Peculiarities of African music and culture

Programme Overview

The Programme is designed to enable relative insight into some distinguishing features of African music and culture. It is essentially a neo-anthropological engagement, which situates African music and culture against the backdrop of general/universal elements of music and culture and how the expression of these elements in particular cultural jurisdictions lends distinguishing/convergent features to their music and culture. It will first focus on culture as the mother set, and such elements as values and beliefs, norms, symbols, language, and ritual; and next, music as the subset, focusing on such elements as rhythm, melody, and harmony. This should help students to appreciate the respective elements of both concepts and their generative correlation.

A combination of lectures and appreciation workshops will be key to engaging students and helping them make the comparative distinctions/similarities between culture and music from Africa, and from elsewhere.

Programme Objective

The Programme seeks to build the capacity of students to make informed ascriptions to African culture and music relative to non-African culture and music, in terms of peculiar differences and similarities.

Specifically, students are expected to demonstrate the following after completion:

Make the correlative distinction between culture and music
Identify three elements of culture and music respectively.
Capacity to identify the distinguishing/convergent features of African culture(s) and music(s).
Capacity to critique the peculiar features of African culture(s) and music(s) as against non-African culture(s) and music(s).

Programme Content (Session activities)

Module 1: Introduction-Culture

Culture as a universal end product of human cumulative experience.
Elements -of culture – values & beliefs, norms, symbols, language, rituals.
Brief expositions on each of the stated elements.
Exercise – students to identify these elements in African culture, with particular reference to their local areas.
A discussion of similarities and differences in how these elements manifest in different jurisdictions.
Summary of lecture
Reading Task

Module 2: African Music

Music as a universal human cultural product; it is a subset/derivative of culture.
Elements of music – rhythm, melody, harmony.
Distinguishing features are in respect of
- Melodic patterns – a function of scales/modes; also, call and response patterns.
- Rhythmic patterns -polyrhythms
- Harmonic patterns – poly-phony
Categories of (African) Musical Instruments:
- Membranophones – e.g. the drum and its varieties;
- Aerophanes – e.g. wind instruments such as flutes, trumpets, etc.
- Idiophones – e.g. gongs, rattles, shakers, zithers, sanzas, xylophones, etc.
- Chordophones – e.g. stringed instruments such as the gonje, the kora, the seprewa, etc
Exercise – students to identify 2 examples of each of these categories from Western musical culture and their African/local equivalents.
- Brief discussion of students’ efforts.
- Summary of lecture

Module 3: Musical acculturation in contemporary Africa

The highlife (West Africa); souckous (central Africa); township jive (South Africa), etc..
Brief history of received musical data during colonial times and subsequently.
Exercise – students are to write down 2 contemporary highlife/hip-life songs and show any received influences on the songs’ elements.
Brief discussion of students’ works. And question time.
Summary

Who Should Attend?

The programme is suitable for a wide range of professionals but will be specifically beneficial to:

Who Should Attend?

Facilitator