‘Reviving’ tradition through digital technologies Traditional repertoires and neo-traditional songs in Western Uganda

Abstract

The article deals with the use of digital technologies in traditional musics and in neo-traditional pieces from western Uganda. The discourse follows the various lines of employment of digital technologies and tries to describe musical and media realities which are rapidly changing: from played back music marking the soundscape in Ugandan towns, to the role of the Internet and of YouTube in promoting artists and their songs, up to the relationship of neo-traditional musics with popular music and to in-studio digital musical production. Special attention is devoted to the production of a Tooro musician, which exemplifies the creative possibilities in the track of tradition, though in dialogue with digital technologies, in a perspective strongly anchored to his native territory but also opened to wider horizons. This case is presented in relation to another Ugandan experience which uses traditional pieces to re-elaborate them embracing the model of world music.