3. STRUCTURAL DECONSTRUCTION OF REIMER’S MUSIC EDUCATION:
3.3. African conception of the self and music as an anomaly in the
3.3.2. African self, music, and music education
It is not my task to estimate whether the “dialectics” between the different poles of the dualities—subject-object, individual-social, mind-body—are valid in current African musical practices. African musical practices of today are, nevertheless, not simply repeating traditions but are subjected to various kinds of infl uences from inside and outside of Africa in the same way as anywhere else. However, my attempt is to illustrate with a few examples from research literature how there is no similar normative dualistic emphasis in African musical context as was the case in western thinking as explained in Chapter 3.1.2 and in Reimer’s theory of music education.
As with the self-concept, one can oppose categorizing African musical cultures into one manifestation of it. Nketia writes, however, that in spite of the apparent diversity in current practices with their Oriental and European infl uences, musical cultures that have their roots in Africa “form a network of distinct yet related traditions which overlap in certain aspects of style, practice, or usage, and share common features of internal pattern, basic procedure, and contextual similarities”583. Interaction and borrowing has been common, therefore, one society’s musical life overlaps that of even distant societies584. This continuity in the variety, or “underlying affi nity” is what is of interest here.
The resemblance between various African traditions and practices has often been gathered around the term ubuntu585. Ubuntu exemplifi es the underlying African conception of the self by representing a way of thinking throughout life and of oneself. It also permeates therefore the musical life of the people. According to Primos,
583 Nketia 1988, 4.
584 Ibid., 6-7.
585 Ubuntu (umuntu ungumuntu ngabantu) in the Zulu language. See Anyanwu 1987. Blacking (1980) argues that the expression of musical experience through relationships with others is shared by all South African peoples but that its musical consequences are found all over sub-Saharan Africa whenever music involves polyrhythm and polyphony (ibid, 204).
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[u]buntu is a prevailing spirit in which everyone acknowledges their existence only in terms of their oneness with others. It is deep-seated in all traditionally rooted Africans and creates a unique unity of persons across the continent. The way in which they make and use music closely refl ects this ubuntu spirit. Everyone brings their personal contribution to the whole musical fabric and united event, be it in a leading role or as part of group interaction.586
Ubuntu has thus clear references to space-time and action. Musical sounds are considered more like a process, which maintains the unity of experience and thought in the particular situation. Music is understood as an event and process in time.587 The difference in relation to the unity of thought, the feeling and creating along the sounds in Reimer’s theory is that in the African musical situation and event the self needs to concretely participate and thus dissolve him/herself into the structures of the sounds instead of examining the music from a distance or as an object. African musical events are therefore also social events whether enjoyment of leisure, for recreational activities, for the performance of a rite, ceremony, festival, or for other collective activity588. Anyanwu argues: “[o]ne cannot truly understand the work of art by detaching oneself from it”589.
Music, together with dance, as the most important realm of aesthetic moods and styles manifests best the ethos of ubuntu. Music does not exist without dance. Robinson points out that African dancing is not independent of what happens on a musical level, or vice versa590. Likewise, the social event or the needs of the performers can generate the scope of music making591. Different elements of the event as a whole are integral and mutually constitutive. Moreover, in African music and dance there is no distinction between ethics and aesthetic-artistic. According to Chernoff, what is important in African music is ethically important generally in the social and personal life. “Music teaches people to recognize and judge what is valuable in social and personal life”592. Excellence is as much an ethical question as aesthetic one. People express their opinions and make a contribution to the success of the musical event by participation. More important, Chernoff argues that music is not only a product
