This paper investigates the construction of accompaniment patterns in Guinean Susu balanyi music, as a means of understanding the structural intervallic foundations of this improvisatory, polyphonic genre. As accompaniment patterns form the backdrop for songs and more elaborate improvisation, understanding their characteristic combinations of intervals is essential to an overview of their systemic use. This paper focuses on intervals rather than specific pitches, as this is a modal system whose instruments, although nowadays commonly tuned to a C-major scale, were historically equiheptatonic.

In the Susu balanyi (also bala, balafon) tradition of Western Guinea, a soloist improvises over one to several supporting parts. As these musical lines layer and interlock, they create interval paradigms, a backdrop of interval patterns that establishes a context for the lead player and/or supports a singer. My analysis of more than twenty balanyi pieces created by six master players, where each piece consists of at least three accompaniment patterns, often also including sample runs and songs, reveals four types of recurring interval paradigms. These range from extremely simple, where only one note changes from one collection to another, to neighbor-tone dyads, to more complex changes.

My analysis builds on the work of scholars such as Eric Charry, whose balanyi analysis invokes such concepts as “harmony” and “tonic,” as well as Susu scholar Joe Luther Williams, whose transcriptions provide additional sources to the scores of patterns included in this analysis that I learned via years of lessons with balanyi master N’Camara Abou Sylla.