Introduction to African Music
Lecture 2, MUS1100, 2007
African Music
1. One continent, 54 states
2. General cultural differences from Europe,
Middle East, Asia, Americas
3. Many internal differences: between and
within states
4. 1000 languages: 50 with more than
500,000 speakers
African regions:
• Sub-Saharan Africa
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West africa
Southern africa
East Africa
Central Africa
• The Maghrib:
– Mediterranean coast North Africa
– But we must be careful of generalising stereotypes
African Music?
• Tiv, Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, Birom, Hausa, assorted
Jarawa dialects, Idoma, Eggon, and a dozen
other languages from the Nigeria-Cameroons
area do not yield a word for music gracefully. It is
easy to talk about song and dance, singers and
drummers, blowing a flute, beating a bell, but the
general terms ‘music’ and ‘musician’ require long
and awkward circumlocutions that still fall short,
usually for lack of abstraction. Charles Keil, Tiv
Song (1979).
Broad types of African Music
• Traditional vs non-traditional music?
Traditional vs non-traditional music
• Traditional
– Group linked: same ethnic or linguistic group
– Share place: eg group of households, village,
small town etc
– Share social historical interpersonal
knowledge
– Participants might be related or know
interpersonal relationships
Non-traditional contexts
• Social life and relationships not based on
kinship or ethnicity
• Eg educational, occupational. Religious
affiliations
• Associations, political parties, trades
unions
• Eg popular music, church music, public
entertainment music etc
• Commercial and professionalised
African music characteristics
• Typical Instruments and ensembles:
• Drum ensembles
• Xylophones
• Various idiophones: eg mbiras (“hand pianos”)
• Distinctive musical styles:
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Call and response
Interlocking parts
Polyrhythm
Time lines
Speech/musical interactions
Vocal style features
– Call and response
– Typically:
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Leader: higher part
Chorus: lower section, alternates with leader
Sometimes overlapping
Musical example: see Worlds of Music CD disc1 track 19
(African-American example: recording of prisoners work
gang, Mississippi, 1947)
– Tonal languages:
• Verbal and musical pitch contours
Ugandan Xylophone Players
• From VSFVAMDA vol 1-item10:
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(=JVC/Smithsonian Folkways Video Anthology of Music and Dance of Africa (MV video 781.620096 J98))
• Mbaire: larger version of xylophone
• Music to accompany marriages, celebrations,
funerals
• Singer/players form call and response pattern
• Interlocking cyclic, polyrhythmic instrumental
lines
Musical Example: Ghanaian Postal
workers
• In CD Worlds of Music, Disc 1 track 1.
• Group of workers cancelling stamps on letters
• See description in extract: Worlds of Music (online article) pp 72-78
•
http://images.lib.monash.edu.au/mus1100/04118227.pdf
• ((note this reading is also in second edition, held in Music-Multimedia, but with different page
numbers: pp 73-9)
• Musical elements:
– Whistled melody (1+ another)
– 3 rhythmic lines
Music and context
1. Music making in a social context
– Not “autonomous music”
– Yet valued aesthetically
2. In what sense is this (or is this not)
“Music”?
See James Koetting’s interaction with the
“music makers” in on-line reading
Music of the BaAka People
• BaAka : “forest people” sometimes referred to as
“pygmy” people
• Hunter gatherers, Congo rainforest area
• See studies eg Colin Turnbull The Forest People
• Cooperative, classless, non-hierarchical society.
– What are the musical implications of this?
– Can we generalise about relationships between
musical structure and social structure?
Musical example Makata
• “Makata” (Worlds of Music CD 1/16)
• Description and analysis in on-line reading:
• pp 129-39, in Titon, Worlds of Music,
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http://images.lib.monash.edu.au/mus1100/04118227-1.pdf
(note this reading is also in second edition, held in Music-Multimedia, but different page numbers: pp108115)
• Net Hunting song
• Vocal ensemble: leaderless group (“acephalous
choir”)
• 2 drums, clapping
• Many vocal layers
Musical Elements
• Text: few repeated words, “meaningless”
vocables or syllables
• Voices; repeated phrases in different
ranges
• Drums set up repeated pattern
• Varied vocal tone colours, head, chest
voices
• Alternation of vocal registers>>Yodel
sounds (characteristic of forest people)