Theories on African Music

Abstract

riting on the development of music in the African continent, Hugh Tracey asserted: Of all the arts in Africa, music is perhaps the most highly misinterpreted. When the attribute 'African' is added to it, the picture they jointly evoke may on first impact leave the impression of a meaningless or 'abstract', unless we care to reverse the painting in its frame and see what is indelibly written on its back by the artists.1 This paper will attempt to take a closer look at the workings of the mind of the African traditional musician, and by means of structural analysis, born of evidence from primary sources, reassess some of the theories and conclusions commonly associated with African music. For too long, sociological and anthropological considerations have tended to dominate and determine conclusions drawn on many aspects of African music; musical evidence has been made to fit in with these conclusions. For example, the phallic symbol is read into the structure of some musical instruments; an innocent looking slit drum is seen as representing a naked woman, and the hammers used in playing it, two men making love to her. Then there is the case of an incompetent conductor of a remote village choir giving a down-beat where an up-beat should occur; some anthropologist concludes that a down-beat in western music equals an up-beat in African music-the case of the sinister abstract that Tracey was talking about. African instrumental melody in many instances derives from, and makes use of, folk tunes. To fully understand the nature of an indigenous instrumental melody, it is necessary for us to take another look at the principles of speech melody and speech rhythm. African folk tunes grow out of the melody formed by the speech inflection of the words of a song. This inflection, which corresponds to the high, low and sometimes medium tones of African languages, and the stress placed on certain words in a sentence, control the intervals of the notes of a melody and dictate its rhythm. Let us take the Yoruba proverb, Agba ti ko yo kun, awun n'o ni (an important person in the community without a pot belly is a stingy man); when correctly charted, the inflections in that sentence will have this