In and Out of Song

Disciplinary bifurcations and limited comprehension of the very ontological status—and hence partial definitions—of music in its sociocultural matrices account largely for the almost heuristic manner in which scholars and amateurs approach the object “African music.” An encounter with a performance (or music and dance, simply) in a particular village, city, or ethnic context in Africa instantly affords the observer multiple—and sometimes competing—resources, especially in regard to sites of meaning and relevant frames of interpretation. Immediate and emerging contexts, historical background, individual creativity (or initiative), and the assumptions, disciplinary orientation, and “undocumented fears” of the researcher can all at the same time translate into specific harzards (misrepresentations), or useful opportunities and resources. These opening statements and observations apply well to both indigenous (born and “raised” in the group) and foreign (i.e., could be a Westerner, or another African not “from” the particular group under study).

As shown in the Steven Feld’s two review essays on “linguistic models” in ethnomusicology, the appropriation of linguistic terminologies and techniques of analysis to the song-speech continuum that characterizes many of the world’s musical traditions provides only a partial understanding of the nature of music, including performers’ speech about music (see Feld). It is, however, expedient in the African context that the scholars gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of this continuum, as shown in John Johnson, who continues to engage both musicological and linguistic parameters in understanding the Mande epic (see Johnson). Such a more sensitive and integrative approach will have as guide the limited designation “verbal genre,” as employed in Akosua Anyidoho in her 1994 study on the nnwonkoro and which is the subject of Kwasi Amapene’s book. The dedication of an entire issue of the journal Research in African Literatures (2001, Vol. 32, No. 2) to “African Music” is one of the positive directions in pursuit of appropriate techniques, research orientations, and range of field data that would provide a sound epistemological foundation for the scholarly and interdisciplinary research agenda best suited to explaining music and related practices on the African continent.

The intersection of the poetic/linguistic and poetic is also as valid as that of the oral and the literate, both in African and other word cultures; the absence of ideographic representations does not signal an absence of either. As shown by Pathé Daigne, writing systems have been integral to many African traditions, and notions of oral-formulaic composition continued to be revised, including the ideas of John M. Foley. (An instructive interface of the oral and the written is presented in my 2003 brief, “Stumbling with/over Scripts: Vignettes.”)

Kwasi (Frank, formerly) Ampene was once an indigene, then temporarily became an “outsider” through the tradition of formal education and the rites of fieldwork and theorizing closely identified with it. Then he had to “go back” to be “raised” in a different but shorter span of time, and for the specific purposes that culminated in this book, Female Song Tradition and the Akan of Ghana: The Creative Process in Nnwonkoro. It is important to note here briefly that Kwasi was raised also in a hybrid musical type, highlife of Ghana (the blurb refers to nnwonkoro also as a “hybrid form”) and was an active performer in that genre. As indicated in many sources, there are specific traits, processes, and concepts in highlife performance practice that either derive from or are closely identified with many ethnic performance traditions of Ghana and as in many parts of Africa, by extension (see Avorgbedor, “The Place of the Folk”; Collins; Coplan; Darkwa; Nketia, “Modern Trends”). In fact, the author appropriately documents this important relationship: “In this highlife song, C. K. Mann’s compositional procedure is similar to that of a nnwonkoro perform-composer and Amu’s written choral music in the African idiom” (172). Or, as stated elsewhere:

The idea of singing the fixed formulaic phrases...