Ngoma Materiality and Instrumentality: Reconfiguring Malawian Indigenous Music Digitization for Global Music Appreciation

This paper focuses on ngoma (African drum), which constitutes one view of my richest lines of inquiry into dance ethnography. It laces together ngoma materiality and instrumentality. Materiality is about the biological and theoretical (Dennis in Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society 44:18–25, 2018) perceptive analysis of ngoma leading to understandings of human belief, knowledge, and behavior. Instrumentality is a vehicle that enables connectivity or communication to occur between actors and the acted upon, which includes discourses such as ngoma sound or voice, song, and dance. The theoretical framework for this study is grounded in Blacking’s (2000) conception of the social–cultural force of indigenous music as well as the Actor-network theory (ANT) which is a methodological standpoint that assumes people and material interface (Bates in Panel session: Organology and others: Cross-disciplinary methods applied to the study of musical instruments. University of Birmingham, 2017). The central questions to this study have been: What can ngoma materiality tell us about Karanga cultural heritage? How does ngoma instrumentality influence Karanga musical sensibility, aesthetics, and behavior? In what ways has digital media affected African musical practices? How has the digital archival process been embraced by the Karanga as an opportunity to create a platform for ngoma that carries indigenous music for development? Thus, the paper is divided into four sections: African creative philosophy in ngoma materiality; Ngoma instrumentality therapeutic practice; Politics of virtual musical practice, and, Ngoma experiential musical practice and archiving addressing the four questions, respectively. As such, this paper expands research capacity in indigenous knowledge systems embedded in the structural constructs and sound of the instruments.