Africa.

1. Ethnic groups, languages and style areas.

Music and dance in Africa exist within an interdependent relationship with other forms of expressive culture. Ruth Stone has stressed that African song, language, oral literature, instrumental music, theatre arts and dance are all a ‘conceptual package’ that most Africans conceive of as unitary (Stone, GEWM, ii, p.7). The relationship between language and music, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, has been stressed by many authors, including Kwabena Nketia (1972). Christopher Ehret (1981) has confirmed that boundaries between musical styles in Africa tend to coincide with the boundaries among the four principal families of African languages isolated by Joseph Greenberg (1966): Niger-Kordofanian, Nilo-Saharan, Afroasiatic and Khoisan (see fig.1).

Owing to considerable differences in the spelling of African languages, ethnic groups, names and terms, variant spellings have been included throughout this dictionary to aid the reader when consulting related articles and material. In addition, although there is a growing preference to adopt phonetic orthography for African names and terms, these forms, unfortunately, cannot be searched on in the electronic format in which this edition of the dictionary is being simultaneously published; conventional roman spellings have thus been used in running text, with the relevant phonetic spelling – when provided by the contributor – included in parentheses on the first mention.

There have been comparative studies of music and dance in the Sudan, among the Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Berta and Ingassana peoples and others (Simon, 1975; 1989; Tucker, ‘Children's Games’ and Tribal Music, 1933; Kubik, 1982) and among nomadic Nilotes in Uganda, such as the Karimodjong or Karamojong (Gourlay, 1970). These studies highlight the contrasts with musics of the Guinea Coast and west-central Africa.

Stylistic borders in Africa also often coincide with smaller-scale linguistic divisions. For example, Bantu languages within the Benue-Congo family of languages have been subdivided by Malcolm Guthrie (1948) into zones, and within each zone further division into groups is made. Angola is a clear example. Guthrie's zone K, group 10, which includes Cokwe (Chokwe), Luvale-Lwena, Lucazi (Luchazi), Mbwela, Nkhangala (Nkangala) and Lwimbi (Luimbi), forms a linguistically and musically homogeneous area covering most of eastern Angola, north-western Zambia and parts of the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo. This south-central African linguistic area contrasts sharply in music with that of the peoples of Bantu-language zone R, covering south-western Angola and northern Namibia.

Other sharp contrasts are due to language-independent influences. For example, the migration of cattle herders from the East African Horn to the Great Lakes region around the 14th century ce gave rise to what became the musical cultures of the Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi and the Nkore (Hima or Bahima) in Uganda. As migratory populations mixed with local populations they abandoned their original languages and adopted Bantu languages, yet they retained many aspects of their music and dance styles.

The diffusion of cultural traits from South-East Asia to the East African coast began in c900 ce via the Indian Ocean trading network. This diffusion was an important process that introduced box-resonated xylophones, flat-bar zithers, one-string fiddles and ostinato-based melodic patterns, especially in the music of northern Mozambique. The most decisive external influences, however, were brought with the Islamic conquests of North Africa after 688 ce, and by Omani-Arab trade along the East African coast between Muqdisho and Sofala (Mozambique) beginning in the 10th century.

Most of the inhabitants of the northern third of Africa originally spoke Afroasiatic languages such as Berber and ancient Egyptian. Berber populations are autochthonous in the area known as the Maghrib, covering Morocco and much of Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. Their pentatonic tonal system dates back far and possibly represents an ancient cultural stratum.

With the Arab conquest of northern Africa in the 7th century, the entire region changed culturally. Transculturation processes in music quickly began between the Arab invaders and the native Berber population. Islam and Arab musical influences spread along trade routes through the Sahara to courts and trading centres along the middle Niger river. In Spain (under Islamic rule for nearly 800 years), an Arab-Andalusian style developed from the court music tradition of the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus and the early Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad. After the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula by Christians, this cultural tradition retreated to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The Andalusian tradition has had a profound impact on musical cultures of the Maghrib. Principal poetic forms include qasida solo improvisation, muwashshah court poetry, zajal, a popular poetic form developed in Spain, and nūbat, suites of songs in five movements, and praises of Muhammad and divine love. All of these forms have modal structures and vocal phrasing characteristic of Arab cultures (al-Faruqi, 1983–4).

The Muslim call to prayer and highly melismatic recitations of the Qur'an have had a profound impact on musical styles in all parts of Africa with a significant Islamic presence, especially in predominantly Muslim countries such as Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea and Somalia, but also in the West African countries of Mali, Niger, Chad and Nigeria, and along the East African coast which was under Omani-Arab influence beginning in 900 ce. Lois Anderson (1971, pp.154–65) noted standard methods of Qur'anic recitation in Morocco, yet in spite of the musical qualities of these recitations, orthodox Muslims do not associate these prayers with music. The Mozabite sect in Algeria, for example, forbids music altogether.

In Morocco, the ceremonial Thursday evening proclamations of the holy day include performances with nfir (trumpet) and ghaita (oboe). Together with gangatan (double-headed cylindrical drums), this tradition crossed the Sahara centuries ago and is still common in Niger, northern Nigeria and northern Cameroon. Associated with Sufi mysticism in many parts of northern Africa and along the East African coast, religious brotherhood and rituals known as dhikr are becoming increasingly popular (Simon, 1975; Dikr and Madīh, 1981). Among the Yao of northern Mozambique and Malawi, this tradition, here no longer ritual, is known as sikiri. Dhikr practices include the use of raspy, guttural sounds. The Tuareg of Niger conduct healing ceremonies (tende-n-nguma) with vocal sounds similar to those heard in dhikr. However, Islamic connections are denied by the Tuareg.

Patterns of nomadism, village life and urban cultures converge in North Africa. The trading routes to the south, traditionally under the control of the Tuareg, contributed to the rise of West African savanna states, such as the Mali Empire (11th–16th centuries), Songhai (7th–16th centuries) and, later, the Hausa states. Many West African culture traits, especially in music, reached North Africa, notably Morocco. The blend of West African and Arab music is particularly obvious in the bardic traditions of Mauritania (Guignard, 1975; Nikiprowetzky, 1964; Musique maure, 1966).

Many other forms of interaction have taken place. Polyphonic music of the so-called pygmies across the rainforests of Central Africa has had a notable effect on neighbouring musics, as is evident from studies among the Batwa (Twa) of the Ituri forest (Tracey, 1953; 1973; Turnbull, 1965), the upper Sangha pygmies in the Central African Republic and Congo (Musique pygmée, 1946; Djenda, ‘Les pygmées’, 1968; Arom, Ba-Benzélé Pygmies, n.d.) and the Bosang (Bøsaŋ) of central Cameroon. In Southern Africa, San speakers transmitted principles of polyphonic form (still prevalent among the !Kung’ today) to arriving Bantu populations from the earliest stages of contact, beginning c400 ce. These principles determined the rise of specific tonal-harmonic systems among the Shona, Nsenga and other populations in Zimbabwe and Zambia. The result of these broad interactions during the past was the formation of style areas that can be delineated, albeit roughly, with the understanding that boundaries are fuzzy and have changed over time.

During the second half of the 20th century, a vast amount of field data on African music became available. Some of the major collections of field recordings of African music include the collections of the National Sound Archive in the British Library (UK), the International Library of African Music (South Africa), the Musée de l'Homme (France), the Musikethnologische Abteilung, Museum für Völkerkunde (Germany), the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria), Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University (USA), and the Smithsonian Institution (USA).

The data provided in these collections indicate that Africa is not compartmentalized along ethnic divisions. Musical style areas are most often shared by several ethnic groups related by language or other features. Neighbours often form clusters of cultural similarity, as outlined in George Peter Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas (1967), sharing a similar social organization, material culture, economy and artistic expression. Occasionally, people are culturally connected even though they may be settled in areas quite remote from each other. Alan Lomax's song-style areas, based on Murdock's culture areas, divide Africa into 15 large sections with geometrically drawn symbolic boundaries; these song-style areas have long supported an understanding of the musical diversity of this continent (fig.2).

Lomax includes Madagascar in the African style world, although Malagasy is a Malayo-Polynesian language, and musical structures and instruments are clearly non-African. However, the presence of influences from the coast of Mozambique, including the five-stroke, 12-pulse time-line used in women's music for leg xylophones has also made Madagascar a historical African outpost (Schmidhofer, 1991). By contrast, Lomax excludes from the African song-style world not only ‘Mediterranean Europe’, ‘North Africa’ and the ‘Sahara’, but also what he terms ‘African Hunters’, with which he groups together ‘Pygmies’ and ‘Bushmen’, somewhat in the tradition of Yvette Grimaud (1956).

Lomax's statistical computation of single musical characteristics suggest that a sub-Saharan song-style core area can be isolated embracing the ‘Guinea Coast’ and ‘Equatorial Bantu’, and from these areas influences radiated to the subcontinent. This reflects the history of the largest known African migration, that of proto-Bantu speakers from the so-called ‘Bantu nucleus’ in eastern Nigeria and western Cameroon. A series of early migrations eastwards reached the Great Lakes region by 400–300 bce. It was followed by a second movement from the ‘Bantu Nucleus’ southwards. A thousand years later, better communication led to further diffusional processes from West Africa into west-central Africa from c700 to 1100, introducing to parts of the subcontinent a cultural complex that included secret societies with masks, single and double flange-welded iron bells and asymmetric time-line patterns in music (see map in GEWM, ii, p.308).

A characteristic of present-day Africa is the overlapping distribution areas of single cultural traits or trait clusters resulting from millennia of superseding waves of invention, contact, diffusion and migration. Some technologies, musical instruments and stylistic traits have coherent small-scale distribution areas, such as cord-and-peg tension in drums and the Guinea-type double bell; both were concentrated in the broad West African coastal belt from western Nigeria to Côte d'Ivoire. Another example is the polyidiochord stick zither, such as the mvet, of which the distribution area is concentrated in southern Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. Coherent distribution patterns often began at a specific time and place, then changed gradually through contacts among neighbours. Sometimes distributional contiguity is indicative of active traditions (Mensah, 1970).

By contrast, log xylophones, bow lutes (see Pluriarc) and specific tonal-harmonic patterns present a discontinuous, patchy distribution pattern. Areas that are distinct from each other, for example, may show stunning affinities, often puzzling scholars. There are notable similarities between log xylophone playing in northern Mozambique, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire (especially among the Baule or Baoulé people), particularly in the presence of interlocking techniques and melodic patterns that include the occasional use of canon (Herzog, 1949; Kubik, ‘Transcription’, 1965; Kubik, Malawian Music, 1987). Harmonic multipart singing with tendencies to simultaneous neutral 3rds performed in secret societies link the Cokwe (Chokwe), Luvale, Lucazi (Luchazi) and others in eastern Angola to the Baule (Baoulé) of Côte d'Ivoire. In Namibia, the musical culture of the pastoral Herero is distinct from their neighbours, the Nama (‘Hottentots’) and the Damara. But there is a compelling similarity between Herero praise-songs and vocal patterns in women's oucina songs to vocal music in Nkore, western Uganda, and in Rwanda, Burundi and western Tanzania.

Discontinuous distribution can be due to external forces, internal decay, or voluntary or forced migration. A musical example of diffusion as a result of migration is the adoption of the mqangala mouth-resonated stick played by women in south-western Tanzania, specifically in locations where 19th-century Nguni intruders from South Africa settled and intermarried. Discontinuous distribution can also be the result of stops at courts along trade routes, with the areas between these stops remaining unaffected.

Bananas, a crop of south-east Asian origin, were probably established in the Lake Victoria area at the beginning of the later Iron Age, c1000–1100. Among the Konjo, Nyoro, Ganda and Soga peoples, stems of banana plantains are used for log xylophones. The same applies to the Nyakyusa, Yao and Makonde peoples of south-western Tanzania and northern Mozambique. Conversely, in the more arid zones of central Tanzania, between these two distribution areas, no log xylophones are found (see Anderson, 1967, for an overview of xylophones in East Africa). On the Tanzanian coast, and inland from Quelimane in Mozambique as far as Lake Chilwa, box-resonated xylophones are played, some of them reminiscent of xylophones played in Indonesian gamelans (Kubik, 1982, pp.110–11). In each of these cases, variation of the East African ecology was a co-determinant of the present-day distribution.

The analogies between log xylophone playing styles in northern Mozambique, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire require a different explanation. Knowledge of these styles could have been transplanted with slaves from Mozambique who were resettled in Sierra Leone after 1815 after being liberated by the British Navy from slave ships of other nations. People of African descent from the United States and Brazil also began to settle at several points along the Guinea Coast in the late 19th century. Thus, Brazilian architecture was introduced to Lagos, along with musical instruments such as the large box-resonated Lamellophone that would be called agidigbo among the Yoruba, because it became associated with gidigbo (a Yoruba wrestling game). It is clearly related to the marimbula, a lamellophone found in the Caribbean.

Migrating instrumental traditions can also clash and be rejected, especially if their social functions converge. The distribution pattern of harps and lyres in East and Central Africa, for example, is exclusive, overlapping only in southern Uganda where the attractive power of the Buganda court accommodated both (Wachsmann, 1971; Kubik, 1982). A magnificent eight-string kimasa harp was collected in Busoga in the 1950s by Klaus Wachsmann. That such instruments did not gain a significant foothold across the border in Kenya could be due to an already strong lyre tradition (Kubik, 1982; Owuor, 1970; 1983).

2. Historical sources and research history.

There is an abundance of pictorial, archaeological and other sources of early African music history, although historical reconstructions that reach back the farthest often rely on conjecture. For example, it is thought that the invention of the hunting bow took place in Palaeolithic times. Wachsmann and Peter Cooke stressed that it ‘was perhaps the first tool to make use of stored energy, but not necessarily for the sole purpose of shooting an arrow’ (Grove 6). They suggest evidence for the bow's use as a sound-producing instrument. The implication is that uses of the hunting bow were probably developed simultaneously, making earlier queries about which came first, the hunting bow or musical bow, obsolete. The link between hunting bows and musical bows is preserved today in south-eastern Angola and parts of Namibia, where hunting bows are instantly transformed into musical bows by attaching a tuning noose, using either the mouth as a resonator or a fruitshell (Kubik, 1970; Kubik, ‘Das Khoisan-Erbe’, 1987; see Musical bow and Angola).

Ancient Egyptian sources have been particularly helpful in understanding the remote past of some contemporary African musical practices. Although it is clear that plucked lutes in North Africa and ancient Egypt are distinct from those of West Africa, the evidence for diffusion is difficult to deny. Since ancient Egypt functioned as a cultural sponge, often absorbing foreign innovations, it is logical to leave the discussion about the directions of diffusion open. For plucked lutes, Eric Charry suggested that paths between ancient Egypt and West Africa are not clear.

Much clearer is the case of arched and angular harps. The Mauritanian ardin is found adrift from an otherwise compact distribution area of African harps (Wachsmann, 1964; Wegner, pp.162–3). Organology and performing practice (it is played exclusively by women today) reflect ancient Egyptian settings. The diffusion of harps from ancient Egypt westwards into the Sahara and from the Nile valley upwards is undisputed, although many details regarding the exact routes and timetable of local adaptations remain to be reconstructed. A detailed rock engraving of a blind musician playing an eight-string harp found in a tomb at Saqqara dating from around the 18th century bce was cited by Wachsmann as particularly relevant for the history of the harp south of the Sahara (see illustration in Hickmann, 1961, pp.82–3). A scene of home music-making showing a performer with an arched harp was also found in a tomb at Saqqara, dating to the Middle Kingdom, c2000 bce.

The oldest known iconographic testimonies to music and dance practices in Africa are provided by rock paintings and engravings, particularly those of the Sahara, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and some parts of Tanzania. Paintings such as those in the Tassili n'Ajjer, Algeria, originally discovered by Henri Lhote (1973) illuminate a new path for the iconographic study of African music history. The cultural history of Saharan populations, as displayed in the rock art galleries of the Tassili, is of direct relevance to the peoples south of the Sahara during later periods. Linguistic reconstructions suggest that c2500 bce, Nilo-Saharan languages were spoken much further north than today.

Visual depictions of music and dance occur in some of the oldest Saharan frescoes, and some of these mirror certain present-day traditions of sub-Saharan Africa. For example, a dance scene from the period of the Neolithic hunters, c6000-4000 bce, showing elaborate body decoration (Lhote, 1973, fig.53; Davidson, 1967, pp.50–51), is reminiscent of the ndlamu stamping dance of the Zulu of South Africa. The Saharan frescoes also include what could be representations of masks and initiation dances for children.

Perhaps the most important Saharan musical retention south of the Sahara is the use of harps in the Central Africa savanna, from northern Cameroon across the entire Central African Republic. Harps were known in the ancient Sahara and they have survived in such areas as Ennedi. A six-string harp is depicted in a Tassili n'Ajjer rock painting that, while controversial, holds the key to unlocking an aspect of the remote music history of Central Africa north of the equator. Tentatively dated by Basil Davidson to 700 bce, within the so-called period of the horse (1967, p.187), the painting shows a harp player with a round head and elaborate coiffure sitting on a characteristic small stool such as those found today in some areas of Chad. The player holds a six-string harp towards his body, playing for a second person with a slim face and equally elaborate coiffure and a beard. A second person sits on what could be a throne, holding a lengthy object, possibly a ceremonial stick, in front of him. The harpist could have been performing for a higher authority, suggesting the existence of social divisions in Saharan cultures during this period.

This Saharan rock painting depicts a ‘tanged’ type of harp (see Wachsmann's classification, 1964). In all, Wachsmann distinguished three types of African harps: the ‘spoon-in-the-cup’ type found in the Great Lakes region of East Africa (e.g. the ennanga of Buganda); the ‘tanged’ type, which includes harps found in the Central African Republic, Chad, northernmost Cameroon and north-eastern Nigeria; and the ‘shelved’ type found in a relatively small area, particularly in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. Bridge-harps, such as the kora in Senegal and The Gambia are excluded from this schema because their history seems to be unrelated. They are distinguished from other harps by two major features, according to Charry: their spiked neck pierces through the resonator and their bridges are perpendicular to the resonator (‘West African Harps’, 1994, p.7). Since there is no known diffusion from foreign sources, the bridge-harp must be a regional, West African development.

No harps are found in Africa south of the equator. (The term ‘ground harp’ often used to refer to ground bows is a misnomer.) The southernmost areas where harps are used in local cultures include Gabon in west-central Africa and the Lake Victoria area in the east. Contemporary Central African harps of the ‘tanged’ type, such as the kundi of the Azande or Zande (Dampierre, 1991), probably derive from earlier Saharan models.

The ‘spoon-in-the-cup’ type, on the other hand, once prominent in Buganda and adjacent areas such as Karagwe, Tanzania, has an essentially different history. Relationships between ancient Egypt and the interlacustrine kingdoms of Bunyoro and Buganda have often been proposed, especially with regard to patterns of kingship, but there is a large unaccountable time gap. Even indirect contact between the kingdom of Kush, destroyed in 350 ce, and the Great Lakes region is difficult to prove, but such contact is a persuading argument for the remote history of the ennanga and other Buganda and Bunyoro cultural commodities. Traditions can remain dormant for centuries, only to emerge in response to social or political stimuli. Ugandan harps, from the adungu of the Alur to other southern types, are quite varied, and there are many local devices, such as buzzing rings of banana fibre sewn into lizard skin, that are then attached to the instrument's neck and positioned close enough to each string so that vibration occurs (e.g. the ennanga). The variety of local adaptations suggests a long development of the harp in the Lake Victoria area.

Sources contributing to African music history include iconographic materials, artefacts, items found in collections, written accounts and oral tradition, within which several generations may be spanned. (For the last hundred years there have also been sound recordings, cinematography and, most recently, video). Artefacts informing us about Africa's musics in the past include vast archaeological materials. In western Nigeria, for example, Frank Willet excavated terracotta ritual pots at Ife, dating from 1100–1400, with reliefs depicting musical instruments. The Yoruba instruments depicted include drums of the gbedu (gbẹdù) type, demonstrating an early presence of the characteristic Guinea method of cord-and-peg tension of a drum skin such as in the atumpan of Ghana and other types used in vodu religious rites among the Fon (Fõ) of Benin (Dahomey) and Togo. They also include edon (ẹdọn or horns) and a double-bell of the Guinea type. Willet asserts that during the 10th–14th centuries another ritual Yoruba drum, the igbin (ìgbìn), was present in Ife. This type of drum is still used today in religious contexts, for example at the shrine for orisańla or obatala, the creator God. These artefacts demonstrate the relative antiquity of particular Yoruba musical instruments.

Equally conclusive is negative evidence, for example the absence of hourglass drums of the dundun (dùndún) type, so prominent in Yoruba culture today (Euba, 1977; 1990) and associated with the performance of praise poetry. There is no indication that they were used in Yorubaland during the so-called Ife classical period, corroborating the opinion that they were introduced from Hausa-speaking northern Nigeria during a later period.

The most famous West African artefacts relating to the study of musical instruments and musical practice are the Benin bronze plaques. They give a significant impression of the musical culture at Benin City from the 15th to 17th centuries, particularly in state ceremonies. Philip Dark and Matthew Hill (1971) presented a survey of the Benin bronze's musical contents, including representations of slit-drums, membranophones in great detail, bells, and even a pluriarc still used in Edo (Ẹdo) culture today.

Archaeology has also made contributions to the history of music in Central and south-eastern Africa, notably in Katanga (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Near Kisale, Congo, artefacts from the 10th to 14th centuries were recovered, including several types of metal bells, one copper aerophone and what could be the iron tongues of a lamellophone. Iron Age technology produced notable musical instrument innovations in Africa, particularly from the 8th to 14th centuries. The history of the single and double flange-welded iron bells in West, west-central and south-east Africa has been largely reconstructed (Walton, 1955; Vansina, 1969; Gansemans and Schmidt-Wrenger, 1986; Kubik, Westafrika, 1989). New data have closed gaps in the sequence of diffusion from West Africa, notably from the upper Sangha valley (GEWM, ii, pp.308-11). Such iron bells are often associated with chieftainship or kingship. Their distribution across west-central Africa into south-east Africa (Zimbabwe and Mozambique) largely coincides with the use of asymmetric time-line patterns in music (see §3 below). Outside the Niger-Congo language family, bells and these particular time-line patterns are characteristically absent, and even within this language area they are absent in East Africa, South Africa and westernmost Africa.

The proliferation of innovative types of lamellophones with iron lamellae in south-east Africa (Zimbabwe and the lower Zambezi valley) began during the Later Iron Age, 1000–1100. A genealogical tree of these types has been reconstructed by Andrew Tracey (1972). Besides single- and double-bells, excavated in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, iron prongs that could very well be lamellae of a mbira dza vadzimu were also found.

Some of the most spectacular remains of the past include lithophones, such as the one that was used by the Dogon of Mali (Rouget, 1965) and rock-gongs. In addition, Bernard Fagg (1956) located multiple rock-gongs in northern Nigeria. In several places across the West African savanna ‘ringing rocks’ were used in initiation rites. Sometimes their use was connected with mythology. Anne-Maria Schweeger-Hefel (Kubik, 1989, pp.168–9) documented the use of rock-gongs at the site of the presumed origin of the Nyonyozi, a legendary and perhaps mythical people in Burkina Faso.

Various archaeological and ethnographic objects survive in collections. Before the establishment of ethnographic museums in Europe and North America, such collections were found in the private possession of the aristocracy. Michael Praetorius's illustrations of one of these collections (1620) allow a glimpse of 16th- and 17th-century musical instruments from the area of Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, including a seven-string harp of the ‘shelved’ type, probably collected from the formative Kele ethnic group, a pluriarc (bow lute) and double-bell with bow-grip.

