Composing the Music of Africa

Composition, Interpretation and Realisation

Malcolm Floyd

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429864292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1999, this volume explores the great diversity of music created by African communities is reflected in this book, which discusses the ways in which a wide range of musical forms are composed and performed from Egypt to South Africa and from Ghana to Kenya. As two composers explain here, this diversity provides much inspiration for western contemporary composition. Particular attention is paid to the contexts generate musical creativity. Ceremonies and festivals celebrating birth, death, marriage or rites of passage provide the impetus for much composition and performance, enabling young people to pick up, early on, some of the techniques and styles of which they then become the new exponents. The book also looks at the role played by formal music education programmes and bodies such as the South African Music Rights Organization and the South African Broadcasting Corporation in fostering musical activity, as well as the contribution of composers to the social and political changes that have dominated South African life in recent years.

1 Introduction: Composing the Music of Africa

Floyd Malcolm

It will be apparent from the complete title of this book that the authors are looking at composition in a range of guises. The adjusting of a phrase to fit new words, the appearance of a new phrase, a new individual contribution to a known song, a new song, a new symphony, all come within our meanings of composition. In some cases there is intensive preparation, in others the performative act of utterance simultaneously embodies the act of composition. In 1903 Albert Lavignac discussed the nature of composers and composition in his book Musical Education. For him:

No study ... can result in producing a composer worthy of the name out of any individual who is not natively endowed with that entirely special instinct that leads one to create and invent combinations of sounds, and which in various degrees is called having ideas, having the creative faculty, and lastly, having the sacred fire, or having genius. (1903: 241)

As to how this ‘special instinct’ is to be recognised, he comments:

... many young composers reveal their vocation from infancy, by the propensity for putting their ideas down on paper, when as yet they know none of the theoretic elements except what they have been able to divine. (Ibid.: 242)

So for Lavignac composition has theoretical constructs, and is to be perceived as existing when written down. A composer has a special instinct, which is innate. In considering the optimal environment for composition, ‘to favour its growth and blossoming’, Lavignac sets it against the worst conditions, which include:

... living in some forlorn region far from every intellectual centre, isolation, or association exclusively with common people who are totally destitute of instruction, the absence of all affection, employment in manual labour of a kind that demands no intellectual effort, ignorance of all manifestation of any art whatsoever, in a word, all that constitutes the most brutish existence. (Ibid.: 243)

It might be seen as unfair to Lavignac to expect his cultural conditioning to stand up to examination nearly one hundred years after his book was published, for situations of which he could have little awareness or understanding. However, it does perhaps make clear a particular attitude to composition and composers that is questioned and generally found to be incomplete by the authors of this book.

This is not to say that there are not ’special’ people doing ‘special’ musical things in Africa, or that notation is always irrelevant, or that environment and training are not important. Rather that music is composed, interpreted and realised in a range of ways that have significance and value within their contexts, and have the potential to inform practice and comprehension beyond their original contexts, in a musical world that has always been a meeting ground, with resulting ‘convergences and collisions’ (Kartomi and Blum, 1994).

Africa has written about its music itself. Not only in academic musicological ways, but through investigating cultural function and change in novels, where music is included both as part of the organic whole, and for its roles as mode of expression of a culture, and as a mode of mutual interpretation between culture and individual. Conflict between cultures, or between the micro-culture of the individual and identifiable meta-culture, which attempts to hold all the individuals in relationship, is often played out in this latter mode.

Camara Laye in The African Child, (an autobiography of a ‘son of Malinke’ in what was then French Guinea, now Guinea) describes a performance by a praise singer designed to persuade his father to work quickly and effectively at producing an item of gold jewellery:

The praise-singer would install himself in the workshop, tune up his cora ... and would begin to sing my father’s praises ... The harp played an accompaniment to this vast utterance of names, expanding it and punctuating it with notes that were now soft, now shrill ... I could tell that my father’s vanity was being inflamed. (1955: 23)

Later, when Laye’s father had been persuaded to undertake the work, there is a relationship apparent between the creative processes of goldsmith and praise singer:

While my father was slowly turning the trinket round in his fingers, smoothing it into perfect shape, [the praise-singer] during the whole process of transformation, had kept on singing his praises, accelerating his rhythm, increasing his flatteries as the trinket took shape, and praising my father’s talents to the skies.

