African music

Introduction

      the musical sounds and practices of all indigenous peoples of Africa, including the Berber in the Sahara and the San (Bushmen) and Khoikhoin (Hottentot) in Southern Africa. The music of European settler communities and that of Arab North Africa are not included in the present discussion. For the music of Islamic Africa, see Islamic arts: Music (Islamic arts).

History

      It is widely acknowledged that African music has undergone frequent and decisive changes throughout the centuries. What is termed traditional music today is probably very different from African music in former times. Nor has African music in the past been rigidly linked to specific ethnic groups. The individual musician, his style and creativity, have always played an important role.

      The material sources for the study of African music history include archaeological and other objects, pictorial sources (rock paintings, petroglyphs, book illustrations, drawings, paintings), oral historical sources, written sources (travelers' accounts, field notes, inscriptions in Arabic and in African and European languages), musical notations, sound recordings, photographs and motion pictures, and videotape.

      In ancient times the musical cultures of sub-Saharan (Sahara) Africa extended into North Africa. Between circa 8000 and 3000 BC, climatic changes in the Sahara, with a marked wet trend, extended the flora and fauna of the savanna into the southern Sahara and its central highlands. During this period, human occupation of the Sahara greatly increased, and, along rivers and small lakes, Neolithic, or New Stone Age (Neolithic Period), cultures with a so-called aquatic lifestyle extended from the western Sahara into the Nile River valley. The aquatic cultures began to break up gradually between 5000 and 3000 BC, once the peak of the wet period had passed. The wet climate became more and more restricted to shrunken lakes and rivers and, to a greater extent, to the region of the upper Nile. Today remnants survive perhaps in the Lake Chad area and in the Nile swamps.

 The cultures of the “Green Sahara” left behind a vast gallery of iconographic documents in the form of rock paintings, among which are some of the earliest internal sources on African music. One is a vivid dance scene discovered in 1956 by the French ethnologist Henri Lhote in the Tassili-n-Ajjer plateau of Algeria. Attributed on stylistic grounds to the Saharan period of the Neolithic hunters (c. 6000–4000 BC), this painting is probably one of the oldest extant testimonies to music and dance in Africa. The body adornment and movement style are reminiscent of dance styles still found in many African societies.

      Some of the earliest sources on African music are archaeological. Although musical instruments (musical instrument) made of vegetable materials have not survived in the deposits of sub-Saharan climatic zones, archaeological source material on Nigerian music has been supplied by the representations of musical instruments on stone or terra-cotta from Ife, Yorubaland. These representations show considerable agreement with traditional accounts of their origins. From the 10th to the 14th century AD, ibìn drums (a set of footed cylindrical drums) seem to have been used. The dùndún (dùndún pressure drum) pressure drum, now associated with Yoruba culture and known in a broad belt across the savanna region, may have been introduced around the 15th century, since it appears in plaques made during that period in the kingdom of Benin. The Yoruba dùndún drums are now used as “talking drums” in accompaniment to oriki (praise name) poetry (see Oral traditions (African literature)). The double iron clapperless bell seems to have preceded the talking drum. Pellet bells and tubular bells with clappers were known by the 15th century.

      Other archaeological finds relating to music include iron bells excavated in the Katanga (Shaba) region of Congo (Kinshasa) and at several sites in Zimbabwe. Benin bronze plaques represent a further, almost inexhaustible source for music history, since musical instruments—such as horns, bells, drums, and even bow lutes—are often depicted on them in ceremonial contexts.

      Among the most important written sources (though superficial analytically) are accounts from the 14th-century Arab travelers Ibn Baṭṭūṭah and Ibn Khaldūn and from the European navigators and explorers Vasco da Gama (Gama, Vasco da), Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van), João dos Santos, François Froger, and Peter Kolbe. Early attempts at notating African music were made by T.E. Bowdich (Bowdich, Thomas Edward) (1819) for Ghana, Karl Mauch (Mauch, Karl) (1872) for Zimbabwe, and Brito Capelo and Roberto Ivens (1882) for inner Angola.

