Ebron Review

Ebron’s main point is this section is that “African music is a music of encounters,” that its music crosses the boundaries of politics, nationalism, and continents.  The encounters are the combination of performers, audiences, and producers, who distribute their music.  These encounters lead to different interpretation and understanding of their music, which affects the structure of feeling of their music, which is how performers play their music and how the audience participates in it.  This can lead to want performers play where, what audiences listen to their music, and where producers distribute them.  Ebron focuses on the Jalis of West African, specifically those in Gambia.  In West African, the jalis are used as a political maneuver to unite different people, support policies, and instill nationalism and pride.  On the other hand, in American, jalis was seen as music of African roots, especially by African Americans.  Both structures of feelings are similar in that they both admire and complexity of the music, but the outcome and the way they are received are different.

            The power of Jalis and their structure of feeling have different effects on different people, audiences, nations.  It can inspire pride or remind them of their history and legacy or simply be enjoyed for its musical mastery.  The jalis incorporate different musical styles and seek many avenues to distribute their music to different audiences, but by incorporating so many different styles and trying to appease so many audiences, are jalis losing the initial aspects of their art?  Are they becoming too globalized, moving away from what Jaliya music was supposed to be?  Or like Diawara said, is praising the people and the feeling of the past keeping West African from moving forward, and that revitalizing Jayila for modern ears is better for the tradition? 

Final Proposal

For my final project, I will study and present on the Ewe tribe of western Ghana.  In this project, I will report primarily on the drum orchestra, focusing on the complex cross-rhythym, instruments use, and the interaction between their music and their traditional dance.  A specific type of music, I will focus on is the Agbadza genre, which was played as war songs about heroism and death, but later transformed into contemporary funeral music.  I will also write about how this change occurred.  I will also focus on the influences of Ewe music, traditions and religions that affect how, when, and where the music is played.  If I have time, I might research on missionaries that visited Ghana and how there beliefs and teachings were received by the natives and how they influenced their music.

In order to research this topic I will search articles about the instruments and find audios of Agbadza.  Also, I will use books such as "Study in African Music" by A.M. Jones and " Principles of Off-BEat Timing and Cross-Rythym in Southern Ewe Dance Drumming by David Locke, which are amiable online.  

African Music Proposal

For my final project, I would like to focus on music from Ghana, starting with the traditional African music, instruments, and rhythms and how they have been influenced by westen culture and have changed over time.  Using articels accessed through the internet and books, I intend to focus on early African music and how it has changed, but with more focus on the early period and period of colonilization and missionaries, rather than comtemporary.  I will study about certain tribes in the region like the Dagomba and types of music like gyil music involving a xylophone type instrument.  Northern Ghana also has a history of griot singing, which is a type of storytelling singing, which is now becoming a exinct tradition. 

Merriam 1982

Merriam brings up many controversial arguments in this chapter and tries to explain the reasoning behind them.  He talks about how researchers go about analyzing music; whether they seek meaning through the players and culture through which the music is distilled or from a more analytic, western approach, breaking music down into information and other categories such as melody, harmony, form, rhythm, etc.  It is these two ideas that conflict with each other.  In this chapter, he focuses on African rhythms and time-reckoning.  Western rhythm is derived on the notion of equally spaced beats, organized into a meters with equally spaced down beats.  It is an infinite, constant, linear stream of pulses that provide the structure to all music.  From an outside perspective African music has a steady beat, an “inherent pulse,” underlying the music, which is normally expressed by a large drum, gong, or handclapping.  Time reckoning from an Africans point of view is different than ours.  To them, time cannot by counted, measured, or discerned at any point during the day, instead it is based on natural phenomenon and social activities.   It is nonlinear and discontinuous.

I was interested in the opposing viewpoints of how to interpret foreign music and agree that neither is right.  A researcher tries to conceive order from a different interpretation of music through the assumptions of his own culture.  Even a combination of both ways of thinking causes something to be lost in the meaning.  As for the idea of time reckoning, time provides us with a way to structure our lives around, gives us a sense of urgency.  Time is a man-made concept, but music is natural one.  Merriam provides much insight into the different ideas of time, questioning how African music has rhythm when their concept of time provides no scaffold to build upon it and provides some answers.  But I muse whether time and rhythm are the same things?  Does one require time in order to conceive rhythm or is it a natural, instinctual feeling?