Introduction to World Music: Lecture 8 - Music of Africa I

welcome back to music 239 introduction to World music today we move into a new chapter on music of Africa chapter three in your text uh should cover this material hope you've had a chance to read it and to listen to the musical examples on the CD we start by talking little about the continent of Africa I have some information on the PowerPoint presentations uh uh in terms of the population 800 million people extremely diverse in terms of languages a lot of different people here and a lot of different ethnic groups we're going to study only

a small fraction of the ethnic groups in Africa in the entire continent so there's a lot more to Africa than we're going to study in this class but we're going to focus in on just about four or five of those cultures sharing between groups there's a lot of um one of the major focuses I think of African music is that being together and sharing music in an ensemble setting is key to this particular culture so instead of having a single solo singer stand out a lot of times The Ensemble is more important now that doesn't

mean that there is some call and response and we're going to get into that a little later there certainly is call and response but the sharing issue is an extremely important one to get us started with African music I'd like to go back to one of the compositions that we listened to at the very beginning of this class and see if you remember it and see if you remember what it [Music] was [Music] [Music] [Music] what was this anybody remember post po workers doing what theying and canceling stamps in Ghana yes and then they were

whistling a tune over the top what was that tune anybody a him it was a himym tune right it's a religious oriented tune and they put that whole thing together uh basically just on their own to create a a very tight Ensemble kind of sound in your textbook you'll find a transcription of that in this chapter toward the beginning of the chapter you'll found transcription in which the tune is written out and also a breakdown of three parts of the rhythm of this tune okay what I'd like to do is to uh have us reconstruct

how that Rhythm goes together and then we're going to we're going to do a little performance of this piece so I need some more volunteers to be drummers and whistlers any good whistlers here come on down come on down my book uh probably you should bring your book yeah because you're going to need to see that Rhythm what part would you like to play I care okay anybody else we're going to need at least four performers okay come on somebody else we got two we need we need a couple more more volunteers all right come

on down you're elected you're elected can we get another one anybody good at Whistling here no well then I'll have I may have to whistle it you good whistler well come on we'll find out we'll find out now what we're going to do is take the three parts that are there and we're going to uh use particular drums and profession instruments to emulate those uh the lowest part see uh which is labeled C in your text who would like to do that three four okay Jonathan is elected to be the the drummer and that that

sort of uh that instrument sort of represents a is similar to the kagu uh which we will study later today in the agab cor Style Okay so we've got that room then we have to have the other one this one's going to I think require sticks now the one that's labeled B is a little bit more complicated and it's going to require sticks we're going to play this one on the water drum we studied the Native American Water drum a couple of sessions AG today we're going to look at an African water drum this one

is a little different than the Native American it's made entirely of gourds dried out gourds there's a large gourd a small gourd and then there's another piece of gourd that's been cut out here to serve as a stand thing about Africans and African music is that they tend to make musical instruments out of anything that's lying around uh and you'll see that in some of the other presentations that we have for this class but uh this one is basically just created out of gourds that have been cut to size so I'm going to go ahead

and put water in the larger container here and um with any luck it won't collapse and send water all over the room and what we're going to do is to float the smaller Gard on top of the larger gourd and the cavity inside the small cord combined with the water create a resonator for the [Music] drum pretty resonant sound isn't it okay now who would like to play would you prefer or should I your choice oh I don't care okay well you want to play exure okay now what you're going to do is play the

rhythm in [Music] B okay give it a [Music] try good good uh now we have one more part and I think it's the part that in the uh the recording is played by the scissors okay we don't have any scissors today so instead we are going to uh we're going to emulate that with with a gourd rattle okay so Andy I guess you're going to be the okay and and what you're going to do is to play a which happens on the an beat of two three and four like that right exactly uh the African

the the the name that we're going to study later for that is a hot um but uh the uh uh but the Latin American name for it is a kabasa so depending on where you go that instrument got lots of different names okay so uh Melody you're going to you're going to whistle I can I can help you okay we'll both we'll both be whistlers and we're going to we're going to whistle the tune okay right so why don't you stand over here with me and we'll be the whistlers and we'll try to put this

together now what we need is uh to do a little percussion rehearsal first of all to make sure that our percussion Ensemble is going to stay together okay let's let's give you guys a try ready one two three four [Music] now now okay let's let's bring the volume of that down just a little bit can uh try the other end of the STI see that's let's try let's try a lighter stick try see if it get a slightly lighter sound yeah that's going to look better okay right okay here we go one two three [Music]