      Major and minor migrations (human migration) of African peoples brought musical styles and instruments to new areas. The single and double iron bells (bell), which probably originated in Kwa (Kwa languages)-speaking West Africa, spread to western Central Africa with Iron Age Bantu (Bantu languages)-speaking peoples and from there to Zimbabwe and the Zambezi River valley. Earlier migrating groups moving eastward from eastern Nigeria and central Cameroon to the East African lakes did not know the iron bells or the time-line patterns associated with them. Consequently, both traits were absent in East African music until the recent introduction of the time-line patterns of Congolese electric guitar-based music. With the intensifying ivory and slave trades during the 19th century, the zeze (or sese) flatbar zither, a stringed instrument long known along the East African coast, spread into the interior to Zambia, the eastern half of Congo (Kinshasa), and Malaŵi.

      Beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries, lamellaphones (lamellaphone) with iron keys, a prominent feature of ancient Zimbabwe and neighbouring kingdoms and chieftainships, spread from the Zambezi valley northward to the kingdoms of Kazembe and Lunda and to the Katangan and Angolan cultures. In the course of migration, some models became smaller, because they were used as travel instruments; others were modified and gave rise to the numerous types present in western Central Africa during the first half of the 20th century. (For a further description of the lamellaphone, see Idiophones (African music).)

      A small box-resonated lamellaphone, called the likembe in Congo, traveled in the other direction, from the west to the east, northeast, and southeast. It was invented in the lower Congo region probably not earlier than the mid-19th century, and thereafter it spread upriver with Lingala-speaking porters and colonial servants to the northern Bantu borderland. The Zande, Ngbandi, and Gbaya, who speak Adamawa-Ubangi languages, adopted the likembe.

      Stylistic traits of likembe music linking it to its region of origin were only gradually modified in the new areas to suit local styles. At the beginning of the 20th century the likembe distribution area extended farther to the northeast into Uganda, where the Nilotic Alur, Acholi, and Lango adopted it. It was later introduced to southern Uganda by northern Ugandan workers; there the Bantu-speaking Soga and Gwere adopted it and began to construct models entirely from metal, even with a metal resonator. The likembe also spread southward from the lower Congo, penetrating Angola from the Kasai region of Congo and being adopted as recently as the 1950s by the Khoisan (Khoisan languages)-speaking !Kung of Kwando Kubango province in southeastern Angola.

      As a result of migrations and the exchange of musical fashions both within Africa and with foreign cultures, specific traits of African music often show a puzzling distribution. Extremely distant areas in Africa may have similar, even identical, traits, while adjacent areas may have quite different styles. The multipart singing style in triads within an equiheptatonic tone system of the Baule of Côte d'Ivoire is so close, if not identical, to the part singing style of Ngangela, Chokwe, and Luvale peoples in eastern Angola that the similarity is immediately recognized by informants from both cultures. Why this is so is a riddle. The two areas are separated by several countries with different approaches to multipart singing. Another historical riddle is the presence of practically identical xylophone playing styles and instruments among Makonde and Makua (Makua language)-speaking peoples of northern Mozambique and among certain peoples of Côte d'Ivoire and Liberia, notably the Baule and the Kru. The jomolo of the Baule and the log xylophones of northern Mozambique—for example, the dimbila of the Makonde or the mangwilo of the Shirima—are virtually identical instruments.

      Diffusionist theories of various kinds have been offered to resolve such riddles. The English ethnomusicologist A.M. Jones proposed that Indonesian settlers in certain areas of East, Central, and West Africa during the early centuries AD could have introduced xylophones and certain tonal-harmonic systems (equipentatonic, equiheptatonic, and pelog scales) into Africa. Ethnohistorians, on the other hand, have tended to accentuate the importance of coastal navigation (implying the traveling of hired or forced African labour on European ships) as an agent of cultural contact between such areas as Mozambique, Angola and Congo, and the West African coast.

