Nip nap

The sound that I was allocated for this track was described as a Zande drinking song, from a collection of wax cylinder recordings of Zande songs, dances and spoken language made by social anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard in South Sudan between 1928 and 1930. 

I spent some time thinking about the collection of songs that was taking place across the world from the end of the 19th Century right up to that time, and wondered what kind of 'drinking song' might have been collected right here, where I am in the North York Moors National Park. I listened to lots of source recordings of English drinking songs from the EFDSS Full English digital archive, but I was drawn back to the Mummers play that we perform in Whitby every year, and the character of the Doctor, who has a little bottle in his inside-outside-jacket-pocket. 

It's a little Nip Nap, and it's most effective if you let it run down your tip tap. It will cure all ills, and do you good. When I was listening to the recording, I was struck by the rhythmic drive of the cylinder, inserting itself into the song, unbidden. That set the tempo, and the composition came into being. 

Drinking songs are sung the world over. We have more in common that could ever set us apart. For me, the union of cultures through music is a shoot of hope in a world of division. Something to raise a glass to at the very least!

Zande drinking song reimagined by Rebecca Denniff.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds