ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on textual analysis to demonstrate how Asante performative arts—drumming, singing, and dancing—become intelligible to participants whose frame of reference and access to the music is through texts. The language and poetry of ivory trumpets and the durugya flute are embedded in a sophisticated system of surrogate speech, defined by Joseph Kaminski as “spoken tonal texts recited from the vibrating lips of the performer”. The Akan practice of using ivory trumpets to send coded messages between settlements and farmlands in the early iron age were transformed into symbolic codes and instrumental speech in the days of migrations, conquests, and warfare in the middle and late Iron Age. The pervasive use of the number seven as a defining number for each group of ivory trumpets is thoroughly considered with regard to Akan notions of spirituality and perfection in numbers. Ivory trumpets featured prominently in ethnographic description of Akwasidae Public Assembly in the Prologue.
