from Research in African Literatures Volume 32, Number 2Introduction
Kofi Agawu
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The essays gathered in this special issue of Research in African Literatures are united by an overriding concern with the interface between music and language and with a number of conceptual and analytical issues that flow from that conjunction. Students of traditional African cultures have often remarked upon the close relationship between language and music. For example, African tone languages, with their intersyllabic relational pitch structure, manifest a musical aspect that in turn constrains melodic contour. Second, the popular and popularizing phenomenon of talking drums, the idea that drums (and other speech surrogates) “speak” and are understood in the way that one understands spoken language—this phenomenon has at its core a configuration involving music and language. And third, the words that enable song, the poet’s emergent music that is eventually colonized by the composer’s music—these song words raise a host of interesting questions about how language is articulated in song, to what extent song displays autonomous structure, and ways in which meaning is transferred from text to music and vice versa.
It will require not one but several issues of Research in African Literatures to air comprehensively the issues involved in a study of music and language. Such a project will be interdisciplinary, drawing on specialized research in folklore, linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, and musicology. Definitions will need to be entered from the start, definitions of the foundational terms music and language, among many others. Questions as to whether music is a language, whether it signifies, and if so how will have to be raised. The problematics of communication will not be left out. The effects of in-time performance will not be ignored; nor will repertorial and generic distinctions be subsumed under an all-purpose “music.” The discussion will be grounded in the specifics of African nomenclature and experience, with each researcher entering deeply into the overlapping conceptual worlds of indigenous performer-critics. The interconnectedness between music and dance will form a part of the study, drawing analytical lessons from indigenous conceptions of play. Finally, the discussion will probe the poetic content of song texts, seeking an understanding of them as expressions of particular individuals or groups, and also as generalized responses to desire, need, loss, or misery, as expressions of joy and elation, or in response to an incitement to warfare.
There are, of course, isolated studies of these issues in the literature on African music and folklore, and it is hoped that the following essays will stimulate further discussion. By far the most concrete point of contact between music and language lies in the song text. Daniel Avorgbedor’s “It’s a Great Song!” offers a comprehensive and incisive analysis of the literary devices employed by Anlo-Ewe poets in a genre of songs of insult known as hal—. (Hal— flourished between 1912 and 1962). In this “war of insults and music,” where rival clans or wards or villages meet to trade sung insults, poets need not be concerned with facts or accurate reporting. They may make up half-truths, accuse people falsely, or deploy maledictions. Considerable learning and inventiveness are required for composing effective hal— texts. Avorgbedor’s glosses on individual texts show the value of interpretation that is not deaf to Anlo ways of world-making. Without this cultural understanding, not all readers will know quite what to make of references to people with crooked teeth, others with flat buttocks, some with questionable ancestry, others with a dance style “like fabric used to sew mismatched attire,” and one who “had sex with his sister [and] the sister died.” Avorgbedor is not here concerned with the musical realization of hal— texts (but see his “Freedom to Sing, License to Insult”); nor does he delineate the difference in impact between spoken and sung insults. He is concerned rather with the range of literary devices employed by Anlo-Ewe poets. Armed with his findings, however, future researchers will be in a much stronger position to pursue a full musico-poetic analysis. They may also shed light on what it is about the medium of sound that enables people in many African communities to sing what cannot be spoken.
Like Avorgbedor, Tanure Ojaide provides a comprehensive analysis of song texts. The genre is udje dance song, the songs are satirical, and their exponents are the Urhobo of the Delta State of Nigeria. Udje songs are used to correct anti-social behavior. They are performed in ritualized song contests analogous to warfare. Because societal living among the Urhobo is regulated by a communal ethos, udje songs come into being as responses to any force or action that threatens to undermine that ethos. The themes of these songs are wide-ranging. Among topics satirized are idleness, cowardice, ugliness (including physical deformities), madness, greed, and miserliness. In addition, sex-related offenses are made fun of: impotence, sterility, adultery, prostitution, incest, having sex in the bush, and being oversexed. Ojaide isolates the literary devices with which these texts are brought to life, describes performance situations, and concludes by assessing the impact of colonialism on the life of this traditional genre that flourished from the early nineteenth century to the first quarter or so of the twentieth. Striking are the parallels between udje song contests and the practices associated with hal— and other Anlo-Ewe song performances (see Anyidoho, “Oral Poetics and Traditions of Verbal Art in Africa”). Ojaide opens a number of hermeneutic windows in this comprehensive and entertaining essay.