4 [Music] okay okay okay well we got there we got there good job everybody it might surprise you to learn that the African workers who recorded this who performed in the recording uh did not consider this to be music okay in their culture this is simply something to pass the time while they work and it is not considered music at all for them now go back to our definition of music that we established on the first day of class that comes out of your text anybody remember what that was yes humanly organized sound music is

humanly organized sound and and so by that definition we determined on that first day that this did fit into the definition of music but uh the Africans who perform it do not consider it that way so from one culture to another there's going to be differences in terms of what actually constitutes music and it's a very interesting point now the other thing I'd like to point out about this is that those accents that uh that Andy was doing on the Alat which is the [Music] gourd see where those happened and your diagram there in the

book those all happen off the beat so the bead is going along one two 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 those are all happening off the beat there's a very important term for that that we're going to be using today today as we start to study African music anybody know what it is an accented note that happens off the beat like that synop syncopation exactly syncopation I'm going run into that term in a little bit this is our first real shot of it here is when you see

the material that happens in letter A in the uh in the transcription in your book now let's continue talking a little bit about instruments in Africa we've already seen a few we've seen some drums we've seen this really cool water drum and listen to that but also in this culture we have loops and harps we have uh an engraving of an eight string harp from around 18th century BCE that's uh that's that's quite a long time ago in addition bells and gongs gourd resonate in addition to bells and gongs we have gourd resonated xylophones and

this is one of them it's a xylophone created with wood on the top and then gourds on the bottom to help to create the Resonance of the sound and when you listen to [Music] it okay the the gourds help to resonate the sound of the wood being played like that so this is an example of a gourd resonated xylophone gourds are also used to resonate other instruments as we will see when we start to study the umir the thumb piano one other interesting thing about this particular xylophone is that these pitches are not tuned according

to Western tuning if you try to match those up with tune with with notes on the piano you would not be successful kind of similar to the Native American flute that we looked at in one of our previous sessions where the tuning does not match up with Western equal tempered tuning more about that later in this course we're going to start studying a little bit more in other cultures in how the tuning does not match up and this is yet another example of that uh and we'll see more of that as we continue to study

Africa okay cultural elements music and dance inseparable they are totally interconnected totally interconnected also uh ancestor reverence having to do with their religious beliefs that their ancestors have come back in some form or another in them and so a person that has some kind of musical Talent will generally look back to his ancestors or her ancestors and say yes this Talent comes from my great great grandfather who was also uh a wonderful drummer uh and so that kind of ancestor reverence ties religion to music in a very interesting way in this culture talking drums what's

that about well this is one this is not authentically African this is a reproduction of a talking drum but the the head the membranes on either side are stretched by the cords that are going between the two so that when you hold it under your arm and squeeze you actually are stretching the membrane tighter it's played with a curved stick you'll read about this in your text when you read about the uh the drummers the Looney drummers for example uh who uh play with the curved s and when you change the membrane you change the

pitch of the [Music] drum okay now why is it called a talking drum because by changing the pitch of the drum you can emulate actual speech patterns and and The rhythms are emulating this the rhythm of the words and so the drum is actually emulating actual spoken text and is used to send messages over long distance by using the talking drum uh people that know what they're listening to can hear the message that's being sent by the drummers many of the pieces that we'll see in this unit uh pieces of music actually have syllables of

text and and actual words that go with it that are not only used to help memorize it but are also used to send messages in their original format so talking drums very important aspect of this culture as I said dance completely intertwined with music in this culture and uh in some cases uh they are um only a veiled ritual purpose they they have a dance just because they like to dance and uh the the actual ritual uh around which the dance is organized may be a secondary matter typically they are done in groups circles or

lines okay uh very typical of African dance music to be done as a large group musical Traditions are learned by passing it down from one generation to another similar to what we heard about in the Ozarks folk music in our previous session is is extremely important part of the culture we will see that with many of the African cultures we St we study uh we're going to study for example about the jalu or Grio in which is a court tradition uh and you can only become a Creo or a shalu by being the son of

another Grio or jalu like a um like a guild almost where you have to be born into that family or cast like in India the cast system very stratified social uh requirement now musical characteristics found in Africa this is a similar list to the one that we looked at with Native American music and so I want you to be able to refer back to this page this is a very important one for your notes because all of these 11 Elements which are characteristic of African music you're going to find in all of the pieces that

