Rhythm in Sub-Saharan Africa
Encyclopedia
Sub-Saharan African music is characterised by a "strong rhythmic interest" 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. C.K. Ladzekpo also affirms the profound homogeneity of approach. 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-beat
s which may be understood as sustained and systematic polyrhythm
s, 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.
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. The beats and sounds of the drum are used in communication, as well as cultural expression. To share rhythm is to form a group consciousness, to entrain
with one another, to be part of the collective rhythm of life to which all are invited to contribute.
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. 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.
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. 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. They inculcate social patterns and values. Many dances are performed by only males or females. Dances are often segregated by gender, reinforcing gender roles in children. Community structures such as kinship, age, and status are also often reinforced.
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.http://www.comm.unt.edu/histofperf/nonwest/downing/topic_three.htm 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.
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. Drums are classed as membranophone
s and consist of a skin or "drumhead" stretched over the open end of a frame or "shell". Well known African drums include the Djembe
and the Talking drum
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. 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 idiophone
s 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.
or three-over-two (3:2), which Novotney has called the foundation of all West African polyrhythmic textures. It is the interplay of several elements, inseparable and equally essential, that produces the "varying rhythmic densities or motions" of cross-rhythmic texture. 3 and 2 belong to a single Gestalt.
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
".
s, 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. Key patterns are typically clapped or played on idiophone
s such as bells, or else on a high-pitched drumhead. Musics organized around key patterns convey a two-celled (binary) structure, a complex level of African cross-rhythm.
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.
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
. 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.
Arthur Morris Jones
Arthur Morris Jones , was a missionary and musicologist who worked in Zambia during the early 20th century. He was stationed at St Mark's School in Mapanza in the Southern Province of present-day Zambia . He is best known for his ethnomusicological work, particularly his two-volume Studies in...
(1889–1980) has described the many local approaches as constituting one main system. C.K. Ladzekpo also affirms the profound homogeneity of approach. West African rhythmic techniques carried over the Atlantic were fundamental ingredients of Afro-American musical genres such as blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
, jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
, reggae
Reggae
Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...
and hip hop
Hip hop
Hip hop is a form of musical expression and artistic culture that originated in African-American and Latino communities during the 1970s in New York City, specifically the Bronx. DJ Afrika Bambaataa outlined the four pillars of hip hop culture: MCing, DJing, breaking and graffiti writing...
, and were thereby of immense importance in 20th century popular music.
Among the characteristics of the Sub-Saharan African approach to rhythm are syncopation
Syncopation
In music, syncopation includes a variety of rhythms which are in some way unexpected in that they deviate from the strict succession of regularly spaced strong and weak but also powerful beats in a meter . These include a stress on a normally unstressed beat or a rest where one would normally be...
and cross-beat
Cross-beat
In music, a cross-beat or cross-rhythm is a form of polyrhythm.Cross-rhythm. A rhythm in which the regular pattern of accents of the prevailing meter is contradicted by a conflicting pattern and not merely a momentary displacement that leaves the prevailing meter fundamentally unchallenged.—New...
s which may be understood as sustained and systematic polyrhythm
Polyrhythm
Polyrhythm is the simultaneous sounding of two or more independent rhythms.Polyrhythm in general is a nonspecific term for the simultaneous occurrence of two or more conflicting rhythms, of which cross-rhythm is a specific and definable subset.—Novotney Polyrhythms can be distinguished from...
s, an ostinato
Ostinato
In music, an ostinato is a motif or phrase, which is persistently repeated in the same musical voice. An ostinato is always a succession of equal sounds, wherein each note always has the same weight or stress. The repeating idea may be a rhythmic pattern, part of a tune, or a complete melody in...
of two or more distinct rhythmic figures
Figure (music)
A musical figure is the shortest idea in music, a short succession of notes, often recurring. It may have melodic pitch, harmonic progression and rhythmic . The 1964 Grove's Dictionary defines the figure as "the exact counterpart of the German 'motiv' and the French 'motif'": it produces a "single...
, patterns or phrases
Phrase (music)
In music and music theory, phrase and phrasing are concepts and practices related to grouping consecutive melodic notes, both in their composition and performance...
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.
Rhythm in Sub-Saharan African culture
Entrainment
Entrainment may refer to:* Air entrainment, the intentional creation of tiny air bubbles in concrete* Brainwave entrainment, the practice of entraining one's brainwaves to a desired frequency...
with one another, to be part of the collective rhythm of life to which all are invited to contribute.
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. 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.
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. 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. They inculcate social patterns and values. Many dances are performed by only males or females. Dances are often segregated by gender, reinforcing gender roles in children. Community structures such as kinship, age, and status are also often reinforced.
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.http://www.comm.unt.edu/histofperf/nonwest/downing/topic_three.htm 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.
