Between approximately 2000 to 1500 years ago, Bantu speaking populations from central and western Africa migrated and occupied most of the southern parts of Uganda.
The migrants brought with them agriculture, ironworking skills, and new ideas of social and political organization.
In music, a call and response is a succession of two distinct phrases usually played by different musicians, where the second phrase is heard as a direct commentary on or response to the first. It corresponds to the call-and-response pattern in human communication and is found in many traditions.
In Sub-Saharan African cultures, call and response is a pervasive pattern of democratic participation -- in public gatherings in the discussion of civic affairs, in religious rituals, as well as in vocal and instrumental musical expression.
Mesomedes was a Roman-era Greek lyric composer, poet, and freedman of Emperor Hadrian,.
His works include two epigrams in the Greek Anthology, and three hymns -- respectively to Nemesis, Calliope, and the Sun.
***
The few bits of Greek and Roman notation that survive are often in asymmetrical and/or changing meters in one of the Greek modes, named after regions of Greece proper or the outlying lands of Asia Minor. The Medieval theorist Boethius would later misidentify the modes as listed below, with solfege patterns (Ra, Me, Le, Te are lowered versions of Re, Mi, La, Ti, and Fi a raised version of Fa) and comments/examples.
Lydian - Do Re Mi Fi Sol La Te Do (Exotic Major - First Delphic Hymn, c. 138 BC)
Ionian - Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do (Major - Roman Church Father St. Ambrose Eternal Founder of All Thing, AD 388 [Ambrosian Hymn])
Mixolydian - Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Te Do (Blues Major - Epitaph of Sekilos, AD 1)
Dorian - Do Re Me Fa Sol La Te Do (Blues Minor [Plato's favorite!] - Gregorian Chant - Kyrie IV, c. AD 600)
Aeolian - Do Re Me Fa Sol Le Te Do (Minor - Chinese Entrance Hymn of the Emperor, 1000 BC)
Phrygian - Do Ra Me Fa Sol Le Te Do (Exotic Minor - Mesomenes of Crete Hymn to the Sun, AD 130)
Mozambique is a country in southeastern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west and Swaziland and South Africa to the southwest.
Between the first and fourth centuries AD, waves of Bantu-speaking people migrated from the west and north through the Zambezi River valley and then gradually into the plateau and coastal areas. The Bantu were farmers and ironworkers.
The Chopi are an ethnic group of Mozambique. They have traditionally lived primarily in the Zavala region of southern Mozambique, in the Inhambane Province, a life of subsistence agriculture, a rural existence.
The Chopi speak Chichopi, a tonal language in the Bantu family.
The Chopi identify culturally, as a people, with the elephant.
They are famous for their traditional music, the best known of their instruments being the mbila (plural: timbila), a xylophone played in large groups. This music was proclaimed a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2005.
Other instruments used by the Chopi include panpipes, whistles, animal horns, rattles, drums of various sizes, musical bows, and a globular flute with three holes made from the dried shell of the nkuso fruit (bush orange).
The Chopi's traditional foods include cassava (manioc) and cashew nuts. They also produce a number of traditional alcoholic beverages, which are produced from fermented tangerines or cashews.
The xylophone (from the Greek words xylon, "wood" + phone, "voice," meaning "wooden sound") is a musical instrument in the percussion family which probably originated in Indonesia.
It consists of wooden bars of various lengths that are struck by plastic, wooden, or rubber mallets. Each bar is tuned to a specific pitch of the musical scale. Xylophone can refer to western style concert xylophones or to one of the many wooden mallet percussion instruments found around the world. Xylophones are tuned to different scale systems depending on their origin, including pentatonic, heptatonic, diatonic, or chromatic. The arrangement of the bars is generally from low (longer bars) to high (shorter bars).
The earliest extant xylophone is from the 9th Century in southeast Asia, however, a model of a hanging wood variant exists, dated to c. 2000 BC in China.
Mark Alburger (b. 1957, Upper Darby, PA) is an award-winning, eclectic ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He is Music Director of San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and San Francisco Cabaret Opera, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music and New Music, and Professor Emeritus in Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College. His principal teachers were Gerald Levinson, Joan Panetti, and James Freeman at Swarthmore College (B.A.); Jules Langert at Dominican University (M.A.); Christopher Yavelow at Claremont University (Ph.D.); and Terry Riley. Dr. Alburger has composed 406 major works over the past 48 years, including chamber music, concertos, oratorios, operas, song cycles, and symphonies. His complete catalogue is being issued on discs from New Music. Alburger's multiple blogs include: markalburger.blogspot.com,
markalburger2022.blogspot.com,
markalburgerworks.blogspot.com, markalburgerevents.blogspot.com, markalburgermusichistory.blogspot.
com, 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com