      Existing historical sources on African music and dance (African dance) are more abundant than might be expected. Sometimes historical data can be obtained indirectly from contemporary observation outside Africa, especially in Latin America. It was a rule rather than an exception that people brought as slaves (slavery) from Africa to the New World often came from the hinterland of the African coastal areas. Between the European slave traders established on the coast and the hinterland areas were buffer zones inhabited by African “merchant tribes,” such as the Ovimbundu of Angola, who are still remembered by eastern Angolan peoples as vimbali, or collaborators of the Portuguese. In the 18th and 19th centuries the inland areas of Angola were not directly accessible to Europeans. But the music and dance of these areas became accessible indirectly, as European observers saw African captives playing musical instruments in New World countries. In Brazil the music of the candomblé religion, for example, can be directly linked to 18th- and 19th-century forms of orisha worship among the Yoruba. In a similar manner, Umbanda religious ceremonies are an extension of traditional healing sessions still practiced in Angola, and vodun religious music among the Fon of Benin has extensions in the voodoo (Vodou) of Haiti and elsewhere in the Caribbean. African instruments have also been modified and sometimes further developed in the New World; examples are the Central African friction drum and the lamellaphone (in the Cuban marimbula).

      African music as it is known today was also shaped by changes in the ecology of the continent, which drove people into other lands, thus producing changes in their art. With the drying of the Sahara, for example, populations tended to shift southward. When settled populations accepted the intruders, they often adopted musical styles from them. Thus, the choral singing style of the Masai (Maasai) had a fundamental influence on vocal music of the Gogo of central Tanzania, as is audible in their nindo and msunyunho chants.

      It is only relatively recently that scholarly attention has focused on the various urban popular styles, reflecting a blend of local and foreign ingredients, that have emerged during the last 50 years or so. The best known of these are West African “highlife,” Congolese dance music, tarabu of East Africa, and South African styles. With the widespread adoption of Christianity in Africa since the 19th century, many new varieties of African church music have risen and continue to evolve. For example, with altered words, hymns—as well as secular songs—are quite often adapted as protest songs in order to rally opposition to political oppression.

Gerhard Kubik Donald Keith Robotham

Musical instruments (musical instrument)

      Outsiders have often overlooked the enormous variety of musical instruments in Africa in the mistaken belief that Africans play only drums. Yet even Hanno the Carthaginian, who recorded a brief visit to the west coast of Africa in the 5th century BC during a naval expedition, noted wind instruments as well as percussion. Of an island within the gulf of “Hesperon Keras,” he wrote:

By day we saw nothing but woods, but by night we saw many fires burning, and heard the sound of flutes and cymbals, and the beating of drums, and an immense shouting. Fear therefore seized on us, and the soothsayers bid us quit the island.

      Ensembles fitting this description may be found over a wide area of West Africa today, serving as accompaniment to dancing and merrymaking or as an essential ingredient of ceremonial or cultic activities.

      Besides the percussion and wind instruments noted by Hanno, there are also stringed instruments of many kinds, ranging from the simple mouth bow to more complex varieties of zithers, harps, lutes, and lyres. While the aggregate of instrumental resources distributed over the continent is vast, each society tends to specialize in a limited assortment, and there is a wide variety from region to region. In some areas interesting new hybrid varieties emerged in the 20th century in response to outside influence, notably the endingidi spike fiddle of Uganda, malipenga gourd kazoos of Tanzania and Malaŵi, and chordophones (chordophone) such as the ramkie and segankuru of South Africa.

      Musical instruments in African societies serve a variety of roles. Some instruments may be confined to religious or cultic rituals or to social occasions. Among some peoples there may also be restrictions as to the age, sex, or social status of the player. Among the Xhosa, for example, only girls play the imported Jew's harp, a modern replacement for the traditional mouth bow, which was formerly their prerogative.