Early historical sources on African music are interrelated with research history. The study of African music began during antiquity. The earliest comparative reference to musical practices in Africa, then called ‘Libya’, is attributed to Herodotus who wrote about vocal practices of ‘Lybian’ women in the 5th century bce. In the 7th century ce the writings of Arab travellers in the western geographical Sudan such as Muhammad ibn Abdullah Battūta (1304–77) and Ibn Khaldun reflect on musical phenomena. European literary and iconographic accounts dominate the available sources beginning in the 16th century. Frei João dos Santos travelled to the Kingdom of Kiteve along the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border in 1586. His are the earliest descriptions of gourd-resonated xylophones in the area, certainly the predecessors of the timbila of the Chopi, and the first descriptions of an African lamellophone, which he labelled an ‘ambira’ (Dias, 1986). Also in Mozambique, Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1596) depicted a player of a braced musical bow, with the bow-stick passed by the lips. Van Linschoten must have seen a player of this bow along the coast near Sofala or on Mozambique Island where his ship had stopped en route to India. This is the first record of the type of mouth bow known today as chipendani among the Chopi in the south, xipendani among the Tsonga, chibendance in Manica Province and chipindano in Tete Province (Dias, 1986; Brenner, 1997).

Two independent 17th-century accounts from the kingdoms of Kongo, Ndongo and Matamba (all situated within the borders of contemporary Angola) by Italian Capuchin missionaries Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi (1687) and Girolamo Merolla (1692) form the most accurate picture of music history in the area. The discovery of Cavazzi's original drawings (Bassani, 1977; Gansemans and Schmidt-Wrenger, 1986) has added a hitherto unknown dimension to these valuable sources. François Froger (1698) provided the earliest detailed account and drawing of the gourd-resonated frame xylophone common in the Gambia and Guinea, often called bala. The development of the bala is specific to westernmost Africa. Two subtypes exist: a small version associated with Mande culture and a larger version among the Lobi and Dagarti in north-eastern Ghana and north-western Côte d'Ivoire (Strumpf, 1970; Yotamu, 1979; Mensah, 1982)

Peter Kolb's detailed description (1719) of dance styles, polyphonic singing and musical instruments such as the gora (!gora) and the gourd-resonated musical bow among the now extinct Cape ‘Hottentots’, opened southern Africa to ethnomusicological research (Mugglestone, 1982; Kubik, ‘Das Khoisan-Erbe’, 1987, pp.173–4). Thomas Edward Bowdich's brilliant early 19th-century account of Fanti and Asante songs along the Gold Coast (1819), accompanied by bridge-harps playing characteristic patterns of parallel heptatonic harmony, included transcriptions that can be analysed and texts that can be transcribed into modern orthography (see ex.1). The song blames step-parents who mistreat an orphan, after which the child cries all night long for its dead parents. The song is accompanied by the sanku, also known as seperewa.

Monographs on African music appeared towards the end of the 19th century. Bernhard Ankermann's Die afrikanischen Musikinstrumente (1901) remains a primary early source for the study of African music cultures. Systematic research and analysis were greatly enhanced when wax cylinder recordings became available. Among the earliest was the collection of recordings made by Sir Harry Johnston in Uganda and Liberia shortly before the turn of the 20th century. Johnston's exhaustive written accounts provide unique background documentation. Prior to World War I, German missionaries, researchers and members of the military recorded African music in various territories, for example Lieutenant J. von Smend in Togo, Günther Tessmann in Equatorial Guinea, Alfred Schachtzabel in Angola and Karl Weule in Tanganyika. These recordings are being restored as part of a project directed by Susanne Ziegler at the Musikethnologische Abteilung of the Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin.

In the 1920s and 30s further cylinder recordings were made in the field by Robert Sutherland Rattray in 1927 among the Asante on the Gold Coast, Helen H. Roberts among the Ngoni of Nyasaland, Steytler who recorded 22 cylinders, and there is the famous Laura Boulton collection (Library of Congress, Washington DC).

In the early stages of African musical research there was a clear division between collectors, who actually worked in Africa and recorded the materials, and scholars, who evaluated the recordings from a distance. One such cooperative effort was between Tessmann and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (1913), who contributed the chapter on music in Tessmann's book Die Pangwe, an early work on the culture of the Fang (Faŋ) people in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. For Hornbostel, this was an opportunity for musicological analysis that led to the introduction of new terms and concepts, such as ‘neutral 3rds’; Hornbostel warned against the use of European theoretical concepts in the study of African music, such as the terms major and minor in relation to intervals (1913, p.398). He also studied songs of the Nyamwezi in Tanganyika, the Sukuma and music from Rwanda.

When 78 r.p.m. shellac discs first became available, especially of North American jazz, and African dancers and instrumentalists toured Europe during the 1920s, comparative musicologists approached African music at a more intimate level. Hornbostel's observations of African rhythm resulted in a proposal of an ‘accented upbeat’ rhythmic conceptualization (1928) that continues to draw comments from researchers. Similarly, in Geschichte der Mehrstimmigkeit (1934) Marius Schneider developed a typology for understanding the polyphony of the Naturvölker, drawing on earlier research and summarizing it. He also studied connections between music and language, particularly among the Duala of Cameroon and the Ewe of Togo (1952; 1961).

During the 1930s an increase of studies of African music and some breakthroughs occurred. Significant contributions to the knowledge of musical instruments and tonal-harmonic patterns in southern Africa were made by Percival R. Kirby (1930; 1932; 1934; 1961), who was both collector and researcher. Basic notions about rhythmic construction in African music were developed by A.M. Jones in Zambia among the Bemba, in particular concerning the technique of interlocking drumming patterns and the presence of a subjective ‘multiple main beat’ (1934; 1949; 1954). With the help of a transcription machine that he invented, he was able to identify the exact spacing of strokes within asymmetric time-line patterns.

Another researcher whose studies began in the 1930s was Hugh Tracey. His vast and systematic recording effort led to one of the most valuable recorded collections of African music and the identification of outstanding contemporary musician-composers, such as Mwenda Jean Bosco. Tracey was one of the first to transcend the collectivistic idea of ‘folk music’ and recognize the creative individual. In 1953 he established the Osborn Awards for creative achievement among African composers. Chopi Musicians (1948) and numerous articles, for example on the assessment of African scales (1958), quickly established new standards for research.

In 1937 Klaus Wachsmann began meticulous fieldwork on musical traditions and their histories in Uganda. In 1948–57 he was curator of the Uganda Museum which he had established. Wachsmann's recorded collection is preserved in the National Sound Archives (London). In later years, while a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Northwestern University, he became increasingly involved in the work of reconstructing African music history (Wachsmann, 1971).

After World War II, an acceleration of African music studies began. An entire school of ethnomusicologists emerged in Ghana, with J.H. Kwabena Nketia as central personality. Nketia's prolific output is a significant contribution to the study of 20th-century African music. In South Africa, David Rycroft introduced a novel approach to the study of Zulu, Swati and other musics that combined his experiences as both musician and linguist (1954; 1957; 1960; 1971). He introduced a circular form of notation that accounted for cycles and overlapping call-and-response forms (ex.2). Rycroft was also one of the first, besides Hugh Tracey and Kwabena Nketia, to consider both older and newer forms of African music, paying attention to urban developments in southern Africa (Rycroft, 1956; 1958; 1959; 1977; 1991). His was the first scientific analysis of the music of Katanga guitarist Mwenda Jean Bosco (1961–2).

Gilbert Rouget instituted a comprehensive recording programme that began in 1946 in cooperation with the Musée de l'Homme (Paris), in an effort to document the territories then under French administration. The series of recordings produced by Rouget present some of the most important documentation of African music ever made. His intimate knowledge of Gun (Gũ) music in the Republic of Benin and its interdependence with language have provided in-depth accounts of this culture (1964; 1971; 1991). His prizewinning comparative study of music and trance (1985), drawing on his African field data, was one of the major achievements in 20th-century research on that subject.

From the 1960s onwards, there was a dramatic increase in published studies of African music, which can be accounted for adequately only in annotated bibliographies. L.J.P. Gaskin's bibliography (1965) and A.P. Merriam's African Music on LP (1970) both served for a long time as the most comprehensive reference works, in addition to the ongoing African bibliography in the journal Ethnomusicology. Two bibliographies, one by John Gray (1991) and the other by Carol Lems-Dworkin (1991), have made more recent literature accessible. It is not possible to do justice to all the fascinating new developments in Africanist music studies, yet a contextual account of some contributions is given in the following sections.

(ii) Principles of timing.

3. Musical structures and cognition.

(i) General.

(iii) Time-line patterns.

(iv) Tonal systems.

(v) Multipart singing, instrumental polyphony and illusory effects.

(i) General.

In some African culture areas elaborate systems of musical theory were developed in pre-colonial times. The ramifications of Arab art music theory in the Maghrib have long attracted the attention of ethnomusicologists and historians (Farmer, 1966; al-Faruqi, 1981), including the composer Béla Bartók (1920) early in the 20th century. An indigenous system of notation was developed in Ethiopia in the liturgical context of the Coptic Church. It consists of approximately 650 signs called melekket that indicate short melodies, not individual pitches (Kubik, 1982, pp.11–14).

One of the most researched theoretical systems was developed in the court music tradition of the Kingdom of Buganda in East Africa. The Luganda language embraces an elaborate, specialized terminology referencing music. For example, verbs such as okunaga, okwawula and okukoonera refer to the functional execution of interlocking parts on xylophones and harps, while abstract nouns such as myanjo and emiko testify to cross-relationships between the auditory and the visual. Omuko (pl. emiko) refers to a system of transposition whereby note rows of a xylophone piece are transposed stepwise without violating the identity of each performer's playing area (Kubik, 1960; Kubik, ‘Theorie, Aufführungspraxis’, 1991). There are also descriptive terms relating to performing practice, accentuation and melodic patterning. None of the Luganda terms can be translated into English; their semantic field can be delineated only descriptively.

In sub-Saharan Africa, music is generally conceptualized within a theoretical framework. However, while some musicians articulate theory in their languages, others do not embrace theoretical concepts. These concepts must then be elicited indirectly from behaviours. Kenichi Tsukada's analysis of phonaesthetic systems in Ghana and in Zambia (1994; 1997) has focussed on the extent to which association between the phonetics of spoken syllables and sound-units constitute a theoretical code, not only as a teaching device in the sense of an oral notation (Kubik, 1969; 1972), but also as a definite symbolic link between speech sounds and musical sounds that are deeply engrained.

The effectiveness of systems of oral notation was most likely a determinant in the superfluity of a visual notation of music in sub-Saharan Africa. Only recently, with decisive changes in the social settings of musical performances, has the need for such systems emerged. Evaristo Muyinda experimented with cipher notation in Buganda in 1961–2 precisely when the esoteric court music became moribund, and this system of notation is now widely used for transcription. Some systems of notation have already allowed members of the present generation to relearn older musics. Other recent notational systems in African music, such as the one used by kora player Mamadou Kouyaté, reflect the influence of ethnomusicology and Western education (Knight, 1971, p.29). Specific notational systems that have been used by ethnomusicologists for analysis and/or teaching include the Time-Unit-Box-System (TUBS) (Koetting, 1970), tablature based on labanotation (Laban dance notation; Serwadda and Pantaleoni, 1968) and visual representations developed in connection with the transcription of music from cinematographic shots (Kubik, ‘Transcription’, 1965; Rouget, 1965).

Basic terms and specialized terminologies in African languages rarely conform to common European-language notions of music, art and literature, although they have often been equated. While the concepts are often not comparable, the phenomena are, and if English is used it is therefore legitimate to speak of African music, African art etc. Most African languages have a term translatable as song (e.g. oluyimbo in Luganda, mwaso in the Ngangela languages of eastern Angola, orin in Yoruba and wimbo in Kiswahili). These words tend to have a somewhat wider semantic field than the English equivalent, embracing instrumental representations of a song as well. This notion reflects the idea that instrumental melodies ‘speak’ in many African cultures and that they can be verbalized. Performers and listeners may project verbal patterns, often syllables with no verbal content, into sound structures. From the verbal interpretation of birds' ‘speech’, as for example in north-western Zambia, to listeners’ projection of lines of text into inherent patterns, there is a broad array of verbalization in African music.

