African Music

I

Introduction

African Music, music of Africans who live south of the Sahara. A rich network of musical traditions has developed in Africa, a vast region of more than 50 nations, each with its own history and mixture of cultures and languages. For information about the music of North Africa, See Arab Music.

II

Musical Style

Although diverse, African music has certain distinctive traits. One is the use of repetition as an organizing principle. For example, in the mbira music of the Shona people of Zimbabwe, a repeated pattern is established by the interaction of various parts, and the musician develops an improvisation out of this core pattern. Another common characteristic is polyphony (the simultaneous combination of several distinct musical parts). African music also has a conversational quality, in which different voices, instrumental parts, or even the parts of a single player are brought into lively exchange. One of the most common types of music making is call-and-response singing, in which a chorus repeats a fixed refrain in alternation with a lead singer, who has more freedom to improvise.

There are many different modes of expression in African music. In West Africa, drum ensembles consisting of three to five musicians who play interlocking patterns are common. In the ensemble, each drummer uses a special method of striking the drumhead to produce varying pitches and timbres—distinctive sounds also known as tone colors—to distinguish the drum from all the others. Such ensembles often include rattles and an iron bell, which is struck with a stick to produce a repeated pattern called a timeline. This pattern penetrates the dense texture of the ensemble and helps the drummers to play their patterns at the correct time. See also Musical Rhythm: Non-Western Systems.

In the akadinda xylophone music of the Ganda, two groups of three players each face one another across one xylophone. The first group plays a repeated pattern in octaves, and the second group fills in the missing beats with an interlocking pattern. The resulting tempo may approach 600 beats per minute. In eastern, central, and southern Africa, groups of musicians play sets of stopped flutes or trumpets, each person contributing a single note in strict rotations with the others. The alternation of the parts creates a rich polyphonic texture. This kind of ensemble technique, sometimes called hocketting, was described by European observers as early as the 15th century. Hocketting also plays an important role in the music of the San people of the Kalahari Desert and the pygmies of the central African rain forests.

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Among the southern African peoples, polyphony is most highly developed in vocal music. In traditional Zulu choral music, individual voices enter at different points in a continuous cycle, overlapping in a complex and constantly shifting texture. The same technique may be used in solo vocal performances, during which a singer will jump from one entrance point to another to create a polyphonic texture. A wide variety of vocal qualities are used in African music, and it is common for sound-producing objects, such as jingles, rattles, and membranes made of spiderweb, to be attached to instruments to produce a “sizzling” effect.

III

Instruments

A wide variety of instruments are used in African music. Drums are among the more popular instruments and are made in a variety of shapes and sizes (see Musical Instruments: Membranophones). Materials such as wood, gourds, and clay are used to construct drum bodies. Drum membranes are made from the skins of reptiles, cows, goats, and other animals. Important types of drums include drum-chimes, in which a set of drums tuned to a scale is mounted in a frame and played by a team of drummers; friction drums, in which sound is produced by rubbing the membrane; and the West African hourglass-shaped tension drum, which is sometimes called a talking drum because it can be used to imitate the tonal contours of spoken language.

Other important percussion instruments in African music include clap-sticks, bells, rattles, slit gongs, struck gourds and clay pots, stamping tubes, and xylophones (see Musical Instruments: Idiophones). The lamellaphone, an instrument unique to Africa, consists of a series of metal or bamboo strips mounted on a board or box. The instrument is held in the hands or on the player’s lap, and the free ends of the strips are plucked with thumbs or forefingers. Lamellaphones are used throughout Africa and are also referred to as mbira, kalimba, or likembe.

African stringed instruments include the musical bow, lute, lyre, harp, and zither. Professional musicians among the Mandinka (also known as Mandingo or Malinke) people of Gambia play the kora, a 21-string harp-lute. The xalam, a plucked lute, is a close relative of the African American banjo. It is used in Senegal by Wolof praise singers, whose songs revere important people. The musical bow, which consists of a string stretched between two ends of a flexible stave, plays a particularly important role in the traditional music of southern African peoples, such as the San, Xhosa, and Zulu.

The flute, whistle, oboe, and trumpet are among the African wind instruments. Transverse and end-blown flutes made from bamboo, reeds, wood, clay, bones, and other materials are used throughout the sub-Saharan region. Trumpets, often associated with royalty, are made from animal horns or wood and are also widely used. Clarinets from the savanna region of West Africa are made from guinea corn or sorghum stems, with a reed cut from the surface of the stem at one end. Double-reed instruments, such as the Hausa algaita, originated from the shawms of North Africa (see Musical Instruments: Single and Double Reeds).

IV

African Music in Society

Professional musicians played a crucial role as historians in the kingdoms that developed from the 10th to the 20th century in various parts of Africa. Among the Mande people of western Africa, professional bards, or griots, still recount the histories of powerful lineages and offer counsel to contemporary rulers. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria, an incompetent or evil king often first heard the public’s command to abdicate from his “talking drummers.” When Ugandan government troops invaded the palace of the kabaka (king) of Buganda in the 1960s, they made sure that the royal musical instruments were destroyed first. In his memoirs, the kabaka described the royal drums as the “heart” of his kingdom.

Music continues to play an important role in African societies. It is a medium for the transmission of knowledge and values and for celebrating important communal and personal events. Music is often combined with speech, dance, and the visual arts to create multimedia performances. Even in societies with well-developed traditions of professional musicianship, the ability of all individuals to participate in a musical event by adding a voice to the chorus or by adding an appropriate clap pattern is assumed to be part of normal cultural competence.

Important stages of an African person’s life are often marked with music. There are lullabies, children’s game songs, and music for adolescent initiation rites, weddings, title-taking ceremonies, funerals, and ceremonies for the ancestors. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria, the mother of twins must perform a special repertoire of songs, and in Ghana there are songs for teasing bedwetters and for celebrating the loss of a child’s first tooth.

In many African religions, sound is thought to be one of the primary means by which deities and humans impose order on the universe. In West Africa, drummers play a crucial role in possession-trance ceremonies, in which the gods enter or “ride” the bodies of devotees. A competent drummer must know scores of specific rhythms for particular gods and be responsible throughout the performance for regulating the flow of supernatural power in ritual contexts. In Zimbabwe, Shona mbira musicians create an environment that encourages the ancestral-spirit possession that is considered a necessary part of healing.

Music is also used to organize work activities. Kpelle men in Liberia use a form of vocal hocketting to coordinate their machete blows while clearing dense brush for rice fields. In pygmy societies of the central rain forest, singing and vocal cries are used to coordinate the movements of hunters through the brush. In southern Africa, herders use flutes and other instruments to help control the movement of cattle.

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