Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Mbira (/ ə m ˈ b ɪər ə / əm-BEER-ə) are a family of musical instruments, traditional to the Shona people of Zimbabwe.They consist of a wooden board (often fitted with a resonator) with attached staggered metal tines, played by holding the instrument in the hands and plucking the tines with the thumbs (at minimum), the right forefinger (most mbira), and sometimes the left forefinger.
The mbira playing and singing are all improvised off the familiar basic patterns, resulting in a constantly changing polyphonic texture. In this ceremony, music that was favored by the ancestors when they were alive is used to summon the spirits to possess living mediums; thus the religious belief system helps to preserve older musical practices.
Chartwell Shorayi Dutiro (1957 – 2019) was a Zimbabwean musician, who started playing mbira when he was four years old at the protected village, Kagande; about two hours drive from Harare, where his family was moved by the Salvation Army missionaries during the Chimurenga. Even though the missionaries had banned traditional music, he learned ...
Also Shona architecture consists of drystone walling that goes back to the ancestors of modern-day Shona people and also Kalanga and Venda peoples. This drystone walling consist drystone walls, drystone walled stairs on hill tops and free standing drystone walls known as great Zimbabwe type drystone walling (examples: Great Zimbabwe, Chisvingo).
An Mbira dzavadzimu. Shona music is well known as representative of mbira ("thumb piano") music. The performer of the "kushaura" (lead mbira part) often acts also as the lead vocalist, selecting a known melody or mbira pattern to accompany selected lyrics, usually a phrase or a few lines of text which are then commented upon improvisationally ...
My ancestors transformed scraps into soul food, turned the lowest of lands into the highest of mountains, turned raging seas into calm waters and refused to drown. I will spend the rest of my life ...
Johnson, 68, traveled to North and South Carolina to research her maternal family history, discovering that Mills had owned Jerry and Myra, Johnson's great-great-grandparents, as slaves.
Although Mujuru played all of Zimbabwe's five types of mbira, he specialty was the mbira dzavadzimu. [citation needed] Ephat Mujuru was raised in a small village in Manicaland, near the Mozambican border, and was taught to play the mbira by his grandfather, Muchatera Mujuru. Muchatera was a medium for one of the most important ancestor spirits ...