      Besides recreational applications, or as accompaniment for dancing, instruments may serve many other roles. In Lesotho it is claimed that cattle graze more contentedly when entertained by the sound of the lesiba mouth bow. Among the Shona in Zimbabwe, a local form of lamellaphone known as likembe dza vadzimu serves in rituals of ancestor worship, while in the kingdom of Buganda the royal drums formerly held higher status than the king. In West and central Africa, pressure drums (dùndún pressure drum) may serve for the transmission of messages or, together with trumpets, for the declamation of praises, by mimicking the tonal and rhythmic patterns of speech. All sub-Saharan languages (except Swahili) are “tone languages,” in the sense that the meaning of words depends on the tone or pitch in which they are said. Consequently, instrumental music—or even natural sounds such as birdsong—often imitates or suggests meaningful phrases of the spoken language. Sometimes this is intentional and sometimes it is merely fortuitous, but in either case it escapes the notice of uninformed outsiders.

      Certain instruments are used solely for song accompaniment. Here the interplay between voice and instrument is often intricate and delicately balanced. Zulu solo songs, in earlier times, were often self-accompanied on the ugubhu gourd bow. In such bow songs, while the instrumental melody was influenced by the tone requirements of the song's lyrics, the tuning of the bow determined the vocal scale to which the singer conformed. Today, when Zulus use the modern Western guitar, precisely the same antiphonal relationship and mutual interdependence between voice and instrument is maintained.

      Of the principal instruments found in sub-Saharan Africa, the following is a brief sampling.

Idiophones (idiophone)

      In this class the substance of the instrument itself, owing to its solidity and elasticity, yields sound without requiring strings or stretched membranes. Some are sounded by striking, others by shaking, scraping, plucking, or friction. Idiophones are numerous and widely distributed throughout the continent. On musical grounds they may be divided into instruments used mainly for rhythm and several varieties tuned and used melodically.

Rhythmic idiophones

      Among the vast array of nonmelodic, rhythmic idiophones, the most common and widespread are probably rattles (rattle), sounded by shaking. One type, the sistrum, which has small metal disks loosely suspended on rods, is important in the Ethiopian church and is also used in Guinea. More widespread are hollow rattles (rattle), consisting of a gourd enveloped in a net of shells or beads or of a container such as a calabash with seeds or pebbles inside. Besides hand-held varieties, there are many other kinds of rattles, often strung on cords, which may be attached to the limbs or other parts of the body and shaken while dancing or playing another instrument, or which may be fastened onto another instrument, such as the lamellaphone, to serve as a supplementary jingling device. In Zimbabwe, bottle tops, instead of the traditional snail shells, serve this purpose on the likembe dza vadzimu of the Shona.

      Struck and concussion-sounded idiophones are found everywhere. These include stone clappers (clapper) and multiple rock gongs (gong) (in Nigeria); wooden clappers and percussion beams; and implements such as hoe blades, weapons, and shields (in fact, all kinds of domestic items serve as temporary idiophones when required). Further examples are metal or wooden bells, either with internal pellets or clappers or externally struck; inverted half calabashes; bottles; and clay pots, partially water-filled, which in West Africa are struck with fanlike beaters. Stamping sticks are also used in West and central Africa, as are stamping tubes made from bamboo or from long, open-ended gourds. In Ghana and Nigeria the latter are used for accompanying certain women's songs. Scraped and friction idiophones are quite widely distributed, the most common form being a notched stick or piece of bamboo that is scraped by another stick.

Slit drums (slit drum)

      Falling between rhythmic and melodic instruments, the largest and most distinctive member of the African struck-idiophone family is the slit drum, made from a hollowed log. By careful thinning of the flanks at certain places, the instrument may be tuned so as to yield as many as four distinct pitches. Besides their use for transmitting messages, West and central African slit drums are often played in combination with membrane drums and other instruments.

Xylophones (xylophone)

      Two markedly different species of xylophone are distinguishable in Africa: one has free, unattached keys, and the other has fixed keys. With free-key xylophones, found in parts of West and East Africa, loose slabs may be laid across the player's outstretched legs or supported on logs or straw bundles, sometimes above a resonating pit. In Uganda and Congo (Kinshasa), from two to six players may perform together on the same instrument.