Music in Africa is transmitted orally and yet it is normally composed, that is its structures are organized by the ‘inventor of a song’ prior to performance. The composer trains others in a group to perform specific parts, often assuming the roles that are ascribed to them. Sometimes the composed framework is rigid; at other times it is less rigid, leaving a wide margin to invention. There is always freedom for individual, spontaneous variation to occur. Variation techniques include textual development by a lead singer or soloist, timbre-melodic development in drumming, shifts in accentuation on various instruments and many other techniques.

In the 20th century several Western-educated African composers working in the tradition of European art composition used staff notation as a means of communication. Ghanaian, Nigerian, South African, Tanzanian and Ugandan composers, including Ayo Bankole, Reuben T. Caluza, Lazarus Ekwueme, Akin Euba, Alfred Assegai Kumalo, Joseph Kyagambiddwa, Gideon Mdegella, John Mgandu, Okechukwu Ndubuisi, J.H. Kwabena Nketia, Meki Nzewi and Fela Sowande, have figured among those whose works have become widely known (Euba, 1988; Klein, 1990; Rycroft, 1991; Barz, The Performance …, 1997).

Musical instruments are classified in African languages according to several principles, and often there are no generic terms. According to Ruth Stone (GEWM, ii, p.10), among the Kpelle of Liberia, instruments are categorized as either fee (blown) or ngale (struck). Aerophones belong to the former category and all other instruments to the latter. Earlier, Paul van Thiel (1969) found that in Runyankore (Nyankore), a language of western Uganda, musical instruments are grouped according to sound-producing actions. Most musical instruments, therefore, are referred to with the verb okuteera (to hit or strike), including various idiophones, the egobore musical bow and omubanda and ensheegu flutes. Various rattles are referred to with the verb okugambisa (to make speak), with the exception of the flat seed-box rattle, which uses the verb okushungura (to sift or winnow). The entimbo bamboo stamping tube is referred to with the verb okuhonda.

A similar system exists in Mpyɛmo (Mpyemo or Mpiemo), a Bantu language spoken in south-western Central African Republic (Djenda, 1996, p.18). For the Igbo language spoken in eastern Nigeria, Joy Lo-Bamijoko (1987, p.19) provided a classification system based on five verbs to express the playing of musical instruments:

Iyo: to shake, rattle or clap together

Iku: to strike a hard surface with a beater

Iti: to strike a membrane with hand or beater

Ikpo: to pluck or bow

Ifu: to blow

In eastern Angola the verb kusika (or kushika) expresses the playing of a musical instrument; it is not used for any other type of action. Musical instruments in Africa are not usually ‘played’. In Cinyanja (Nyanja) and Chicheŵa (Chewa), they are ‘sung’ (kuyimba), and accordingly the generic term for instruments is zoimbaimba (continuously sounding or singing things). In Kiswahili, the verb kupiga is used to express the playing of instruments; its semantic field, however, is much wider than dictionary translations such as ‘to beat’ or ‘to strike’. Accordingly, kupiga tarumbeta means to play a trumpet and not to strike it.

The practice of naming instruments and instrumental designations in African languages can be based on tradition, while new designations are often invented. M.A. Malamusi (1991, p.66) has shown how individual drum names in a samba ng'oma (drum–chime) performance group had been created by the group's leader, Mário Sabuneti, a Lomwe musician in Malawi, from memories related to experiences he had in various villages. One drum is called ndeke (aeroplane), others are chigalu and zengereya because they were bought in villages of those names.

(ii) Principles of timing.

In very few African languages, if any, is music described in terms of time. In two languages extensively researched, Chicheŵa in Malawi and Lucazi in Angola, concepts of time refer only to tempos and coordination, not to musical structures. For example, one can blame musicians by saying in Cinyanja, ‘mukucedwa!’ (‘you are getting late!’) if they slow down with their rattle beats.

There are some forms of African music that could be placed between song and speech since they are in ‘free rhythm’, such as Isizulu izibongo praise-poetry in South Africa (Rycroft, 1962), or omuhiva praise-poetry of the Herero in Namibia. But most African music that is accompanied by bodily movement such as hand-clapping, dance and work is based on an orientation screen that can be described in English as a time concept.

In the music of sub-Saharan Africa, there are three distinct levels of subjective timing that interface to guide musicians and dancers. The first level is the elementary pulsation, consisting of a mental framework of fast infinite series of pulses, the smallest regular units of action in a musical performance. The elementary pulsation is essentially a non-sonic grid in the mind of performers, singers, dancers, instrumentalists and audiences, serving as a way of orienting time. In most African cultures, music is objectified as a fabric of continuous interweaving action units, e.g. drum strokes by different players. Once learnt, the reference grid remains firmly ingrained to the extent that dancers and audiences instantly recognize the elementary pulsation in a given piece of music, even if it is not objectified. Musical enculturation, especially among speakers of Niger-Congo languages, is critical to the development of this inner orientation screen. Jones (1934; 1949; 1954) speaking of ‘smallest units’ and Richard A. Waterman (1952) postulating a ‘metronome sense’ were the first researchers to articulate this concept: the former in terms of structure, the latter in terms of an inner experience. The elementary pulsation is not necessarily identical to the ‘smallest rhythmic units’ in a piece of African music, although in many cases it is. Yoruba music (religious and non-religious), for example, utilizes an elementary pulse-line that can be further subdivided at specific points by drum strokes. However, such transient subdivisions are merely ornamental and have no orientation function for the performers.

The reference beat is the second level of subjective timing. In many African traditions, there is a unitary dancers' beat that is sometimes referred to (in translation) as the ‘dancers’ feet’. A central reference beat exists in many forms of African music. However, in contrast with European, Mediterranean and some Arab musics, the beat in sub-Saharan African music, as in North American jazz, is usually conceptualized without pre-accentuation; there are no preconceived strong or weak parts of the metre.

The beat in African music is usually formed by compounds of 3, 4, 6, 8 or 12 elementary pulse-units (more rarely 5 or 9) to constitute a higher level orientation grid. The point of departure of such a compound, i.e. beat unit one, is so ingrained that it needs no special emphasis and does not need to be counted. For this reason, in a four-beat sequence, beat unit one is often acoustically veiled or unsounded. This system allows musicians to generate extreme rhythmic complexity. Unimpeded by concepts of accentuation, melodic accents can fall on or off a beat anywhere along the elementary pulse-line according to phonetic and syllabic text structures. This is a phenomenon for which Richard A. Waterman coined the expression ‘off-beat phrasing of melodic accents’ (1952). Autonomous phrase structures are then spread out against the pulse-line, as in the seven-pulse motif ‘Ẹrin yéyé’ in an alo (àlo) Yoruba story-song (ex.3). In repetition, with different tones, it appears in different relationships to the hand-clap beat.

The system of notation used in ex.3 is a modified form of staff notation now widely used in the transcription of African music. This system allows ethnomusicologists to avoid the ‘syncopation’ problem in transcription of African music, resulting from conventional durational symbols. Vertical lines represent elementary pulses, and reinforced vertical lines indicate a beat unit within the greater metrical scheme. Individual beats are expressed by hand-claps.

The unitary reference beat in African music is often a regular hand-clap, as in ex.3. In some other African traditions, such as in the kponingbo dance of the Azande (Zande), dancers ‘lift’ their legs, giving emphasis to beat units two and four. Influenced by American jitterbug, a similar phenomenon was observed in South African urban music. In other music and dance styles, such as the oucina dance by Herero women in Namibia (see Namibia, fig.4) beat units one and three are objectified with gentle movement, while two and four are clapped.

In some musical genres of East, south-eastern and south-central Africa, musicians do not share a unitary reference beat. This was first discovered by Jones in his study of the ngwayi dance and drum patterns among the Bemba of Zambia (1934), in which he referred to it as a ‘multiple main beat’. In such cases, musicians refer their themes and patterns to a relative reference beat which interlocks with those of their partners. From the viewpoints of individual participants, partners play continuous syncopation (fig.3a). Triple interlocking reference beats can also be executed by two performers, with one performer assuming the roles of two with left- and right-hand strokes. Both duple and triple interlocking patterns have visual analogies in textile weaving and mat plaiting patterns.

The concept of the interlocking relative reference beat is a long-transmitted heritage in sub-Saharan Africa, found not only among speakers of Niger-Congo languages (including the so-called pygmies), but also among Khoisan speakers. It regularly appears in group-oriented music, depending on the musical genre. Within the same community, there may be story-songs performed with a unitary hand-clapped beat while log xylophones are played in an interlocking style. Among millet agriculturalists of the West African savanna, an archetypal form of the interlocking relative reference beat survives in women's mortar pounding. Three women, pestles in hand, encircle a mortar and strike alternately, creating a triple interlocking rhythm. In addition, each woman may tap her pestle on the rim of the mortar to create accents. From time to time, the women produce sucking and clicking sounds with their lips, palate and tongue. Each woman integrates her actions to an individual reference beat objectified by the downstrokes of her pestle.

Among the !Kung' of south-eastern Angola and northern Namibia, women interlock their hand-clapping in communal singing, relating their short syllabic phrases to an individual clap. Gogo women of central Tanzania performing the ng'oma dance interlock their strokes on hourglass drums held between their knees. In southern Uganda, six players, three at each side of a 17-note akadinda xylophone, interlock their lines in triple-division style (fig.3b). Amadinda and embaire xylophone players of the same culture area interlock in duple style.

The cycle, the third level of subjective timing, is created by integrating the elementary pulsation, the beat and the basic theme of a musical piece. A cycle combines a large, regular number of elementary pulses, usually 16, 24, 32, 48 etc., to form repeating units. Most African music is cyclic. Some examples have short cycles, others long cycles; strophic forms also occur in many musical cultures. Irregular cycles are occasionally found, for example in the song Agenda n'omulungi azaawa sung in Luganda (Uganda) to a cycle of 70 pulses (Kubik, ‘Theorie, Aufführungspraxis’, 1991).

Since numbered cycles were first introduced (Kubik, 1960), they have replaced conventional Western time signatures in many transcriptions of African music. Cycles not only express repeated units, such as a theme or a line of text, they also blend together diverse musical materials. Polymeters resolve in cycles of 12, 24, 36 or 48 pulses. Cycles also accommodate different types of melodic or harmonic tonal segmentation. Prior to John Blacking's identification of root progressions in Venda flute music (1959), it was often thought that harmonic progression between steps or degrees did not exist in African music. In fact, the internal organization of most African music, unless based on a persistent drone (often due to Arab or Asian historical influences), demands periodic shifts between tonal levels. This applies both to unison and harmonic styles.

Most frequently in African music cultures, there are harmonic progressions through four scale degrees, such as the famous Shona bichord sequence :

Progressing between four and not just three degrees of the scale, as in the European tonic-subdominant-dominant scheme, is so entrenched in several African musical cultures that urban African musicians regularly reinterpret Western chords in terms of local harmonic concepts. Four-part segmentation of various cycles is also the hallmark of mbaqanga popular music in southern Africa. The most frequent harmonic ostinato cycle in mbaqanga, I–IV–I6/4;–V, has persisted in southern African urban music from marabi to kwela to mbaqanga with stunning tenacity. While on the surface this harmonic cycle seems to reinterpret the three common chords, there are subtle differences. For a Western theoretician I6/4 is an inversion of tonic, but in the musical perception of mbaqanga-playing musicians, it is a different harmonic sound cluster, and can, therefore, be understood as a progression through four different chords.

(iii) Time-line patterns.

The term time-line was first used by Nketia in the 1950s. Time-line patterns are typically single-pitched, occasionally double-pitched as in the gangkogui of the Ewe people (Jones, 1959); they are rhythmic patterns struck on objects such as bells, the bodies of drums, percussion sticks etc. These patterns are characterized by irregular, asymmetric structures presented within regular cycles, and they range from the ubiquitous eight-pulse cycle (3 + 3 + 2), common in musical traditions of the Maghrib, to the most complex asymmetrical patterns such as the 24-pulse pattern struck on a percussion beam in the moyaya dance of the Bangombe (Bankombe) pygmies, Central African Republic. Time-line patterns often represent the structural core of a musical piece, a condensed and extremely concentrated representation of the rhythmic possibilities open to the musicians and dancers.

