a dzura ta Hëndlë
ptm danced they Hëndlë
They danced at the bull festival

Introduction

In this section we introduce the music of Sukur, focusing on the instruments played and, to a lesser extent, on music sung without instruments or with minimal instrumental accompaniment. It will immediately be apparent that we are not musicologists; nor did we set out to capture the full repertoire of Sukur's music. We did however make audio recordings as time allowed and occasion demanded and it is these recordings that are sampled below. There is a great deal more material in ND's 18 hours of video recordings, but we have not as yet begun to mine this source for its musical content.

To our ignorant ears Sukur music seems less varied than that of the neighboring Higi. For example there are no stringed instruments (chordophones). It is on Higi musicians of the blacksmith-potter caste that Sukur call when there are important ceremonies, especially the funerary celebrations (riin) held weeks or months after the burial of an elder man or woman. There are, on the other hand, numerous wind instruments (aerophones), several drums (membranophones) and also idiophones such as rattles. Two forms of Sukur music strike us as particularly notable and beautiful: the kwatarza flute music - heard as you are welcomed to this site - played especially around the time of initiation, and the dirges sung by male choirs at funerals. Examples are given below.

We thank Roger Blench who collected a list of instruments during our first visit to Sukur in 1991. For more information refer to Christo van Rensburg's web site on African musical instruments and to the BBC's pages.

Be warned that the audioclips (in MP3 format) may take a while to load and that they are designed to be played using RealPlayer (click here for free download). For reasons that presently escape us, if you have Windows Media Player set as the default .mp3 player ALL the clips on the page play at once! In this case you have to stop each one and then play the one you want to hear. Sorry!

To reduce download time we have divided the material into three files:

Musical Instruments

    I. Aerophones            II Membranophones and III. Idiophones

Singing