      Fixed-key xylophones are more elaborate. Mounted below each key, there is usually an individually tuned calabash resonator, often with a mirliton (a vibrating membrane) attached to add a buzzing quality to the sound. A mid-14th-century account mentions a calabash-resonated xylophone in the West African kingdom of Mali, and similar instruments were reported on the east coast in the 16th century. Xylophone ensembles are common in some areas, notably among the Chopi of Mozambique, where timbila orchestras of up to 40 xylophones, of six different sizes, have been reported.

Lamellaphones (lamellaphone)

      These “thumb pianos” are plucked idiophones unique to Africa and widely distributed throughout the continent. In construction they consist basically of a set of tuned metal or bamboo tongues of varying length fitted to a board, box, or calabash resonator, their free ends being twanged by the player's thumbs and fingers. Supplementary rattling or buzzing devices are often added, and board-mounted varieties are often played inside a half calabash or bowl to enhance the resonance. They serve mainly for song accompaniment. Some common names for regional varieties of the instrument are likembe, mbira, and timbrh.

Membranophones (membranophone)

      All African drums (drum) except the slit drum fall within this class, sharing the basic feature of having a stretched animal skin as their sounding medium. The mirliton, or small “singing membrane,” is often added to the bodies of drums and xylophone resonators as a supplementary buzzing device. It is an essential component of the malipenga gourd kazoos used in Tanzania and Malaŵi to simulate military band music.

      Africa has a wide variety of drums, which may serve in a number of different roles, some of them not primarily musical. Their manufacture is often steeped in ritual and symbolism, and their use may be restricted to specific contexts. In many societies, only men may play them; in others, certain drums are used only by women (as among the Venda, Sotho, and Tswana of southern Africa). Playing techniques differ widely: some drums are beaten with the bare hands, others with straight or curved sticks. Friction drums (friction drum) are also occasionally found, such as the ingungu used in Zulu girls' nubility rites. Except in the extreme south, drums of contrasting pitch and timbre are frequently played in ensembles, with or without other instruments, to accompany dancing. Though the role of drums is usually rhythmic, the entenga drum chime in Uganda, comprising a set of tuned drums, plays vocally derived melodies.

      The body of a drum may be either bowl-shaped, tubular, or shallow-framed. Bowl-shaped drums include those made from gourds and pots as well as the small and large kettledrums found in and around Uganda. Tubular and frame drums may have either one skin or two, which are either pegged, pinned, glued, or laced onto the body. Tubular drums come in many sizes and shapes, such as cylindrical, conical, barrel-shaped, goblet-shaped, footed, and hourglass-shaped. The atumpan talking drums of the Asante are barrel-shaped with a narrow, cylindrical, open foot at the base. East African hourglass drums are single-skinned. In West Africa double-skinned hourglass drums are held under one arm, their pitch rapidly and continually changed by as much as an octave by squeezing the lacing that joins the two heads. In some areas wax may be applied to the centre of the drum skin, and a mirliton, shells, or jingles may be attached to the body to modify the tone.

Chordophones (chordophone)

      This class, comprising instruments (stringed instrument) that produce sound from strings stretched between fixed points, is well represented in Africa. There is an abundance of specimens in the form of zithers, lutes, and harps.

Musical bows (musical bow)

      These consist of a string stretched between the two ends of a flexible stave. There are three types: bows (bow) with a separate resonator; bows with attached resonators; and mouth bows, which use the player's mouth for resonance. Though it is conjectural whether all varieties evolved from the shooting bow, the San of the Kalahari often convert their hunting bows to musical use. Sometimes it is held against the mouth, yielding a range of mouth-resonated harmonics, as with the Jew's harp, or it is pressed against a hollow container. Apart from adapted shooting bows, more specialized types of musical bows are widespread. Most are sounded by plucking or striking the string, but the Xhosa umrubhe is bowed with a friction stick, the xizambi of the Tsonga has serrations along the stave that are scraped with a rattle stick, and the Sotho lesiba (like the gora of the Khoekhoe) is sounded by exhaling and inhaling across a piece of quill connecting the string to the stave. Bows with more than one string are rare, but the tingle apho of the Kara people in southern Ethiopia has three.