It was Jones who first identified the asymmetric structure of such time-lines, transcribing patterns among the Bemba of Zambia (1954, p.59), then from a Ghanaian Ewe-speaking informant (1959, p.210). African time-line patterns are mathematically determined by (a) the cycle number (the number of constituent elementary pulse units contained in the repeating cycle, usually 8, 12, 16 or 24), (b) the number of strokes distributed across the cycle (5, 6, 7 or 9 strokes) and (c) the asymmetric distribution of the strokes that generates two adjoined sub-patterns (5 + 7, 7 + 9 or 11 + 13). Each asymmetric time-line pattern has both manifest and latent components. The auditory, perceptible part is supplemented by a silent, unvoiced pattern. Perhaps the most famous recorded time-line pattern is the 12-pulse standard pattern (fig.4). In a given musical culture, either of the two patterns given in fig.4, the seven- or five-stroke component, is usually prevalent while its complementary pattern is latent, perhaps silently tapped with a finger. Among the Luvale of eastern Angola and north-western Zambia, both components are struck together with two sticks in left-, right-hand alternation on the body of a drum. This applies also to the 16-pulse standard kachacha pattern in Luvale, the most prominent time-line pattern in that culture area (Tsukada, 1990).

The asymmetric time-line patterns are all mathematically interrelated. In a computer simulation, A.M. Dauer determined that if a given number of strokes is systematically distributed in a given cycle, then asymmetric time-line patterns will always be predictable. For example, the five- and seven-pulse standard patterns indicated in fig.4 always appear at a certain point in the permutation series (Dauer, 1988, pp.130–31). Dauer's finding suggests that asymmetric time-line patterns mathematically embody the nearest-to-equidistant distribution of odd-numbered strokes that is possible across an even-numbered cycle, giving us a startling look at ancestral African musician-composers’ mathematical discoveries.

Asymmetric time-line patterns are not universal, however, in African music. They are limited to certain genres, and their general distribution today is concentrated among Kwa-language speakers along the Guinea Coast and the western stream of Benue-Congo languages, with a broad corridor into south-east Africa between the Zambezi and Ruvuma valleys. Their invention could well date back to early stages in the formation of the Kwa and Benue-Congo languages in West Africa, from where they spread to other areas of sub-Saharan Africa. A secondary centre for dispersing the nine-stroke, 16-pulse kachacha pattern was possibly located in the historical Luba-Lunda culture area in Katanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. With the Cokwe (Chokwe)-Ngangela migration from the Lunda empire, kachacha spread to eastern Angola (c1625), and with the slave trade it spread from Angola to Brazil, where it resurfaced in samba.

Time-line patterns are often transmitted by vocal mnemonics used for teaching. These are either mere syllables or verbal patterns to suggest timbre, durational values and even rhythmic characteristics of the strokes to be executed. Plosive consonantal sounds, for example, usually signify a hard, firm timbre, while liquid sounds and velar fricatives signify strokes requiring less physical effort, with a soft, weak timbre. The ‘t∫’ affricate sound, as in ‘church’, normally indicates the reference beat, especially if it coincides with rattle strokes (Kubik, 1969; 1972; Tsukada, 1994; 1997).

(iv) Tonal systems.

The European tonal system has been imported into most parts of Africa with factory-manufactured instruments, and through religious and school choir teaching. Although it is widely accepted in Africa today, there are still pockets of African cultures with tonal systems that were developed independently.

A preliminary inventory of tonal systems in Africa suggests that three broad families can be distinguished:

1. Tonal systems derived from the experience of the natural harmonic series either inspired by the formants of human speech or through instrumental experience.

2. Tonal systems extrapolated from speech-tone contrasts in tone languages.

3. Tonal systems derived from the idea of equidistant temperament in instruments, or similar adjustments in vocal performance.

Cross-influences and blends among these three families are known to occur.

Some pentatonic scalar patterns among ethnic groups in the West African savanna and Sahelian regions may have remote origins in the frequencies of vowel and consonant formants of human speech. Characteristically, these scales do not accommodate harmonic counterpoint but are linked to singing in unison and octaves. In other parts of Africa, there are pentatonic systems that also derive from vocal experience, but, by contrast, developed into impressive forms of polyphony. Outstanding examples include the music of the ‘pygmies’ of Central Africa and the Gogo of central Tanzania. The vocal origin of the Gogo tonal-harmonic system that makes selective use of the 4th–9th partials over a single fundamental was demonstrated by the celebrated Gogo musician Hukwe Zawose to Finnish ethnomusicologist Philip Donner. The Gogo are one of only two ethnic groups in Africa known for practising diphonic or overtone singing, otherwise prominent along the Altai mountain range (in west Mongolia, Tuva, the Altai Republic and Khakassia); the other ethnic group is the Xhosa of Transkei, South Africa (Dargie, 1991).

Tonal systems derived from harmonics produced by musical instruments are found wherever mouth bows or overblown horns were prominent; they are typically concentrated in southern Africa, where the technique of nearly every instrument from musical bows to friction chordophones, variously known as sekampure in Namibia or igongqo in Transkei, includes strategies for reinforcing partials. The specific results depend on variables, such as whether the tonal system is derived from partials over one or more fundamentals, which section of the harmonic series is used and how high in the series. More than one tonal system has been known to exist within the same community.

The !Kung’ of south-eastern Angola derived their tetratonic system from the mouth bow and the selective reinforcement of partials not higher than the 4th harmonic over two fundamentals. !Kung' performers, however, can divide the bow string so that the two sections produce fundamentals at any interval, usually a whole-tone, minor 3rd or major 3rd.

Hexatonic systems based on harmonics up to the 6th partial over two fundamentals a whole tone apart are found in a crescent area beginning in Gabon and Congo, moving down into Angola and South Africa. They are also derived from mouth bow performance. Impressive examples have been recorded among the Fang (Faŋ) of Gabon (Simon, ed., 1983, cassette 1, no.20, beng or beŋ mouth bow played by Bwiti priest André Mvom). In Angola, aspects of mouth bow performance were transferred to vocal practice at an early stage, generating unique forms of multipart music, such as that of ekwenje boys' initiation songs among the Nkhumbi and Handa of south-western Angola (Humbi en Handa, 1973). In South Africa, Xhosa music is largely based on a hexatonic system derived from a similar background.

The relationship between languages and tonal systems in Africa, particularly regarding the impact of speech-tones on melody, is an ongoing research topic, despite considerable earlier work (Jones, 1959; Schneider, 1952; 1961; Rouget, 1964) and the continuing work on the Yoruba language and music by Euba (1971; 1977; 1990) and others. Prior to the advent of 19th-century Islam that popularized a strongly melismatic and declamatory vocal style, most Yoruba-speaking peoples, with the exception of the Ijesha and the Ekiti, used an anhemitonic pentatonic scale. Pre-Islamic forms are well preserved, however, such as in the alo (àlo) story-songs.

Present data on the relationship between language and music suggest a connection among the three Yoruba speech-tones in addition to glides, intermediate tones and musical pitches. Tonal variations in language do not always correspond neatly with musical intervals; intervals appearing as 2nds in one performance of a Yoruba song may be rendered as minor 3rds on another occasion. More important than actual intervals is the direction of pitch movement for making text understood. It is likely, therefore, that any African tonal system is derived exclusively from the exigencies of a tone language. There are other, language-independent factors that helped generate the specific anhemitonic pentatonic systems shared by the Yoruba, Fon and others in West Africa.

In some areas of sub-Saharan Africa, musicians have developed tempered instrumental tunings. The major areas for equipentatonic tunings include southern Uganda (Ganda, Soga etc.), the south-western Central African Republic (Gbaya, Mpyemo) and adjacent areas in northern Congo; for equiheptatonic tunings central and southern Mozambique (Sena and Chopi), Mande-speaking areas of Guinea, Mali, The Gambia etc. and parts of Côte d'Ivoire. In some areas, people tune all their musical instruments according to a general system, yet there are other areas within which different tonal systems are used for different genres. In south-western Central African Republic, for example, Mpyemo musicians tune their kembe lamellophones equipentatonically, yet sya story-songs utilize either a hexatonic or heptatonic system with chord clusters shifted at intervals of a semitone.

Equidistant tunings rely on pitch abstraction and comparison. Musicians who tune different instruments together usually employ one as a model, as Evaristo Muyinda from Uganda did in Berlin in 1983, using an enderre (flute) for tuning a new amadinda xylophone. For this reason, analyses of spectrograms for determining equidistant tuning as an auditory psychological phenomenon are inconclusive.

Musicians who tune their xylophones, lamellophones or zithers by ear do not achieve pitch accuracy to the degree of decimal values. Deviations from the equidistant mean-values by -20/+20 cents are expected. Therefore, all Stroboconn measurements that appear to be accurate can, in fact, be misleading, hence Wachsmann's proposition of the term pen-equidistance (1967). Recent research in Uganda by Cooke (1992) and in south-east Africa by Andrew Tracey (1991) has reconfirmed the existence of margins of tolerance. In addition, deliberate attempts are made by musicians to tune their instruments in friction octaves, that is octaves tuned on purpose sharp or flat to reduce the fusion effect of melodic lines played in parallel octaves. This is common practice, for example, in the tunings of xylophones and other instruments in southern Uganda.

Hornbostel (1911), Kunst (1936) and Jones (1964) postulated that historic instrumental temperament was imported from south-east Asia with instruments such as xylophones. Other researchers posit the possibility of intracultural motivations, such as the need for shifting melodic patterns across the keys of a xylophone without risking the loss of the melodies' identities (Tracey, 1991, pp.87–8).

(v) Multipart singing, instrumental polyphony and illusory effects.

Singing in unison and octaves is widespread in Africa, especially among pastoralist peoples such as the Karimodjong (Gourlay, 1970), the Hima (van Thiel, 1971), the Tutsi (Tracey, 1973) and others who came under their influence in the Great Lakes region of East Africa. It is the hallmark of Herero music in Namibia and characterizes both the pastoral and urbanized FulBe (Fulbe or Fulani) people in the West African savanna. Unison singing is also a characteristic of Berber music and the vocal styles of Semitic and Cushitic speakers of north-east Africa.

For many areas north of the equator, the Arab-Islamic invasion that began in the 7th century brought a reinforcement of unison singing, supplemented by declamatory song-styles with strong, often microtonal ornamentation. Hausa singing and music in northern Nigeria demonstrates how some of these influences were processed. However, Islamic influence cannot be associated with the overall promotion of unison singing styles. There are notable exceptions to the rule, such as along the East African coast where singing in parallel 3rds has been noted in the recitation of Swahili poetry and Qur'anic recitation.

Many Eastern-influenced traditions are characterized by the presence of a centralized reference tone that often takes the form of a drone. A drone-like sound can be produced by a sustained open string on chordophones such as the West African goge (or gojé) or the ngoli and takare one-string fiddles used by itinerant Yao, Shirima and other musicians across northern Mozambique. In the latter area the drone also appears in combination with explicit harmonic principles. In performance on log xylophones, called mangwilo, dimbila or mangolongondo in the Nyasa-Ruvuma region, two players sitting opposite each other produce a drone on one slat through interlocking strokes (Kubik, ‘Transcription’, 1970; Opeka Nyimbo, 1989). This drone often represents the 2nd or 3rd partial in the natural harmonic series, which is used up to the 11th partial, sometimes even the 13th partial, to form melodic patterns.

African multipart musical traditions make use of call-and-response as a universal principle, operating in both vocal and purely instrumental settings. Simha Arom pursued an integrative approach, not discriminating artificially between vocal and instrumental polyphony (1985). Richard A. Waterman suggested that along the Guinea Coast call-and-response phrases often overlap with leaders anticipating their next lines before the chorus ends their response (1952). In some traditions, there are duets between leaders, such as among the Makonde of northern Mozambique. In his study of cantometrics, Lomax speculated that vocal organization might reflect social structure. He pointed out that the call-and-response form tends to be found in societies with a strong tradition of leadership, but that ‘the African emphasis on overlap, with its essentially egalitarian structure, is more understandable’ (1968, p.161).

