Ancient Text Messages of the Yoruba Bata Drum (Soas Musicology Series) [Hardcover]

Amanda Villepastour (Author)

Book Description

Series: Soas Musicology Series | Publication Date: January 1, 2010

The bata is one of the most important and representative percussion traditions of the people in southwest Nigeria, and is now learnt and performed around the world. In Cuba, their own bata tradition derives from the Yoruba bata from Africa yet has had far more research attention than its African predecessor. Although the bata is one of the oldest known Yoruba drumming traditions, the drum and its unique language are now unfamiliar to many contemporary Yoruba people. Amanda Villepastour provides the first academic study of the bata's communication technology and the elaborate coded spoken language of bata drummers, which they refer to as 'ena bata'. Villepastour explains how the bata drummers' speech encoding method links into universal linguistic properties, unknown to the musicians themselves. The analysis draws the direct links between what is spoken in Yoruba, how Yoruba is transformed in to the coded language (ena), how ena prescribes the drum strokes and, finally, how listeners (and which listeners) extract linguistic meaning from what is drummed. The description and analysis of this unique musical system adds substantially to what is known about bata drumming specifically, Yoruba drumming generally, speech surrogacy in music and coded systems of speaking. This book will appeal not only to ethnomusicologists and anthropologists, but also to linguists, drummers and those interested in African Studies.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dr Amanda Villepastour, Curator of musical instruments, The MIM, Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 196 pages
• Publisher: Ashgate; Har/Com edition (January 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0754667537
• ISBN-13: 978-0754667537
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,169,930 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #80 in Books > History > Africa > Nigeria

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A heavy little package, October 2, 2010

By 

david penalosa "Dr. Clave" (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ancient Text Messages of the Yoruba Bata Drum (Soas Musicology Series) (Hardcover)

Ancient Text Messages of the Yoruba Bata Drum; Cracking the Code
By Amanda Villepastour. SOAS Musicology Series. Ashgate: Burlington, VT, 2010. ISBN-13: 978-0754667537

Reviewed by David Peñalosa

The title and sub-title say it all. Bata drums perform the function of surrogate speech as polyrhythmic music. Amanda Villepastour takes us inside this esoteric drum system, breaking down in lean and methodical prose, the history, grammar and function of these drums and their veiled language.

Dr. Villepastour is currently the curator of the Museum of Musical Instruments in Phoenix, Arizona. Her PhD Dissertation Bata Conversations; Guardianship and Entitlement Narratives, about the bata in Nigeria and Cuba, is the definitive work comparing the two drum systems, and investigating the inevitable questions of retention and invention.

With Ancient Text Messages of the Yoruba Bata Drum, Villepastour takes us deeper, to the intersection of language and music itself. She compares the methods of surrogate speech in three different, but related Yoruba drum systems of southwest Nigeria: dundun, bata and omele meta.
While most modern Yoruba understand the mimicked speech of the iyaalu (lead) dundun, the iyaalu (lead) bata and its companion the omele abo together speak in a coded language known as ena bata. We are shown how bata master Rabiu Ayandokun generates the coded ena language from Yoruba and the correlation of vocables and drum strokes. As part of her review of previous literature on the African bata, Villepastour dispels the common misconception that bata cannot speak clearly or is an inferior talker to the dundun. As she explains, the dundun is used to communicate with everyday Yorubas, whereas the bata speaks an insider language that intentionally excludes the uninitiated from understanding its meaning.

The omele meta is a relatively recent instrument consisting of a set of three small bata drums lashed together. Those familiar with Afro-Cuban music will be interested to know that the omele meta was indirectly inspired by conga drums (known in Cuba as tumbadoras). In Nigeria, conga players using three or four drums in highlife and juju bands mimicked the tonal speech of the Yoruba. Villepastour states: "Yoruba listeners became so accustomed to hearing congas mimic speech that they would even read semantic meaning into non-semantic solos." The omele meta is used in secular musics such as fuji and can improvise with, or without semantic meaning.

The complexities of the bata drum system are at times staggering, but Villepastour keeps the text on track, never indulging in intellectual excesses. The music transcriptions, tables, and the audio examples on the accompanying CD support our understanding of the text. The book functions well as both a cover-to-cover read and a reference source, where specific information can be easily accessed. Like many ancient traditions, knowledge of the bata is slowing eroding over time. For that reason, Villepastour's work will be sought for decades to come. With the Appendices, Bibliography, Discography and Index, the book comes in at 173 pages. For its modest size, Ancient Text Messages of the Yoruba Bata Drum contains an amazing wealth of information. Although weighing just a little over a pound, this is unquestionably, a "heavy" little package.