The African Idiom in Music

THE QUESTION of what constitutes the African idiom in music, like any other approach which seeks to distill generalizations from a wide variety of phenomena covering an immense geographic area, is one which be answered only with considerable difficulty.1 We narrow the problem, however, by limiting our investigation to Africa south of the Sahara, thus excluding the northern coastal belt, Egypt, and the Sahara itself and its western and eastern coastal areas, for these are regions primarily of Arabic influence. Indeed, in the music area mapping of Africa,2 the northern part of the African continent has been divided into two broad areas, the North Coast, which is distinguished by purely Arabic and the Sudan-Desert, which is subdivided into the Desert on the North, in which Islamic styles are primary, and the Sudan to the south which represents an area of music fusion between Islamic and Negro African styles, clearly differentiated from the West Coast3 in which Islamic musical penetration is of less consequence although present. We deal, then, not only with Africa south of the Sahara, but to a considerable extent with Africa south of the Sudan. Also to be noted is the wide range of musical styles within this area, including the Bushman-Hottentot, East Africa, East Horn, Central Africa, and West Coast groupings. The Bushman-Hottentot area has been based primarily upon the description of musical instruments and styles presented by Kirby;4 very little recorded material is available for this region. The East Africa area can ... be differentiated from areas to the west in terms of types of musical instruments used, the specific uses of drums and drumming, the Islamic influences, and some other characteristics, especially the absence of 'hot' rhythm,5 while the East Horn area is distinguished by the intensity of the Islamic influence

Art · Linguistics · Literature · African history and culture analysis · History · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Philosophy

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