Musical cultures that employ unison and octaves exclusively are not necessarily devoid of polyphony. Among the Ganda, Nyoro and Soga peoples of southern Uganda, for example, instrumental textures are polyphonic, and yet no simultaneous sounds other than unison and octaves occur. But many forms of polyphony in Africa are indeed interconnected with harmonic styles. Impressed by elaborate harmonic part-singing along the Guinea Coast, Richard A. Waterman postulated that sub-Saharan Africa and Europe once formed a harmonic ‘block’ that was later bisected by Arab-influenced North Africa (1952).

In 1930, Kirby suggested a functional interdependence between the tonal systems and harmonic sounds in African and African American vocal music (1930; 1961). Kirby's theory was the earliest formulation of what was later termed the ‘skipping process’ (Kubik, 1968; 1994), a structural principle referring to a specific way singers derive their vocal lines from the vocal lines of their partners by skipping one note in their common scale and duplicating the vocal line of the first singer at a different level. The results vary considerably according to the tonal system of the performers (ex.4; cf. Gogo harmonic patterns, Kubik, 1994, pp.176–9).

African multipart harmonic forms and patterns can be broadly classified as heterophonic, homophonic or polyphonic. Homophony and polyphony have special meanings in African contexts. Homophonic multipart singing in Africa implies that individuals within a group sing together with identical rhythms and texts, but at different pitch levels. The singers often move in parallel motion, such as in parallel 3rds or 4ths. This is usually the case in areas where semantic and grammatical tone are important for a language, such as in the Kwa-language family along the Guinea Coast. But there are other musical cultures, notably in eastern Angola and north-western Zambia, that accommodate contrary and oblique motion between voices (Mukanda na Makisi, 1981; Tsukada, 1990; The Songs of Mukanda, 1997). Homophonic multipart singing styles are common throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and they are usually associated with a leader/chorus structure in call-and-response form. After a leader's solo call, a chorus responds in tight harmony. In kukuwa songs within the mukanda circumcision school in eastern Angola and adjacent areas, long periods of solo singing alternate with choral responses that tend to be strophic in form.

African multipart styles often include functional polyphony performed on instruments, e.g. three drums, with each assuming a specific role. Such styles are built on interlocking patterns, and they have been compared to the hocket technique (Nketia, 1962). Polyphonic multipart singing in Africa involves two or more singers who combine melodic material different in rhythm and texts (even if the text consists only of vocables); melodic lines may be of varying lengths and have differing starting points. This interweaving style is prominent among the ‘pygmies’ of Central Africa and the ‘Bushmen’ of south-western Africa. It is also found in other parts of Africa, notably in the Zambezi valley. A.M. Jones transcribed a polyphonic Manyika story-song with four interlocking lines of text (1949), and Hugh Tracey noted polyphonic threshing songs performed in a similar style among the Shona during the 1930s.

Among polyphonic compositional techniques there are also indirect methods that generate auditory illusions that draw on the human auditory perceptual apparatus. At some point in the remote past, African solo players of instruments such as zithers or lamellophones discovered the boundaries to which the human ear can process sound. When that boundary is crossed, human auditory perception reacts by splitting the complex melodic input into separate pitch layers, an effect that has been called an auditory stream segregation by cognitive psychologists. African instrumentalists discovered this phenomenon independently and utilized their knowledge in their compositional techniques. This first came to light in the study of the court music of Buganda (Kyagambiddwa, 1955, p.106; Kubik, 1960, p.12). The phenomenon is now generally known as the I.P. (inherent pattern) effect, and the auditory illusory patterns emerging from such compositions are referred to as inherent or subjective patterns (Kubik, 1960).

In Kalagala e Bembe, an amadinda log xylophone piece recorded by Hugh Tracey in the Kabaka's (king's) compound in Kampala, Uganda, in 1950 (Tracey, 1973), it is easy to experience how human auditory perception splits the fast-running combination of note rows into at least two distinct pitch levels by isolating neighbouring notes to form independent pitch lines. In this case, one subjective auditory line is made up of all notes four and five, another of all notes one and two (fig.5). The task of player III in fig.5 is to identify by ear the lowest of the inherent patterns and duplicate it two octaves higher. In Buganda and elsewhere, the I.P. effect helps musicians, harp players for example, create text-lines since inherent patterns often suggest words (Kubik, 1994, pp.228–9, 313).

Cornelia Fales recently identified other illusory percepts while researching inanga chuchotée music in Burundi (GEWM, ii). Independent of compositional techniques, illusory patterns in African music are often the result of specific instrumental designs that generate oscillating timbre qualities. Lamellophones may have snail shells attached to their resonators or a central hole covered with a spider's web mirliton; beads or metal rings may be attached to some of the lamellae. Such sympathetic vibration devices generate timbral and melodic patterns of chance that permeate the music. Thus, in addition to composed melodic and rhythmic structures, there are oscillating timbre sequences that are controlled only indirectly by the performer. The emerging chance images have a stimulating effect. In the auditory experience of players, it is as if another person, perhaps a spirit, plays or hums with them. This can be observed in the interaction between the singing and playing of one of Zimbabwe's most accomplished mbira dza vadzimu lamellophone players, Beauler Dyoko (b 1945; cf. Kuzanga, no.26 on the CD accompanying Kubik, 1994).

Conforming with linguistic and cultural backgrounds, performers continuously verbalize and interpret auditory images. Many texts and text variations have their primary inspiration in instrumental patterns that are constructed in such a way as to create oscillating auditory images.

4. Music and society.

The social dimension of music and dance in Africa became increasingly important to researchers after World War II due in part to the impact of the theory and practice in British social anthropology. Outstanding works published during the 1950s and 60s include Nketia's Drumming in Akan Communities of Ghana (1963), Clyde Mitchell's The Kalela Dance (1956), a study of music on the Zambian Copperbelt, Audrey Richards's Chisungu: a Girls' Initiation Ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia (1956) and John Blacking's ‘Songs, Dances, Mimes and Symbolism of Venda Girls' Initiation Schools’ (1969). During this period Alan P. Merriam's The Anthropology of Music (1964) set a new tone among ethnomusicologists by advocating a more anthropologically oriented approach for the study of African music.

In 1958 Herbert Pepper published an Anthologie de la vie africaine on disc with music from Gabon and Congo. Blacking provided an elaborate table of communal music of the Venda people of South Africa covering a full year (1965, p.30). D.W. Ames and A.V. King wrote a glossary of Hausa music and its social contexts (1971), and Jos Gansemans published a study of music in the social and ritual life of the Luba people in Congo (1978). Somewhat earlier, Hugo Zemp struck a balance between contemporary trends (1971). In cooperation with linguist Thomas Bearth, Zemp presented a model study of musical concepts among the Dan (Dã) of Côte d'Ivoire, while also analysing sociocultural contexts of Dan music and various professional and non-professional roles of Dan musicians. Blacking also gave ethnomusicology a new twist by emphasizing ‘cultural processes and products that are externalizations and extensions and manifestations of the body in varying contexts of social interaction’ (Process and Product, 1969). His Anthropology of the Body (1977) details this philosophy (see Baily, 1985 and 1990 for further developments). Blacking also recommended a closer look at African musicians as individuals, and shortly before his death he questioned the existence of so-called ‘ethnic’ music (1989).

Musical practices flourish within sociocultural contexts; Africa is no exception to this rule. But its music and dance practices are no more or less determined by sociocultural contexts than the musical practice in other regions of the world. The researcher's goal, therefore, can be to discern only the specific contexts of music and dance genres and the roles of their carriers, not engage in a cross-cultural measurement of contextual quantities. To say that music in Africa is more functional than in the West and more rigidly bound to social occasions is highly misleading. Social contexts vary according to the cultural profile of a society. In societies where male and/or female puberty initiation is practised, specific types of music are linked to initiation ceremonies, such as ekwenje and efuko initiation songs for boys and girls respectively in south-western Angola, or the nyimbo za chinamwali (girls' initiation songs) in Chicheŵa- and Cinyanja-speaking communities of Malawi, Zambia and central Mozambique (Kubik, Malawian Music, 1987). Some instruments used in initiation ceremonies are secret, such as ndumba mwelela (bullroarer) among the Luvale in Angola and Zambia. The same applies to secret societies (Mukanda na Makisi, 1981). Where no initiation ceremonies exist, these manifestations are absent.

In socially stratified societies, musical professionalism by jalolu (Griot) or by specialized court musicians, as among the Hausa and FulBe, is omnipresent. In urban cultures with traditions of ‘ballroom’ dancing, the participants often represent age-sets, such as in the rebita dance clubs of Luanda, Angola (Kubik, ‘Muxima Ngola’, 1991), or concert and dance music of South Africa during the 1930s (Ballantine, 1993). Class differences also selectively determine participation in particular aspects of a music culture, such as the class-determined community that frequented palmwine taverns in West Africa during the Highlife era (Nketia, 1957; Schmidt, 1994).

Oral literature and music are intimately connected in most parts of Africa and are often impossible to separate (Arom and Cloarec-Heiss, 1976; Malamusi, 1990; Rycroft, 1962; 1975–6; Stone, 1982). The social roles of the so-called talking drums of West and Central Africa, such as the atumpam in Ghana (Aning, 1977), the chenepri among the Anyi of the Côte d'Ivoire (Yotamu, 1979), the dundun set among the Yoruba (Laoye I, 1959; Euba, 1977; 1990), and various slit-drums in Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Carrington, 1949) demonstrate this intimate link.

Songs are often integrated into story-telling. Such chantefables display remarkable, unitary behavioural patterns across sub-Saharan Africa, from West Africa to areas of primarily Bantu-language speakers. It is not by chance, therefore, that some word roots for ‘story’ in Bantu languages recur in comparable forms in often distant areas: simo in Kigogo (Gogo or Chigogo) of Tanzania and visimo in the Ngangela (Nkangala) languages of Angola or ntano or ngano in several languages of eastern and southern Africa and as far west as northern Namibia and Angola.

African music in religious contexts has been well documented. Victor Turner's seminal work, The Drums of Affliction (1968), focussed on religious processes among the Ndembu of Zambia, while Euba (1977) studied drumming for the Yoruba orisa (orisa) transcendental being Eshu (Ẹsu). Danhin Amagbenyõ Kofi documented music in the context of vodu among the Fon (Fõ) of Togo, while Maurice Djenda focussed on death in Mpyemo society (‘Ein Todesfall’, 1968). Robert Garfias wrote about dreams and spirit possession among the Shona (1979–80), Nketia on funeral dirges among the Akan (1955) and Rouget on trance in several societies (1985). Ideas about shapes and uses of musical instruments are often related to religious contexts (Brincard, 1989); anthropomorphic or zoomorphic shapes are frequently found. Instruments are often conceptualized as having a front, back, head etc. The ngombi harp in Bwiti cult music of Gabon is considered by priests to house a female divinity.

Several works have dealt with the use of music in psychotherapy (see Simon's work on dhikr in northern Sudan, 1975; Berliner, 1975–6; Friedson, 1996; Malamusi, 1999). In healing sessions that function as group therapy, desired effects are achieved indirectly with the help of a medium. Interaction between musicians, the medium and the sick person follows culturally determined patterns. The goal of many healing sessions is to liberate the individual from affliction by a dissatisfied spirit, as in mahamba sessions in Angola, or the effects of witchcraft, as in the mangu (witchcraft) denunciation among the Azande. There are accepted, intracultural reasons given to explain why the healing dance is beneficial to vimbuza patients of the Tumbuka of northern Malawi (Chilivumbo, 1972; Soko, 1984). The objective of the dance is to provide relief for the person suffering from vimbuza. The term vimbuza may cover a wide range of ailments from simple wounds to paralysis, hiccups, back pains and bad dreams.

