Free Analysis of African Kalimba Essay Sample

When it comes to media, the name of musical instruments instantly comes in the mind of people. There are a hundreds of instruments available for music but some instruments have their own significance like the piano, guitar e.t.c. Some instruments are known as the traditional musical instrument. In this assignment, we will talk about one of the most traditional musical instruments used in Africa. The instrument name is Kalimba. In this piece of paper, we have to do a thorough analysis of the African Kalimba, through different angles. Let's start the analysis.

Words about African Kalimba

The Kalimba is a modern style of the African mbira. It could be a solo instrument or as an accompaniment to singers, musicians and dancers. In the 1920's, Hugh Tracey came from England to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to help his older brother run a tobacco grows. He became fascinated by the limited song urbanity. Through the encouragement of prominent composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, he decided to make an inquiry of African tune and eventually fashion the International Library of African Music. The mbira was one of his utmost happiness and created the Kalimba based on the African mbira. Introducing by Tracy in the early 1960's, Kalimba was the registered brand for his diatonic instrument that rapidly became prevalent around the world. The word Kalimba literally means little tune. It was well right for Western tune and made it painless for the performer to play harmony using both thumbs.

As with the mbira, the name Kalimba know throughout much of Africa, but regionally, the name mbira is more commonly worn in Zimbabwe, while the name Kalimba is worn in Kenya, the name ikembe is used in Rhuanda, and the name likembe is used in the Congo, while other names are bit minus joint such as sanza, sansa, marimba, marimbula, there are more generic names of finger harp, gourd piano, and thumb piano that are often used in the west.

The Kalimba is an instrument in the percussion family. It is a modernized form of the southern African mbira. It is a sound box with metal keys friendly to the top to give the different notes. It is also known as the African thumb piano.

The Kalimba is a musical instrument from southern Africa. Several reeds or tines are plucked with the thumb or fingers, and the reed vibrations are bigger by a hollow box resonator or a sounding timber. The Kalimba is a portion of the Lamellophone family of musical instruments.

The first Kalimba to be exported commercially out of Africa was the Hugh Tracey Kalimba. After days of studying African music and dozens of prototype instruments, Hugh Tracey's guests African Musical Instruments also began manufacturing Kalimba, a western version of the mbira, in the recent 1950s. The name Kalimba is a Bantu word which means "little music," and is related to the word karimba, a kind of mbira.

The Physical Attributes of African Kalimba

The important Kalimba is a recent mbira with a sound box with metal keys or tongues (called lamellas) close on the top. The keys or tongues are sometimes made from wicker. The sound box is Kyatt timber (an African hardwood), with keys or tongues made out of European skip steel. Home made versions can be made from old dollop handles, bicycle spokes or jump lead that were cut and hammered to the preferred affect. The keys or tongues are plucked with the thumbs, or with combinations of thumbs and fingers. The keys regularly consist of 20 to 24 metal tongues mounted across two bars at one end attached to the sound box with a stiff dowel holding them in place. The bar closest to the sound retreat serves as a join, the other to grant a means for the dowel to restrain the keys (tongues) in place. The gratis trimmings of the keys (tongues) are positioned at different lengths to generate the kind of pitches.

Soon, African Musical Instruments began making other styles of Kalimba with related, but different notice layouts. The earliest Kalimba was named the Treble, and a larger, poorer inclined 15-document copy called the Alto was introduced. See the ALTO tuning chart below:

Tuning chart for the 15-message alto Kalimba. Similarly, different Kalimba models with the same observe shape was also introduced over time. Most traditional African Kalimba had the tines mounted on a boring lodge, sooner than on a box, though some traditional Kalimba was mounted on a sample of copse which was hollowed out to offer an echoing box. The total stay Kalimba could be placed inside or on top of a hollow gourd, which was worn as a resonator to expand and alter the value of the sound the Kalimba shaped. The new enter-mounted Hugh Tracey Kalimba was a nod to the traditional African Kalimba designs. The minor entered-mounted Hugh Tracey Kalimba was given the name "Celeste" (as in "Celeste treble").

Shortly after the Hugh Tracey Kalimba started being sold around the world, artisans and craftspeople started copying the figure, or adapting the design. Several high value Kalimba makers subsist around the world nowadays: Lucinda Ellison, Andrew Masters, David Ballenger, Steve Catania, Luc De-Cock, R. P. Collier, and Greg Trimble. On the other hand, most Kalimba sold today is inexpensive copies made in third world countries such as Pakistan or Indonesia.