we're studying but perhaps not all of them in all of the pieces so uh we are going to be doing the same kind of very scientific sort of approach that we use to the music where we study how many of the elements exist in each one of the pieces let's go over this list briefly and uh talk about what these elements mean repetition that one's pretty self-explanatory just as we saw in Native American music repetition is going to exist in African music pentatonics there it is again pentatonic scale okay you know what that is now

so uh no explanation is probably necessary non Western sense of pitch that's uh that's sort of a new one although we did see it with the Native American flute and uh and and we discussed it just a minute ago but Western pitch has to do uh to our ears with the division of the octave into 12 equal parts that's not necessarily going to happen in African music there is a uh there is an interesting comparison to be made here as well in your book you will find a um in your book you will find a

description of the use of pitch variability where they are talking about the uh the music associated with aget cor which we'll study a little later in today's session and um in this section I'm going to just read a sentence from the book here the intonation of the second scale degree is variable sometimes n sometimes natural sometimes flat often somewhere in between so the second scale degree that particular note that you see in the transcription there sometimes appears as an F natural sometimes as an f and in the reality the singer is singing something that's somewhat

in between there now there's an interesting parallel to be made between this and uh African-American Blues and particularly the blue node that we're going to study when we get to that unit but you can also compare it back to the Native American flute and the fact that there were certain notes that just did not tune up with the synthesizer so the fact that not all tuning Alles itself with Western tuning is something that we're going to see more and more very important component of this style Coral singing as well as solo singing okay a lot

more Coral singing than we saw in the Native American style there is also solo singing but uh as I said before the sense of Ensemble is Paramount here to the African sense of community music making call and response we saw just a little of that in Native American music in African music it is going to become one of the stocks in trade okay one of the founding uh I should say uh one of the building blocks of this style is the call and response method poly Rhythm poly Rhythm okay now uh that is another one

of these major major elements in this style uh we're going to study some of that today we saw some of it when we did our Recreation of the postal workers song where there were rhythms that were pulling against each other the most prevalent use of poly rhythm in this style that we'll look at though is the sense of three against two three against two now in order to demonstrate that we're going to do a little experiment okay everybody uh everybody clear off your desk so that you have a desk in front of you with with

no book and we're going to divide you up into two groups so I want um this about this half of the room starting about here you're going to be group a everybody else is Group B roue you divide the beat by two okay you're dividing the beat by two group be you divide the beat by three so if the beat is here the people dividing by two let hear you guys here go you got a drum right in front of you good good stop now Group B you're dividing the group you're dividing the beat by

three one you okay use both hands if you need to keep that going now keep that going and let's add the two St in two three four good good yeah you can practice it on your own if you can get one hand to play in two and the other hand to play in three you can emulate the sound of African drumming and much of African music that we are studying because that whole pull of two against three ends up sounding something like this do it up here [Music] right okay three going on here two going

on here put those together and you get that interesting pull of the poly rhythm of two against three right so that's the essence of poly Rhythm it is a major major element in the style of all of the African music that we're going to look at the next on our list is syncopation and we talked about syncopation already somebody give me a working definition again accented right accented offbeats or an accented notes that happen off the beat okay very good definition of syncopation and we heard a little bit in the uh in the African postal

music we heard a little bit in the postal workers music let's go back and listen to that again so that we can hear that syncopation [Music] [Music] happening I think we sounded better don't you I think our our students sounded better than that well maybe not at any rate the uh uh the syncopation that you hear there makes it very danike and helps to drive the music along so syncopation is extremely important element buzzing rling sounds okay uh you particularly hear that when you listen to the imira which is the African thumb piano and they

have a little membrane in there that buzzes and rattles while they play they really like like that kind of sound we're going to see that very very characteristic in this style songs integrated into storytelling in some cases uh the singer is essentially a historian who is keeping the history of his tribe or his village through song and the song is the way that they remember the history of the tribe and the or the village going way way back okay so we're going to see the Grio for example are the uh the particular Guild of musicians

that is the historian SL Storyteller SL singer you'll see that in this culture and finally music accompanied by body movement such as hand clapping dance and work we've already seen that here in the postal workers music we'll see it more as this uh as we continue studying these styles 11 characterist istics and we'll begin to associate them with the music as we go on okay now I mentioned that the African rhythms are Central to their to their music uh there is a quotation that rhythm is to the African as Harmony is to the European uh

that's a very important axom to remember as we study African music there are always at least two rhythmic things going on 3:2 is Central as we uh just demonstrated with our drums our desk drums but there are additional cross rhythms that are used by African performers besides just three to two one of them is known as clo aym and I want you to know about that one in addition to the 3 to2 uh the next PowerPoint slide has a demonstration of both of these types of poly rthm 3 against two being demonstrated up above and

