Music Traveler - African Music (Part One)

When a group of people perform on stage, they are sharing their culture, creative experience and believe in enriching the community of life!!

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African

Music Traveler - African Music (Part One) African

Whitney Houston is one of my favorite singers indeed. She could manage her voices without any hesitation whether in high or low register. Generally, those black people have an appealing voice and have a strong rhythmical sense. It is like a natural instrument build inside their bodies. They don't have any sense of absolute pitch. However, they have relative pitch. Once the soloist introduces a motif then rest of the group can respond and harmonize it immediately which is recurring in cyclical pattern. (Listen to part of a Gospel version of Shembe hymn in Stickam, Track two)

STICKAM STICAKM

AFRICAN MUSIC

Track Three : Takada Drumming (Source from http://www.ancient-future.com/africa.html)

Track Four : Gospel version of Shembe hymn

Track Five : Step by Step by Whitney Houston AFRICA MUSIC

AFRICAN MUSIC

Actually, percussion is their main musical instrument in Africa. This shows their rhythmical sense have been trained and developed from their young by plenty of percussion. The details of different kind of African’s percussion will not be discussed in this article. For more details please check the site of‘African Musical Instrument’

RHYTHM

RHYTHM The concept of rhythm:_

The stress on the first beat in two, three or four meters was normally heard in western music. However, the rhythmic system that they are using is totally different from western music. It is so called polyrhythm, the multi-metric patterns occur simultaneously. (Listen to part of Takada Drumming in Stickam, Track One ) Sometimes, they approach to increase the complexity of the rhythmic pattern by clapping hand. (See example as Howard McCrary )

From the track of Takada Drumming, the rhythmic patterns are shown as below:

Example Example

Example

Each percussion player introduced the independent rhythmic simultaneously. As a practice for rhythmical sense, you should try to follow the music and play those rhythmic patterns with your both hands in two different rhythmic patterns. Or you should try to sing a rhythmic pattern and play the different rhythm patterns with your both hands at the same time. Next

In Part two I will talk about the harmony and scales that they used. Harmony

siuyuyee 28 Feb, 2007tinued

HARMONY ************************************** **********************************************

Bibliography

Bibliography:

1/Gerhard Kubik, Theory of African Music, Volume one, (Germany, 1994)

2/Composing the Music of Africa, edited by Malcolm Floyd, (Hants, 1999)