IV
A pedantic digression concerning music and a class of people called Griots.
In the Soudan the art of music is confined to a special hereditary caste of men called griots, who are wandering musicians and composers of heroic songs.
It is the griots upon whom devolves the duty of beating the tom-tom for the bamboulas, and of singing at festivals the praises of persons of quality.
When a chief feels a craving to hear the praises of his own glory, he summons his griots, who seat themselves before him on the sand and extemporise in his honour a long series of special couplets, accompanying their strident voices with the sounds of a small, very primitive guitar, whose strings are strung over serpent skin.
The griots are at once the laziest and the most philosophical people on earth. They lead a roaming life, and take no thought for the morrow. From village to village they wander, either alone or in the train of the great warrior chiefs, receiving alms here and there, treated everywhere as pariahs, like the gipsies in Europe—sometimes loaded with gold and favours, like courtesans in our country—excluded during their lifetime from religious ceremonies, and after death from burial grounds.
They know plaintive romances with vague mysterious words, heroic songs which hold a suggestion of melody in their monotony and something of the warlike march in their well-marked vigorous rhythm; dance music full of frenzy; love songs like transports of amorous fury, or the roaring of maddened beasts.
But in all this negro music, as in that of all primitive races, the melody varies little; it consists of short, mournful phrases, scales of more or less unequal intervals, beginning with the highest notes within the compass of the human voice and descending abruptly to the very lowest, in a dragging, plaintive wail.
The negro women often sing at their work, or during that listless half-sleep, which constitutes their siesta. In that intense stillness of noon, a stillness more impressive out there than that in our fields of France, this singing of Nubian women, with the eternal stridulation of grasshoppers for its accompaniment, has a charm of its own. But it would be impossible to transport this singing from its exotic environment of sun and sand. Heard in other surroundings it would no longer be itself.
The more primitive, the more elusive the melody appears by reason of its monotony, the more difficult and complicated is the rhythm. As the long wedding processions one meets at night meander over the sands, they sing, under the leadership of the griots, concerted choral music, weird in character, and the persistent, syncopated accompaniment seems, as if of its own sweet will, to bristle with rhythmic difficulties and eccentricities.
A very simple instrument, reserved for the women, plays an important part in this ensemble; it is merely a long-shaped gourd, with an opening at one end; this gourd is beaten with the hand, now on the side, now on the opening, and two different tones are thus produced, one sharp, one dull. It yields no other sound, but the result obtained in this manner is nonetheless surprising.
It is difficult to describe the sinister, almost diabolical effect, of a distant clamour of negro voices, half-drowned by hundreds of these instruments.
The persistent counter-rhythm of the accompaniment and the startling syncopations, perfectly understood and observed by the performers, are the chief characteristics of this form of music—inferior perhaps to our own, certainly very different from it, and such as our European tradition does not enable us wholly to appreciate.