Wheatstone? Sighting

[Anglo-Irishman]

The other evening, I went to a jazz club in Stuttgart. It was their monthly "world music" evening, and the band consisted of German pianist, lead guitarist, bass guitarist and drummer, with a Turkish singer and a Senegalese Griot, who sang and played djembe and kora.

 

Marvellous music, but not a concertina - or even a free reed - in sight.

 

What caught my attention was the kora. See here for a full description. In short, it's neither a harp nor a banjo, but it's got characteristics of both. The main feature with regard to playing technique is that its 21 strings are arranged in two banks, the strings of each bank being plucked with the thumb and forefinger of one hand. After watching the player for a while, a certain suspicion grew within me, so I spoke to him during the interval, and got him to explain the cora to me. (He first ascertained that I was a musician myself, and then went into some detail!)

And my suspicion was confirrmed: the diatonic scale on the cora is played by both hands, one note left, next note right, next note left, and so on up the scale!

 

On an abstract level, this is the same as Wheatstone's patented button arrangement, which I believe he also envisaged for instruments other than the concertina. Consulting Wikipedia, I see that the first reference to the kora by a European (the explorer Mungo Park) was made in 1799. That's suspiciously close to, but earlier than, Wheatstone's fingering. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

 

Could it be that the English concertina, like my beloved banjo, has some West African genes in its DNA?

 

Any thoughts on this theory?

 

Cheers,

John

 

(PS. Nobody now seriously claims that the first banjo came to America directly from Africa, but the idea behind it could well have crossed the Atlantic with the first African slaves.)

 

 

[Theo]

I haven't had the privilege of talking with a Kora player, but my understanding is that the strings are tuned to a diatonic scale, in which case the left right alternation of notes might be more of a parallel with the push/pull of a German concertina or a diatonic accordion.

[Anglo-Irishman]

Theo,

Think of a diatonic EC in C. That would only have two button rows each side, slightly offset from each other. Then imagine squeezing the buttons of one row in between the buttons of the other row - and you've got a map of the kora's two string banks, one left, one right.

I didn't get to try out the man's kora, but I understood him as saying that the scale went left-right-left-right and so on, which would put the octave notes on opposite sides, as in the EC.

 

I perceive the push-pull of the Anglo, melodeon and other bisonoric instruments as primarily an economic measure: two notes to a button takes fewer reeds than one note per button, saving both space and material costs for a given range of octaves. The Richter scale, which was devised to make sense of this bisonority, is not just "push, pull, push and so on;" it's "push-pull-push-pull-push-pull-pull-push." The neat little shuffle between the last two buttons means that all the push notes in all octaves are in the tonic major chord, and the notes of the subdominant and dominant 7th are on the pull in all octaves. That's what makes harmonisation on the Anglo so intuitive for the untrained amateur musicians for whom it was developed (and by whom it is still played).

 

The rigorous "left-right-left and so on" of the EC is obviously aimed at fast, melodic scale passages - and a feature of kora music is very fast scale passages, with less emphasis on harmonies.

 

Cheers,

John

[StuartEstell]

I played with Kora player Dan Wilkins in a Finals recital performance of a mutual friends' composition some years back. Dan's a fabulous musician:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8Nr7WaJWgc

 

At one rehearsal I asked if I could have a go on his kora, and yes, there are similarities to the middle two columns of buttons on the English concertina in the alternation of the hands up the major scale. I was no more successful at playing kora than I ever have been at playing EC

[JimLucas]

...my suspicion was confirrmed: the diatonic scale on the cora is played by both hands, one note left, next note right, next note left, and so on up the scale!

So like the English concertina, an octave on the kora is found in the opposite hand? (As opposed to the anglo push-pull system, in which an octave doesn't switch bellows direction.)

 

A similar left-right alternation is also found on the kalimba ("thumb piano"), in at least some of its traditional African incarnations. (And that's also a "free reed" instrument, though not an "aerophone". I.e., the "reeds" are plucked to make them vibrate, rather than being driven by an air stream.) Andean pan pipes consist of two rows of pipes, with the scale alternating between the front and back rows. (With low-pitched pipes, the two "rows" are actually separated into two instruments, with one person playing the "lines" and the other playing the "spaces".) But I don't believe any of these have Wheatstone's "sawtooth" pattern within each hand.

 

I'm inclined to believe in independent invention.