      Besides mouth-resonated bows, the gourd bow, which has an attached gourd resonator, is commonly used in southern, central, and East Africa for self-accompanied solo singing. The string is struck with a thin stick or grass stem. The Zulu ugubhu is a typical example. Harmonic tones are selectively resonated by moving the mouth of the gourd closer to or farther from the player's chest. The fundamental pitch of the string can be altered by finger stopping; with other types, like the Swazi makhweyane, a noose or brace divides the string so as to yield two different “open” notes, and resonated harmonics are selected in the same way.

      While all the above types of musical bow are simple forms of the zither, the so-called ground bow or earth bow of equatorial Africa, which has one end planted in the ground, qualifies as a ground harp.

Lutes (lute)

      Characterized by strings that lie parallel to the neck, the lute is found in Africa in several varieties. The multiple-necked bow lute, or pluriarc, of central and southwestern Africa is the oldest. This has a separate flexible neck for each string and resembles a set of musical bows fixed at one end to a sounding box. West African plucked lutes such as the konting, khalam, and the nkoni (which was noted by Ibn Baṭṭūṭah in 1353) may have originated in ancient Egypt. The khalam is claimed to be the ancestor of the banjo. Another long-necked lute is the ramkie of South Africa.

Fiddles (fiddle)

      The bowed-lute family is represented by three types of one-string fiddle, as exemplified by the rebeclike goje of Nigeria and the spike fiddles masenqo of Ethiopia and endingidi of Uganda—the last being a 20th-century invention.

Harp lutes

      The sophisticated kora of the Malinke people of West Africa is classified as a harp lute. Its strings lie in two parallel ranks, rising on either side of a vertical bridge, which has a notch for each string. The long neck passes through a large, hemispherical gourd resonator covered with a leather sounding table.

Lyres (lyre)

      These have been termed yoke lutes, the strings running from a yoke supported by two side arms. Their distribution in Africa is confined to the northeast. In Ethiopia two types occur: the large beganna, with 8 to 10 strings and a box-shaped body (corresponding to the ancient Greek kithara); and the smaller six-string krar, with a bowl-shaped body (resembling the Greek lyra). The latter type, with from four to eight strings and varying in size, is also used in The Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya. The litungu is a typical specimen.

Harps (harp)

 These are confined to a belt, north of the Equator, running from Uganda to Mauritania. All African harps (like those of ancient Egypt) are classed as open harps, as they have a neck and a resonator with a string holder but lack a supporting pillar to complete the triangle. In most cases some form of buzzing device is incorporated. Examples are the ennanga (Uganda; see photograph—>), ardin (Mauritania), kinde (Lake Chad region), and ngombi (Gabon).

Aerophones (aerophone)

      The archaic bull-roarer (a board attached by rope to a stick and whirled about in the air) survives in various localities, notably in southern Africa among the San and neighbouring peoples. Of the wind instruments (wind instrument) proper, the three main divisions—flutes, reed pipes, and trumpets—are all well represented, though the second of these is more restricted in distribution than the others.

Flutes (flute)

      At the southernmost tip of the continent the navigator Vasco da Gama in 1497 encountered a band of Khoekhoe people “playing upon four or five flutes of reed.” Ensembles of single-note stopped flutes playing on the hocket principle, with each flute blowing its note in rotation, have been reported from various regions, ranging from southern Africa through eastern Congo (Kinshasa), Uganda, and The Sudan to southern Ethiopia. panpipe ensembles are less common, but notable examples have been witnessed in central Africa, and particularly among the Nyungwe of Mozambique. There are many other types of open and stopped flutes—cylindrical and conical; transverse and end-blown; made from bamboo, reed, roots, stems, wood, clay, bone, and horn. Globular flutes (vessel flute) made from small spherical gourds or from hard-shelled fruits such as Oncoba spinosa are found in southern Africa, Congo, Mozambique, Uganda, Guinea, and elsewhere. End-blown notched flutes, with a U- or V-shaped embouchure, either with or without finger holes, are widely distributed across the continent. The long Zulu umtshingo has an obliquely cut embouchure; there are no finger holes, but a double range of overblown harmonics is produced by alternately stopping and unstopping the lower end with a finger. Such instruments and many others throughout the continent are played singly, but in many areas flutes are played in pairs or in combination with other instruments.

