Description
The
ancestor of the modern
marimba, the balafon is a wooden
xylophone
with hand-carved keys, having hollow
gourds suspended underneath and open
at their tops for
resonance. It is played with
sticks that usually have
rubber tips formed
by wrapping strips of
inner tube around the ends. The keys are mounted in such
a way as to have minimal and precise contact with the frame of the instrument, and
no contact with each other,
so as to produce a freely-ringing tone. The keys rest on their
nodal points, about 20%
in from the ends, to foster unimpeded
vibration.
A large balafon may have as many as 21 keys;
a small one may have only 8. Each key is a slightly different length, with the longer keys
producing the deeper tones.
Origin
From "The Healing Drum: African Wisdom Teachings" by Yaya Diallo
and Mitchell Hall, and from "The Mandinka Balafon: An introduction With Notation
for Teaching" by Lynne Jessup
The word "balafon" is from "bala" (wood) and "fo" (to speak) and is used by the
Mande people in West Africa. The balafon is common throughout western Africa,
especially in Guinea, Senegal, and Mali. According to legend, a king of the
Sousou people in West Africa saw and heard the balafon in his dream and made the
first one when he awoke. Similarities in construction and tuning suggests that
such wooden xylophones originated in Indonesia
and Borneo and were carried from there to Africa. When the slave trade spread
African culture to South and Central America, the balafon was
carried along and became the marimba.
Balafons are made both in
pentatonic and
heptatonic varieties. The heptatonic
scale of the Mande balafon is quite close to the equidistant heptatonic scale and very
different from the typical 7-note major or minor scales of Western music. Since balafon
makers tune their instruments by ear, without the aid of
tuning forks, etc., there is
some variety in the scales used, and the notes don't come out precisely equidistant. For
example, the fourth and fifth of the scale are usually closer to the Western fourth and
fifth than a pure equidistant tuning would dictate.
Pentatonic
balafons are found in parts of
Mali and
Burkina Faso.
Removing wood from the ends of a balafon key will raise its pitch; removing wood
from the middle on the underside will make the pitch lower.