Music of Africa


The continent of Africa and its music is vast and highly diverse, with different regions and nations maintaining distinct musical traditions. African music includes genres such as makwaya, highlife, mbube, township music, jùjú, fuji, jaiva, afrobeat, afrofusion, mbalax, Congolese rumba, soukous, ndombolo, makossa, kizomba, and taarab, among others. African music also uses a wide variety of instruments from across the continent.
The music and dance traditions of the African diaspora, shaped to varying degrees by African musical traditions, include American genres such as Dixieland jazz, blues, and jazz, as well as Caribbean styles such as calypso, and soca. Latin American music genres including cumbia, salsa, son cubano, rumba, conga, bomba, samba, and zouk developed from the music of enslaved Africans and have, in turn, influenced contemporary African popular music.
Like the music of Asia, India, and the Middle East, African music is highly rhythmic. Its complex rhythmic patterns often involve one rhythm played against another to create a polyrhythm. A common example is the three-against-two rhythm, comparable to a triplet played against straight notes. Sub-Saharan African music traditions frequently rely on a wide array of percussion instruments, including xylophones, djembes, drums, and tone-producing instruments such as the mbira or "thumb piano".
Another distinguishing feature of African music is its call-and-response style, in which one voice or instrument plays a short melodic phrase, and that phrase is echoed by another voice or instrument. This interaction also extends to the rhythm, with one drum playing a rhythmic pattern that is echoed or complemented by another. African music is also highly improvised. A core rhythmic pattern is typically played, with drummers then improvising new patterns over the established foundation.
Traditional music in much of the continent is passed down through oral tradition. Subtle differences in pitch and intonation that do not easily translate to Western notation. African music most closely adheres to Western tetratonic, pentatonic, hexatonic, and heptatonic scales. Harmonization of the melody is accomplished by singing in parallel thirds, fourths, or fifths.
Music is an integral part of communal life in Africa. It is created for both public enjoyment and public participation, and it is this social bonding over music that informed Christopher Small's idea of musicking. Music serves as an avenue for social commentary and moralism, taking forms such as work songs, love songs, lullabies, boasting songs, praise songs, narrative songs, and satirical songs. Music is also important to religion, where rituals and religious ceremonies use music to pass down stories across generations and to accompany singing and dancing.

Music by regions

North Africa and the Horn of Africa

is the seat of ancient Egypt and Carthage, civilizations with strong ties to the ancient Near East and which influenced the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Egypt later came under Persian, then Greek and Roman rule, while Carthage was later ruled by the Romans and the Vandals. The region was subsequently conquered by Arab forces, who incorporated the region into the Maghreb of Arab Africa . Its music maintains close ties with Middle Eastern music and utilizes similar melodic modes.
North African music encompasses a wide range of styles, from the music of ancient Egypt to the Berber and Tuareg music of the desert nomads. For centuries, the region's art music has followed the conventions of Arabic and Andalusian classical music, while its popular contemporary genres include the Algerian raï.
The music of Sudan and the Horn of Africa, including the music of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia, may be grouped with those of North Africa. Somali music is typically pentatonic, using five pitches per octave in contrast to a heptatonic scale such as the major scale. The music of the Ethiopian highlands is based on a modal system called qenet, which includes four main modes: tezeta, bati, ambassel, and anchihoy. Three additional modes are variations on the above: tezeta minor, bati major, and bati minor. Some songs take the name of their qenet, such as tizita, a song of reminiscence.

West, Central, Southeast and South Africa

, an ethnomusicological, observed that the shared rhythmic principles of Bantu African musical traditions form a single overarching system. Similarly, master drummer and scholar C. K. Ladzekpo affirms the "profound homogeneity" of Bantu African rhythmic principles.
African traditional music is frequently functional in nature. Performances may be long and often involve the participation of the audience. There are specialized songs for work, childbirth, marriage, hunting, and political activities, as well as music intended to ward off evil spirits or honor benevolent spirits, the dead, and the ancestors. These forms are not typically performed outside their intended social contexts, and many are associated with specific dances. In some situations, professional musicians perform sacred, ceremonial, or courtly music at royal courts.
Outside the greater Horn of Africa, as categorized above, the remainder of Sub-Saharan Africa can be divided into four musicological regions:
Southern, Central and West Africa share many features of the broader Sub-Saharan musical tradition, while also exhibiting additional influences from Muslim regions of Africa and, in modern times, from the Americas and Western Europe.
Afrobeat, jùjú, fuji, highlife, makossa, and kizomba are among the genres performed in West Africa. West African music varies regionally, with Muslim regions incorporating elements of Islamic music and non-Muslim regions drawing more heavily on indigenous traditions, according to the historian Sylviane Diouf and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik. Diouf notes that traditional Muslim West African Music incorporates elements of the Islamic call to prayer, including lyrics praising God, melodic and pitch variations, "words that seem to quiver and shake" in the vocal cords, dramatic shifts in scale, and nasal intonation. Kubik similarly observes that the vocal style of Muslim West African singers "using melisma, wavy intonation, and so forth" reflect the musical heritage of the region's long contact with the Arabic-Islamic world of the Maghreb which began in the seventh and eighth centuries. In terms of instrumentation, Kubik notes that string instruments were traditionally favored in Muslim West African communities, while drumming was more characteristic of non-Muslim West Africans.

Musical instruments

Besides vocalisation, which uses various techniques such as complex, hard melisma and yodeling, a wide variety of musical instruments are also used. African instruments include a wide range of drums, slit gongs, rattles, and double bells; harps and harp-like instruments such as the kora and the ngoni; fiddles; various xylophones and lamellophones such as the mbira; and wind instrument including flutes and trumpets. String instruments are also used, with lute-like instruments such as the oud and the ngoni serving as accompaniment in some regions.
Sub-Saharan African musical instruments are grouped into five categories: membranophones, chordophones, aerophones, idiophones, and percussion. Membranophones include drums such as kettles, clay pots, and barrels. Chordophones are stringed instruments like harps and fiddles. Aerophones are wind instruments, including flutes and trumpets, similar to those found in American music. In Northern Nigeria, Niger, and Northern Cameroon, the algaita – a double reed instrument – is commonly played at festivals and seasonal celebrations.
Idiophones are rattles and shakers, while percussion also includes body-produced sounds such as foot-stomping and hand-clapping. Many wooden instruments are carved with shapes or figures that represent ancestry, and some are decorated with feathers or beads.
Drums used in African traditional music include talking drums, bougarabou and djembe in West Africa, water drums in Central and West Africa, and the different types of ngoma drums of Central and Southern Africa. Other percussion instruments include rattles and shakers, such as the kashaka, rain sticks, bells, and wooden sticks. Africa also has many other types of drums, flutes, string, and wind instruments.
Polyrhythmic playing is one of the most widespread characteristics of Sub-Saharan music, in contrast to polyphony in Western music. Several uniquely designed instruments evolved over time to facilitate the playing of simultaneous contrasting rhythms. The mbira, kalimba, kora, ngoni and dousn'gouni organize their notes not in a single linear arrangement from bass to treble, but in two separated rank arrays, allowing performers to more easily produce cross rhythms. The continuing influence of this design principle can be seen in the 20th-century American instruments the gravi-kora and gravikord, which are modern adaptations of traditional instruments.