586 Primos 2001, 2.
587 Anyanwu 1987; Nketia 1962, 2-3.
588 Nketia 1988, 21. Musical life is characterized by group activities although solo performances occur, too (ibid.,24).
589 Anyanwu 1987, 35.
590 Robinson 2001, 2.
591 Nketia 1988, 27-28.
592 Chernoff 1979, 167.
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of social sensibility, but it also helps in shaping this sensibility: “Africans use music to mediate their involvement within a community, and a good musical performance reveals their orientation toward this crucial concern”593. Critical standards are expressed by participation so that music and art forms a means of bringing quality to a social situation. Music also gains its value and meaning in the actual process of making music measured by its social effectiveness594. Therefore, music is a form of community experience and a form through which community experience is created and developed.595 Chernoff describes:
In Africa, music helps people to work, to enjoy themselves, to control a bad person or to praise a good one, to recite history, poetry, and proverbs, to celebrate a funeral or a festival, to compete with each other, to encounter their gods, to grow up, and, fundamentally, to be sociable in everything they do.596
The transformational aspect thus reaches beyond the individual although music is also a socially-accepted channel for self-expression, personal messages or problems597. For Africans, music is on many levels a way of life, as Nketia describes598.
This kind of merging of the social and bodily into the musical and aesthetic is not sought after in Reimer’s philosophy. If aesthetic experience for Reimer is not a matter of interpersonal relationships or ethical-moral issues, then his aesthetic in African music reduces the situational experience into auditory perception without the multiple purposes of the sound structures and meanings created by the event as a whole. Hence, it has been pointed out that there is a crucial difference between formal analysis of African music and a real experience of making music where the social effectiveness of the music is tested. A theory of ‘crossing the beats’ or ‘multiple main beats’ based on an analysis of procedure in drumming may demonstrate the achieved complexity through the use of relatively simple elements. It gives some understanding about the sounds. However, according to Nketia, drumming as a cultural activity has a meaning that cannot be reduced to its structure599. The relationship between the leader and group, for example, leads closer to the character of the performance and event than an analysis of the musical form as structures of sounds. Music is learned orally and memorized but not for exact reproduction. The memorized music
593 Ibid., 154.
594 Ibid.
595 Ibid., 161; Blacking 1980, 204; Nketia 1988, 34.
596 Chernoff 1979, 167.
597 Primos 2001, 1.
598 Nketia 1962, 3.
599 Ibid.
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functions as a framework for creating future performance since only the actual event can have the power to transform life and experience. “There is no search for correct reproduction, only for correct re-creation”, as Primos writes600. If the success of the music is in the fi nal analysis tested by its social effectiveness, then it is clear that a recorded form of the event does not replace the social context of the event.Music is never exactly the same as it depends on the social situation and on what is communicated in that particular event.
The diffi culty for western music educators in switching from the subject-object perspective to the created participatory situation has also been pointed out by Oehrle.
Western music teachers are used to evaluate musical pieces mainly according to their melodic and harmonic uniqueness, and even when the rhythm is important, it is, as Oehrle writes, “something to ‘get with’”601. Chernoff maintains that the western approach to rhythm is that it is something we follow and that it is largely determined in reference to the melody or defi ned as an aspect of the melody. In African music
“there are always at least two rhythms going on”602. When music is articulated within the framework of a subject-object relationship, then, the epistemological focus is on the characteristics of the object. The object is considered as stable and unalterable.
In African music, however, rhythm, while being the most important element of the music, is something to respond to in a social situation603. It is rare to clap or tap African rhythms without articulating it in movement and ”[i]t is the latter that gives the former its meaning and interpretation”604.
Amoaku has described how music in African context sustains traditions in daily educational situations. The attitude of participation is taught to children in informal and formal ways. The child is compelled to think of herself as an inseparable component of the group and, in case there would be a lapse on any one’s part, the entire group falters and falls apart. Also rhythmic games that children create themselves develop the child’s sense of inter-dependence and community. Such games require rhythmic precision, teamwork and acute sense of rhythm and co-ordination.605 The most important aspect to learning is then to interact musically by taking part in the events that the music belongs to. The social and political are not subject
600 Primos 2001, 2.
601 Oehrle 1991, 169.
602 Chernoff 1979, 42.
603 Ibid., 55.
604 Amoaku 1998, 23.
605 Ibid., 24-25; Primos 2001.
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contents that are ‘about’ the music but rather the signifi cance that sounds have in the community in that particular event. How music develops the social experience, needs to be experienced in one’s own embodied experience.