If you happened to be anywhere near the Mandel Center for the Humanities on Wednesday afternoon, you most likely heard the music of the gounkogui bells and the Ewe drums emitting from the atrium. These sounds came from the first performances of the course titled "Music and Dance from Ghana."
The course focuses on the traditional music and dance from Ghana, as well as Togo and Benin. The "Music and Dance of Ghana" course is offered every semester under the Music Department. It puts on two performances each semester and has no prerequisites.
It is Prof. Faith Conant's (MUS) first time teaching this course. Conant received her master's degree in ethnomusicology from Tufts University. Ethnomusicology is the study of the music of non-Western cultures.
"I guess I've always been interested in music. I was always confused by rhythm in particular and I thought that West African music would be good for an understanding of that," Conant said in an interview with the Justice.
Conant was asked to come to Brandeis by Prof. Judith Eissenberg (MUS) to restart the "Music and Dance of Ghana" course after a few years of it being dormant. "I got invited to do a demonstration of this music by professor Judy Eissenberg and I guess she really liked what she saw me do with the students," Conant said.
Conant spoke to the teaching potential of this genre of music. "This kind of southern Ghanaian music has been taught since the 1960s in the U.S. and I think with good reason because it lends itself to being taught to groups of beginners through very experienced musicians," she said.
Some of the music is old, with some pieces dating to the 1700s. "You can live an entire life and not explore all that there is in this music to explore. It's a very deep tradition," Conant said.
The music from these regions of western Africa represents the tones of the languages of the Gbe-speaking people. The Gbe languages consist of 20 related languages in the western regions of Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria. The most commonly spoken Gbe-language is Ewe. Each tone and drum has a distinctive meaning. "African music really fascinates me because of the complex and beautiful relationship between language and the music. Because the drums are actually playing language, they're playing poems, they're playing phrases and in their tonal languages," Conant said.
At their performance in the Mandel Center for Humanities on Dec. 4, the class performed a variety of traditional pieces. They performed a war piece called "Agbekor." The dance they performed is a war song traditionally performed to predict battle and is also done after war to recount battle. Conant explained to the audience that each drum says something about war. One says "on the battlefield" and another says, "look back at home." Conant led the piece with her master drum while several students played the Ewe drums and others played the axatse and gounkogui bells. Two students danced fervidly in front of the drums with sosi-horsetails, which looked like large feather-like whips.
The performers were dressed in cloth wraps that were from Conant's personal trip to Togo. For the Gahu dance, students wore cloth wraps and for the war piece they wore pants called shankar. Conant noted in an email to the Justice, "some of the wraps have Ghanaian symbols on them, others were commercially produced in Holland but are given names like 'my rival's eye' and can be used to taunt or inform people about the wearer's state of mind."
The class performed several other pieces that included a diverse ensemble of dancers and drummers. Laili Amighi '14 danced one poem from the piece "Adzogbo" that demonstrated the relationship between language and drumming. During her dance the audience clapped in polyrhythm-when a rhythm makes use of two or more different rhythms simultaneously.
Amighi noted in an email to the Justice, "I really appreciated this course because it was truly experiential in nature. What we learned as a class from actively participating is much different than what we would have learned from any reading or lecture." Amighi's choice of instruments this semester were the rattle, the agan drum and the kloboto drum.
Guest dancers and musicians from western Africa often teach and perform with the students. In class on Dec. 5, Conant had Saeed Abbas of a Ghanaian music ensemble and Rebecca Abbas perform with the class in a piece called "Kpanlogo." The ensemble was created after Ghana's independence from England to share the many different traditions from all the different ethnic groups with one another.
Conant expressed that she feels the music has the ability to connect people cross-culturally. "I've actually enjoyed introducing this music to different types of people ... The courses and places that I've been involved with have proved that West African music is very inclusive."
Conant doesn't follow a strict structure of the course. Instead, she tailors the class to her students' interests. "It's more some dancing, some drumming and some singing throughout the semester and depending on how it's going we work more on one or the other toward a performance, but also so that people get enough time on what they need and what they want to. Enjoyment being a chief goal," Conant said.
The various instruments played by students all came together and formed cross-rhythmic structures. "It didn't come as easily to me as it does to my students. I'm really amazed by how fast they pick it up. They're all new to it. It's so incredible," Conant said.