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) Page 1 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.  Subscriber: Utrecht University Library; date: 23 April 2020 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 Page 2 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.  Subscriber: Utrecht University Library; date: 23 April 2020 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 Page 3 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.  Subscriber: Utrecht University Library; date: 23 April 2020 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 Page 4 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.  Subscriber: Utrecht University Library; date: 23 April 2020 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). Page 5 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.  Subscriber: Utrecht University Library; date: 23 April 2020 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 Page 6 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.  Subscriber: Utrecht University Library; date: 23 April 2020 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, Page 7 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.  Subscriber: Utrecht University Library; date: 23 April 2020 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. Page 8 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.  Subscriber: Utrecht University Library; date: 23 April 2020 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 Page 9 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use.  Subscriber: Utrecht University Library; date: 23 April 2020