African Musical Instruments continue to give high value Kalimba from their store in South Africa. They have lingered their offerings to over a dozen different Kalimba models, ranging from an 8-edge student model to a current rendering of a traditionally tuned Shona karimba. AMI also makes high quality marimbas and drums.

Performance Characteristics of African Kalimba

The Kalimba produces an evocative, fluid percussive sound that is considered restful and enchanting. Since you can play both simultaneously or alternating between both thumbs, sung and periodic things are doable. Many things can be employed by plucking up or down on the keys (tongues). Although the Kalimba was bent to interest to the Western harmony sensibilities, many Africa musicians will employ the rehearsal of adding busy things to the instrument. Wrapping twisted this tongues with wire or adding a mirliton ruse. This adds an additional perky or whining appeal to the sound of the instrument which is an important sound in many of the family cultures. Often, snail shells or metal bottle caps are often attached to the sound live or the sound box to start or enhance the plentiful active sound. The buzzing is thought to sunny the tend and allocate the listener to focus totally on the melody. The buzzing property are not usually used on the diatonic versions of the Kalimba or beyond of the African tribal cultures. Most recordings do not embrace the property as they tend to promote the unsullied sounds of the instrument.

The actual Trademarked Kalimbas come in three different models, the treble, celeste and alto. The Celeste Kalimba has a downright propose with an unfussy sound plank (lacking a sound box) that produces a chilly sound and has a seventeen-reminder scope. The Treble Kalimba has the same seventeen-notice reach, but it also has a sound box that provides innate hint to distinguish it from the Celeste Kalimba. The Alto Kalimba skin the same sound box as the Treble Kalimba, but has a more narrow fifteen-tone variety.

Finally, the kalimba also found its way into the area of New Music where it is often used together with live-electronics. In his composition kalimBAO, Sascha Lino Lemke uses a Kalimba with microtonal tunings, where in Karlheinz Essl's Sequitur XIV the kalimba is processed with a custom-made laptop agenda. Both pianist Jennifer premiered pieces Hymer who also specializes in Kalimba performance.

The 2007 excise proof "Four Songs by Arthur Russell" features Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman with a kalimba in his rendition of Russell's "A Little Lost." While he had initially played ukulele for the cross, Lekman thereafter frequently featured the kalimba version in his live sets for an epoch.

Tuning/Music Created from African Kalimba

Most western instruments have an austere linear visual mapping from the instrument to the pitch which is played: on a piano, the broaden left you go, the reduce you go, and high remarks are to the right. String instruments have an akin mapping - the broaden up the isthmus you go, the junior the pitch - but this progression is realized independently on each cord. Most western series instruments have an alike progression from one filament to the next: each violin series, for example, is a total 5th greater than the prior one. Such consistent spatial mappings from the instrument to the pitches it acting promotes the development of feeling and aids in the knowledge of the instrument and even the ability to cope or play by ear.

It is everyday on African mbira and other lamellophones to have the lowest remarks in the highlight with elevated comments to the far left and the far right - this is an ergonomic detail, in that the thumb can rotate such that all the tines are calm to reach. However, traditional African tunings use comments that do not lie on the grid of the western tempered balance, and traditional Kalimba edge layouts are regularly idiosyncratic, sometimes with adjacent tines making part of a climb, but then an odd document unnerved in that defies the guide.

The Hugh Tracey Kalimba are tuned diatonically in the key of G. The arrangement of the remarks on the Hugh Tracey Kalimba borrows from the normal machinate with the lowest remarks in the inside and the higher notes on the left and the right, but a recurrent tinge outline is used, with the notes in the ascending climb alternating closely right-left and open outwards towards the two sides. With this bidirectional record blueprint, it seems that all intuition from linearly mapped instruments goes out the window. This arrangement requires that the kalimba player arise a new intuition, but that new intuition is not as hard to come by as the more idiosyncratic observe layouts of the traditional African lamellophones.

The diatonic western Kalimba tuning Hugh Tracey used was helpful for a worldwide instrument - with hundreds of African Kalimba tunings, the elected western benchmark would raise the number of people who would immediately connect with the Kalimba. The beauty of this shade arrangement, with notes free up the size in a right-left-right-left progression, is that modal 1-3-5 or 1-3-5-7 chords are made by singing adjacent tines and are petty to learn and play. If chords are played in the reduce octave, the same notes will look on the contrary segment of the Kalimba in the upper octave, which makes it very easy simultaneously to play a song in the upper octave and an accompanying harmony in the reduce octave. So, the arrangement of notes on the Hugh Tracey Kalimba makes some byzantine musical operations very simple and easy.