Indeed, the praise-singer participated in a curious - I was going to say direct, effective - way in the work. He too was intoxicated with the joy of creation; he declaimed his rapture, and plucked his harp like a man inspired; he warmed to the task as if he had been the craftsman himself... He was no longer a paid thurifer; he was no longer just the man whose services each and anyone could hire: he had become a man who creates his song under the influence of some very personal, interior necessity. (Ibid.: 29-30)

There is much here to which Lavignac would relate. There is a person perceived as having a particular gift, which has been nurtured, and is valued. The importance of keeping a record, which for Lavignac requires notation, is achieved by the praise singer through the use of a strongly developed and frequently exercised memory, and the use of traditional patterns and formulae as an aid to that memory. Laye also considers that the praise singer moves beyond the acknowledged, and paid for, function of the composition; there is an internal drive, which may remind us of Lavignac’s ‘sacred fire’.

On the other side of the continent the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, also gives music particular significance in dealing with the central issues he writes about. Petals of Blood (1977) deals with the new capitalism, colonial oppression, and the struggle against ‘a more severe and deadly exploitation by an alliance of foreigners and the class of newly-propertied Africans’ (back cover). There are references to music, often as cultural signifier, throughout the book, and in one case Ngugi laments the disappearance of a traditional drink that was closely linked to occasions of composition:

Theng’eta is the plant that only the old will talk about. Why? It is simple. It is only they who will have heard of it or know about it... Nyakinyua says that they used to brew it before the Europeans came. And they would drink it only when work was finished, and especially after the ceremony of circumcision or marriage or itwika, and after a harvest. It was when they were drinking Theng’eta that poets and singers composed their words for a season of Gichandi, and the seer voiced his prophecy. (Ngugi, 1977: 204)

The Gichandi is a seed filled gourd and is used in competition as described by Senoga-Zake:

Commonly two players, especially old men, used to challenge each other in a market place. They shook their instruments and chanted poems or told stories, or even had a question and answer style warbling. Whoever lasted longer than the other ... won and took possession of the other’s gicandi. (Senoga-Zake, 1986: 165)

Later in the book, Ngugi describes a wedding celebration, in which some of the central characters of the novel are involved in singing, which, although based on what is known, is also highly adapted to these particular circumstances:

Under the emotion of the hour, Munira suddenly tried a verse he thought he knew. Njuguna and Nyakinyua were making it sound so easy and effortless. But in the middle he got confused. Njuguna and Nyakinyua now teamed up against him:

You now break harmony of voices

You now break harmony of voices

It’s the way you’ll surely break our harmony

When the time of initiation comes.

But Abdulla came to the rescue:

I was not breaking soft voices

I was not breaking soft voices

I only paused to straighten up

The singers’ and dancers’ robes.

Nyakinyua’s voice now drifted in, conciliatory, but signalling the end of this particular dance. She asked in song: if a thread was broken, to whom were the pieces thrown to mend them into a new thread? Njuguna replied, turning to Karega: it was thrown to Karega for he was a big warrior, Njamba Nene. (Ibid.: 209)

There is in this still something of the notion of gradations of skill in singing/composing, but it is a skill that all have access to, and all need to maintain for full involvement in demonstrations of cultural identity, to understand what is happening and to affect it.

