Music in West Africa: Expressing Music, Expressing Culture (review)

Music in West Africa is not about West Africa as a broad geo-cultural region—sixteen countries, over 210 million people, and more than 1,000 languages—but about Ruth Stone's experience studying music among the Kpelle of Liberia. This is not to say that there are no references to other parts of Africa in this friendly introductory text, but they are few and largely decorative. (Ch. 5 may be the exception.) Billed as a journey 'in search of music in Africa', the book opens with a chapter invoking the penetration of the continent by Arab and European travellers such as Abdullah Ibn Battuta, D. W. Whitehurst, and George Herzog—three authors who pre-dated her own journeys to West Africa. Travel as motif has enabled a surprisingly large number of writers to impose their own ideas about beginnings on African societies, invoking a tabula rasa as an instrument of conceptual domination. It is to her credit, however, that Stone, daughter of missionaries who spent part of her childhood in Liberia, is finally unable to maintain the traveller's stance. Relying mostly on her own previous writings on the Kpelle, she offers a concise view of what she believes matters to them when they make music.

Stone reminds us that there is no single word for music in the Kpelle language. 'Music' in this African world is more than drumming; it includes dancing, singing, playing of instruments like horns and the musical bow, and verbal performance. The traces of these actions are vividly illustrated on the accompanying CD, which serves as a sonic backdrop to the book. The material is wonderfully varied, ranging from a children's counting song through work songs to epic narration and various instrumental and vocal repertories. Eleven of the fifteen tracks were recorded in 1976, three in 1970, and one in 1989. Although the book's narrative parallels the sequence of tracks on the CD, some readers will surely be moved to fashion alternative narratives. Indeed, readers may wish to begin their own journey into the Kpelle sound world by first listening to the CD. (Readers should be warned that the CD has sixteen tracks, not the intended fifteen described on pp. xv–xvi. Tracks labelled 10–15 on page xvi should be corrected to 11–16; corresponding corrections should be made throughout the text. Those who are curious about the extra track, track 10, might like to know that it has been imported—inadvertently, I believe—from the CD accompanying the Garland Encylopedia of World Music: Africa, track 3, which Stone edited in 1998. It has nothing to do with the Kpelle or with West Africa. It was in fact collected by Cornelia Fales from Bujumbura, Burundi, and is labelled 'Inanga Chuchotée' (whispered inanga), inanga being a trough zither.)

One of the distinctive aspects of this book is its use and invocation of terms and concepts originating from Kpelle speech. Spending her middle childhood in Liberia enabled Stone to acquire fluency in the Kpelle language. And so we read that a performer pours an epic, a singer catches a song, and a dancer speaks the dance—colourful terms, some readers might think, for familiar actions. She does not always indicate the semantic reach of these terms; nor is it obvious that, taken together, they cohere into a formal discourse, a separate indigenous metalanguage, not merely a set of ad hoc descriptive terms offered to an eager ethnographer. Nevertheless, the marked or stilted nature of their English renditions may serve to broaden our understanding of what lies behind performance actions. Stone is particularly anxious to get at the specific ways in which Kpelle think in and about music.

Had the author been consistent in maintaining this conceptual orientation, she might have hesitated before advancing certain kinds of explanation. In chapter 5, for example, rhythmic organization is explained in part as an additive process. Stone admits that Kpelle...