The African Imagination In Music

311 Pages·2016·14.243 MB·English

by  Kofi Agawu

Introduction
The African Imagination in Music
Kofi Agawu
Print publication date: 2016
Print ISBN-13: 9780190263201
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190263201.001.0001
Introduction
Kofi Agawu
In its richness and diversity, African music remains one of the most vital
repertories performed today. Its history reaches back into ancient times, its
continued cultivation on the continent is as alive and human centered as it ever
was, and its worldwide influence is deep, subtle, and profound. This book is
designed to support exploration of some of the core features of African music.
For the most part, emphasis is placed on the music itself rather than on external
factors. Readers seeking chronologies and histories, or in-depth studies of
individual genres, instruments, communities, and musicians, will find them in
the many ethnographic studies and reference works that have been produced by
ethnomusicologists, organologists, historians, and anthropologists since the
early decades of the twentieth century. My task here is narrower: to supplement
an acknowledgment of these resources with a discussion of musical creativity as
manifest in a handful of repertory items. Aimed at the general reader rather
than specialists, the book invites a scholarly dialogue with those who wish to
deepen their understanding and appreciation of African music.
“Africa”
Anyone who dares to talk about “Africa” is obliged to immediately acknowledge
the size and diversity of the continent. Here are some sobering facts. Africa is
the site of the earliest human population. Genetic variation among its people
exceeds that of any other human group. Over one billion people live on the
continent (as of 2015), making it the second-most populated. It is the second-
largest continent by virtue of its thirty million square kilometers; indeed, you
could fit all of the United States, China, Japan, India, most of Eastern Europe,
Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal into its current space. With no fewer
than 1,000 languages and perhaps as many as 2,500, Africa stands as the most
polyglot continent on earth. Upward of 500 million Africans identify (p.2)
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Introduction
themselves as Christians and a comparable number as Muslims, two of the most
influential organized religions in the world. A smaller number subscribe to the
heterogeneous set of beliefs and practices consigned by our historical
oppressors to the catch-all category “indigenous African religion.”
All of this is by now conventional knowledge, the sort you can look up in any
standard encyclopedia. But its overarching point is one that we are liable to
forget, namely, that Africa is huge, diverse, and complex. The recurrent media
focus on some of its failures and challenges (the AIDS epidemic, political
instability, the Ebola crisis, failed states, ethnic conflict, and genocide) may
make us lose sight of the many contests in which Africa boasts a superior record.
Musical life is one such contest, as I hope this book will affirm. One reason we
sometimes forget or suppress Africa’s well-earned superlatives is that the pan-
African vision that would gather our achievements and hold them up for
constant view and inspiration, balancing them against the losses we have
suffered, especially in the last two and a half centuries, is not necessarily the
dominant one in contemporary text making about Africa. Under epistemic
regimes promulgated by anthropology, ethnology, and ethnomusicology, all of
them made possible by European colonialism, Africa all too often spells
difference and distance. It is reduced to tribes, ethnic groups, or nation states—
configurations that proved manageable for the purposes of political
administration and the production of certain kinds of knowledge in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The consequent scattering of the continent’s
many coherences delivers an unacceptably partial account of the potency of its
collective expressive forms. The best way to study Africa is to rigorously
maintain a sense of what V. Y. Mudimbe calls “the idea of Africa” without
underestimating its internal complexity.1
“African Music”
The phrase African music tends to suggest different things to different people.
Some think immediately of the popular dance forms originating in urban Africa,
others of the ancient songs and drums associated with traditional societies, and
still others of new music composed for the concert hall. These are all legitimate
forms of African music. The domain is so huge that some scholars prefer the
phrase African musics (in the plural) to African music (in the singular). Further
complications arise if we wish to distinguish between African music (implying
music of African origins) and music in Africa (implying any and all repertories,
irrespective of origin, that are performed on the continent).
(p.3) While I do not believe that we stand to gain much from splitting hairs
over definitions or from trying to delimit with surgical precision the domain of
the rich and complex network of sounds and processes that we call “African
music,” I must nevertheless briefly explain my own usage. “African music” as
used here refers to music conceived, created, and performed by African peoples.
It includes vast repertories of precolonial origin, others of more recent vintage
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Introduction
associated with the popular sphere, and still others produced in the mold of art-
composed music. There is reason to believe that music was there in the
beginning, alongside language; there is evidence that music has been a part of
practically every community over the last 1,000-plus years of written history;
and today, no one has any doubt that, as both a functional and an aesthetic
phenomenon, music remains a vibrant force not only on the continent but also
throughout the African diaspora.
(The idea of) African music both mirrors and inflects the collective profiles of its
land, people, material and spiritual resources, and overall culture. African music
displays a self-evident historical depth together with an astonishing diversity in
its sound-producing objects, languages, ritual affiliations, styles, and aesthetic
ideals. “Musicking” in Africa—borrowing Christopher Small’s useful
formulation2—is indexed by a variety of terms: we beat, shake, touch, and play;
we say, recite, recollect, and sing; and we move, stir the body, look our way, and
dance. In speaking of “African music,” then, we do well to keep this expanded
semantic horizon in mind.
