Berber Music

Berber music gathers the traditional musics of the Amazigh peoples of North Africa, across Morocco, Algeria, Mali, Niger and Libya. It spans village ceremonies built on communal singing, frame drums and responsorial dance — the Moroccan ahidus and the Algerian ahellil among them — and the professional song traditions of Kabylia, where poets such as *Idir* and *Lounès Matoub* set Tamazight verse to guitar and mandole. Pentatonic melody, call-and-response and cyclical percussion recur throughout, while the Tuareg guitar music of *Tinariwen* and *Bombino* carried the repertory to international audiences from the 1990s.