Knowledgebase
Viewing articles tagged 'music'
Viewing articles tagged 'music'
4 articles
Dega culture
A village, the land around it held in common, kinship that decides obligation, and a moral order older than any state that has claimed us. Around thirty peoples, each with its own building, weaving, music and dance, held together by an animist thread that runs through all of them, and by a gong tradition that UNESCO has placed on the list of the...
Films and recordings
Where to see and hear the Dega: the American wartime films now in the public domain, later documentaries, videos made in our own languages, the published records of our music, and the field recordings held in Paris, many of them free to listen to online. We list what we have been able to find and check, and say where we could not.
Gongs and epics
Much of what the Dega know was never written down. It was played on gongs and sung through the night. In 2005 UNESCO recognized the gong culture of the Central Highlands as a masterpiece of the world’s intangible heritage, and in 2008 put it on the Representative List. This page is about what that heritage is, about the stone instrument at Ndut...
Instruments beyond the gongs
The gongs are the voice of the highlands, but they are not the only one. Our peoples made music from bamboo, gourds, stone and a single string: xylophones, mouth organs, tube zithers, one-string fiddles, jaw harps, flutes and panpipes, and, once, from stones cut before any of our languages were spoken. Most of it was recorded by outsiders in the...
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