African music is a vibrant tapestry of regional styles, each with unique characteristics. The continent of Africa is vast and its music is diverse, with different regions and nations having many distinct musical traditions. Geography, history, and culture shape African musical traditions. Climate influences instrument choice, migrations spread musical ideas, and social structures determine performance contexts.
East African music is characterized by the use of pentatonic scales, vocal polyphony, and instruments like the lyre, fiddle, and various drums. The eastern region includes the music of Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe as well as the islands of Madagascar, the Seychelles, Mauritius, Music of Somalia (which can also be considered to be in East Africa) and Comor.
Map of Africa highlighting the Eastern region (light green). Source: wikimedia.org
General Characteristics of African Music
Like the music of Asia, India and the Middle East, it is a highly rhythmic music. The complex rhythmic patterns often involve one rhythm played against another to create a polyrhythm. The most common polyrhythm plays three beats on top of two, like a triplet played against straight notes. Another distinguishing form of African music is its call-and-response style: one voice or instrument plays a short melodic phrase, and that phrase is echoed by another voice or instrument. The call-and-response nature extends to the rhythm, where one drum will play a rhythmic pattern, echoed by another drum playing the same pattern. African music is also highly improvised.
Traditional music in most of the continent is passed down through oral tradition. There are subtle differences in pitch and intonation that do not easily translate to Western notation. African music most closely adheres to Western tetratonic (four-note), pentatonic (five-note), hexatonic (six-note), and heptatonic (seven-note) scales. Music is an integral part of communal life in Africa. African music is made for both public enjoyment and public participation, and it is this social bonding over music that informed Christopher Small's idea of musicking. In Africa, music is used as an avenue for social commentary and moralism.
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Instruments Used in African Music
Besides vocalisation, which uses various techniques such as complex hard melisma and yodel, a wide array of musical instruments are also used. African musical instruments include a wide range of drums, slit gongs, rattles and double bells, different types of harps, and harp-like instruments such as the kora and the ngoni, as well as fiddles, many kinds of xylophone and lamellophone such as the mbira, and different types of wind instrument like flutes and trumpets. There are five groups of Sub-Saharan African musical instruments: membranophones, chordophones, aerophones, idiophones, and percussion.
- Membranophones: Drums, including kettles, clay pots, and barrels.
- Chordophones: Stringed instruments like harps and fiddles.
- Aerophones: Wind instruments, including flutes and trumpets.
- Idiophones: Rattles and shakers.
- Percussion: Sounds like foot-stomping and hand-clapping.
Many of the wooden instruments have shapes or pictures carved out into them to represent ancestry. Drums used in African traditional music include talking drums, bougarabou and djembe in West Africa, water drums in Central and West Africa, and the different types of ngoma drums (or engoma) in Central and Southern Africa. Other percussion instruments include many rattles and shakers, such as the kosika (kashaka), rain stick, bells and wood sticks.
A variety of African musical instruments. Source: i.ytimg.com
Musical Elements and Techniques
The playing of polyrhythms is one of the most universal characteristics of Sub-Saharan music, in contrast to polyphony in Western music. Several uniquely designed instruments have evolved there over time to facilitate the playing of simultaneous contrasting rhythms. The mbira, kalimba, Kora, ngoni and dousn'gouni are examples of these instruments which organize notes not in the usual single linear order from bass to treble, but in two separated rank arrays which allows additional ease in playing cross rhythms.
Many languages spoken in Africa are tonal languages, leading to a close connection between music and language in some local cultures. These particular communities use vocal sounds and movements with their music as well. In singing, the tonal pattern or the text puts some constraints on the melodic patterns. On the other hand, in instrumental music a native speaker of a language can often perceive a text or texts in the music.
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Historical Influences
Historically, several factors have influenced the traditional music of Africa. The music has been influenced by language, the environment, a variety of cultures, politics, and population movement, all of which are intermingled. Each African group evolved in a different area of the continent, which means that they ate different foods, faced different weather conditions, and came in contact with different groups than other societies did. Each group moved at different rates and to different places than others, and thus each was influenced by different people and circumstances.
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East African Urban Music
East African urban music is a popular music genre of the three countries customarily grouped as "East Africa": Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The genre is basically an offshoot of western popular music, particularly hip hop and funk, somewhat influenced by more traditional African music. With the integration of the East Africa Community, talent pool and exchange of ideas plus cooperation between artiste and music industry players of the EAC countries has improved the music scene in East Africa.
Musicians of the early 1990s, including Tedd Josiah (Kenya), P-Funk (Tanzania) and Steve Jean (Uganda), began to combine western influences with the area's more traditional popular music. Local radio stations were at first reluctant to experiment with this new music, until privately operated FM stations began to appear and needed new material to establish a market niche. Production houses specializing in the genre-such as Ogopa Djs, Swahili Entertainment Africa, Samawati, HipHop kila pahali, Home Boyz and Bongo Records-have emerged.
In 2004 the Kilio Cha Haki, A Cry for Justice (by Nairobi Yetu) compilation appeared, featuring Rha Goddess, a performing artist and socio-political activist based in New York. and Nomadic Wax Records combined in late 2004 to start the distribution and publishing of East African urban music.
Dhamaals Music and Dance Performances in Gujarat
Dhamaal is a mix of Sufi and African (mostly East African) musical and dance traditions. It refers particularly to the spiritual practices of the Siddis of Gujarat. Usually, Dhamaal songs and dances are performed to celebrate the anniversary of the birth and death of spiritual leaders. They are performed in two ways - Dance Dhamaal and Baithaaki Dhamaal. The Baithaaki Dhamaal is performed in the sitting position and the Dance Dhamaal is performed in both sitting and dance positions. During Dance Dhamaal the focus is more on the sounds of the instruments. These are often played in a frenzied manner and accompanied by frenzied dance movements.
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| Feature | Baithaaki Dhamaal | Dance Dhamaal |
|---|---|---|
| Position | Sitting | Sitting and Dance |
| Focus | Lyrics | Instrument Sounds |
| Tempo | Slower | Frenzied |
The creole cultural aspects of Dhamaals are broadly reflected through the Swahili Creole language used to sing the zikrs, the Indian and African musical instruments used to perform them and the Afro-Indian body movements of Dance Dhamaals.
