Sounding the woods: the significance of gyil music in Dagara funeral ceremonies

Abstract

Funerals are significant social events among the Dagara of Ghana. Each occasion offers families a space to mourn the deceased according to traditional religious and cultural practices. Music plays an integral role in Dagara funeral ceremonies. Almost every death triggers musical performances that stimulate typical and diverse emotional reactions during funerary events. Music essentially drives the symbolic behaviours which constitute Dagara people’s endorsement of a deceased person, as well as validates the funeral as a public event (Saighoe 1988; Dankwa 2018). Funerals in Dagara society revolve around a pentatonic xylophone called the gyil, the use of which is paramount. Somé (1994:59), a Dagara spiritualist and scholar, captures this succinctly: ‘without the xylophones […] there is no funeral, no grief, and no death’.1