that's the one we did already but the other one is clave you take a set of 16 notes dividing the measure so four sets of 416th notes and then you put a in the particular places that are shown you will get what is known as clave Rhythm which has become exported from Africa into South America into Cuba into all of the Latin American countries and we will study that later on as as a as a rhythm that is a prevalent part of those cultures it comes from Africa so if you have 16 notes like that

and you accent the ones that are shown there so that you get this right then you take out all of the 16th notes except the ones that were accented you get and that is the Rhythm that the clave instrument plays in a lot of Latin American Music okay if you listen to Latin American dance music such as AR Rumba the chaa if you listen to Tango you will hear the clave in the instrumental Ensemble what is a clav anybody know what clav are aren't they like two sticks yeah two sticks not like these they're actually

a lot more resonant but that's what the claas would play we'll bring some in when we study Latin American music but right now I want you to understand where this comes from and how it essentially is an African cross Rhythm just like 3 against two those are the two cross rhythms that I'd like you to know for this class are the three against two and the CLA Rhythm and they are both demonstrated on this slide any questions about about that okay instruments here are the categories of instruments that we've studied before lots of idiophones sticks

Bells rattles xylophones stamping tubes anybody know what a stamping tube is take a big tube made of bamboo or PBC whatever you can find Africans are very resourceful and you basically cut them to different sizes and then you literally hit them on the ground to create tones you stamp them on the ground and that creates the tones and you make music out of it uh as you as as we look at the African culture we will see that they have ways of making music out of just about anything like a gourd for example okay membranophones

Drums of all types copones yes the the particularly the harp the loot and the sither we're going to see uh the Kora harp later on uh in this unit very important part of the African culture and aerones flutes whistles OBO and trumpets one colleague of mine uh who will be doing a presentation uh has uh pictures of young boys making trombones out of pieces of bamboo okay they will make these instruments out of just about anything and these interesting slide instruments that they made out of out of bamboo are quite fascinated okay now we begin

by studying music of GH where is Ghana well you have pictures in your book of Ghana on the west coast of Africa and the first style of music that we're going to study is the a-way people who live right on the coast uh in in an area that is encompassed both by Ghana and Togo which is just east of Ghana and you can see both of those on your map in your text the aay people are quite famous for a dance called AET okay aget and your book goes into quite a bit of um detail

about this style and so we're going to spend a significant amount of time talking about AET core and eventually uh after our first test uh we will have a performance of aget core so I'm looking going to be looking for more volunteer drummers to come up and recreate aget core what does agab cor mean what does your text say anybody find that it means clear light literally okay yeah it's it's it's right up on on the PowerPoint uh clear life literal translation and that meaning basically translates as our lives are in the clear now that

the battle is over and we've won it's a celebration after having won a military Victory but there's much more to the reasons behind adet core than just celebrating the victory in fact uh it it originat as war from okay there's a passage in your text that I would like to read to you about this in which uh they discussed the reasons for having agor in the first place your text says when the Warriors heard the rhythms they would be completely filled with bravery they would not think that they might be going never to return for

their minds were filled only with spots of fighting now this is an interesting cultural phenomenon back at the beginning of this course I wrote down that one of the things we would study is music as a controlling Force how is music used to control the way you think and the way you act and uh the ability of music to make people want to go fight in a war is something that has been around for a long time and is a cross cultural phenomenon in this culture aget cor drumming was used for this purpose to get

people all excited about particularly the men excited about going and fighting can you think of uh of ways that this has been done in other cultures whether whether other cultures ways of getting people excited about going and fighting in a war yes Scotland bag pipes absolutely yeah bag pipes are are amazing major influence on on on on warlike activity with the Scots anything else yes the dancing of the Native Americans dancing of the Native Americans so can you think of specific one that we studied I know I'm putting you on the spot yeah how about

the Sue grass dance there you go yeah great one uhhuh Sue grass Dan in fact the braids of grass in the grass that they wore on their uh on their outfits uh represent the enemies that they have killed okay so the grass dance is a very important Bo dance good good analogy what else how about this ah yeah trumpets and vehicle calls right anytime you do something like uh like this charge right cavalry charge it's getting people excited and uh making them forget about the fact that they might get shot with an arrow okay uh