Reed (reed instrument) pipes

      Transverse clarinets (clarinet) are used throughout the West African savanna region, from Guinea to Cameroon. These are single-reed pipes (pipe) made from hollow guinea corn or sorghum stems, the reed being a flap partially cut from the stem near one end. Single and double clarinets are found in The Sudan among the Dinka people. Conical double-reed instruments of the oboe or shawm type have spread around the northeastern and northwestern fringes of Africa wherever Islam has taken root. Despite local variations, they are basically related to the Arab zūrnā, having a disk (or pirouette) below the reed that supports the player's lips.

Trumpets (trumpet)

      Lip-vibrated aerophones (aerophone) made from a variety of materials are widespread in Africa. Apart from musical uses, some serve for signaling. In West Africa, side-blown ivory or horn instruments may transmit verbal praises of chiefs and rulers. Among the Hausa, the long metal kakaki and wooden farai, both end-blown, fulfill this role in combination with drums. In East and central Africa, the instruments are often made from gourds, wood, hide, horn, or a combination of these materials. In Buganda, trumpet sets were part of the royal regalia. Throughout Africa, more than one or two notes are seldom produced from a single trumpet, but trumpet ensembles are common, playing in hocket fashion.

Donald Keith Robotham

Musical structure

      In Africa it is unrealistic to separate music from dance (African dance) or from bodily movement. In Europe the body tends to be used as a single block, while in African and Afro-American dance it seems to be “polycentric”—that is, split into several independent body areas or “centres.” Likewise, the playing of African musical instruments involves a whole combination of body movements. This is one reason African music is less amenable to notation than Western music; for analytical purposes, sound filming (rather than just sound recording) is essential.

      In Africa music making (musical composition) is very often collective, involving organized collaboration in which performers contribute not identical, but complementary, constituents. Besides polyrhythmic and polymetric procedures, melodic phrases are frequently offset against one another, with different starting and ending points, either in an antiphonal “call-and-response” relationship or in an overlapping relationship that yields polyphony. In addition, melodic phrasing and instrumental accompaniment may be deliberately out of step—a displacement technique described in 1952 by American anthropologist Richard Waterman as “offbeat phrasing of melodic accents.” Complementary participation is also evident in drumming and in flute or trumpet ensembles where each player in turn sounds a different, single note. The Ghanaian musicologist J.H. Kwabena Nketia pointed out the function of this African form of hocket technique in “achieving overall effects of continuity, [and] for building up interlocking, and sometimes complex structures, out of relatively simple elements.”

Timing (time)

      In a great many African music and dance cultures, movement organization rigidly follows certain principles of timing that cannot be equated with Western metrical systems. African systems of timing are generally based on at least four fundamental concepts:

● There is an overall presence of a mental background pulsation, or “metronome sense,” consisting of equally spaced pulse units continuing ad infinitum and often at great speed. These so-called elementary pulses serve as a basic orientation screen; they are two or three times faster than the beat rate, or gross pulse.

● Musical form is organized so that recurring patterns and themes are timed against a regular number of elementary pulses—usually 8, 12, 16, 24, or their multiples (more rarely, 9, 18, or 27). The recurring sequences are called strophes or cycles; the number of pulses they contain are referred to as their form numbers or cycle numbers.

● Such strophes or cycles are often divisible in more than one way, allowing simultaneous combinations of contradictory metrical units. For example, 12 pulses—12 is the most important form number in African music—can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6.

● Patterns with the same form number can be shifted out of phase, so that their starting points and main accents do not coincide, resulting in “cross rhythms.” In some cases they cross in such a way that they interlock, or fall between one another, with no two notes ever sounding together.

