Arpa Sanza

Music, or even better, rhythm, is something inherent in the African, as inseparable as the music of the word is. In fact most of the languages of West Africa are very musical. Any object capable of percussion serves to set the pace and for those who hear it to start to mark it. Musical instruments accompany all manifestations of social and religious life. Funeral ceremonies, initiation rites, fertility of the land or of the woman, mourning uprisings or outings of masks are not conceived without the accompaniment of the instruments corresponding to each occasion, with the permanent presence of the tam tam or drum. The drums speak, transmit messages and establish a dialogue between them. It is drum is associated with the person. Bells and bells, koras and balafones, harps of ropes and sheets or sanzos, scratchers or awakos and the infinite variety of drums, metal, wood and skin, slotted wood, mobile, fixed, arm, etc., not to mention the numerous flutes, whistles, horns, trunks and olifantes. Some of these instruments such as bells, sonajeros and iron drums have, in addition, as a function, to mark the rhythms and pauses of the divinatory processes. The musical instruments accompanied the griots to sing or narrate the praises to their masters, tell stories or describe genealogies, were part of the teachings to the members of the community, participated in all kinds of ceremonies and served to send messages and communicate with both the world of the living and the ancestors and supernatural forces. As in the rest of the daily activities also in the elaboration of these instruments is manifested the aesthetic feeling of the African soul. Without attempting to manufacture art objects, this concept was unknown to Africans until the arrival of Europeans, they like to surround themselves with the beautiful. They don't know art by art and therefore artistic feeling, but they live, however, deeply aesthetic feeling. These instruments can be classified into the following categories: Aerophonos.- Instruments that work by blowing: whistles, flutes, horns, tubes, trumpets. CORDOPHONS.- String instruments, harps, liras. The sound is produced by the vibration of the rope. LANGUAGES.- Percussion instruments that produce an impact sound on the material from which they are made: scratches, xylophones, slot drums, bells, systems. MEMBRANOPHONS.- All types of drums whose percussion is performed on the skin of an animal, hitting with chopsticks, hammers or with hands, being the resonance box its same support. LAMELOPHONS.- Instruments in which sound is obtained by pressing or actuating thin sheets, of metal or of cane solidly fixed at one end to a resonance box: The sanzas.

Anthropomorphic lamelophone. Six fine bamboo sheets fixed in the belly produce the notes that will accompany dances at parties and funerals. The body of the figure is made of resonance.