Sub-Saharan African music is characterised by a "strong rhythmic interest"[1] that exhibits common characteristics in all regions of this vast territory, so that Arthur Morris Jones (1889–1980) has described the many local approaches as constituting one main system.[2] C.K. Ladzekpo also affirms the profound homogeneity of approach.[3] West African rhythmic techniques carried over the Atlantic were fundamental ingredients of Afro-American musical genres such as blues, jazz, reggae and hip hop, and were thereby of immense importance in 20th century popular music.
Among the characteristics of the Sub-Saharan African approach to rhythm are syncopation and cross-beats which may be understood as sustained and systematic polyrhythms, an ostinato of two or more distinct rhythmic figures, patterns or phrases at once. The simultaneous use of contrasting rhythmic patterns within the same scheme of accents or meter lies at the core of African rhythmic tradition. All such "asymetrical" patterns are historically and geographically interrelated.[4]
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In many parts of Africa the use of music is not limited to entertainment: it serves a purpose to the local community and helps in the conduct of daily routines. Traditional African music supplies appropriate music and dance for work and for religious ceremonies of birth, naming, rites of passage, marriage and funerals.[5] The beats and sounds of the drum are used in communication, as well as cultural expression.[6] To share rhythm is to form a group consciousness, to entrain with one another,[7] to be part of the collective rhythm of life to which all are invited to contribute.[8]
Many sub-Saharan languages do not have a word for rhythm, or even music. Rhythms represent the very fabric of life and embody the people's interdependence in human relationships. Cross-beats can symbolize challenging moments or emotional stress: playing them while fully grounded in the main beats prepares one for maintaining life-purpose while dealing with life’s challenges.[9] The sounding of three beats against two is experienced in everyday life and helps develop "a two-dimensional attitude to rhythm". Throughout western and central Africa child's play includes games that develop a feeling for multiple rhythms.[10]
African dances are largely participatory: there are traditionally no barriers between dancers and onlookers except with regard to spiritual, religious and initiation dances. Even ritual dances often have a time when spectators participate.[11] Dances help people work, mature, praise or criticize members of the community, celebrate festivals and funerals, compete, recite history, proverbs and poetry and encounter gods.[12] They inculcate social patterns and values. Many dances are performed by only males or females.[13] Dances are often segregated by gender, reinforcing gender roles in children. Community structures such as kinship, age, and status are also often reinforced.[14]
Yoruba dancers and drummers, for instance, express communal desires, values, and collective creativity. The drumming represents an underlying linguistic text that guides the dancing performance though most meaning comes from nonverbal cues and metalanguage. The spontaneity of these performances should not be confused with an improvisation that emphasizes the individual ego. The drummer's primary duty is to preserve the community.[1] Master dancers and drummers are particular about the learning of the dance exactly as taught. Children must learn the dance exactly as taught without variation. Improvisation or a new variation comes only after mastering the dance, performing, and receiving the appreciation of spectators and the sanction of village elders.[15]
African music relies heavily on fast-paced, upbeat rhythmic drum playing found all over the continent, though some styles, such as the Township music of South Africa do not make much use of the drum and nomadic groups such as the Maasai do not traditionally use drums. Elsewhere the drum is the sign of life: its beat is the heartbeat of the community.[8] Drums are classed as membranophones and consist of a skin or "drumhead" stretched over the open end of a frame or "shell". Well known African drums include the Djembe[16] and the Talking drum[16]
Many aspects of African drumming, most notably time-keeping, stem from instruments such as shakers made of woven baskets or gourds or the double bell, made of iron and creating two different tones.[17] Each region of Africa has developed a different style of double bell but the basic technology of bell-making is the same all over the continent, as is often the bell's role as time keeper. The South American agogo is probably a descendent form these African bells. Other idiophones include the Udu and the slit drum or log drum.
Tuned instruments such as the mbira and the marimba often have a short attack and decay that facilitates their rhythmic role.
African rhythmic structure is entirely divisive in nature[18] but may divide time into different fractions at the same time, typically by the use of hemiola or three-over-two (3:2), which Novotney has called the foundation of all West African polyrhythmic textures.[19] It is the interplay of several elements, inseparable and equally essential, that produces the "varying rhythmic densities or motions" of cross-rhythmic texture.[20] 3 and 2 belong to a single Gestalt.[21]
Cross-rhythm is the basis for much of the music of the Niger–Congo peoples, the largest linguistic group in Africa south of the Sahara Desert. For example it "pervades southern Ewe music".[22]
Key patterns, also known as bell patterns, timeline patterns, guide patterns and phrasing referents express a rhythm’s organizing principle, defining rhythmic structure and epitomizing the complete rhythmic matrix. They represent a condensed expression of all the movements open to musicians and dancers.[23] Key patterns are typically clapped or played on idiophones such as bells, or else on a high-pitched drumhead.[24] Musics organized around key patterns convey a two-celled (binary) structure, a complex level of African cross-rhythm.[25]
The most commonly used key pattern in sub-Saharan Africa is the seven-stroke figure known in ethnomusicology as the standard pattern.[26][27][28] The standard pattern, composed of two cross-rhythmic fragments, is found both in simple (4/4 or 2/2) and compound (12/8 or 6/8) metrical structures.[29]
Until the 1980s this key pattern, common in Yoruba music, Ewe music and many other musics, was widely interpreted as composed of additive groupings. However the standard pattern represents not a series of durational values, but a series of attack points that divide the fundamental beat with a cross-rhythmnic structure.[30]
The most basic duple-pulse figure found in sub-Saharan African music is a figure the Cubans call tresillo, a Spanish word meaning 'triplet' The basic figure is also found within a wide geographic belt stretching from Morocco in North Africa to Indonesia in South Asia. This pattern may have migrated east from North Africa to Asia with the spread of Islam: use of the pattern in Moroccan music can be traced back to slaves brought north across the Sahara Desert from present-day Mali.[31] In African music this is a cross-rhythmic fragment generated through cross-rhythm: 8 pulses ÷ 3 = 2 cross-beats (consisting of three pulses each) with a remainder of a partial cross-beat (spanning two pulses). In divisive form the strokes of tresillo contradict the beats while in additive form, the strokes of tresillo are the beats. From a metrical perspective the two ways of perceiving tresillo constitute two different rhythms. On the other hand from the perspective of the pattern of attack-points, tresillo is a shared element of traditional folk music from the northwest tip of Africa to southeast tip of Asia.