Music and dance therapy in Africa accommodate both the individual and the group. The collective level is manifest in work-songs and in music and dance used in rituals responding to life-crises. At an individual level, autotherapy occurs within performance of musical instruments in solitude, for example while walking on a long journey. The nkangala mouth-resonated stick is played by women in Malawi for relief from sadness and feelings of loneliness in the absence of a husband or friend. Outsiders would not hear much, but for the performer the psychotherapeutic effect is generated by the amplification experience inside the skull, due to the performer's use of the mouth as a variable resonator. S. Passarge suggested psychological effects for mouth bow playing among the Bushmen of the Okavango basin in Botswana (1905, p.684). The use of the likembe box-resonated lamellophone in Central Africa is well documented among travellers of long distances during the first half of the 20th century, as an instrument of self-pleasure and autotherapy. The constant motion of walking allows travellers a positive management of walks of up to 30 km per day. Surplus energy is available to the walking performer, by streamlining motion.

Africa, §5: Modern developments

5. Modern developments.

Dramatic changes in African musical practices during the 20th century were triggered by the progressive integration of Africa into global trading and communication networks. These changes are primarily due to the catalyst effects of two particular socio-economic developments that gradually gained momentum.

First, the physical opening up of Africa created opportunities for people to travel via new forms of transportation (i.e. steamers, motor vehicles, air travel etc.). Areas that historically had little contact with each other, except via the 18th- to 19th-century caravan trade routes, were suddenly neighbours. This opening up of the continent created new pathways of dislocation, thus facilitating the emergence of urban, industrial and mining centres, and thereby promoting labour migration, inter-ethnic and inter-language contact, and agglomerations of townships.

Second, the rise of mass media, marked by the availability of wireless sets and hand-cranked gramophones from the 1920s on, meant that songs could spread to remote villages without human carriers. In the late 19th century, musical instruments such as the zeze (flat-bar zither) had reached Kisangani on the Congo river with porters travelling from Bagamoyo (Tanzania) along a caravan trade route. But by the 1940s, new songs began to spread by radio signals and shellac discs through the Belgian Congo, and original performers were rarely seen.

One result of the revolution in communications and the extreme power held by those in control was the rise of stylistic super-regions of popular music. By 1964 it was already possible to map out a zone of Highlife and Jùjú along the West African coast, a zone of Congo guitar music in Central Africa overlapping into East Africa, with subdivisions into western Congolese and Katanga guitar styles, and a kwela and sabasaba-based style area in southern Africa, which included countries to the north of South Africa, such as the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi). Influences from the south were also felt to a certain extent in the Copperbelt.

Stylistic super-regions all developed within a decade and included significant pockets of divergent styles, such as Luo guitar music based on lyre traditions in Kenya (Low, ‘A History’, 1982). From the late 1960s onwards, boundaries became increasingly blurred, because the mass media began to cover the entire continent. Congo dance-band music with electric guitars became increasingly popular not only in Central and East Africa but also in West Africa, notably in francophone areas. New pockets with divergent styles, often based on older musics, emerged in subsequent decades, such as chimurenga music in Zimbabwe during the 1980s, based on Shona harmonic patterns and the legacy of the mbira, and newer Mande guitar traditions in the western Sahel and savanna belt.

New African popular traditions have absorbed and processed a variety of African diasporic styles, from Cuban son and Dominican merengue in Central Africa to calypso in West Africa, swing jazz in South Africa, and up to the more recent influences of soul, reggae and rap. A significant increase in ethnomusicological literature, focussing on recent musical developments began in the early 1970s. John Gray's bibliography lists 1763 titles on African popular music (1991). Ronnie Graham's discography (1988) is an indispensable guide. There are also several overviews, such as Wolfgang Bender's Sweet Mother (1991), Peter Manuel's Popular Musics of the Non-Western World (1988) and a great number of regional studies such as those by David Coplan (1985), Erlmann (1989; 1990; 1991; 1994), Ballantine (1993), Nollene Davies (1994) and others for South Africa; John Collins (1985) and Christopher Waterman (1990) for West Africa; several articles by Kazadi wa Mukuna (1979–80; 1992; 1994; 1998) and a booklet by John Low (Shaba Diary, 1982) for Congo-Zaïre; Stephen Martin (1982; 1991), Gregory F. Barz (‘Kwayas, Kandas, Kiosks’, 1997), Low (‘A History of Kenyan Guitar Music’, 1982) and Janet Topp Fargion (1992) on Kenya and Tanzania. Erlmann edited a reader in 1991 on popular music in Africa, including studies of Taarab music along the Kenya-Tanzania coast and on Zanzibar, and 20th-century developments in Angola. In 1994, the journal World of Music devoted an entire issue to ‘The Guitar in Africa: the 1950s–1990s’.

African music in the second half of the 20th century was greatly affected by changing colonial or post-colonial values. What is widely considered ‘modern’ African music is almost exclusively performed on imported, factory-made instruments, particularly electric guitars. The use of synthesizers in studios is now so common that in an interview with Cynthia Schmidt, John Collins complained about the ‘disappearance of live music’ in the large cities of Ghana (1994, p.146). In recording studios, drum machines have replaced drummers and synthesizers have replaced horn sections.

In spite of the increasing cost of new equipment and the disproportionate burden on African economies, popular opinion in Africa seems to consider the use of Western industrial products an asset. Since the 1960s the broad public has been impressed by nothing short of the latest amplifiers, and popular evaluation not only contributed to eliminate acoustic guitar styles in most areas by the 1980s, but also forced groups unable to afford the costs of performing with modern equipment out of business. The trinity of lead, rhythm and bass guitars has been the model for nearly 40 years; sometimes locally manufactured instruments are added to this combination to lend an indigenous or national flavour. Clearly, the music business has been monopolized to a great extent, leaving only small margins of operation to dissident individuals among musicians. With only the latest records dominating popular tastes, musical groups, particularly those of lesser fame, have no choice but to change their styles periodically, following current fashions. Notated African music such as art compositions have an even smaller share of the continental market. For economic reasons, many musicians and composers have migrated to North America or Europe.

Mainstream popular music has decisively influenced the music of village-based dance groups that use locally manufactured instruments. The trend began in the 1960s with groups such as the Richard Band de Zoe Tele near Yaoundé, Cameroon, and the Miami Bar Xylophone Band in Duala, Cameroon, performing Congo-Zaïrean-based popular music on menjang (mendjaŋ) xylophones, especially an adapted form of merengue. Musicologist Pie-Claude Ngumu (1975–6) also used these instruments, though for composing indigenous church music in the tradition of new Catholic church music that had been introduced in Cameroon, Congo, Uganda and other places in the 1950s (w'Itunga, 1987; Mbunga, 1959; Kyagambiddwa, 1963; Klein, 1990; Barz, Performance of Religious and Social Identity, 1997). Locally made instruments have survived often because musicians perform ‘modern’ music on them. Valimba gourd-resonated xylophones in southern Malawi probably survived into the 1990s due to local musicians learning to copy music first from popular Kenyan records and then from Zimbabwean records.

While ethnomusicologists and commercial record companies worldwide have become interested in the history of 20th-century popular music in Africa, historical consciousness remains low in the general African public. Mid-20th-century styles are quickly dismissed as ‘out-of-date’ or ‘colonial’ by young people.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Grove6

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L.J.P. Gaskin: A Select Bibliography of Music of Africa (London, 1965)

G. Rouget: ‘Un film expérimental: Batterie Dogon, eléments pour une étude des rythmes’, L'Homme, v/2 (1965), 126–32

B. Davidson: African Kingdoms (Amsterdam, 1967)

J. Vansina: ‘The Bells of Kings’, Journal of African History, ix/2 (1969), 187–97

A.P. Merriam: African Music on LP: an Annotated Discography (Evanston, IL, 1970)

M. Strumpf: ‘Ghanaian Xylophone Studies’, Review of Ethnology, iii/6 (1970)

P. Dark and M. Hill: ‘Musical Instruments on Benin Plaques’, Essays on Music and History in Africa, ed. K. Wachsmann (Evanston, IL, 1971), 65–78

G. Rouget: ‘Court Songs and Traditional History in the Ancient Kingdoms of Porto-Novo and Abomey’, ibid., 27–64

D. Rycroft: ‘Stylistic Evidence in Nguni Song’, ibid., 213–41

A. Tracey: ‘The Original African Mbira?’, AfM, v/2 (1972), 85–1

H. Lhote: A la découverte des fresques du Tassili (Paris, 1973)

E. Bassani: ‘I disegni dei Manoscritti Araldi del Padre Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo’, Quaderni Poro, iv (1977), 9–87

A. Euba: ‘Ìlù Èsù (Drumming for Èsù): Analysis of a Dùndún Performance’, Essays for a Humanist: an Offering to Klaus Wachsmann (New York, 1977), 121–45

D. Rycroft: ‘Evidence of Stylistic Continuity in Zulu “Town” Music’, ibid., 216–60

M. Yotamu: ‘My Two Weeks Field-Work in Ivory Coast’, Review of Ethnology, vii/21–34 (1979), 161–92

A.A. Mensah: ‘Gyil: the Dagara-Lobi Xylophone’, Journal of African Studies, ix/3 (1982), 139–54

E. Mugglestone: ‘The Gora and the “Grand” Gom-Gom: a Reappraisal of Kolb's Account of a Khoikhoi Music Bow’, AfM, vi/2 (1982), 94–115

U. Wegner: Afrikanische Saiteninstrumente (Berlin, 1984)

G. Rouget: Music and Trance: a Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession (Chicago, 1985)

M. Dias: Os instrumentos musicais de Mocambique (Lisbon, 1986)

J. Gansemans and B. Schmidt-Wrenger: Zentralafrika: Musikgeschichte in Bildern (Leipzig, 1986)

G. Kubik: ‘Das Khoisan-Erbe im Süden von Angola: Bewegungsformen, Bogenharmonik und tonale Ordnung in der Musik der !Kung’ und benachbarter Bantu-Populationen’, Afrikanische Musikkulturen, ed. E. Stockmann (Berlin, 1987), 82–196

G. Kubik: Westafrika: Musikgeschichte in Bildern (Leipzig, 1989)

A. Euba: Yoruba Drumming: the Dùndún Tradition (Bayreuth, 1990)

E. de Dampierre: Harpes Zandé (Paris, 1991)

J. Gray: African Music: a Bibliographical Guide to the Traditional, Popular, Art and Liturgical Musics of Sub-Saharan Africa (New York, 1991)

C. Lems-Dworkin: African Music: a Pan-African Annotated Bibliography (London, 1991)

G. Rouget: Un roi africain et sa musique de cour: chants et danses du palais à Porto Novo sous le règne de Gbèfa (1948–1976) (Paris, 1991) [incl. 2 CDs and video]

D. Rycroft: ‘Black South African Urban Music since the 1890s: some Reminiscences of Alfred Assegai Kumalo’, AfM, vii/1 (1991), 5–32

E. Charry: ‘West African Harps’, Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, xx (1994), 5–53

E. Charry: ‘Plucked Lutes in West Africa: an Historical Overview’, GSJ, xlix (1996), 3–37

K.-P. Brenner: Chipendani und Mbira: Musikinstrumente, nicht-begriffliche Mathematik und die Evolution der harmonischen Progressionen in der Musik der Shona in Zimbabwe (Göttingen, 1997)

c: musical structures and cognition

E.M. von Hornbostel: ‘Über ein akustisches Kriterium für Kulturzusammenhänge’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, xliii (1911), 601–15

B. Bartók: ‘Die Volksmusik der Araber von Biskra und Umbegung’, ZMw, ii (1920), 489–501

J. Kunst: ‘A Musicological Argument for Cultural Relationships between Indonesia, probably the Isle of Java, and Central Africa’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, session lxii (1936), 57–96

R.A. Waterman: ‘African Influence on the Music of the Americas’, Acculturation in the Americas, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, 1952), 207–18

J. Kyagambiddwa: African Music from the Source of the Nile (New York, 1955)

J. Blacking: ‘Problems of Pitch, Pattern and Harmony in the Ocarina Music of the Venda’, AfM, xxii/2 (1959), 15–23

A.M. Jones: Studies in African Music (London, 1959)

G. Kubik: ‘The Structure of Kiganda Xylophone Music’, AfM, ii/3 (1960), 6–30

J.H.K. Nketia: ‘The Hocket-Technique in African Music’, YIFMC, xiv (1962), 44–52

D. Rycroft: ‘Zulu and Xhosa Praise Poetry and Songs’, AfM, iii/1 (1962), 79–85

A.M. Jones: Africa and Indonesia (Leiden, 1964)

