INDIA III

 INDIA III

A MUSICAL ANTHOLOGY OF THE ORIENT  / UNESCO COLLECTION 

 Bärenreiter-Musicaphon, ?, BM 30 L 2018

 

This is the album n° 18 in this series and the third one dedicated to India. Dhrupad is the topic here with two of the greatest exponents of this musical style Moinuddin and Aminuddin Dagar. Raja Chhatrapati Singh plays the pakhawaj.
Alain Daniélou who recorded them also wrote the presentation text starting with a short introduction to dhrupad. Considered as the noblest style of Indian music it is sober and containt and well displayed here. 
They sing the raag asavari on side A a raag I didn't know until then with the alap followed by Ana sunai composed by Tansen (translated). 
Side B starts with the raag bhairavi finishing with a composition by Baiju Bhavare Jagata Janani; then a short pakhawaj solo ends that side. 
Texts in English (French, German)

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Les musiciens de la forêt

 

GABON / LES MUSICIENS DE LA FORÊT VOL. 1

THE MUSICIANS OF THE FOREST 

Ocora, 1981,  558569

 Ocora had several series including this one entitled ''living traditional music''; and in this series there were several categories here the first one entitled ''music from the oral tradition''. 

Gabon is a small country  with less than 2,5 million people in 2023 (9 inhabitants per square kilometre). But as it is often the case in Africa the population is quite diversified with mostly bantu groups like the Fang, the Punu-Echira, the Vili or the Myene; the only other non-bantu people are the Pygmies who settled there before the Bantu.
This album is the work of Catherine Oneto and Hugues Poitevin, two people who fell in love with the locals. They recorded some ritual music sung and played with the eight-string harp ngombi by Nzé Menvié (seen on the cover) a Fang farmer, sculptor and crafstman in his sixties at the time of the recordings. So this ritual music was not performed during a religious ceremony. Part of this repertoire belongs to what is called bwiti that the Fang have adopted from the Tsogo at teh beginning of the twentieth century only. But the aim of Oneto and Poitevin was to help Menvié and the villagers in agricultural and cultural terms. For that they created an association which is helped by the Gabonese government. 
This is not a an ethnomusicology record so the notes are brief.
These recordings were made in 1979 in mono but published in stereo.
Text in French only. I don't think that this volume 1 was followed by a second one. 

 


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