Three years ago, a freshman named Daniel Marbury and a group of his friends decided to start a student organization known as the University Drum Circle. The idea for the Drum Circle began after Marbury took a Music in World Cultures class and was introduced to the music of Ghana, a country in West Africa.
He and his friends began meeting on the quad in 2006 to play and frequently used the rhythms Marbury had learned in class. Nearly two years after the Drum Circle was made official, Jennifer Caputo, an instructor in New College who has studied Ghanaian music for eleven years, decided to team up with Marbury and form a class called the African Drumming Ensemble.
With their own collection of African drums and instruction on playing and singing songs from Ghana, the ensemble feels that they are now ready for their first official concert. The African Drumming Ensemble will be having a free concert in the recital hall in Moody Music Building tonight at 7:30 p.m.
“The ensemble has been together for three semesters,” Caputo said. “We’ve played as part of other people’s concerts, but this is our first full concert. We now have enough material for a full concert.”
The drums and songs that the ensemble perform come from the Ewe tribe in the Southeastern region of Ghana, known as the Volta region. Their first few drums, including the master drum, came from a study abroad trip to Ghana that Marbury took with the University of North Texas in 2008.
“I was there a month learning about the music and the culture,” Marbury said. “I bought some drums there and brought them back to school with me.”
The ensemble completed their collection of Ewe drums by buying them from Jag Drums, a company in Massachusetts that makes traditional Ghanaian drums.
“Since we created the ensemble, we do performances where we get donations,” Marbury said. “Those donations help pay for more drums so we can have a bigger ensemble and get more people.”
At tonight’s performance, the ensemble will be doing several different pieces that are part of a larger piece.
“A traditional piece could go on from thirty minutes to the length of a day,” Marbury said. “What we will be doing is long segments of one particular piece.”
The ensemble’s set will included drumming pieces as well as singing pieces from the Ewe tribe.
“Traditionally with African music, the drumming, singing and dancing all go together,” Caputo said. “We don’t have any dancers just yet, so there won’t be any dancing. We would like to have dancers, though.”
While some of the songs will be performed in English, most are in Ewe. The ensemble learned most of their music by ear and they perform it by memory, Caputo said.
“African music is conveyed through oral tradition, so we try to maintain that in class,” Marbury said. “There are nine different cultural tribes, so a lot of people of that culture don’t even understand what the songs are saying. What we do is pretty similar to the way you would experience it as a native of that culture.”
The African Drumming Ensemble will be joined tonight by Nozomi Daiko, a Japanese Taiko Ensemble and by the Chamber Percussion Ensemble.
“We wanted to make this ensemble open to other world music,” Caputo said.
Beth Gottlieb, a percussion instructor in the School of Music, will be conducting the Chamber Percussion Ensemble.
“Our part is just one little part where it’s the Chamber doing this piece where you get to play a pretty cool instrument called the Apuche,” Gottlieb said. “The only other instruments they use are change in their pockets, their bodies and their feet. It’s basically body percussion.”
Their performance will consist of five people playing beats and rhythms on their bodies with their hands and a couple of handheld beaded instruments called apuche’s being passed around.
“You have to play as a team,” Gottlieb said. “It’s not a solo instrument. It’s a group, so you have to play the rhythms together. It’s kind of like a hand bell choir at church where one bell is part of a melody.”
The Percussion Ensemble will be performing a piece from the concert they had last week, which the African Drumming Ensemble helped with. The different ensembles frequently help each other with concerts, Gottlieb said.
“I’m really proud of all the students for working so hard and learning as much music as we have for this performance,” Caputo said. “They have all really done a lot of hard work for this concert.”