you could you could find so many cross-cultural kinds of things anybody seen the movie um Apocalypse Now yeah what did they do the Valkyries right of the Valkyries they used vogner's music uh blasting it from the helicopters to try to put fear in the hearts of the vet Kong as they uh as they got ready to drop naal on them you remember the famous quotation from that scene I love the smell of naal in the morning I love the smell of naal in the morning yeah Robert Duval uh very famous scene uh in this case

uh that particular passage of Music being used to get people excited about dropping Napal on somebody uh music as a control ring Force extremely important cultural phenomenon so keep that one in mind as we continue to study this uh because that's a crosscultural phenomenon that you're going to see happen more and more okay back to aget for what's the leg what is linked to a legend of a monkey dance anybody run into that in their reading okay okay check that out in the text because there is a legend about how aget cor originated having to

do with the fact that uh they they saw monkeys doing this and they imitated and they decided to bring it into the culture and there are different versions of how this related originally to a monkey dance so there there is an interesting cultural thing there that you might want to read about in your text um some other things in the text that I would like to point out to you and highlight uh uh there is a passage in here about how the missionaries when they came to this area of Africa attempted to eradicate the traditional

music of this area by whipping the young students who tried to perform aget Corp okay uh Randy Falcon who spoke to us the other day uh went to a school when he was a young boy and they did the same thing to try to keep them from singing their Native American song songs in other words they wanted them to get rid of their past and their past religious beliefs so that they would change to the religion that they were attempting to establish uh and so you see that particular pattern happening in a lot of different

cultures as well as you have a crosscultural sort of clash with one religion clashing with another one other thing to point out about aget that relates with well I think to the Native American styles that we have studied is that all of the drummers are male you find this in your text as well but the singers are largely female now how does that compare to what Randy Falcon told us about the the role of the women in the Native American drumming most women don't but some tribes have only women okay some tribes now currently have

women who are drumers because why the males have lost their interest in it yeah the men don't want to do it anymore right but uh in in in his particular tradition what was the role of the women sit behind the yes to to sit or stand behind the man and remind them of where they were and What song came next and and what they were supposed to be doing so you you can I think it's an interesting thing cross culturally to trace the role of men and women in music in that particular culture and see

who is allowed to do what when we get to Japan for example we're going to find a completely different role for men and women uh compared to what we see here in Africa and what we've seen in Native American Styles so that's another interesting cross-cultural uh sort of phenomenon to trace okay let's get into a little bit of aget today we're going to probably have enough time to do just a little bit of this and then we'll continue it in our next session um the most important element of aget core for a beginner is to

listen to the Bell okay and this is a this is a bell anybody know what this is called any percussion people in here two different PID this is technically a Latin American instrument called a goo Bells but uh it actually comes from Africa and aget cor is one of the antecedants I think of the Agogo in the uh aay culture it's called the kogui and there's sort of a parallel Agogo kogui there's there is a linguistic parallel I think there two different pitches and the essence of aget is kept together by what the cono player

is doing and if you can look at that you'll find places in your text where the transcription of the various components of aget cor takes place okay find that place in your book and you'll see the transcription of the Bell Rhythm right up top and it sounds like this that's what the Bell is play now to your ears where is the beat when I play [Music] this Clap the beat for me [Music] right that is certainly one of the beads okay what you did was to divide the measure into six parts okay by doing that

one two three four five six 1 two three four five six okay the measure or the pattern that I was playing you divided it into six parts and did it like that that is not necessarily how the African hears it however the African actually hears that pattern divided into four parts and in our diagram that we have on the web page on the PowerPoint you'll see that that measure of 128 is divided into four dotted quarter notes so that instead of thinking it as [Music] being one two three four five six like that instead it's

divided into 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 four everybody clap that Rhythm one 2 3 4 1 now listen to The [Music] Bell [Music] it's weird isn't it it's weird but that's the poly Rhythm pulling against each other because there's a feeling of Six Beats to the measure but there's also a feeling of four beats to the measure and they're both going on at the same time and so as we begin to add more and more instruments to the alet core pattern and I'll show you what that looks like okay in your PowerPoint you

can see the full background pattern here and as you add more instruments to it some of those instruments are going to be playing with a division of the beat of six and the other ones are going to be doing four and so what you have here is a really big three against two because the six is basically just 3 multiplied by two and the four is going to pull against that three just in the same way that two against three did when we did it on our desks a few minutes ago so we have that

four against six is essentially the same mathematically as the two against three and you get that same kind of pull so we're going to we're going to continue studying this as we as we uh as we get together the next time