Nyabole: Music of the Hamar, Southern Ethiopia presents the music of the Hamar people as recorded by the ethnologist Ivo Strecker during his long field research among them. "Look here, the customs of our fathers keep us warm": the men of the Hamar still tell of the great deeds of their ancestors, from whom they inherited a heroic will and strong personalities. The edition sets the music inside its social, psychological and historical context.
Ivo Strecker made the recordings in Ethiopia between 1970 and 1976 and wrote the notes, as a participant and observer over long periods of fieldwork. Wilhelm Leopold is credited as engineer. According to the label, the material was first published on LP in 1977 and received the annual German Record Critics' Award in 1981. The CD comes with a 94-page book in German and English, rich in illustrations, in a slipcase.
The music of the Hamar is varied. There is the word painting of the musical bow in Tingle Apho, the flute in Woissa, and the play of voice and lyre in Goala and in Maz Sa Goala, the lyre of the initiates. Running songs, leaping dances and war songs sit beside them: Nyabole, singing on the way to the dancing ground, the Churra leaping dance and the Gurra, danced in a row. The Bu, ox and goat songs, run for over fourteen minutes and include the dance of the ancestors. Some tracks document speech and ritual rather than music in the narrow sense: a calming-down song, a word game, the song of the killer, a wailing, Lomotor's speech, a public meeting with war songs. The final twenty minutes bring the songs of the ancestors and a blessing, the Barjo Aela.
The approach is what the label calls an ethnography of communication and performance. Events at the edge of a performance, the notes argue, may be needed to understand it, and such an edition was possible only through the experience Strecker gathered in his long periods among the Hamar.
A CD of 77 minutes in Wergo's Music of World Cultures series, in the Museum Collection Berlin line, catalogue SM 1707 2, released in 2003.
