Music Analysis and the Dignity of African Music

Abstract

Music Analysis and the Dignity of African Music Ingrid Monson (bio) KEYWORDS Agawu, speech mode, melodic imagination, groove, dignity, timeline Agawu, K. (2016). The African imagination in music. Oxford University Press, 372 pp. In The African Imagination in Music, Kofi Agawu offers a magisterial synthesis of his work on African music that seeks to provide a conceptual framework for thinking about all music "conceived, created and performed" by Africans (p. 3). Long a critic of approaches to African music that fetishize difference, he offers a distinction between what is "truly African" (p. 18) and what is "uniquely African." The truly African does not need to prove its uniqueness, only "to live out its status as sincere utterance" (p. 18). For Agawu, African music contains "a level of procedural sameness based on certain broad organizational attitudes and propensities" that deserve to be closely analyzed musically. The book contains dozens of close analyses intended to convey the beauty of what he calls the rhythmic, melodic, and formal imaginations found in African musics across the continent. To this end, he chose a hundred CDs—some that accompanied the books of Africanist music scholars and ethnomusicologists, plus regional- and country-specific collections of music representing all areas of the African continent. The focus is on traditional musics that have figured in major debates within music studies, although he [End Page 76] also devotes considerable attention to African composers and well-known artists in popular music, such as Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Throughout his career, Agawu has written about African music in provocative and stimulating ways that have challenged orthodoxies in ethnomusicology, anthropology, and musicology. He has emphasized the importance of representing African music through the voices of Africans themselves, not only as informants, but as scholars, composers, and theoreticians. He has delivered withering critiques of ethnomusicology and colonialism. Although these perspectives remain central to the scaffolding of the book, The African Imagination in Music is less polemical in tone than his earlier Representing African Music (2003). Yes, the Hornbostel-Sachs system of instrument classification is critiqued for its complicity with colonial efforts to classify and hierarchize all things; yes, Western ethnographers are chided for their cultural and linguistic deficits; but Agawu's primary aim is to show, through musical analysis, the rational complexity (p. 156) of African music and, in so doing, refuses characterizations of the music as unknowable, or African artists as lacking in deep conceptualization. As he did in African Rhythm (1995), Agawu emphasizes the importance of African languages in the understanding of African musics throughout The African Imagination in Music. Given the widespread use of tone languages throughout the continent, the existence of talking drums, and speech surrogates articulated on many instruments, the boundary between language and music is especially flexible and intertwined. He is right to emphasize that song is of central importance in African musics even when surrounded by elaborate instrumental textures. The speaker of a tone language hears not only the literal words of the song text, but also intertextual relationships to proverbs and other deep knowledge. Making use of Nketia's famous categories of speech mode, signal mode, and dance mode, Agawu clearly explains the levels of linguisticity that can be experienced in drumming. In speech mode, the instruments literally talk by iconically mimicking the rhythm, shape, and melodic profiles of the words. The signal mode makes use of a smaller lexicon or set of phrases to create understood signals, while the dance mode provides "the groove for community dancing" (p. 128) rather than verbal messages. There is a constant interplay among these modes that a fluent speaker of the language can recognize and appreciate, while a non-speaker necessarily misses some of the richness and depth of the art. My own work with Malian balafonist Neba Solo, whose songs in Bamana and Senufo reference Mande and Senufo proverbs and other forms of deep knowledge, both in song lyrics and played on the balafon, has attuned me to the astonishing depth of these interrelationships. Although by every measure Neba Solo [End Page 77] is a virtuosic instrumentalist, his identity as a composer of songs and a crafter of poetic messages is central to how he sees himself. In...