Folk Music of Martinique

Carnival is seen as an important festival, which is known as Vaval on Martinique. The music signifies a vital role, with Martinican big bands marching through the island. Vaval fall during the World War II, bouncing back from the modern bands arrangements and the modern customs only in the 80s, like Guadeloupe and Martinique features participatory call-and-response pattern of songs during this Vaval occasion.

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Creole bands in the early 20^th century traveled on trucks or in small carts during the Vaval, playing music was referred to as beguine vide (or just videe). And after the fall of Vaval in the World War II, the custom renew in the 1980s where a large of number of fifty bands marching and it became common and this include the horn players, percussionists and dancers. These large bands are referred to as groups a peid and each where identified with the neighborhood.

Beguine vide is a up tempo version of the bigunie rhythm, it combine other carnival elements. The music involved the bandleader singing a verse and the audience responding. The new instrumentation includes a variety of improvised drums that is made up of container of all types, plastic plumbing, bells, debonda, chacha, tanbou, tiwa and bel-air drums. Apart from the beguine vide bands Vaval includes song and costume competition, zouks parties and masquerading.

Bele is the early type of beguine that joined group dance and song that was followed by drumming; often it is led by a call and response style. It is accompanied by tambour bele and tibwa rhythms sticks and the martiniquan bele is the source of several important Martiniquan renowned styles which include the beguine and chouval bwa and also used an influence on zouk. The song-dance of bele include bele dous, belay, pitje, gran bele and beguine bele.

Chouval bwa is a type of Martinican traditional music, which features bamboo flute, percussion and accordion and wax-paper/comb-type kazoo. The origin of this music is among the rural Martinicans as a way of celebrating holiday music played to follow a dance known as the manege (which is translated as merry-go-round; chouval bwa is a Creole version of cheval bois, which means to the wooden horses seen on meryy-go-rounds). The percussion of chouval bwa is played by a drummer on the tambour drum and the tibwa, the percussion instrument is made out of a piece of bamboo laid horizontally and beaten with sticks and most of the traditional bands also used accordions, chacha (a rattle) and bele-air, a bass version of the tambour.

The French Caribbean culture, especially the Lesser Antilles, the word kwadril is a creole word which means a folk dance which derived from the quadrille. Kwadril dances are in groups, which comprises of the proper quadrilles, plus creolized version of 19^th century couple dance; biguines, valses creoles and mazouks.

The instruments comprises of variable combinations of guitar, violin, accordion, chacha (either a single metal cylinder as in Martinique, or a spherical calabash without a handle held in both hand), tanbou dibas, malakach (maracas), triangle, bwa (tibwa) and syak, a bamboo rasp one meter long, grooved on both top and bottom that is held with one end on the belly the other on a door or wall and scrapped with both hands.