We do well, too, to keep the human dimension in view. Music everywhere is a
part of society, but because so many people on the continent live under the sign
of a communal ethos, the musical forms they have produced over the years have
collectively inscribed and at the same time interrogated sets of values in which a
manifest plurality subtends a deep, internal singularity. The sense of
connectedness is most apparent at what might be called a background level, and
this aura is akin to the dynamics of bonding that one encounters, for example, in
kinship systems. This fact alone enjoins us to listen beyond surfaces to the
shared structures that prop up those surfaces.3
(p.4) The Recorded Legacy
From a cosmopolitan perspective, Africa’s wealth and diversity in musical
resources are most readily evident in the body of sound recordings produced
since the early 1900s. In 1959, distinguished anthropologist and folklorist Alan
Lomax pronounced Africa “the best-recorded continent musically speaking,” by
which he meant that by the mid- to late 1950s, more recordings had been made
of its indigenous music than of the indigenous music of any other continent.4 No
figures accompanied that claim, but many would probably grant its intuitive
rightness not least because Lomax’s own quest to understand the social
motivations for music making entailed extensive use of a wide variety of
recordings from around the world. The significance of his remark has less to do
with its empirical verifiability than with its indexical function: it compels
attention to a rich set of resources distributed across various collections and
archives both within and outside Africa.
Starting in the 1920s, Hugh Tracey (1903–1977) undertook a mammoth project
“to discover, study and present in recorded form the original unaided genius of
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Introduction
African musicians.”5 The result was a collection of “210 Long Playing Records of
Music and Songs from Central, Eastern and Southern Africa,” the largest such
collection in the world. The two-volume catalog that accompanies The Sound of
Africa Series (as Tracey called it) is a fascinating ethnographic document in its
own right. It includes classifications of songs and instruments, scale
measurements, and glossaries of “vernacular” words. It also contains notes
identifying various performers, locations, and genres, and, perhaps most
important, suggestive descriptions of a poetical and philosophical nature of what
African musicians imagine in song. Although known to specialists, this
remarkable resource has only recently come to the attention of a wider public,
thanks to the creation of a website and the partial dissemination of the archive’s
contents in the form of compact discs as a complementary The Music (p.5) of
Africa Series. Surely the history of African music in recorded form is
unimaginable without the Tracey materials.6
A notable resource is the Berlin Phonogram-Archiv, whose contents date back to
the 1900s. Although only about a third of the archival holdings are from Africa,
the collection is of importance to anyone who wishes to reconstruct the history
of music in the twentieth century. Materials were assembled from various
African countries, among them Angola, Cameroon, Egypt, Liberia, Mozambique,
Libya, Ruanda, South Africa, Togo, Tunisia, and Uganda, and collectors include
household names in African studies like Meinhof, Evans-Pritchard, Frobenius,
Ankermann, Herskovits, Smend, Lachmann, Kubik, and Simon. The archive’s
first director was Hornbostel, a well-known figure in comparative musicology
and also a distinguished Africanist.7
Another notable archive is the personal collection of veteran Austrian
anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik (b. 1934), which contains
close to thirty thousand items housed at the Phonogramarchiv in Vienna. Kubik
boasts unmatched credentials as a fieldworker in Africa. He has worked in over
eighteen countries and maintained a regimen of field research and active
publication over the last five decades. His collection is testimony to this
longevity and dedication. In addition to music and dance, there is a large
quantity of speech or oral data. The material comes predominantly from eastern,
central, and southern Africa. Although not as widely used as it might be, this
valuable resource is poised to support decades of research into a variety of
African expressive forms.
The Tracey, Berlin, and Kubik collections form only the tip of a giant iceberg. In
Paris, London, Oxford, Mainz, and Tervuren, and elsewhere in Europe, libraries
and museums house significant sets of recordings of African music.8 On the
African continent, the (sometimes precarious) archives of various national
broadcasting corporations assembled since the early 1960s in (p.6) Nigeria,
Ghana, Kenya, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda
and elsewhere are filled with a great variety of recorded data, including samples
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Introduction
of African popular music that emerged in the second half of the twentieth
century. Finally, at universities and other institutions in the United States (in Los
Angeles, Chicago, Bloomington, and Washington, DC), there are sizeable
collections of African music on record—enough, indeed, to keep students of
African music busy for several generations.9 If we add to these the products of
the many cassette and now CD, MP3, and DVD industries that are booming in
various urban locations on the continent, not to mention the explosion on
YouTube and other Internet sources, it becomes apparent that we are dealing
with an extraordinary set of resources. Although the story of recorded African
music remains to be told comprehensively, there is no room for doubting the
depth and potency of this network of resources.10
No individual can be expected to be familiar with the entire recorded legacy of
African music. I have therefore selected some one hundred recordings to serve
as a kind of sonic backdrop to the ideas explored in this book (Figure I.1).
