14 - 20 March 2002
Issue No.577
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 March 2002 Issue No.577 |
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Beyond the eight-tone scale
Composing the Music of Africa: Composition, Interpretation and Realisation, Malcolm Floyd (ed.), London: Ashgate, 2001. pp351The subtitle of this book is an indication of the attention it gives to both the musicologist and the lay reader. Indeed, "on the Equator anybody who finds it more interesting to sit at a desk writing symphonic scores than watching hippos and crested cranes, snorkelling in the Indian Ocean reefs, conversing with African and international friends and undertaking musical field-trips wants his or her head examined," writes Geoffrey Poole of Manchester University in his penultimate chapter "Black -- White -- Rainbow: a Personal View on what African Music means to the Contemporary Western Composer".
Quite so, and since the book is published in London and aimed at a Western readership, I should have liked to see this chapter nearer the beginning. Poole's comments about absolute pitch -- "nobody in a village is about to conjure up an A440 tuning fork" -- and about the Western middle-C versus the rest -- "there is a universe of windy unfocused notes, and others whose overtones vie with the fundamental need to shift your perception away from earthy certainty towards the diffusion of sky" -- have a humbling effect on anyone who believes that the eight-tone scale is sacrosanct and anything else a deviation.
Despite its title, the book does not cover the whole of Africa, singling out, in Part One, Egypt, Ghana, Uganda and Kenya, and containing, in Part Two, a fascinating chapter on South Africa. In his chapter "Egyptian Folk Music" in the first part of the book, Egyptian composer and critic Adel Kamel discusses the heritage of folk music from Ancient Egypt as expressed in song. He also offers descriptions of Egyptian and Nubian musical instruments and examples of notation for some of the chants. Later, in a chapter entitled "Egyptian Composition in the Twentieth Century," Kamel goes on to introduce composers whose work was the fruit of their own musical inheritance and of their training abroad, there having been few training institutions in Egypt at the time.
These composers include Youssef Greiss (1899-1961), Hassan Rasheed (1896- 1969), Abu Baker Khairat (1910-1963) Aziz El-Shawan (1916-1993), Kamel El- Remali (b1922), Refaat Garana (b1924), Halim El-Dabh (b1921), Gamal Abdel- Rehim (1924-1988), Youssef Aziz (b1946), Rageh Dawoud (b1954), Mona Ghoneim (b1955), Adel Afifi (b1945), Alaaeddin Mustafa (b1947), as well as the author himself.
Kamel discusses the effects of the musical cross- fertilization between East and West that began in the early 19th Century with Mohamed Ali's attempts to create a modern Egyptian army complete with military band. Those enrolled in the army's music school were required to learn Western notation and to play brass instruments under the tutelage of French and Italian masters. From the Khedive Ismail's commissioning of Verdi's opera Aida to the operettas of the tragically short-lived Sayed Darwish (1892-1923), the influence of this meeting of cultures was profound.
Darwish's songs were deeply influenced by Egyptian nationalism and by the stirrings of socialism, the latter being a theme also taken up, in a by-no-means positive way, by Hans Roosenschoon, a lecturer at the University of the Orange Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. In that country, Roosenschoon writes, the American singer-songwriter Paul Simon, who worked with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a South African ensemble, has come under fire for introducing private enterprise into what some consider to be the realm of the state. South African musicians today, he comments, are "caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of depending either on a private sector subject to pressure from its workforce and with few sponsorship incentives, or on a state- funding system which might well get caught up in the toils of an ideological posturing that is ultimately destructive to freedom of expression in art." Composers say not enough is being done, either by government or by private enterprise, to foster contemporary music.
In addition, music in South Africa is mostly an affair of the white community. Roosenschoon cites only one black composer, Michael Moerane, who attempted to approach Western classical music "from the other side" in his orchestral tone-poem Fatse la Heso (My Country), written in 1941. "It must be stated quite openly," Roosenschoon writes, "that having a conscience about the South-African situation in the socio-political sense is a personal crux, while addressing such topics in one's music is a matter of choice."
While giving due attention to the special case of South Africa, the book also devotes separate chapters to the musicology of African ethnic groups from the Maasai warrior composers to the pennywhistle players of Johannesburg's black townships. In his chapter "The Roots of Ghanaian Composers," for example, James Flolu addresses the musical skills of young children in Africa. "In Ghana, music is a living and practical activity," he writes. "Improvisation and composition occur as a matter of course." Certain kinds of music are incomplete without dance, and the dancer's role is thus almost that of co-composer.
Terence Wiggins, discussing Ghanaian drum music, writes that since such music is unwritten, and is handed down aurally, we have no knowledge about its development before recording began in the early 20th Century. The process of transmission is necessarily one of change, he points out, since no one drummer performs in exactly the same way as another, though the main rhythmic line is passed on. Something similar happens in Ghanaian xylophone playing, which is also aurally transmitted. Here, the melody is played with one hand -- normally the right -- while the left hand improvises according to the skill of the player. The same music will thus sound different from one place to another, with many variations in instrument tuning and individual performance style.
In his chapter "Warrior Composers: Maasai Men and Boys" Malcolm Floyd looks at Kenyan music. The Maasai, at first living in northern Kenya, moved south to the Serengeti in the late 17th century, bringing with them a distinct culture, every thread of which was woven into their music and song. Maasai warriors sing of personal bravery and sexual relations, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone, "part warning to others and part seduction."
Kwela pennywhistle music, which developed in Johannesburg's black townships in the 1950s, is a fusion of South African and African-American music that has found its way from the streets into the recording studios. The move has had a significant impact on kwela, which now has a stronger melodic input from lead and bass guitar. Yet, local musical elements have nevertheless always overshadowed American innovation, showing that African music is continually moving on.
Composing the Music of Africa contains dozens of musical texts, as well as informative maps showing the distribution of musical instruments and figures illustrating dance movements. The editor who assembled these entertaining and informative essays is Malcolm Floyd, head of music at King Edward's University College, Winchester, England.
Reviewed by Jenny Jobbins
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