With Tejumola Olaniyan’s splendid essay on the notorious Fela Anikulapo Kuti we move out of old Africa, so to speak, into a new, modern Africa. (This is inaccurate, of course; spatial metaphors better capture this move, for the traditional and modern exist not always in a temporal sequence but side by side as well, sometimes within the same locales.) Not only song texts but biographical and stylistic-historical data allow Olaniyan to tease out some of the complexities and contradictions in Fela’s musical thematizations of contemporary social, political, and economic problems. The central contradiction, indeed one that goes beyond contradiction to register “antinomies,” is the nativist-cosmopolitan nexus. Olaniyan’s framing here is deeply suggestive for other studies of musical postmodernity, including developments in art music.
It is a pity that his analysis does not extend to the long stretches of purely instrumental music that many listeners associate with Fela. For example, “Lady,” a composition lasting 13’50 begins with a full 6 minutes of instrumental music before the voice enters, while “Shakara,” lasting a total of 13’26 is inaugurated by 6’30 of instrumental playing. (Both may be heard on the 1971 album, Shakara.) In these drawn out, wordless stretches, we hear (or are invited to hear) another kind of speech, a different set of protests, satires and commentaries. Musical discourse thus prepares (or anticipates, or is supplemented by) the verbal and musico-verbal discourses that come later in each song. Perhaps future researchers will extend this fruitful opening in Olaniyan’s work.
In “Beyond Song Texts,” Meki Nzewi and his (token) co-authors explore the meanings of drum speaking. Drawing on ethnographic research on Ese tuned drum music of the Ngwa Igbo of Nigeria, Nzewi first lists the role that text plays in music. Then he describes the instruments that do the talking, and explains what is said and how it is danced. An unrelenting advocate of authentic understanding of African music, Nzewi stresses the language basis and spiritual character of drumming and dancing. His overriding aim would seem to be to illuminate “music’s human mission,” as one of his co-authors put it. Nzewi does not provide extensive documentation of the specific individuals or groups who so tragically misunderstand African expressive arts, and although one might be sympathetic to his critique, one also yearns for a more targeted demolition of the offending scholarship. But perhaps such pedantic naming might mute the force of his programmatic assertions.
Discovering the hidden music of poetry is the task of Luke Eyoh’s essay. The focus here is on J. P. Clark-Bekederemo’s “Return of the Fishermen,” which is understood as embodying a number of organizational principles indigenous to music, foremost among them rhythm. Eyoh’s suggestive essay reminds us that written poetry, like transcribed oral poetry, badly needs a range of supplements in order to come to life. Eyoh’s recognition of such parallels does not lead him to collapse distinctions but to pursue a critical path suggested by one of them. Thus the notion of polymeter, which in principle indexes simultaneous doing in ensemble performance, is applied analytically to poetry in a bid to put a positive slant on the free-verse character of African poetry in English.
A number of musicologists have denied that polymeter (not polyrhythm) is a feature of African music (Kolinski 501; Arom 205; and Anku 170, among many others), but it is unlikely that the work of specialists will dissuade exotica-seeking writers from finding the most fantastic polymetric structures in African music. Eyoh in effect erases the vertical dimension of polymeter by reducing its sense to the linear succession of differing time spans. It is at moments like this, moments in which our vocabulary signifies differently, that some might feel a strain in the cross-disciplinary effort. But this in no way undermines the value of Eyoh’s injunction that we listen beyond the semantic exterior of poetry.
Of special interest as an insider’s perspective is composer Akin Euba’s essay, “Text Setting in African Composition.” Analyses by literary critics, musicologists and folklorists can seem detached, for they have neither the challenges nor pressures of in-time, aesthetically motivated composition and performance. Euba, by contrast, is regularly on the battle front, so to speak, as for example when he has to select a text for musical setting. Taking a cue from composers of traditional music, Euba acknowledges that “texts are crucial to the understanding of music in African societies.”