In Devil on the Cross, Ngugi considers the ’composer’ as Lavignac would have understood the term. Gatuiria is a young Gikuyu man, who has studied music at an American university, and is now researching traditional music at university in Kenya. He is also a composer:

My ambition and dream is to compose a piece of music for many human voices accompanied by an orchestra made up of all kinds of national instruments ... I often hear with the ears of my heart flutes and trumpets blown by a choir of herdsmen in the plains, the drums of the whole land call on the youth of our country to go to war ... I seize pen and paper write down the message of the voices before they are carried away by the wind. (Ngugi, 1982: 59-60)

What we see here is somebody who is fully absorbed in plans to integrate the many communities of his country through music, and is planning to achieve it through ways that do not perhaps originate in his own culture, but which are appropriate for assimilation, because of the fact that ‘composition’ itself is well known and practised. Later on, Gatuiria’s plans are much further developed, and he plans to finish his piece in honour of his fiancée:

... Gatuiria had decided that his score would be Wariinga’s engagement ring ... during tomorrow’s ceremony Gatuiria intended to offer her the two hundred sheets of music, the fruits of two years of the labour of his heart. (Ibid.: 226)

So Gatuiria would appear to meet Lavignac’s criteria: having special instincts, a ‘sacred fire’, the ability to infer or apply theoretical constructs, and being nurtured in an appropriate environment. There is also the idea that the score is the music. And in a sense, anyone wishing to combine all the cultures of Kenya musically would have to work outside the traditional practices of any one of them, precisely because of their cultural loads.

What these novels, and many others, perhaps show about the nature of composition in Africa is its groundedness in a people’s life. It is communal expression and signification, and a vehicle for individual interpretation of that. Through the relationship between this individuality and communalism it embodies cultural dynamism. Composition in Africa is seen as a medium for change and integration inter-culturally and internationally, as well as intra-culturally. It may be that this book will reveal some of the dynamic processes and products of this medium.

The book

This book looks at music from several parts of Africa; from Egypt to South Africa, from Ghana to Kenya. It investigates a range of styles and types; traditional, popular, contemporary and syncretic. It is written by a variety of scholars, some African, and all of whom have spent considerable time in Africa in connection with their researches. We have included transcriptions wherever possible, to give a flavour of the music, although we are all well aware of the significant limitations of these. There are also references to recordings, and some of those are held centrally, in places such as the British Library National Sound Archive, thus making access easy for those in Britain at least. Recordings are also held in the National Archives of most countries in which our research has been based.

I would like to record my thanks to King Alfred’s, University College Winchester for supporting this work through the granting of sabbatical time, and for financial support; to Maureen Blaydon for most of the music setting, and particularly to Emma, my wife, who has put up with my absences and supported both me and my work.

Bibliography

Kartomi, Margaret J. and Blum, Stephen (1994), Music - Cultures in Contact. Convergences and Collisions, Basel: Gordon & Breach.

Lavignac, Albert (1903), Musical Education, New York: D. Appleton & Co.

Laye, Camara (1955), The African Child, London: Fontana. [Extracts reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers Ltd.]

Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1977), Petals of Blood, London: Heinemann.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1982), Devil on the Cross, Oxford: Heinemann. [Extracts from the two books above are reprinted by permission of Heinemann Educational Publishers, a division of Reed Educational and Professional Publishing Ltd.]

Senoga-Zake, George (1986), Folk Music of Kenya, Nairobi: Uzima.

2 Melodic and Rhythmic Aspects of African Music

Christopher James

African music has long-standing traditions and has produced a vast variety of beautiful and impressive music. Apart from a few specialists, Europeans have only relatively recently begun to appreciate and understand the rich tapestry of African musical styles.

Music making is such an important part of African social and cultural life that it is performed regularly in a wide diversity of social settings. When communities come together, music usually forms an integral part of the activities.. Music is played for purely recreational purposes, or it may enhance ceremonies or rites (Nketia, 1975: 21).

Africans assume that all normal people have some musical ability and are therefore capable of taking part in a musical performance (Blacking, 1973: 34). Thus when music is performed by a group or tribe it becomes a shared creative experience which enriches community life (Nketia, 1974: 22). Musical performance cannot therefore be separated from social activities. Even in urban communities it is an essential component of cultural life (Coplan, 1985: 4).

Music is generally performed by groups of musicians who lead the others in dance and song; however, it is sometimes performed by individual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Ashgate Studies in Ethnomusicology: General Editor’s Preface
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Composing the Music of Africa
• 2 Melodic and Rhythmic Aspects of African Music
• Part I The Making of ‘Traditional’ Musics
• Part II The Changing Faces of Music