Research in African Music: Accomplishments and Prospects

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to survey the existing literature on African music south of the Sahara in the hope of noting trends, tendencies, and lines of research, and thus perhaps to draw a rough sketch showing the general shape of our field of knowledge. An additional objective, of course, will be that of indicating areas in which our present knowledge is scanty. For a library science thesis, I surveyed the complete runs of twelve selected periodicals and serials, listing those articles pertaining to African music (Thieme 1963). Two very interesting facts emerged from a statistical study of the entries in this work. Only 25 percent of the authors listed had contributed more than one article, and of the tribes mentioned in the index, only 22 percent were discussed at any length in more than one article. In noting the entries in the course of expanding this bibliography 1 to include also as many articles as possible in all periodicals published since 1950, it seems, in general, that these proportions are remaining roughly constant. We find, in short, that there is a relatively large number of authors who have written only one or two articles, and a relatively large number of tribes about whose music a little has been written.