Although a few items of popular and art music are included, the majority are of
the so-called traditional music, which I regard as the backbone of Africa’s
musical thinking. Arranged in three parts, the list is made up of recordings that
accompany books and monographs, free-standing field and commercial
recordings spanning a variety of vocal and instrumental genres (these are
arranged by country for the sake of convenience), and finally recordings
conceived as collections with a thematic focus. The selections in Part 1 include
continent-wide overviews (Herbst et al., Brandilly, Stone, Dauer), regional
characterizations (Kubik, Stone, Charry, Muller, Djedje), music of individual
ethnic groups or subgroups (Agawu, Fernando, Kisliuk, Omojola, Rouget), and,
most commonly, music of individual genres (Ampene, Anku, Locke, Tang, Vallejo,
Villepasteur, Waterman). Similar rubrics can be used to (p.7) (p.8) (p.9) (p.
10) (p.11) (p.12) (p.13) categorize those in Part 2, which covers a wide
variety of regional and ethnic music arranged by country from Angola to Zambia.
Those in Part 3 form a miscellaneous group. They include collections (such as
the Rough Guide series), art music (as performed by Ghanaian-American pianist
William Chapman Nyaho and by the Pan-African Orchestra), and material of
purely historical interest (such as the Hornbostel demonstration collection).
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Introduction
Composing a selection such as
this invariably arouses
suspicion that qualitative
measures have been applied,
that the list represents some
kind of “top one hundred”
chart. No such lofty ambition
motivated this exercise, only a
practical need to lay bare the
kinds of environments that have
stimulated my own thinking and
that, I believe, provide a
formidable introduction to
African sound worlds. I have
preferred recordings that are
readily available commercially
or in public libraries to those
locked away in specialized
collections and archives. Keep
in mind that for every song,
lament, dance drumming or
play-song included here,
literally thousands of
alternatives exist.
These recordings offer
opportunities to explore
different ways in which the
African imagination has been
exercised musically. Pay
attention to instruments and
their associated timbres,
varieties of speech and song,
and modes of rhythmic
expression; notice the temporal
feel, resultant forms, rhetoric,
and succession of
simultaneities. It is probably
best to plunge in directly and
without mediation, and listen to
as many of the CDs as you can
and in whatever order you
choose. You will likely
experience a range of emotions
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Introduction
and (p.14) reactions: you may
be intrigued, surprised
(pleasantly or otherwise),
repulsed, or even puzzled. You
will surely also find some of the
offerings exhilarating,
seductive, and even inspiring.
Later, depending on what
interests you have formed after
a first pass through the list, you
can search for the sorts of
information that might enhance
a second or third pass,
including information about
performers and performances,
musical systems, and the
purposes for which the music is
made. It is hard to imagine an
outcome from this initial
exploration of a hundred CDs
that will be anything less than
edifying.11
While recordings allow us to
experience a variety of sound
worlds away from their
performance sites, day-to-day
observation sheds even more
light on patterns of music
making. Play, ritual, worship,
and entertainment serve as
pretexts for boys and girls and
men and women to find
pleasure, satisfaction, or
meaning in singing and
drumming, in beating bells and
xylophones, in blowing horns
and flutes, or in playing harps,
fiddles, and lutes. There is no
end to the number of styles and
genres cultivated. Techniques of
musical construction are
equally varied, ranging from the
use of melodic archetypes,
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Introduction
rhythmic topoi, and rhythmic
narratives to the coordination of
multiple voices around a shared
reference beat. And there is
always dance to embody the
music, to domesticate it in
physical movement, and to unite
participants along kinship, age,
gender, mother-tongue, and
occupational lines. Notable are
the varieties of music that
confront anyone who rides a
taxi, bus, or lorry; visits dance
halls on weekends; or attends
weddings, outdoor ceremonies,
church, modern-day funerals,
festivals, political rallies, and
football games.
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Introduction
Groove as Essence
Despite the numerous
variations in idiom, mode of
performance, and social
function, African music retains
a level of procedural sameness
based on certain broad
organizational attitudes and
propensities. It subtends a
palpable essence (p.15) that
indexes a deep-level expressive
coherence. This view is often
implicit (and sometimes
explicit) in the writings of
scholars, among them Lomax,
Arom, Nketia, Brandilly,
Schaeffner, and Nzewi. From
this point of view, speaking of
“African music” in the singular
is no less defensible than
speaking—with appropriate
qualifiers—of “Russian music,”
“American music,” or “European
music.” This larger perspective
may be hidden from view
whenever we confine our field
of vision to individual
ethnographic studies. If,
however, we stand back and
take a synoptic view, shared
ways of proceeding become too
compelling to be ignored.
Figure I.1 One hundred recordings of
Does African music have a African music.
specifiable essence? The
answer is yes. While not
necessarily reducible to a single formula, the essence of African music originates
in a will to communal truth that is incorporative, generous, and inviting. It is
highly disciplined in its temporal articulation and structured in such a way that
it not only elicits but also demands participation—indeed, as John Miller
Chernoff showed years ago, African music is in principle incomplete without the
listener-dancer’s participation. “The African orchestra,” he wrote in 1979, “is not
complete without a participant on the other side.”12 The outward sign of this
nexus of belief and practice is a series of cycles, circles, grooves, and ostinatos
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