Instruments
Township music
Township music is a genre of South African music that originated in the 1900s , and is characterized by its musicians, who were often urban township residents during the Apartheid period in South Africa...
of South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
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. Drums are classed as membranophone
Membranophone
A membranophone is any musical instrument which produces sound primarily by way of a vibrating stretched membrane. It is one of the four main divisions of instruments in the original Hornbostel-Sachs scheme of musical instrument classification....
s and consist of a skin or "drumhead" stretched over the open end of a frame or "shell". Well known African drums include the Djembe
Djembe
A djembe also known as jembe, jenbe, djbobimbe, jymbe, yembe, or jimbay, or sanbanyi in Susu; is a skin-covered drum meant played with bare hands....
and the Talking drum
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. 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
Agogo
Agogo may refer to*Agogo, Ghana*Agogô, a musical instrument*Agogo , by KMFDM-See also:*À gogo , multiple term deriving from a French expression meaning "in abundance, galore"*Junior Agogo...
is probably a descendent form these African bells. Other idiophone
Idiophone
An idiophone is any musical instrument which creates sound primarily by way of the instrument's vibrating, without the use of strings or membranes. It is the first of the four main divisions in the original Hornbostel-Sachs scheme of musical instrument classification...
s include the Udu
Udu
for other uses see Udu The udu is an African drum originated by the Igbo people of Nigeria. In the Igbo language, udu means vessel. Actually being a water jug with an additional hole, it was played by women for ceremonial uses. Usually the udu is made of clay...
and the slit drum
Slit drum
A slit drum is a hollow percussion instrument, usually a log drum of bamboo or wood, that is made with one or more slits in it. Most slit drums have three slits, cut into the shape of an "H". If, as is usual, the resultant tongues are different lengths or thicknesses, the drum will produce two...
or log drum.
Tuned instruments such as the mbira
Mbira
In African music, the mbira is a musical instrument that consists of a wooden board to which staggered metal keys have been attached. It is often fitted into a resonator...
and the marimba
Marimba
The marimba is a musical instrument in the percussion family. It consists of a set of wooden keys or bars with resonators. The bars are struck with mallets to produce musical tones. The keys are arranged as those of a piano, with the accidentals raised vertically and overlapping the natural keys ...
often have a short attack and decay that facilitates their rhythmic role.
Cross-rhythm
African rhythmic structure is entirely divisive in nature but may divide time into different fractions at the same time, typically by the use of hemiolaHemiola
In modern musical parlance, a hemiola is a metrical pattern in which two bars in simple triple time are articulated as if they were three bars in simple duple time...
or three-over-two (3:2), which Novotney has called the foundation of all West African polyrhythmic textures. It is the interplay of several elements, inseparable and equally essential, that produces the "varying rhythmic densities or motions" of cross-rhythmic texture. 3 and 2 belong to a single Gestalt.
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
Ewe music
Ewe music is the music of the Ewe people of West Africa. Instrumentation is primarily percussive and rhythmically the music features great metrical complexity. Its highest form is in dance music including a drum orchestra, but there are also work, play, and other songs. Despite his title Ewe music...
".
Key patterns
Key patterns, also known as bell patternBell pattern
A bell pattern is a rhythmic pattern, often a key pattern , performed on metal bells such as an agogô, gankoqui, cowbell or similar percussion instruments such as the metal shell of the timbales or drum kit cymbal.-sub-Saharan African music:The use of iron bells in sub-Saharan African music is...
s, 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. Key patterns are typically clapped or played on idiophone
Idiophone
An idiophone is any musical instrument which creates sound primarily by way of the instrument's vibrating, without the use of strings or membranes. It is the first of the four main divisions in the original Hornbostel-Sachs scheme of musical instrument classification...
s such as bells, or else on a high-pitched drumhead. Musics organized around key patterns convey a two-celled (binary) structure, a complex level of African cross-rhythm.
The standard pattern
The most commonly used key pattern in sub-Saharan Africa is the seven-stroke figure known in ethnomusicology as the standard pattern. 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.Until the 1980s this key pattern, common in Yoruba music
Yoruba music
The music of the Yoruba people of Nigeria is best known for an extremely advanced drumming tradition, especially using the dundun hourglass tension drums. Yoruba folk music became perhaps the most prominent kind of West African music in Afro-Latin and Caribbean musical styles...
, Ewe music
Ewe music
Ewe music is the music of the Ewe people of West Africa. Instrumentation is primarily percussive and rhythmically the music features great metrical complexity. Its highest form is in dance music including a drum orchestra, but there are also work, play, and other songs. Despite his title 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.
Tresillo
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 MoroccoMorocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
in North Africa to Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...
in South Asia. This pattern may have migrated east from North Africa to Asia with the spread of Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
: use of the pattern in Moroccan music can be traced back to slaves brought north across the Sahara Desert from present-day Mali
Mali
Mali , officially the Republic of Mali , is a landlocked country in Western Africa. Mali borders Algeria on the north, Niger on the east, Burkina Faso and the Côte d'Ivoire on the south, Guinea on the south-west, and Senegal and Mauritania on the west. Its size is just over 1,240,000 km² with...
. 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.
Sources
- Agawu, Victor Kofi (2003). Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415943906.
- Novotney, Eugene D. (1998). The Three Against Two Relationship as the Foundation of Timelines in West African Musics. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois.
- Peñalosa, David (2009). The Clave Matrix; Afro-Cuban Rhythm: Its Principles and African Origins. Redway, CA: Bembe Inc. ISBN 1-886502-80-3.
- Ladzekpo, C. K. (1995). "The Myth of Cross-Rhythm", Foundation Course in African Dance-Drumming (webpage, accessed 24 April 2010).