Documentation of music making and its integration into religious, martial, governance, and recreational domains of community life in one West African town is presented here. Based on fieldwork and audio and video documenting carried out by Roger Vetter in Anomabu, Ghana, in 1992-1993, the intent of this site is to illustrate how the Fante people—the cultural formation to which belong the majority of Anomabu residents—perform their shared identity through communal music making. Drawing upon Christopher Small’s idea of “musicking” (Small 1998), I attempt here to direct the attention of the users of this site to the relationships between performers, the social and spiritual institutions of which they are a part, the sounds they produce when performing, and the nature of the occasions into which they are integrated. Small argues that it is in these relationships, which are in play during performances, that the meaning of music making as a cultural expression is revealed.
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Citation
Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.
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