African Music by Francis Bebey

Author:Francis Bebey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 1975-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Many African griots stop their ears with hands when they sing.

THE HUMAN VOICE

We shall conclude with a few remarks about the human voice—the musical instrument most widely used by Africans, as an examination of available records will demonstrate. Even if we were to put all the recordings where the voice is of secondary importance into the instrumental category, we would still be left with a ratio of about two vocals to every instrumental piece. Vocal music is truly the essence of African musical art. This fact in no way diminishes the interest of musical instruments; on the contrary, since the prime motive of the instruments is to reconstitute spoken or sung language, they have a significance which is unparalleled in the music of other continents.

The utilization of the voice by musicians in black Africa—its timbres and the different nuances obtained by means of artifices unknown to the rest of the world (stopping the ears, pinching the nose, vibrating the tongue in the mouth, producing echoes by directing the voice into a receptacle, etc.)—largely accounts for the confusion, or rather, the incomprehension that almost inevitably confronts the non-African listener when he at first hears black African music.

Before we go any further, we must emphasize that the notion of a “beautiful singing voice”—one of the most subjective notions imaginable— cannot be applied to the letter as far as black singers are concerned. A Negro musician may happen to have a beautiful voice by Western standards, but this does not mean that his music springs from Western criteria—criteria such as melodic perfection, correctness of pitch, finish, or purity of tone. A beautiful voice (again in the Western sense) may be a mere accident in the context of traditional African music. The objective of African music is not necessarily to produce sounds agreeable to the ear, but to translate everyday experiences into living sound. In a musical environment whose constant purpose is to depict life, nature, or the supernatural, the musician wisely avoids using beauty as his criterion because no criterion could be more arbitrary.

Consequently, African voices adapt themselves to their musical context—a mellow tone to welcome a new bride; a husky voice to recount an indiscreet adventure; a satirical inflection for a teasing tone, with laughter bubbling up to compensate for the mockery—they may be soft or harsh as circumstances demand. Any individual who has the urge to make his voice heard is given the liberty to do so; singing is not a specialized affair. Anyone can sing and, in practice, everyone does.

This is the essence of the collective aspect of African music; no one is ruled out because he is technically below par. Vocal music is vitally important in this respect because it gives the people who perform it every day of their lives a confirmation of the social significance of their art. Therefore, it is hardly necessary to add that it is vocal music alone that can adequately express the meaning of a rite, offer up a prayer to the gods, pronounce sentence and order execution, or preach love and unity within the community.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.