next one the next music is of two harps playing together and you'll notice that they're also playing in rounds so it's playing in rounds and playing in rounds okay so here's two harps and i don't have a picture of it so everybody um i hope you get the idea of how how much of an art that was okay both musically and and language-wise okay making up the poems and the music and combining the two in very unique compositions each time sure do you know who makes them is uh no usually it's a special
well there there have been times when a a heart player would make his own harp um but it would take weeks if not months because you'd have to get the animal you'd have to cure the thing you'd have to cut down the right kind of wood you'd have to let that cure you would then carve it you'd you know take care of the skin and then you sew the whole thing together then you have to go out and get the spring strings and you have to top them and string them and let them rest and
i think at one point they were even buried for a while to kind of get the moisture and get set and then finally you could you could play it and it really was a very very long procedure and very few people could do them some of the best harpists did make their own but then when that harpist died he would pass that harp on so a lot of people inherited the harp you know from an uncle or from a cousin or from an older brother or somebody sometimes from a father they would inherit it so
they wouldn't necessarily know how to make them and that has what happened is what has happened is that people no longer know how to make harps okay and that it's a huge problem i tried to get someone to make a heart but it was just pitiful um and this is a difference just in 20 years what happened in zander land in 1960s there were still harp good harps around and there were still people who had learned harpists from before the colonial people from before the colonial period but already by the 80s and 90s that had
pretty much died out that's a good harp and he's playing it the right way this one i don't know if you can tell it it's got a sardine can on top okay it's just really pitiful now he was blind and he's a wonderful harpist but he lost his harp a long time ago and he could never make another one so he borrowed that one but he's of course turned it around okay so once the courts lost their power the art not only of the playing but of the making of the harps also disappeared and that's
what it'll probably never never be the same and you can see actually this harp you can see the the strings are almost parallel which is not good as opposed to that one where they they're wider on top and narrower on the bottom so there's all kinds of things that are done wrong on that one this one's rounded and that one's squared and of course it's turned upside down now what else has happened is that most recently and i'm going to let you listen to one more harp song it's no longer the old kinds of rhythms
it's no longer like those canons um it's just simply it's simple melodies kind of like what i played and like xylophone songs just to dance to so they're just pretty songs they're no longer the songs that people you know used to sing at quartz so this is one last harp song and it's also by a blind guy and he's a pretty good player and i recorded this one i think in 1988 and he had a pretty good harp but it's it's a dance tune it's not the old kind of social commentary poems that that the
old harpist used to play he's tuning at first that's what i just did a minute ago see that's a jazzy kind of dance tune it's very pleasant but it's not the old style he's singing to his girlfriend probably of a long time ago who wears safety pins in her hair as decorations i salute you nothing oh and there are still kids or people who can play this kind of style in the land today on not so nice harps and that still is around and at least we still have that and actually um since there is
no radio or stereos or you know mp3 players or anything it's always handy to have harpists around because they really do help pass the time if you're just sitting around in the afternoon hanging out and you want to hear some music somebody picks up the harp and and there you go and it's very nice there's also song or some people now they carry it under their arms like this and when they're walking they'll play songs as they go that's one of the ones that somebody taught me for when they're just walking so it just kind
of makes and they have to walk a lot of course they don't have cars or anything so it just kind of helps the time pass if you can just kind of and that's one one guy said that's why they turned it upside down so they can play it while they're walking rather than you know sitting like this and playing it i don't know if that's the real reason but it was good enough for him so that's what's happened you know to the harps and zombieland unfortunately but now um that's another example of a modern harp
which you can tell just by looking at it it has nothing you know it can't really compare to the old ones although that still does have a good a good um skin on it now what i was saying earlier about the egyptian harps that one up in the left over there is very similar to the central african harps but not as good okay musically it does not make as good a sound and that's the thing that my professor went out and did was he traced down all the egyptian harps and he measured the resonance boxes
and he measured the strings and for example you can see the strings are parallel you know as opposed to being wider on top and skinnier on the bottom there's a piece of wood on top of the skin which kind of takes away the whole purpose of having the skin there if the strings are attached to the wood rather than to the skin so his theory is that the harps actually probably did come from central africa and then spread from there so maybe the harps that you see in your orchestras here originated you know the whole
idea of pluriarcs from that area of central africa there's just one more thing um and it's this is also something new um one thing i discovered this summer while i was in france also was a song from the next people down okay so this is no longer zande this is going to be a people called the yakuma okay and instead of in bangasu they're farther down but there's some vocal stuff that i heard on tape that just to me is just out of this world it's it's harmonies done inside the pentatonic scale and um and
i hope you enjoy it i'm gonna um i don't have oh yeah i do have a picture okay that's the river that separates the central african republic from the congo and at this point in the river at this point it's very very wide because it's where two rivers come together and there's a lot of traffic across those rivers and that's like a half a mile away okay and you'd get huge canoes that have you know 10 15 people in them and they'd go tearing across the river um to trade or to take passengers and actually
in the past they would have canoes that could carry up to 30 people okay so they had pretty big canoes and of course these people are not water people the yakima or water people but they have canoes they have songs okay and they develop songs this particular song is not on the canoe sorry but it's it's by those same kind of people and the the melodies are and the harmonies i just think are otherworldly and you'll tell me if you've ever heard of anything like this and actually if any of you ever become musicians you
could um compose music based on these kinds of harmonies it would be gorgeous so this is the last one and this is the yakuma and this is a song ah yay okay i can just imagine the bare tones you know people think that acapella was started you know just recently here you know in universities but that kind of stuff has been going on for hundreds of years and again it's people they've got their voices they don't have machines they have their voices they have bamboo you know they have strings and harps and they just kind
of make their own and their musical life is just absolutely extraordinary that's all that i have prepared if you have any questions i'd be happy to answer like how to join the peace corps you
