Female Voices from an Ewe Dance-Drumming Community in Ghana: Our Music Has Become a Divine Spirit (review)
- Female Voices from an Ewe Dance-Drumming Community in Ghana: Our Music Has Become a Divine Spirit
By focusing on Ewe dance-drumming, James Burns inevitably sets for himself a great challenge: to justify yet another study on one of the most widely discussed topics in African ethnomusicology. I must state immediately that Burns manages this challenge with remarkable success. Drawing on formal interviews, musical transcriptions, video recordings, and vivid ethnographic accounts, this provides a compelling portrait of Dzigbordi, a dance-drumming ensemble located in the Ewe town of Dzodze, Ghana. Because women singers and dancers rather than male drummers form the center of attention, Burns's study undermines the popular assumption that the "solitary male master drummer" is the only authentic voice of West African drum ensemble (11). Analytical perspectives from the field of oral literature are expertly employed to privilege the creative process over the finished composition, and to discuss the musical event in terms of its social and affective significance and as a "verbal signifier" for communal experience (20).
Chapter 1 situates Dzigbordzi historically and culturally by examining the impact of Western culture and religion, and by highlighting how indigenous notions and practices of gender and polygyny disadvantage women and pave the way for them to become the principal "nurturers" of traditional music in contemporary Ewe society. With particular attention to funeral, sacred, and dance drumming traditions, chapter 2 examines Ewe conceptions of musical space in terms of identity markers like ethnicity, gender, and family, and how space supports the articulation of hierarchical spheres of power. Chapter 3 discusses Dzigbordzi more specifically, focusing on ensemble organization, contexts of performance, and how the music illustrates salient features of Ewe drumming. Corroborating the work of scholars like David Locke and Kofi Agawu, Burns explains that Ewe drumming is shaped by a "meta-rhythmic" sequence of dance beats which acts as a foundation for the entire rhythmic matrix, including the drum language (vugbe) of atimevu, the lead instrument. This position rightly rejects the undue emphasis placed on the concept of "additive rhythms" by scholars like A. M. Jones and J. H. Kwabena Nketia, and disagrees with the "pulse-based approaches" of scholars like James Koetting and Hewitt Pantaleoni in their various attempts to understand the background structures of African drumming. The final chapter focuses on specific performances by five female members of Dzigbordi, with an in-depth analysis of their individual styles (atsiã) and repertoires. The chapter lucidly demonstrates the ways in which performance practices and the prerogatives of style derive from, or are meditative of, social experience. [End Page 211]
Notwithstanding the overall success of this book, certain issues could have been addressed to enhance its overall argument. First, I would have liked to see a more rigorous engagement with similar gender-themed studies of other African musical and performance traditions, including, for example, Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza's book on the Baganda (Baakisimba: Gender in the Music and Dance of the Baganda People of Uganda, Routledge, 2005), which the author briefly refers to, and Beverly Mack's work on the Hausa (Muslim Women Sing: Hausa Popular Song, Indiana University Press, 2004). Critical dialogue with previous studies on related topics represents the only viable means of generating cross-cultural analytical models through which we can move the discourse on African music forward and garner a cumulative and an intercultural understanding of the affective and social significance of African musical traditions. Second, I looked in vain for a final conclusion that would draw together the main issues raised throughout the book while articulating possible directions for future studies.
These are minor criticisms, however. Female Voices from an Ewe Dance-Drumming Community in Ghana is a successful interrogation of musical events as an integral part of social experience. Its clarity of language, ethnographic depth, and effective use of musical transcriptions and video illustrations make it an excellent addition to the literature on West African music. [End Page...
