I went last night to the Colchester Arts Centre to see Seckou Keita, a Senegalese kora player. I'd barely heard of him until I read in the arts centre brochure that he was coming to Colchester, didn't have a very clear notion of what Senegalese music was like, and had only a hazy idea of what a kora was, but the idea of a twenty-two stringed African harp was irresistible. Not to the Systems Administrator, who is less enthusiastic about world music and who needs to want to see something at the arts centre very, very badly to be willing to spend an evening sitting on their chairs, but a friend agreed to come.
The kora is absolutely fascinating. The body is made out of a gourd, faced with an animal skin on one side, standing on little legs like a stool, with a long wooden neck coming out of the top, a bridge protruding horizontally from the side with the skin, two long pegs on top that the musician holds lightly to steady the instrument, and the twenty-two strings running between the neck and the bridge in a great fan. The tuning of the strings is like nothing else I have heard, and I got the impression that to switch the key or pitch of whatever you were playing or singing you changed instruments, as with a penny whistle. One of the two kora on stage last night actually had two sets of strings on separate necks, but I never saw Seckou Keita play on more than one set within a single tune (I'm not utterly sure about that, though, since unluckily we got two very tall as well as broad people sitting in front of us).
The rhythms of Seckou Keita's music were beautiful and strange and complicated, and not a million miles away from what I've heard of Malian music, which was not surprising since the countries are near neighbours. The sound of the kora was wonderful and strange as well, though of course what we were listening to was the electric kora. The unamplified arrangement of calabash and strings would barely reach to the back row of the arts centre, as was demonstrated when it briefly became unplugged. I enjoyed his whole performance very much, while realising that I still didn't know anything about how he fitted into the broad scene of Senegalese music, and I had no idea whether I was listening to the folk-rock version, like a Senegalese Fairport Convention, or more of a Watersons hard core traditional take.
A twenty-two stringed instrument based on a large pumpkin does take quite a lot of tuning, and as Seckou Keita tended to his strings he told us that in his country tuning up was part of the performance. I should think it is. He was playing a westernised concert version of the kora, with metal tuning pegs, but in the accompanying background video the traditional instruments just had plaited leather wrapped around the necks to support the strings. They must need tuning about every two minutes.
The koras were the second interesting musical instruments I've seen this week. One of the exhibits in the British Museum's Celts exhibition was a medieval harp dating from around 1450, now sitting in splendid isolation in a large, ornate Victorian cabinet. I was struck by how small it was, not even two feet high. It was made of hornbeam, according to the museum label. Hornbeam is a very close grained and dense wood, once used for making butcher's blocks and notorious for blunting carpenters' tools, and I wondered whether it was deliberately chosen for its density and if that contributed to the quality of the sound in some way. Completely the opposite of a calabash, in any event.
It was quite a thought, trying to imagine where the harp might have played, before ending up as a family heirloom in a glass case, unstrung. I'd have liked to see it with strings, even if they were left with no tension on them to avoid stressing the ancient frame. It would have looked like a proper working instrument. As it was, it looked mute and sad, stuck inside its elaborate cabinet. The koras, decorated with studwork and shining under the stage lights, were very much alive.
No comments:
Post a Comment