Audio Selection:
The music making captured in this clip was part of a weekly meeting of the Awerekyekyer organization of Anomabu, recorded in a classroom of the town’s Catholic secondary school. The cantor, Miss Florence Dawson, is a member of the Cape Coast branch of Awerekyekyer, but travels to Anomabu to help train the group musically. The cantor has much freedom in spontaneously selecting lines of text all of which work with the repeated choral response. And yes, the final section of the second song has as its choral response “alleluia.”
Texts/Translations for the Songs Heard on the Audio Example:
Yesu ye medze
Christ is mine
Senee metse biara meyi me nyame aye
[a song expressing consistency of faith in God on the part of the singer]
Performance Forces:
| afirikyiwa | metal castanet consisting of a wide ring worn on the thumb and a somewhat globular-shaped bell hanging from the second finger of the same hand; time-keeping instrument |
| dondo | double-headed pressure drum with hourglass-shaped body, struck with a single hook-shaped stick, only one head is struck; a rhythmic instrument |
| conga | pair of single-headed tubular hand drums with a conical bodies mounted on a stand, local adaptation of the Latin American conga; a rhythmic instrument |
| cantor | female |
| chorus | mixed, approximately forty-five females and five males |