Somali Music

Somali music is the musical tradition of the Somali people of the Horn of Africa, encompassing the orally transmitted poetry-song forms of the interior, the urban popular styles of Mogadishu and Hargeisa, and the work of the post-1991 diaspora. Its classical core is qaraami, a love-song idiom built on the oud and measured poetic metre, from which the modern heello song developed. Twentieth-century Somali music fused these foundations with theatre orchestras, state radio ensembles and, in the 1970s and 1980s, funk, reggae and disco. Singing in the Somali language, with its strict alliterative verse rules, remains the tradition's defining constant across every idiom.