Every day, the
tam-tams played for marriages, baptisms and circumcisions.
Tribaliques, La nouvelle romance, Sans
tam-tam and Le pleurer-rire depict a particular worldview which provides an insight into the overarching reality of a young Africa that had just attained political independence.
Well before the advent of print, in the spoken literature, the citation of the first words of a zabyuure or proverb was equivalent to quoting the full zabyuure or proverb, as Pacere explains in the introduction to his poetry collection, Saglego ou le poeme du
tam-tam pour le Sahel: The zabyuure les petits tamariniers ne produisent pas quelque chose de fade ("The small tamarinier trees do not yield something insipid") is often referred to by "the small tamarinier trees" when addressing learned people (Pacere 1994: 18).
They rethink it and reinterpret it by using traditional instruments like corats and the
tam-tam. Dance is done, too, as they enter into the Office of the Hours.
Upon Enchanted Ground, featuring the unusual combination of harp, flute, cello, and giant
tam-tam, sounds something like a miniature ballet score as it leaps and twirls and pirouettes.
The "Stockhausen Ensemble" of the time consisted of the six persons required to perform Mikrophonie I: four musicians in two teams playing and "microphoning" the
tam-tam (Aloys Kontarsky and Johannes Fritsch, Harald Boj[acute{e}] and Alfred Ahlings) and two musicians for the filtering and sound projection of the two
tam-tam teams (Stockhausen and myself).
In "Quand Bat le
Tam-tam" [When the Tom-Tom Beats], the poet celebrates the beauty and pull of his African roots.
The second movement draws upon a number of metallophones--triangle, suspended cymbals, metal chimes,
tam-tam, gongs, and sleigh bells.
"Then, that is different," said
Tam-Tam. "You white men, you pretend a lot.
Ironically, the gong we see on screen is actually made of plaster and paper with the noise created by reverberations from a Chinese
tam-tam.
Musicien lui-meme, il etait un familier du cabaret [beaucoup moins que] Le
Tam-Tam [beaucoup plus grand que] appartenant au pere d'Ouarda El Djazairia.
There were some good things of course, not least Graham Sibley's important tuba contribution in Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto, stand-in leader Rakhi Singh's dark-toned violin solo in Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances, and a lingering
tam-tam glower at the end of that wonderful piece (too often it's cut short, contradicting the composer's detailed instructions).