H.G. Farmer: Islam: Musikgeschichte in Bildern (Leipzig, 1966)

G. Kubik: Mehrstimmigkeit und Tonsysteme in Zentral- und Ostafrika (Vienna, 1968)

A. Lomax: Folk Song Style and Culture (Washington DC, 1968)

M. Serwadda and H. Pantaleoni: ‘A Possible Notation for African Dance Drumming’, AfM, iv/2 (1968), 47–52

G. Kubik: ‘Transmission et transcription des éléments de musique instrumentale africaine’, Bulletin of the International Committee on Urgent Anthropological and Ethnological Research, xi (1969), 47–61

P. van Theil: ‘An Attempt to a Kinyankore Classification of Musical Instruments’, Review of Ethnology, xiii (1969), 1–5

J. Koetting: ‘Analysis and Notation of West African Drum Ensemble Music’, Selected Reports, i/3 (1970), 115–46

A. Euba: ‘Islamic Musical Culture among the Yoruba: a Preliminary Survey’, Essays on Music and History in Africa, ed. K. Wachsmann (Evanston, IL, 1971), 171–81

R. Knight: ‘Towards a Notation and Tablature for the Kora, and its Application to Other Instruments’, AfM, v/1 (1971), 23–36

P. van Thiel: Volksmusiek uit Ankole, West-Uganda (Tervuren, 1971)

G. Kubik: ‘Oral Notation of Some West and Central African Time-Line Patterns’, Review of Ethnology, iii/22 (1972), 169–76

L.I. al-Faruqi: An Annotated Glossary of Arabic Musical Terms (Westport, CT, 1981)

A. Simon, ed.: Musik in Afrika (Berlin, 1983)

S. Arom: Polyphonies et polyrythmes instrumentales d'Afrique Centrale: structure et méthodologies (Paris, 1985)

J.N. Lo-Bamijoko: ‘Classification of Igbo Musical Instruments, Nigeria’, AfM, vi/4 (1987), 19–41

A.M. Dauer: ‘Derler 1: ein System zur Klassifikation von Rhythmen musiktheoretische und musikhistorische Aspekte’, Jazzforschung, xx (1988), 117–54

A. Euba: ‘Der afrikanische Komponist in Europa: die Herausforderung des Bi-Kulturalismus’, ÖMz, vii-viii (1988), 404–7

C. Klein: Messenkompositionen in Afrika (Göttingen, 1990)

K. Tsukada: ‘Kukuwa and Kachacha: the Musical Classification and the Rhythmic Patterns of the Luvale in Zambia’, Peoples and Rhythms, ed. T. Sakurai (1990), 229–75

D. Dargie: ‘Umngqokolo: Xhosa Overtone Singing and the Song Nondel'ekhaya’, AfM, vii/1 (1991), 33–47

G. Kubik: ‘Theorie, Aufführungspraxis und Kompositionstechniken der Hofmusik von Buganda: ein Leitfaden zur Komposition in einer ostafrikanischen Musikkultur’, HJbMw, xi (1991), 23–162

M.A. Malamusi: ‘Samba Ng'oma Eight: the Drum Chime of Mário Sabuneti’, AfM, vii/1 (1991), 55–71

A. Schneider: ‘Tonsysteme, Frequenzdistanz, Klangformen und die Bedeutung experimenteller Forschung für die Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft’, HJbMw, xi (1991), 179–223

A. Tracey: ‘Kambazithe Makolekole and his Valimba Group: a Glimpse of the Technique of the Sena Xylophone’, AfM, vii/1 (1991), 82–104

P. Cooke: ‘Report on Pitch Perception Experiments Carried out in Buganda and Busoga (Uganda)’, AfM, vii/2 (1992), 119–25

K. Tsukada: ‘Japanese Drums Meet African Drums: a Cross-Cultural Study of “Phonaesthetic” Aspects of Japanese and Fanti Music Cultures’, Third International Symposium and Festival on the Theme ‘New Intercultural Music’ (11–16 April 1994)

M. Djenda: ‘L’importance de la fonction musicale pour la classification des instruments de musique en langage Mpyemo’, AfM, vii/3 (1996), 11-20

G.F. Barz: The Performance of Religious and Social Identity: an Ethnography of Post-Mission Kwaya Music in Tanzania (East Africa) (diss., Brown U., 1997)

K. Tsukada: ‘Drumming, Onomatopoeia and Sound Symbolism among the Luvale of Zambia’, Cultures sonores d'Afrique, ed. J. Kawada (Tokyo, 1997)

d: music and society

S. Passarge: ‘Das Okavango-Sumpfland und seine Bewohner’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, v (1905), 649–716

J.F. Carrington: Talking Drums of Africa (London, 1949)

J.H.K. Nketia: Funeral Dirges of the Akan People (Exeter, 1955)

C.J. Mitchell: The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers, no.27 (1956)

A. Richards: Chisungu: a Girls' Initiation Ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia (London, 1956)

J.H.K. Nketia: ‘Modern Trends in Ghana Music’, AfM, i/4 (1957), 13–17

T. of E. Laoye I: ‘Yoruba Drums’, Odu: a Journal of Yoruba and Related Studies, vii (1959), 5–14

J.H.K. Nketia: Drumming in Akan Communities of Ghana (Edinburgh, 1963)

A.P. Merriam: The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, IL, 1964)

J. Blacking: ‘The Role of Music in the Culture of the Venda of Northern Transvaal’, Studies in Ethnomusicology, ii (1965), 20–53

K.P. Wachsmann: ‘Pan-Equidistance and Accurate Pitch: a Problem from the Source of the Nile’, Festschrift for Walter Wiora, ed. L. Finscher and C.-H. Mahling (Kassel, 1967), 583–92

V.W. Turner: The Drums of Affliction: a Study of Religious Processes among the Ndumbu of Zambia (Oxford, 1968)

J. Blacking: Process and Product in Human Society (Johannesburg, 1969)

J. Blacking: ‘Songs, Dances, Mimes and Symbolism of Venda Girls’ Initiation Schools’, African Studies, xxviii (1969), 215–66

D.W. Ames and A.V. King: Glossary of Hausa Music and its Social Contexts (Evanston, IL, 1971)

H. Zemp: Musique Dan: la musique dans la pensée et la view sociale d'une société africaine (The Hague, 1971)

A.B. Chilivumbo: ‘Vimbuza or Mashawe: a Mystic Therapy’, AfM, v/2 (1972), 6–9

P. Berliner: ‘Music and Spirit Possession at a Shona Bira’, AfM, v/4 (1975–6), 130–39

D. Rycroft: ‘The Zulu Bow Songs of Princess Magogo’, AfM, v/4 (1975–6), 41–97

S. Arom and F. Cloarec-Heiss: ‘Le langage tambouriné de Banda-Linda (République Centrafricaine)’, Théories et méthodes en linguistique africaine (Paris, 1976), 54–5

B. Aning: ‘Atumpan Drums: an Object of Historical and Anthropological Study’, Essays for a Humanist: an Offering to Klaus Wachsmann (New York, 1977), 58–72

J. Blacking, ed.: The Anthropology of the Body (London, 1977)

J. Gansemans: La musique et son role dans la vie sociale et rituelle Iuba, Annales, xcv (Tervuren, 1978)

R. Garfias: ‘The Role of Dreams and Spirit Possession in the Mbira dza Vadzimu Music of the Shona People of Zimbabwe’, Journal of Altered States of Consciousness, v/3 (1979–80), 211–34

R. Stone: Let the Inside be Sweet: the Interpretation of Music Event among the Kpelle of Liberia (Bloomington, IN, 1982)

B.J. Soko: Stylistique et messages dans le vimbuza: essai d'étude ethnolinguistique des chants de possession chez les Ngoni-Tumbuka de Malawi 1900–1963 (diss., U. of Sorbonne, 1984)

J. Baily: ‘Music Structure and Human Movement’, Musical Structure and Cognition, ed. P. Howell, I. Cross and R. West (London, 1985), 237–58

J. Blacking: ‘Challenging the Myth of “Ethnic” Music: First Performance of a New Song in an African Oral Tradition, 1961’, YTM, xxi (1989), 17–24

M.-T. Brincard, ed.: Sounding Forms: African Musical Instruments (New York, 1989)

J. Baily: ‘Music Performance, Motor Structure, and Cognitive Models’, European Seminar in Ethnomusicology, vii (1990), 33–45

M.A. Malamusi: ‘Nthano Chantefables and Songs Performed by the Bangwe Player Chitenje Tambala’, South African Journal of African Languages, x/4 (1990), 222–38

G. Kubik: ‘Muxima Ngola’: Veranderungen und Stromungen in den Musikkulturen Angolas im 20. Jahrhundert’, Populäre Musik in Afrika, ed. V. Erlmann (Berlin, 1991), 201–71

C. Ballantine: Marabi Nights: Early South African Jazz and Vaudeville (Johannesburg, 1993)

C. Schmidt, ed.: ‘The Guitar in Africa: the 1950s–1990s’, World of Music, xxxvi/2 (1994)

S.M. Friedson: Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing (Chicago, 1996)

M.A. Malamusi: Ufiti ndi Using'anga: Witchcraft and Healing Practice (MA diss., U. of Vienna, 1999)

e: modern developments

S. Mbunga: Misa Baba Yetu (Peramiho, Tanzania, 1959)

J. Kyagambiddwa: Ten African Religious Hymns (Munich, 1963)

P.C. Ngumu: ‘Les mendzaŋ des Ewondo du Cameroun’, AfM, v/2 (1975–6), 6–26

K. wa Mukuna: ‘The Origin of Zairean Modern Music’, African Urban Studies, vi (1979–80), 31–9

J. Low: ‘A History of Kenyan Guitar Music 1945–1980’, AfM, vi/2 (1982), 17–36

J. Low: Shaba Diary: a Trip to Rediscover the ‘Katanga’ Guitar Styles and Songs of the 1950's and 60's (Vienna, 1982)

S. Martin: ‘Music in Urban East Africa: Five Genres in Dar Es Salaam’, Journal of African Studies, ix/3 (1982), 155–63

J.E. Collins: African Pop Roots (Berkshire, 1985)

D. Coplan: In Township Tonight! South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre (Johannesburg, 1985)

K. w'Itunga: ‘Une analyse de la Messe Katangaise de Joseph Kiwele’, AfM, vi/4 (1987), 108–25

R. Graham: The Da Capo Guide to Contemporary African Music (London, 1988)

P. Manuel: Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: an Introductory Survey (New York, 1988)

V. Erlmann: ‘A Conversation with Joseph Shabalala of Ladysmith Black Mambazo: Aspects of African Performers' Life Stories’, World of Music, xxxi/l (1989), 31–58

V. Erlmann: ‘Migration and Performance: Zulu Migrant Workers’ Isicathamiya Performance in South Africa, 1890–1950’, EthM, xxxiv (1990), 199–220

C. Waterman: Jujú: a Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music (Chicago, 1990)

W. Bender: Sweet Mother: Modern African Music (Chicago, 1991)

V. Erlmann, ed.: Populäre Musik in Afrika (Berlin, 1991)

S. Martin: ‘Brass Bands and the Beni Phenomenon in Urban East Africa’, AfM, vii/1 (1991), 72–81

K. wa Mukuna: ‘The Genesis of Urban Music in Zaire’, AfM, vii/2 (1992), 72–84

J. Topp Fargion: Women and the Africanization of Taarab in Zanzibar (diss., U. of London, 1992)

N. Davies: ‘The Guitar in Zulu Maskanda Tradition’, World of Music, xxxvi/2 (1994), 118–37

V. Erlmann: African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance (Chicago, 1994)

K. wa Mukuna: ‘The Changing Role of the Guitar in the Urban Music of Zaire’, World of Music, xxxvi/2 (1994), 62–72

G.F. Barz: ‘Kwayas, Kandas, Kiosks: a Tanzanian Popular Music’, Ethnomusicology Online, ii (1997)