The Plum of Bambara-Groundnuts

The Plum of Bambara-groundnuts is a devotional form of music originating in The Bottomless Geyser. The form guides musicians during improvised performances. The music is played on a tuthaba and a amathi. The musical voices bring melody with harmony. The melody has short phrases throughout the form. Pitches are densely packed in clusters as music moves from chord to chord. It is performed using the ithi scale. Throughout, when possible, performers are to play arpeggios.

• The tuthaba always does harmony, should build as the performance proceeds, is to be moderately loud and plays staccato. The voice stays in the raucous high register.
• The amathi always does the main melody, should be spirited and is to become louder and louder.
• The Plum of Bambara-groundnuts has a simple structure: three to five brief unrelated passages.
• Each of the simple passages is fast. Each passage is performed in the slutha rhythm.
• Scales are constructed from twenty-four notes spaced evenly throughout the octave. The tonic note is a fixed tone passed from teacher to student.
• The ithi pentatonic scale is thought of as two disjoint chords spanning two perfect fourths. These chords are named izela and emayethi.
• The izela trichord is the 1st, the 2nd and the 11th degrees of the quartertone octave scale.
• The emayethi trichord is the 15th, the 23rd and the 25th (completing the octave) degrees of the quartertone octave scale.
• The slutha rhythm is made from two patterns: the cucecuse and the slothepanine. The patterns are to be played over the same period of time, concluding together regardless of beat number.
• The cucecuse rhythm is a single line with four beats. The beat is stressed as follows:
• | x - X x |
• where X marks an accented beat, x is a beat, - is silent and | indicates a bar.
• The slothepanine rhythm is a single line with two beats. The beats are named feri (spoken fe) and uwame (uw). The beat is stressed as follows:
• | x - |
• where x is a beat, - is silent and | indicates a bar.

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