4. 7 dimensions of West African music
performance
1- community context
2- musical performers
3- instruments (including voice)
4- rhythm
5- melodic material
6- form
7- texture
5. Community Context
• Occasional – functions as indispensable ingredient of
religious or social activity. Gives meaning to ritual.
• Music is “a primary vehicle for man’s communication
with the supernatural, symbolizing a person’s identity
with a group, reflecting and reinforcing the dominant
characteristics, values and directions of a culture.”
What happens to the music when a society is moved,
changed and not permitted to pursue its old
religion(s)?
6. African American music
• What happens to a tribal music when
the conditions of life are rapidly and
radically changed through geographical
displacement, enslavement, and
infusion of non-tribal, Western musical
and cultural elements?
7. Musical Performers
• Music makers include both men and women, both
soloist and ensemble. Soloist is often leader in call
and response ceremonial song, which underscores
social integration (expert is socially integrated into a
community/group)
• Cross-fertilization between music and dance – John
Miller Chernoff remarks that for an African,
“understanding” a certain type of music means, in its
most fundamental sense, knowing what dance it
accompanies
8. Instruments (including voice)
• Intimate relationship between tonal language and
musical sound in performance of African instruments.
Use of instruments to emulate human voice,
extending to percussion instruments, most notably
the kalangu, talking drum of west Africa
• Value of “dirty” tones, non-pitch specific sounds
which add to richness of sound.
9. Rhythm
• Metrical structure with regular beats complemented
by emphasis on syncopation, playing off the beats.
• Additive structure of short repeated rhythmic
patterns. Prolonged steady tempo gives music
cohesiveness and propulsion. Unchaning steady
beat called”hot” in Africa and in jazz/blues/rhythm
and blues
• Rhythmic polyphony displays superimposition of
many varying meters over basic pulse pattern.
Complex pattern combinations create rhythmic
variety.
10. Melodic material
• Melodic contour related to language intonation. Less
emphasis on fixed pitch and more attention to pitch
relationships. Melodic ideas connected to speech
patterns. Pentatonic/heptatonic pitch systems related
to blues scales (notes “in-between the keys”)
• Tendency to use short phrases or motives to build
larger patterns. Additive nature of melodies combine
with additive nature of rhythms
11. Form and texture
• Call and response forms. Socially oriented music
often improvised for special occasions. Often cyclical
structure. Improvisation celebrates special unique
nature of the moment, not to be mechanically
reproduced. Also characteristic of non-literate
societies…
• Variety of simultaneous sounds (solo vs. response),
variety of melodic phrases (improvised variation,
melismas, swoops, growls, timbral changes)
12. Ruins of Fort on St. James Island
Where Slaves Were Held
13. Cell Where Slaves Were Held on
St. James Island, Gambia, important slave-trade port