In what language should the African composer speak? Euba has set Yoruba and English texts, and his overall aim would seem to be to achieve “an African identity in music (based on pan-African elements).” Pan-Africanism defines itself against an imagined Europe, however, so that when an African composer writes an opera, symphony, or string quartet, s/he is in danger of sounding ironic, perhaps inauthentic. But how long can this oppressive binary opposite persist? Shouldn’t it be possible for an African composer like Euba to sound African no matter what language he chooses—or, more to the point, is chosen—to speak in? Is it conceivable that Christian worshipers fail somehow to reach God because the language of hymns was borrowed from Europe? To pose these questions is to hint at some of the absurdities they subtend. Passages from Euba’s scores reproduced in his article, although designed to exemplify more or less successful invocation of an African sound world, are perhaps better approached as more or less successful instances of word setting.
The issue of identity looms large in Carol Muller’s biographical study of South African-born jazz singer Sathima Bea Benjamin. From Cape Town through various European locations to New York, Sathima’s life as a musician has accrued a complex texture within an overarching desire to maintain “the spirit of South Africa.” Muller provides a lucid and absorbing account of the cumulative impact of these experiences on Sathima’s construction of her own identity, itself informed by her choice of repertoire and style, her recording priorities, and her political commitments.
Finally, Bode Omojola tackles the piano works of Akin Euba, detailing salient aspects of form and process, hinting at their cultural meanings, and rehearsing familiar dilemmas about how to achieve an African identity in sound. Euba invented the phrase African pianism to designate an expanding repertoire of compositions for piano written primarily—but not exclusively—by African composers in a diversity of idioms each of which bears an African trace. Traces include compound meters like 6/8 or 12/8 as indices of African dance, extensive use of repetition and ostinato patterns, use of certain instruments, singing in African languages, and incorporation of folk material in the manner of Bart—k into a dense, atonal and—for some people- alienating musical language.
But is African pianism possible? From a symbolic point of view, the piano is quintessentially European. And yet, as a percussion instrument, the piano shares modes of execution with traditional African instruments like xylophones, mbiras, and drums. Increasing use of keyboards of various sorts in popular and religious musics throughout urban Africa would lend further support to the view that the piano was already an “African” instrument. Yet, while the use of a keyboard in a highlife or jùjú band raises no eyebrows, the composition of a sonata or suite for piano alone, to be performed in front of a listening but not dancing audience often in a dark auditorium—this practice apparently requires justification. Euba has written and spoken eloquently about these issues, and Omojola makes good use of his words in explaining his music. Whether practice will ever catch up with theory remains to be seen, but it may not be a bad idea to talk less and compose more.
Understood as “sound that is organized into socially acceptable patterns” (Blacking, 25), music is sound at the core. This apparently tautological statement may help set into relief a counterclaim that music is “hollow at the core” (de Man, 128). For it is precisely in that hollow space, the space filled by a hollow sound, that active listeners and interpreters are invited to play, to invent, to dream, and inevitably, to lie. If, in their engagement with aspects of the relationship between word and tone, between language and music, the essays assembled here provide some food for thought for intellectually curious music lovers, they will have served their purpose.
WORKS CITED
Anku, Willie. “Towards a Cross-Cultural Theory of Rhythm in African Drumming.” Intercultural Music Vol. 1. Ed. Cynthia Tse Kimberlin and Akin Euba. London: Centre for Intercultural Music Arts and Bayreuth, Bayreuth African Studies Series, 1995. 167-202.
Anyidoho, Kofi. “Oral Poetics and Traditions of Verbal Art in Africa.” Diss. U of Texas at Austin, 1983.
Arom, Simha. African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: Musical Structure and Methodology. Trans. Martin Thom et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
Avorgbedor, Daniel. “Freedom to Sing, License to Insult: The Influence of Halo Performance on Social Violence among the Anlo-Ewe.” Oral Tradition 9.1 (1994): 83-112.
Blacking, John. How Musical Is Man? Seattle: U of Washington P, 1973.
de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Kolinski, Mieczslaw. “A Cross-Cultural Approach to Metro-Rhythmic Patterns.” Ethnomusicology 17.3 (1973): 217-46.
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