Interlocking

      Interlocking techniques are a prominent feature of many instrumental styles in East and southeastern Africa. From regions in Tanzania and Mozambique come the ng'oma drumming of Gogo women and such log xylophone styles as the dimbila of the Makonde, the mangwilo of the Shirima, and the mangolongondo of the Yao people. The drumming in the ngwayi dance of northeastern Zambia, the timbrh lamellaphone music of the Vute people of central Cameroon, and many other traditions also use interlocking techniques.

      A basic characteristic of interlocking is the absence of a common guide pulse to be taken as a reference point by all players. In a Western music ensemble or a jazz band all the players share a “beat,” one common metric point of departure. They may even beat their feet to mark it. While there are many traditional African musics in which such a common reference pulse does exist, in several others the musicians in a group relate their parts to individual reference pulses, which can stand in various relations to one another.

      In one type of relation the pulse of one performer or group of performers falls exactly in the middle of the other's pulse. This type of interlocking occurs, for example, in the music of the amadinda and embaire xylophones (xylophone) of southern Uganda. A special type of notation (musical notation) is now used for these xylophones, consisting of numbers and periods. A number indicates that a player strikes a note; the number refers to the note in the scale, as 5, for example, the fifth note of the scale. An underlined number should be read an octave down; in other words, 5 is an octave below 5. A period indicates that no note is struck. Numbers and periods both occupy one elementary pulse.

      The following is an example of interlocking as played on the amadinda. The melodies are actually played in parallel octaves; that is, each melody is played at the notated pitch and also at the pitch an octave below:

      In interlocking music of this type, one musician's positive action of striking a note always coincides with a negative action, or “non-strike,” of his fellow musician, who at that moment lifts his beater. The effect is such that both series of equally spaced notes seem to interlock like the teeth of a cogwheel. Each of the two musicians, however, feels his own series of notes as “on beat.”

      In the very fast mangwilo xylophone music, the interlocking technique is exploited further. In some compositions by two virtuoso players, each musician interlocks with the right hand only. The left hands play different rhythm patterns superimposed over the interlocking pattern.

      Triple interlocking is another type, used, for instance, in Zambia in drum music and also in southern Uganda in the music of the akadinda xylophone. Here a group of three musicians plays a short pattern of equally spaced notes in parallel octaves. Three musicians sitting opposite them interlock with another pattern that fits two equally spaced notes between each note of the first group's pattern. In numerical notation it looks like this:

      Interlocking techniques allow African instrumentalists to produce resultant patterns—overall patterns formed by all the players—that are unbelievably rapid. The resultant pattern of the above akadinda musical example is: 214435214235114135214535. This series of 24 notes, when played by expert musicians, is at a speed of approximately 600 notes per minute. But each musician, for himself, plays one-third that fast.

Time-line patterns

      In certain areas there is yet another principle of timing, known as time-line patterns. These are struck motional patterns that make up a rhythmic ostinato with an asymmetrical inner structure (such as 5 + 7 or 7 + 9), against which the melodic and rhythmic phrasing of other performers is juxtaposed. They are percussive patterns, produced either by hand clapping or on some musical instrument of penetrating sound quality, such as a bell, a high-pitched drum, the rim or body of a drum, a bottle, an ax blade, a calabash, a percussion beam, concussion sticks, or a high-pitched xylophone key. Time-line patterns are a regulative element in many kinds of African music, especially dance music along the West African coast, in western central Africa, and in a broad belt along the Zambezi River valley from Zambia into Mozambique. Broadly speaking, they are found in those parts of Africa covered by the Kwa (Kwa languages) and Benue-Congo (Benue-Congo languages) subgroups of the Niger-Congo group of languages—with the notable exception that they are not found in most areas of East Africa or in South Africa.

      A time-line pattern represents the structural core of a musical piece, something like a condensed and extremely concentrated representation of the rhythmic and motional possibilities open to the musicians and dancers. Singers, drummers, and dancers in the group find their bearings by listening to the strokes of the time-line pattern, which is repeated at a steady tempo throughout the performance. The following are some of the most important time-line patterns:

● The 12-pulse seven-stroke pattern

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      Version a (mainly West African)

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