Both while in Madagascar and after my return I was asked what I had missed most. My response was normally a joking ‘air conditioner’ or ‘two-ply toilet paper’ but the fact was that I didn’t know what I missed about my life in the states. Sure I missed D and the critters, I missed beef, I missed ‘normal’ but I knew all of those things would still be there when I got home and I was only mildly homesick for them. The foreignness of it all was pressing at times but there was the compound to go back to and family on hand. I had a buffer, I was ok. A few days after my return, on my first day back to work, I realized that there was something I had missed, music. I had been lonely for it and I hadn’t even noticed until I turned the key in the ignition and a cheesy 80’s tune came belting out of the speakers. I was absurdly happy to be bopping along to it.
When I sat down to put the slide show together one of the first things I considered was music. My take on African music has always been percussion; heavy, pounding, foot-stomping percussion. Had I heard music in Madagascar? Once or twice we’d passed stores where the music rolled out so loud it was no longer music but a distorted roar. There had been music in the car on our drive south; a radio station that played French and English tunes. “Green, Green Grass of Home”, in French, seemed to be every third song. None of these seemed fitting for my slideshow but then I remembered New Year’s Eve which we spent in a mid-sized town called Ambositra. We ate at the hotel restaurant and as we dined we were serenaded by a young man and his mother. They sang harmony as he played any of three, stringed instruments. The first was a simple guitar, a bit smaller than those I’m used to but otherwise easily recognizable. The second was a large rectangular wooden box roughly the size and shape of a bassoon case but thicker with strings down both sides. The third was a large bamboo tube as wide as my palm strung vertically along its length. None were percussion; none were my idea African music.
Online research would reveal that the huge, strange rectangular box is called a Marovany; a type of zither. The strung bamboo tube is a Valiha and the national instrument of Madagascar which explains why I saw it over and over again in the tourists markets. I didn’t have music yet but I did have my instrument. A quick search of iTunes scored a Malagasy artist, Justin Vali, who played the Valiha (coincidence in names? I don’t know) and twenty or so songs to choose from. The quick sample wasn’t enough to tell me much about the songs so I chose simply by name. “Baobab”, the trees we traveled so very far to see, and “Tsingy” a wonderfully peculiar limestone formation that occurs in a few places in Madagascar. A Malagasy artist, playing song about things particularly Malagasy and perfect for the slideshow.
There was music in Madagascar. I just hadn’t listened closely enough.
