Music in sub-Saharan Africa
Ewe of Ghana
- Voluntary dance clubs are the primary institutions through which the all-important dance-drumming traditions are performed.
- Musical performance is not as frequent.
- Instruments: double-bell (gankogui), gourd shaker (axatse), different barrel- shaped drums (sogo, kidi), large drums (atsimevu, gboba), smallest drum (kaguna).
Mande of West Africa
Pygmy Music
- Jali: oral historian, musician, praise singer, genealogist, announcer, and diplomat.
- Unlike the Pygmies, music-making is more professional, and a status position.
- The main instruments played by the Mande jali to accompany singing are the balo (a xylophone), the kora (bridge harp), and the kontingo (a five-stringed plucked lute with a skin face like the banjo.
- The kora has twenty-one strings and a range just over three octaves.
- Each kora piece has a basic vocal melody known as donkilo and an improvisatory melody known as sataro.
Buganda Kingdom
Mbira
- The Pygmies have very few musical instruments of their own, except for end-blown flutes made from cane.
- Vocal music is the core of Pygmy musical life.
- Call-and-response phrases are repeated continually, creating a cyclical ostinato pattern.
- On top of the ostinato, singers will add a complementary ostinato
- After, variations will be added to create a dense texture.
- Formerly the most powerful independent kingdom in the Lake Victoria region in East Africa.
- The kabaka's court was a major center for musical activity.
- One important court ensemble consisted of at least five side-blown trumpets made of bottle-shaped gourds.
- The most important royal ensemble was the entenga, which consisted primarily of 12 drums tuned to the local pentatonic scale.
The Bira
- The typical form of classical mbira music is a melodic-harmonic cycle, or ostinato of forty-eight quick beats.
- The particular ostinato of most classical mbira pieces is divided into four twelve-beats phrases in 12/8 meter.
- Small variations are added throughout the piece, and must not be rushed.
Popular Music in
the 20th Century
- Shona people hold a ceremony called a bira, where family members can people to spirits.
- As the bira begins, the people gather and listen to the music of the mbira and hosho.
- Mbira players, musical specialists, play at the ceremony, providing the musical foundation for the evening.
- Men and women may contribute to the performance by adding vocal lines in a high-pitched yodeling style.
General Principles of African Music
- West Africa: 1920s big bands using brass instruments emerged.
- E.T. Mensah, the "King of Highlife," was the first to orchestrate both traditional themes and indigenous rhythms.
- "Palm-wine" music, played on acoustic guitar and accompanied by various percussion instruments, spread throughout British West Africa in informal settings.
- Juju: "African-pop" style associated with Ebenezer Obey and King Sunny Ade.
Congolese Guitar Music
- Practice of interlocking or fitting pitches and beats into the spaces of other parts or alternating the pitches or phrases of one part with those of another to create a whole.
- The aesthetic preference for dense, overlapping textures and buzzy timbres that contribute to a dense sound quality.
- Often cyclical and open-ended in form involving one or more repeated melodies or ostinatos as the basic foundation.
- Rhythmic complexity.
South Africa
Zimbabwe