Alternative tunings are probable, as the tines of most Kalimba are clearly pushed in and out to file or squash their pitch. Some alternative tunings just change the key of the Kalimba, lacking shifting the mention layout ploy. Other alternative tunings move the Kalimba to non-modal scales (such as Middle-Eastern scales). Each reminder of the Kalimba can be tuned independently (different a guitar), so any ascend, western or non-western, is possible, and traditional African scales are still accessible to this advanced African instrument. Composer Georg Hajdu has tuned the Hugh Tracey alto Kalimba to the chromatic steps of the Bohlen-Pierce range in an example called Just Her - Jester - Gesture. The Bohlen-Pierce dimension subdivides the just twelfth into 13 steps.

African Kalimba and Native People

Today, the tines of the Kalimba are mostly made out of metal and the resonator is a firewood box with holes in it. Kalimba performers yield an airy sound out of the instrument by using their thumbs to strum the end of the lamella tines. Closely linked to the organ logy of the Kalimba are its memoirs. According to Kalimba scholars, the origination and saga of the Kalimba has been sometimes misunderstood over the last fifty being. A regular misconception that has made its way into much of the extant literature on the matter is that the Kalimba is a fresh addition to the mbira family of percussion instruments and was formed by Hugh Tracey in the early sixties. This idea appears to have originated because Hugh Tracey began producing and marketing the "Hugh Tracey Thumb Piano" from his family-run factory in South Africa in the early 1960's. According to basic sources, Hugh Tracey did not create the actual instrument, he just adapted the Kalimba to be able to be shaped and sold on the world market. He traveled the world promoting his revised Kalimba call as the "Hugh Tracey Thumb Piano". Consequently, some people misunderstood and thought that he had actually invented the instrument. Mark Holdaway, a Kalimba promoter for Hugh Tracey's circle, AMI, said in the private interview has done for the inquiries that he himself operated under the misconception that the Kalimba was a present English invention awaiting several authoritative sources corrected him that informed him that to the different, the Kalimba is one of the most dated and indigenous of African instruments. An internal addition to the reading of the Kalimba is a familiarity with its sociological narration and posture. How was this instrument traditionally worn? How is it currently worn? The mbira families of instruments have traditionally had prominent symbolic significance in the African society.

The Lemba people judge that their mbira of range, the deza, enables the Lemba ancestors to be reincarnated through the song and dance that accompany the deza rituals. An austere internet explores gives a colorful picture of just how alive and active Kalimba harmony and performance is nowadays. The Kalimba is used as a featured instrument in many music impending out of Africa nowadays as well as in many music's of the African Diaspora around the world. The absolute trod in ahead foundational awareness of the Kalimba is to arise a drawing of the instrument from a musicological perspective. How does it connect to regulate and tune premise as the typical American music teacher might know it? Or doing it? Traditionally, the Kalimba is tuned according to what sounds good to the chief musician in any given vicinity. Paul Tracey, son of Hugh Tracey and brother to Andrew Tracey, recounted that his father spent his life leaving from village to village and asking the chief musician in each location to tune a given instrument. Hugh Tracey was demanding to find a dress tuning, or even a shared tuning thread, throughout Africa. After foundational comprehension of the Kalimba is established, a short comparison between the piano and the Kalimba can be made. Many music teachers are everyday with the piano, so a correlation between it and the African thumb piano, will be of use to most educators. The tines of the Kalimba are long and lined up next to each other, analogous to the keys on the piano. The Kalimba tines are stroked by the player's thumb and the sound is produced from the resonating of the sound through the copse box resonator.

Worship of Christian and African Kalimba

Most traditional religions in Africa difficult some form of ancestor worship. The Shona felt they had to be on good provisos with their ancestors' spirits, or the world would be in risk of failure. Christians of Africa used Kalimba in their worship while making holy tunes and songs. The spirituality of those songs was marvelous.

The Kalimba has extraordinary potential to be used as a successful tool in the music in classroom. It can be related to what many music educators already know about the piano and has many of the same educational capabilities of the piano; yet it is inexpensive, portable and relatively easy to learn. The Kalimba can be studied by even young children in a classroom setting, and allows the musician to sing while playing the instrument. With a basic comprehension of its organ logical, historical, sociological and musicological position and heritage, American music teachers can use what many of them already know about the piano as a point of reference to easily and effectively introduce pedagogy of the African Kalimba and its literature into their classrooms. This addition will only enhance their instruction and, even more vital, provide for a more extensive and rich atmosphere for learning about the world of music.

 

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