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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.

Docteur Nico

Franco and O.K. Jazz

South Africa

Kanda Bongo Man

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

Zimbabwe

Thomas Mapfumo

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