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Killing My Own Snake: Fieldwork, Gyil, and Processes of Learning
| Title: | Killing My Own Snake: Fieldwork, Gyil, and Processes of Learning |
| Author: | Lawrence, Sidra Meredith |
| Description: | This thesis is an account of my experiences studying the gyil, a xylophone played by the Dagara, an ethnic group located in Northwest Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Côte D’Ivoire. I spent six weeks living and learning with a group of Dagara musicians in Medie, a village north of Accra, Ghana’s capital city. While there, I studied with Bernard Woma and Jerome Balsab. I explore the process of learning gyil in Medie beginning with my teachers’ instructional methods and ending with the ways in which I came to situate the music within my own Western framework. I examine the field work situations I experienced in Ghana, reflecting upon the challenges posed to me as an ethnomusicologist, a musician, a woman, and an individual. I relate the struggles of learning to play gyil music in a context that operated outside of the framework in which I normally perceived and learned music. I present a self-developed transcription model, which I implement in the transcription of one gyil piece. I then analyze this piece, focusing on topics of meter and time conception. I propose an alternative means of framing musical understanding through the incorporation of dance rhythms, a relatively unexplored topic. Finally, I investigate how gyil music is transmitted, from the traditional Dagara approach to Woma’s eclectic method, and to my own methods. I reflect on how teaching methods become more methodical as the music and dance move farther from their original context. I then develop a method—including transcriptions and coordination exercises—by which this information can be disseminated to Western-trained musicians. |
| Permanent Link: |
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1151067357
http://hdl.handle.net/2374.OX/15414 |
| Date: | 2006 |
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