 

(PS. Nobody now seriously claims that the first banjo came to America directly from Africa, but the idea behind it could well have crossed the Atlantic with the first African slaves.)

Seems to me the banjo is a sort of cross between the kora and the guitar:

• Geometrical relation of the strings to the body of the banjo is like a guitar, but a stretched skin similar to a drumhead rather than wood for a "soundboard" is like the kora.
• I've also heard the kora played with a "high drone" effect similar to the 5th string technique on a banjo. (Not always, but in at least some traditional music.) Was that a musical style borrowed from the kora and built-in on the banjo? Seems unlikely that it would have travelled in the reverse direction.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of Asian stringed instruments, both plucked and bowed, that use stretched skins as sound boards. But I'm not suggesting that that idea was borrowed in either direction between Africa and Asia. Once again, I'm quite happy to believe in independent invention.

[Anglo-Irishman]

 

Seems to me the banjo is a sort of cross between the kora and the guitar:

• Geometrical relation of the strings to the body of the banjo is like a guitar, but a stretched skin similar to a drumhead rather than wood for a "soundboard" is like the kora.
• I've also heard the kora played with a "high drone" effect similar to the 5th string technique on a banjo. (Not always, but in at least some traditional music.) Was that a musical style borrowed from the kora and built-in on the banjo? Seems unlikely that it would have travelled in the reverse direction.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of Asian stringed instruments, both plucked and bowed, that use stretched skins as sound boards. But I'm not suggesting that that idea was borrowed in either direction between Africa and Asia. Once again, I'm quite happy to believe in independent invention.

 

Jim,

This is a bit OT, but since you mention it, here goes:

Yes, there are many stringed instruments in Africa and Asia that have a skin resonator. However, for historical reasons, it is safe to assume that the idea of the skin head on the American banjo - originally associated with the Black subculture there - came from Africa.

Morphologically, the kora is not really related to the banjo - or any other skin-covered instrument, for that matter. Organologists, following Curd Sachs, categorise stringed instruments in four families: the Harps, the Lutes, the Lyres and the Zithers (or Psalteries). About 99% of the stringed instruments we know today worldwide, and of which we have ancient pictorial or spade-archaeological evidence, fit into one of these four categories, irrespective of the materials used in their construction, be they wood, skin, metal or plastic or any combination of these or other natural or artificial materials. In Europe we have long regarded spruce as the ideal material for sounding-boards; but in Africa they have no spruce, so they use skin.

 

The kora, however, is one of those very rare "hybrids" that doesn't fit into one family. On one hand, it has its strings (one string per note, and each string a different length) in a plane perpendicular to the soundboard, like a Harp; on the other hand, it transfers the vibration of the strings to the resonator via a bridge, like a Lute or Lyre.

The banjo, by contrast, is clearly a Lute, with the strings in a plane parallel to the resonator, coupled to it by a bridge, and with its few strings led close to a neck, so that several notes per string can be made by stopping.

 

The closest African relative to the banjo is regarded as the West African akonting. This is definitely a skin-resonator Lute - it has all the characteristics outlined above.

Furthermore, the akonting and the banjo share a feature that many Lutes lack: the short string on the thumb side of the neck. This is played as a high drone by the thumb while the melody is executed by stopping and striking the longer strings with a finger - a technique closely resembling the early "stroke style" used on the banjo. The akonting has no frets - the player has to place his fingers accurately on the neck - and the earliest banjos were also fretless. (Even today, some banjoists play fretless banjos using stroke style, or "frailing.")

So to answer your question: if anything, the "high drone" or "Frailing" technique on the banjo is related to the akonting, not the kora, which has a very harp-like set-up without a built-in drone (though I suppose you could use one of the melody strings as a drone if you so wished).

 

Considering the kora's string layout, I suppose you could even call it a cross between a harp, a banjo and an English concertina. However, I am with you in assuming a case of independent invention (or development). If you're looking for fast fingering of scale passages, the left-right-left ... note arrangement is (if I may use the L-word) very logical. In a diatonic context, it even puts the major and minor triads on adjacent strings/buttons.

 

Cheers,

John

 

Edited to add:

Of course the modern banjo has had a lot of Euro-American technology added, such as guitar-like frets, built hoops instead of gourds for the body, threaded tensioning hooks and machine-heads for tuning.

Edited September 6, 2015 by Anglo-Irishman