THE UNIQUE YET UNIVERSAL SHAPE OF THE KORA
Though the actual origins of the kora are unknown due to various contradicting legends, one thing must be noted about the shape of the instrument itself. It is a shape we have seen time and time again in various cultures across the world. While the 21 strings and double-bridge may be specific to the kora, a neck with strings coming off the end of a resonating chamber has been an all too popular model for stringed instrument construction since around 3000 BCE, the time of the earliest arched harps. It has remained prevalent in almost all sting instruments including the violin family, guitars, harps, and various world instruments. The question is, how was it discovered that placing a string adjacent to a resonating chamber will increase the amplitude (volume) of the string’s vibration? And more importantly how did that information wend its way to west africa in the 17th century?
Galileo was the first scientist to experiment with resonance, which he discovered from his work with pendulums, but this design came much earlier in the scheme of human history. I believe that says something about the nature of man, that we proceed forward even when we do not know the way. Those first harps led to the invention of more sophisticated harps with, larger and larger resonance chambers until the form evolved altogether into a lute shape, with a fretted neck that allows the player to depress strings at varying lengths to create pitches while a not is either bowed or plucked below. This gave us various instruments including lutes, guitars, violins (and violas, cellos, and basses), sitars, and somewhere along the line, the kora. We classify the kora as a harp-lute because while it is played like a harp (plucking strings without depressing them), it has a large round resonating chamber like most lutes.