Music
The three distinctive instruments of Zimbabwe include drums (ngomas), the mbira, and the marimba. Different sizes, shapes, tightness of the membranes, and materials used to make drums produce different tones and pitches, just as the different sized wood strips of a marimba create different tones. The mbira is perhaps the most important instrument used. It is plucked with the fingers to produce the melody, and is often used during religious rituals by spirit mediums in order to communicate with ancestral spirits. The mbira, and consequently the mbira dance, has been around for a long time, according to archaeological digs. Mbiras have been uncovered and dated back to the twelfth century.
Read more about this topic: Dance In Zimbabwe
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“From where Pan’s cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“I used to be angry all the time and I’d sit there weaving my anger. Now I’m not angry. I sit there hearing the sounds outside, the sounds in the room, the sounds of the treadles and heddles—a music of my own making.”
—Bhakti Ziek (b. c. 1946)
“Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)