African Music, Ideology, and Utopia

In a recent article entitled "Is African Music Possible?" Abiola Irele describes the dilemma of African art music, understood by the author as "a conscious and highly elaborated [musical] form [. . .] bound to the musical language of Europe" (56-57). He depicts in detail the contradictions of a music that, in the face of structural and experiential impediments, "has yet to take root within the contemporary culture of Africa" (56). The article undertakes a wide-ranging description of the ongoing dialogue between "art" and "folk" musics, tracing their intermingling in Western music from Handel and Mozart through Schoenberg, Bartok, and Stravinsky, and in the more recent concert music of the Nigerian composers Fela Sowande, Adam Fiberissima, Akin Euba, and Ayo Bankole. Regarding the former, he concludes that Western concert music has backed itself into a corner of opacity, in which "serious musical composition has come to be understood in certain so-called avant-garde circles in the West in such narrow terms that any work that makes the slightest concession to tonality or that recalls the Romantic convention of musical feeling is rejected out of hand" (66). Not surprisingly, given this argument, the African composers Irele describes appear likewise unable, despite certain limited successes, to articulate a viable musical language using Western musical materials. Lacking workable models of "conscious and [. . .] elaborated [musical] form" from either the West or indigenous cultures, "they are compelled to hover, at best, between the two traditions without achieving a satisfactory integration of both." Irele's pessimistic conclusion is that African concert music "which meets a definition of individual art in the Western sense, is not possible" (69). Rightly, I think, Irele refuses to mourn this situation, and instead evokes in his conclusion the dramatic vitality of indigenous African musical expression, both traditional and modern.

In this essay, I wish to expand upon Irele's suggestion and look to indigenous African musics fro examples of these "conscious and highly elaborated [musical] form[s]," while arguing against any rigid distinction between what he terms "art" and "folk" musics. For while Irele calls attention to the "disabling [. . .] opposition" between elite and popular art, and indeed much of his essay is spent demonstrating the intermingling of these categories in Western music, they noneless function as discrete limiting categories in the logic of his argument. My point is not to attempt a hollow deconstruction of an argument that is already dialogical to its core, but rather, following Irele, to describe the already complex, dialectical nature of African "classical" (traditional) and popular musics themselves, to pursue this search for a complex, self-reflexive African music beyond the limits of a sterile model of concert music abstractly applied to a vastly different African context. To do so, I will look to two musical fields with which I am familiar in particular. First, traditional Mande music and its ambiguous mid-century mutation from a vehicle of intersubjective communication within a tradition-oriented community to a rationalized concert music in Fodéba Keita's Ballets Africains. Then I will turn to the musical traditions of the African Diaspora, and jazz in particular, to conclude that the compositions, written and improvised, of its most radical practitioners offer precisely the model of a highly developed "art" music that yet retains its viability as an expression of an intersubjective vernacular community unavailable to African composers in canonical Western concert music.

If music as a language is fundamentally nonconceptual, achieving a semblance of logic only in the formal constitution of its material, this withdrawal from unambiguous, rationalized communication never fully realizes its promise. Music speaks of a realm of experience beyond mere exchange, yet this incipient narrative remains a deceitful sleight of hand operated behind the back of every-hopeful listeners; we are always and ever again naive in the face of music, ready to believe its promise of a trasncendence of a cynical (post-)modernity. Music remains utopian in its refusal to participate fully in a violent society where unambiguous communication means...