Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T23:08:00.106Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Therapeutic Efficacy of Music-Making: Neglected Aspect of Human Experience Integral to Performance Process

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Diane Thram
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This paper is based on field research (1993, 1994-95, 1998, 1999) with a ngoma drum-dance group called Mhembere Dandanda, who live in Mhembere Village, Murewa, a rural community an hour northeast of Harare in Zimbabwe. Dandanda is an indigenous form of ritual dance with its own song repertoire and distinctive ngoma (drum) and hosho (gourd rattle) style. It is practised among the Zezuru, the largest sub-group of the Shona, in sacred contexts of ceremonies for the ancestral spirits and secular contexts of dance competitions and government sponsored events. The word dandanda itself is an ideophone that evokes the sound of deer rushing into nets during the hunt. Song lyrics make reference to strength for battle and the hunt, to nature, family and the ancestral spirits. The designations of sacred and secular for the contrasting contexts in which dandanda is performed are used because this is the way participants in the events differentiate them. Communication with ancestral spirits is considered sacred because the ancestral spirits are the people's conduit to communicate with the creator, Mwari.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 34 , 2002 , pp. 129 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 By The International Council for Traditional Music

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References Cited

Biesele, Megan 1993 Women like meat. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Campbell, Don 1997 The Mozart effect. New York: Avon Books.Google Scholar
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Isabella, 1988 Psychological studies of flow in consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Csordas, T.J. 1996 Imaginai performance and memory in ritual healing. In The performance of healing, eds C. Laderman and M. Roseman, 91–113. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Dale, D. 1981 Duramazwia a Shona—English Dictionary. Gweru: Mambo Press.Google Scholar
Friedson, S. M. 1996 Dancing prophets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
2000 Dancing the disease: music and trance in Tumbuka healing. In Musical healing in cultural contexts. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co.Google Scholar
Feld, Steven 1994 Aesthetics as iconiicity of style (uptown title); or, (downtown title) “Lift-up-over sounding“: Getting into the Kaluli groove. In Music grooves, S. Feld and C. Keil, 109–50. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Janzen, John 1986 Drums of affliction: Real phenomena or scholarly chimera? In Religion in Africa, eds Thomas D. Blakely et al, 161–81. London: James Currey Ltd.Google Scholar
1992 Ngoma. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
2000 Theories of music in African ngoma healing. In Musical healing in cultural contexts, ed. P. Gouk, 46–66. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co.Google Scholar
Kapferer, Bruce 1983 A celebration of demons. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
1986 Performance and the structuring of meaning and experience. In The anthropology of experience, 188–203. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Keil, Charles 1994 Motion and feeling through music. In Music grooves, S. Feld and C. Keil, 53–76. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lambek, Michael 1981 Human spirits: a cultural account of trance in Mayotte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McNeill, William H. 1995 Keeping together in time. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rouget, Gilbert 1985 Music and trance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Roseman, Marina 1991 Healing sounds from the Malaysian rainforest. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
1996 Pure products go crazy: Rainforest healing in a nation-state. In The Performance of healing, eds C. Laderman and M. Roseman, 233–69. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
2002 Making sense out of modernity. in New horizons in medical anthropology, eds M. Nichter and M. Lock, 111–40. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Schieffelin, Edward 1996 On failure and performance: Throwing the medium out of the séance. In The performance of healing, eds. C. Laderman and M. Roseman, 59–89. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Schutz, Alfred 1962 Collected papers I: The problem of social reality. The Hague:Martinus Nijhoff.Google Scholar
1964 Collected papers II: Studies in social theory. The Hague:Martinus NijhoffGoogle Scholar
Stobart, Henry 2000 Bodies of sound and landscapes of music: a view from the Bolivian Andes. In Musical healing in cultural contexts, ed. P. Gouk, 26–45. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co.Google Scholar
Stoeltje, Beverly J. 1993 Power and the ritual genres: American rodeo. Western Folklore 52:135–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thram, Diane J. 1999 Performance as ritual—Performance as art: Therapeutic Efficacy of Dandanda Song and Dance in Zimbabwe. PhD dissertation, Indiana University.Google Scholar
In press Performance as ritual, performance as art: Therapeutic efficacy of Dandanda song and dance in Zimbabwe. In Music, ritual, and religion in Africa, ed. Daniel Avorgbedor. Mellon Press.Google Scholar
Timms, Frederick 1998 Unpublished paper presented as part of “Forum: Music therapy and healing in Africa”, 43rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Bloomington, Indiana, 21-25 October.Google Scholar
Tracey, Hugh 1967 Music appreciation in central and southern Africa. African Music Society Journal 4(1):47–55.Google Scholar
Turner, Victor 1968 The drums of affliction. London: Hutchinson & Co.Google Scholar
1977 The ritual process. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
1982 From ritual to theatre. NYC: Performing Arts Journal Publications.Google Scholar