African Music as Text

Kofi Agawu

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Musicology and Musical Analysis Music History and Culture Diverse Musicological Studies

Abstract

In so far as they constitute complex messages rooted in specific cultural practices, the varieties of African music known to us today may be designated as text. While performing practice and audience participation vary according to genre, the activity of meaning construction remains essential to all participants. We only have to listen to the elaborate vocal polyphony of BaAka Pygmies, the polyrhythmic dance-drumming of Fon, Anlo-Ewe, or Yoruba, the horn ensembles of the Banda-Linda; or Zairean soukous, Nigerian jùjú and fújì, Ghanaian Highlife, South African mbube; or the compositions of Fela Sowande, Akin Euba, Ephraim Amu, and Joshua Uzoigwe to begin to appreciate the kinds of fantasies that music in motion elicits.

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References

1985Semiotics: An introductory anthology 1985Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After 1971Language in Relation to Other Communication Systems 1980African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms 1980African Rhythm and African Sensibility. Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms 1965Drumming in Akan Communities of Ghana 1995African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective 1995Theory of African Music

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