Contribution of African Music

The African Hunter kind could be the music with the San from the southwestern Africa and also the African Pygmies dispersed throughout Africa. The African Hunter variety is characterized by the use of: "falsetto, yodeling, hocketing (a program in which the melodic line is distributed between several voices), disjunct melody (wide skips during the melodic line), and dense texture represented by polyphony, several vocal timbres in hocket, and solo voices which sometimes emerge as leading melodic indicators" (Merriam, 1982, p. 138). The music from the Nguni peoples (Zulu, Swazi, Xhosa, etc.) is characteristically Black African. However, its variations include: "lack of the steady tempo, slow movement, the presence of spoken recitative, powerful portamento (sliding from a single note to the next), large but flaccid sound, and extremely dense texture" (139). In general, the music areas of Africa consist of similar stylistic features in the big central core, marked differences in sort during the north and northeast, and variant forms within the south (139).

The well-known denominator of African music is its central functionality both in terms with the community and the individual. Music is often a celebration of life and its a number of passages. Once an African baby is born, the event is accompanied by conventional songs, dances, and rituals. Even before the birth with the child, once the mother visits the witch doctor relating to the child's delivery, unique incan

 

Chordophones are stringed instruments. The main four subcategories of cordophones are lutes, lyres, zithers, and harps. The most common representation of chordophones in Black Africa will be the musical bow. Another popular instrument could be the stringed-bow lute of western Sudan and East Africa. Cordophones are ubiquitous, "plucked lutes, lyres, harps, and numerous kinds of zithers abound, specially in East Africa" (Merriam, 1982, p. 146).

Kebede, Ashenafi. Roots of Black Music. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982.

The intimate union between music and African life has been described like a "total communion" (Bebey, 1975, p. 12). The totality of this union is demonstrated by the truth that in some African languages no word exists to define what music is. Music is an expression of African life: "The art of music is so inherent in man that it is superfluous to obtain a particular name for it" (p. 12).

The musical instruments applied by African musicians reinforce the contrast in the musical traditions of African and Western societies. The goal on the African musician just isn't to imitate nature, but to incorporate natural sounds into his or her music (Bebey, 1975, p. 3). The result may sound disharmonious to Western ears, but for the African each sound carries a specific meaning. A wide amount of musical instruments is applied by the African musician. Every is individually crafted and made from natural materials indigenous towards surrounding community. Since mass-production of instruments is rare in Africa, each instrument bears the particular stamp of its creator: "Generally, speaking each musician creates his very own instrument to suit his unique specific tastes. He also 'teaches' the instrument the language it'll 'speak,' which is, of course, the musician's personal mother tongue" (p. 40).

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