Sounds of Change: Social and Political Features of Music in Africa (review)

This compilation is part of a series published by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. It includes twelve essays and interviews on the theme of musical performance and change, and is accompanied by a CD with eleven musical examples. Among the topics discussed are censorship and resistance, trade and distribution, transmission and teaching, and intellectual property rights. In his introduction, Stig-Magnus Thorsén emphasizes the importance of scholarly cooperation; accordingly, the book includes both Swedish and African scholars, the latter representative of Kenya, Zimbabwe, Ghana, and Uganda. While Thorsén is a musicologist, contributors to this volume are drawn from a variety of disciplines, including gender and colonial studies, media and communications, and music education, in addition to musicology. The interdisciplinary nature of the text is an admirable attempt to approach the study of what Thorsén calls "the man-music-society triangle." However, the various approaches employed by the authors in this collection fail to coalesce into a conversation among disciplines, and at times the book reads more like a set of disparate writings than an integrated whole.

In the interests of space, I will discuss only three contributions: two essays and one interview. The collection opens with a chapter by Mai Palmberg on music and censorship in Zimbabwe. Unfortunately, her essay reveals a number of omissions and errors that detract from her timely discussion of the politics of music in Zimbabwe. One of the most interesting topics Palmberg addresses is the use of music in campaign advertisements by Zimbabwe's ZANU-PF ruling party. However, her understanding of Zimbabwean musical genres and their relationship to political campaigning is thin, and her interpretations of many of the examples she discusses would seem unfamiliar to Zimbabwean audiences.

Two contributions to the volume deserve special praise, however. The first is Caleb Okumu Chrispo's brief but excellent article on music television and cultural identity in South Africa. Okumu emphasizes the dynamism and innovation that enable musical change in South African society, and his discussion of the relationship of music video to paradigms of "traditional," "modern," and "popular" music is especially perceptive. The second of these contributions is Carita Backstorm and Mai Palmberg's interview with the legendary musicologist Kwabena Nketia, preceded by a forward written by Thorsén. In this interview, Nketia shares some of the insights he has accumulated during his career as an African musicologist, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of music in Africa and the complexity of the relationship of music and culture to African history, in both the colonial and postcolonial periods.

The audio examples that accompany the book are an excellent attempt to encourage readers to engage directly with the music discussed in the volume. With the exception of a few tracks, musical examples are drawn primarily from urban, electrified genres, leaving primarily rural or acoustic genres underrepresented. However, many of the musical examples are intriguing, not only as phenomena of sound but also because of their cultural impact in their countries of origin. Nevertheless, music and text are not always paired, a major shortcoming in such a work. In several of the essays, engagement with musical sound is sparse; in other cases it is nonexistent, leaving the reader with little means of relating the music to the text. A few authors, on the other hand, do an excellent job of integrating their musical examples with the text of their essays.

Given the inconsistencies in both the texts themselves and their relationship to the musical examples, Sounds of Change represents a promising approach to the study of music and culture but falls short of accomplishing its goals.