The song I chose from the reading today was “Nag Biegu”, which means ferocious wild bull to the Dagbamba people of Ghana. The song is extremely drum-focused, which parallels the importance of drummers in their culture and everyday life where drummers, like the lunsi, serve dual roles in the community as both musical performers and counselors to royalty, genealogists, and cultural experts amongst other things.

For the piece’s melody, its contour is incredibly varied. The song only has one main vocalist and his contour is extremely erratic. When he begins singing, his tone and volume escalate quickly and plateaus for a long note until the note drops out  and  he finishes the phrase with a quick succession of short notes of the same pitch in the mid-range. He continues again with a long burst, followed by another, followed by several mid-range bursts of vocals and then another mid-range sustained note. For the rest of the two minute long recording, he continues in the same kind of pattern, varying it only slightly occasionally, adding more mid-range shorter notes in the middle of the song. The piece’s melodic character is disjunct. The main singer varies between both high and extremely low notes. His vocalizations escalate and decline erratically through his phrases, with the disjunct character paralleling the varied contour of the melody. Some phrases are conjunct in the middle of the song when the main vocalist strays from the long bursts of sustained, louder notes and transitions into the phrases of mid-range vocal bursts that have a much closer range. The overall range of the song is very wide. The main singer begins in a higher register, belting our longer, booming notes and then quickly drops down into lower notes to finish out the phrase. The phrasing of the song, like the contour, is also very varied. The vocalist mixes in very long phrases, with his long bursts of sustained, louder notes; as well as  very short phrases that are merely comprised of tiny bursts of vocalizations in a lower register. These varied lengths of phrases also parallel the erratic drum beats that accompany the melody. Most of the song is very varied in its melodic content. However, there are repeating musical motive sections in the melody. The main vocalist varies his vocalizations throughout the song mostly, but he does repeat his long, sustained, louder note bursts several times throughout the musical piece.

The piece’s texture is relatively simple monophony with percussion as the song only contains four layers. One layer is a deeper, louder, booming drum beat. A second layer is a shorter, higher pitched drum beat, probably coming from a smaller hand drum. The third layer is a high pitched screech, seemingly coming from either a female vocalist or an animal nearby, that occurs four times throughout the song, and the fourth layer is the main, male vocalist. The first two layers of drum beats serve a function of signaling the beginning of a new phrase of melody, as well as setting the beat of the music. The deeper drum serves as a beat for the piece where as the higher pitched drum accents the deeper drums loud, booming sounds with lighter beats. The fourth layer of the male vocalist serves as the melody of the piece. The third layer, which I’m not entirely sure if it was meant to be part of the song or was just surrounding sound picked up by the recording equipment, does not appear to have any function. It does not fit the melody or accompany the beat. The fourth layer of the male vocalist is going at a much faster pace than the rest of the layers for most of the song. The higher pitched drum’s layer is the second fastest layer of the song for most of the time, followed by the deeper drum’s layer, and the screeching layer last. The only time the two drums are at the same speed is near the end of the song where the two match each other in time, speed, and rhythm for an extended phrase. The timbres of the layers are radically different as one is a male vocalist whose vocals have a ululate-like quality to them. Meanwhile the drums have contrasting sounds they emit as one is deeper and reverbs outward more, while another is smaller and has a more succinct noise it emits when struck. The other layer is merely a screech reminiscent of a distressed female or some sort of animal, possibly a bird-like creature. There is no call-and-response as there is only one layer of melody in the song.

The piece’s time is hard to describe. The drumming back beat is normally the indicator of the meter of a song but the erratic nature of the song makes it difficult to place any sort of pattern into the song’s composition. The different layers of the drums, plus the fact one could drop out entirely while another one plays a different rhythm and then come back in halfway through another drum part, makes it hard to establish a set rhythm. There is really only chaos. Therefore, I do not believe the song does have any sort of set meter it follows. But while the meter is hard to distinguish, the rhythm in each layer is now. The two drum layers do not have differences in the durations of the notes. The male vocalist does have the ability to switch up how long or short he chooses to hold a note and he does that throughout the song. In the beginning, as mentioned throughout this writing, he begins with a long burst of a loud, high sustained note (“Boom-ahhhhh” and “bom-dee-eyyyyy”) followed by a drop off in both duration, volume, and pitch. He repeats the same type of bursts throughout the beginning of the song before he switches to mainly short notes in the middle of the song. He goes back to his long bursts near the end of the recording again.

There is no harmony component to the melodic part as there is only one melodic layer. But the drums bring about an interesting, dissonant harmonic character. For most of the song, there is a lot of tension between the two drumming parts as they seem to be playing different rhythms at some parts. However, in a few select sections, the two work together to create a pleasant, consonant beat. Especially in the parts with no vocals, the drums seem to match up well.