Analytical Approaches to World Musics
ISSN 2158-5296
2013, Volume 3, No. 1
AAWM JOURNAL Volume 3, No. 1 (2013)
Volume 3, No. 1 (2013)
Call and Response in Ewe Agbadza Songs: One Element in a Network of Musical Factors
David Locke
Call-and-response has iconic status as a sign of African musical style. The approach to musical form is widespread geographically, frequently used, found in many genres, and employed on most instruments. The form enables collective participation in music-making, which is another oft-noted characteristic of African music. The form’s emblematic status in musical discourse entails a risk of under-estimating its sophistication. Countering the notion that call-and-response is limited to a simple, back-and-forth, AB alternation this paper argues that the concept of musical exchange between complementary melodic-rhythmic units is capable of providing structure to a great variety of musical forms. Focusing on a corpus of twenty-five songs from the Ewe dance-drumming music called Agbadza, the paper will demonstrate how composers combine factors of melody, rhythm, tonality, sonority, and lyrics to yield subtle yet significant formal variety to the their works of vocal music.
Rhythmic Elasticity and Metric Transformation in Tunisian Stambēlī
Richard C. Jankowsky
Stambēlī is a trance healing music developed over centuries by displaced sub-Saharans in Tunisia. It features a monophonic, deeply cyclic, and subtly transformative rhythmic system designed for entrainment. This rhythmic system is characterized by 1) a metric framework of non-isochronous beat patterns and 2) a gradual and normative rhythmic cycle compression that gradually transforms the non-isochronous beat subdivisions into nearly isochronous ones as the tempo increases. In this article, I illustrate these transformations through chronometric analysis of songs in each of stambeli’s four rhythms. I propose a set of musical and ritual conditions that contribute to this rhythmic elasticity, and suggest that close analytical attention to Stambēlī’s rhythmic system broadens our understanding of “African” rhythm and meter.
Fractal Harmonies of Southern Africa
Martin Scherzinger
At stake in this article is a demonstration of the fractal-like logic undergirding harmonic processes found in the archaic lamellaphone music in the region of Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Mozambique. Fractal geometric shapes are generally attributed to objects found in opthalmic nature (clouds, snow flakes, frost crystals, etc.) and the visual arts (Giacometti’s landscapes, Tuareg leatherwork, etc.). In most accounts, therefore, recurrence relations between geometric shapes (on reduced-size, or magnified, scales) are described in relation to points in space; less often do fractal relations pertain to aspects of time. This presentation reflects upon fractal relations in time, as shaped in specific musical traditions of southern Africa. By way of two detailed harmonic analyses, depicted on geometric graphs, the presentation will reveal the music’s fractal-like temporal qualities.
In lamellaphone music of southern Africa, the time-transcending symmetric and near-symmetric harmonic shapes that ground the music’s rhythmic-melodic flow are perhaps the most striking mathematical aspect of the music. In mbira, kalimba, njari and matepe music we find harmonic shapes – or, more precisely, subsets within their characteristic harmonic progressions – that constitute and resemble shapes found elsewhere in the progression. The resemblance frequently involves identity across an imaginary mirror axis, projected either horizontally or vertically. In other words, harmonic shapes recur in uncanny inversion or retrograde forms at various points in their respective cycles. Furthermore, harmonic shapes also recur in original (non-mirrored) form at various pitch-transpositions within the progression, which facilitates hearing near-identical harmonic trajectories at different points within the cycle. In other words, these harmonic structures facilitate a kind of phase-shifted experience of similitude in the context of transformation (no less than transformation in the context of similitude). The music’s unexpected mimesis can thus be heard in various ambiguous “contrapuntal” combinations.
Charles Lwanga
In the twenty-first century, Béla Bartók and other composers inspired a generation of African Art music composers who are preoccupied with the search for new musical idioms. Through formal music education and field research, these composers acquired a richer context for creativity, one that provokes possibilities of bridging existing boundaries between music scholarship and composition. The composition style of Ugandan composer and music professor Justinian Tamusuza, for instance, exemplifies an approach that amalgamates Ganda (traditions and customs of the Baganda people of south-central Uganda) and Western musical idioms, to create a unique aesthetic. Focusing on the first movement of his string quartet Mu Kkubo e ry’Omusaalaba, I examine how Tamusuza’s approach to composing art music bridges ethnomusicology and composition. I examine how he evokes and employs Ganda musical sonorities and processes to articulate the interactive imperative in baakisimba music practice of the Baganda.
Building Bridges Between African Traditional and Western Art Music: A Study of Joshua Uzoigwe’s Egwu Amala
Marie Agatha Ozah
The use of folk music in western art composition has its roots in the works of Béla Bartók (1881-1945). Motivated by his interest in folk music and contemporary renaissance of attention in rational national culture, Bartók in 1908, collected and studied old Magyar folk melodies, and later incorporated elements of these peasant music into his compositions. His style thus became a symbiosis of oral folk music, classicism, and modernism. Akin Euba has, in recent times, popularized this approach to musical composition through his theory of creative musicology.
This blending of traditional and Western art idioms have underscored the compositions of many African art music composers, including Joshua Uzoigwe, a Nigerian ethnomusicologist and composer, who have explored and utilized traditional music resources as the principal basis of their modern art music compositions.
Among Uzoigwe’s many works is his famed Talking Drums for Solo Piano. This collection consists of five pieces that draw upon rhythmic and melodic characteristics of Igbo folk music. My paper focuses on one of these pieces, Egwu Amala, because its sonic and rhythmic structures are derived from Égwú Àmàlà, a popular women’s dance genre of the Ogbaru people of southern Nigeria. I argue how Uzoigwe’s ethnomusicological scholarship and compositional skills articulate intercultural approaches to contemporary African art music creativity. Engaging Égwú Àmàlà as a pre-compositional resource, I analyze the musical components of this traditional dance to explain those unique folksy characteristics that influenced the conception, creativity, and the structure of Uzoigwe’s contemporary piano composition, Egwu Amala.
In lamellaphone music of southern Africa, the time-transcending symmetric and near-symmetric harmonic shapes that ground the music’s rhythmic-melodic flow are perhaps the most striking mathematical aspect of the music. In mbira, kalimba, njari and matepe music we find harmonic shapes – or, more precisely, subsets within their characteristic harmonic progressions – that constitute and resemble shapes found elsewhere in the progression. The resemblance frequently involves identity across an imaginary mirror axis, projected either horizontally or vertically. In other words, harmonic shapes recur in uncanny inversion or retrograde forms at various points in their respective cycles. Furthermore, harmonic shapes also recur in original (non-mirrored) form at various pitch-transpositions within the progression, which facilitates hearing near-identical harmonic trajectories at different points within the cycle. In other words, these harmonic structures facilitate a kind of phase-shifted experience of similitude in the context of transformation (no less than transformation in the context of similitude). The music’s unexpected mimesis can thus be heard in various ambiguous “contrapuntal” combinations.