Editorial: The Landscape of African Music

For too long, the field of African music has been occupied and even dominated by ethnomusicology. We have certainly much to be thankful for to this discipline, for it has provided us with valuable knowledge about the structure of our traditional music and its performance modes. Moreover, in its disciplinary and methodological association with anthropology, ethnomusicology has also brought into clear view the central role of music in African societies and cultures, its relation to other aesthetic forms in the total experience of traditional, precolonial communities, and its continuing function in the organization and sustenance of the affective and symbolic universe that surrounds and gives meaning to the material world and practical life and activities of these communities.

To acknowledge the contribution of ethnomusicology to an understanding of African music in this way is, however, not to lose sight of the limitations imposed on the discipline by its very vocation, and by its methods of investigation. As with other disciplines bearing the prefix ethno-, it presupposes not merely an immediate focus on non-Western forms of musical practice and expression, but also a disparity between these forms and those that are taken to constitute the Western musical tradition. The relation between ethnomusicology and historical musicology--the latter considered as a discipline devoted primarily to the study of the development of Western music--often precludes any consideration of a possible connection between this heritage and other musical traditions around the world. Thus, it seems inconceivable that the first movement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, with its wonderful flute ritornello, could evoke the Igbo tradition of ozo and atilogwu music, yet to anyone who cares to listen, the similarities in instrumental color and rhythmic pattern can be striking. And I recall the remark made by the late Fela Sowande about how much the opening theme of the second symphony by Sibelius evinced for him a Yoruba quality that he came to feel an especially strong bond with the great Finnish composer on account of this passage.

Ethnomusicology ignores such connections, and tends to operate a constriction of African music in such a way that this music becomes enclosed within a narrow range of perception and discourse, serving at best as an exotic mode whose interest resides in its strangeness, its very otherness, and at worst as a curiosity, with hardly any reality outside of its anthropological significance. One of the consequences of this approach is the way it has conditioned the view one has so often encountered, that the only authentic music in Africa is the traditional music, represented for us in its current ideal form by the music of the so-called rain forest. It hardly ever occurs to those who hold this view that this is tantamount to declaring that Western music stopped with polyphony. The simplified view of African music promoted by ethnomusicology is best illustrated by the constant harping upon rhythm as its defining feature, to the exclusion of other aspects that are constitutive of its syntax as a form of musical language. It is this simplification that provoked Kofi Agawu's polemical reappraisal of the academic discourse on African music in his 1995 essay, "The Invention of 'African Rhythm.'" Indeed, it is not seldom that the ethnographic emphasis so dominates the account of a particular African tradition that the music itself disappears behind its auxiliary function in ritual and other forms of social processes. The least that can be said, then, is that ethnomusicology fosters what can only be called a tunnel vision of African music, when it does not actively promote such a vision.

But the landscape of African music is more extensive, and richer and more varied than the view presented by ethnomusicology. For any conception of the African musical heritage must take account of a history that has paralleled the African experience both on the continent and in the Black Diaspora. The church music of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Cuba belongs as much...