GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

Strict polyrhythmics and polyphony produced by melodic instruments have thus far been examined separately and out of context so as to give us a better view of how each works. In the musical practice of this part of Africa, however, the polyphony produced by melodic instruments always rests on a rhythmic or polyrhythmic substructure. We must therefore now consider the principles which govern the conjunction of these two components within a musical construction. We will do so by returning to the pieces which we have examined in partial form in the preceding chapters.

We may recall that the polyphony performed by melodic instruments itself acts as a support and a modal, periodic, and metric framework for vocal music.

There are several ways of performing such vocal music:

1. (1) It may be performed entirely by a soloist

2. (2) It may be performed by a soloist, backed by a choir, although the choral part may on occasion be assigned to a single person

3. (3) It may be performed responsorially in two parts, the first of which is sung by the soloist and may display variations, and the second of which is an invariant response sung by the choir.

In every case, the solo part is sung by the instrumental musician himself or, in the case of music performed with two melodic instruments, by one of the two musicians (usually the most experienced one). While the solo part is subject to variation, the response by the choir or any individual singer remains unchanged. It acts as an extremely stable, if not perfectly strict melodic and rhythmic ostinato.

INTRODUCTION

Before presenting a sketch of the general characteristics of the musics to be found in Central Africa, such as their social functions and their relations with language and with dance, let us remind the reader, when approaching traditional African cultures, to be wary of relying too much on the rationality inherent in Western thought, with its tendency to distinguish and to categorise.

I have shown elsewhere that in African civilisations the world is almost invariably apprehended in the multiplicity of its aspects as a dynamic ensemble, as a coherent whole displaying a diversity whose elements are not only not mutually exclusive but rather tend to complement each other. All of these elements are linked by a multiplicity of bundles of relations internal to a universe which implies no separation of the metaphysical from the physical (Arom 1974: 3–6).

Consequently, the notion of art, and that of musical art in particular, in sub-Saharan Africa depends upon quite other mental categories than it does in the West. As Senghor observes:

Ethnomusicology, which strictly speaking is the study of ethnic music, and musical anthropology, which is primarily concerned with the role music plays in a given society and the way it interacts with the surrounding cultural context, are often treated as synonyms. This situation is doubtless a consequence of the rapid development of a young discipline.

The reader is now aware that our own perspective is specifically ethnomusicological: our purpose is to study certain musical techniques which are practised in societies that are generally made the subject of ethnological description.

Our initial objective was to discover the principles, or the underlying theory, governing polyphonic and polyrhythmic forms of music in a specific geocultural region. But a valid theory must be supported by the convergence of data gathered by observation and confirmed by experience, with pertinent statements regarding musical practice elicited from the traditional musicians themselves. We are therefore logically required to sustain a constant dialogue between ‘objective’ and cultural data, or equivalently, between the ways in which the traditional musician and the researcher understand the same object.

As we understand it, the proper task of ethnomusicology is to study the principles governing all forms of ethnic music within their cultural context, i.e., in the area where people actually use them, and where light can be thrown on them from within.

This work has both descriptive and methodological aims. We would have been unable to decipher and transcribe Central African polyphony if we had not developed a suitable and previously non-existent methodological tool. That is why we have felt obliged to give a precise description of this tool and describe in detail how it is to be used.

INTRODUCTION

For many European musicologists, the word ‘polyphony’ describes a technique of the art of composition that belongs to their tradition alone. In the Western world, polyphony dates from the end of the first thousand years AD. It blossomed in the school of Notre-Dame of Paris around 1200, particularly in the organa of Perotin. It has since been established, in various forms, as one of the fundamental techniques of composition in European Art music, of which it was at one time the principal characteristic.

If the idea of polyphony is accepted in such a narrow sense, it cannot be applied to the music of any other civilisation, whether this be the orchestral ensembles of Bali or the choral and instrumental ensembles of Black Africa. Let us quote the radical crew expressed by Pierre Boulez in the Encyclopédie de la Musique published by Fasquelle:

This typically ethnocentric opinion differs fundamentally from that of Jacques Chailley who, in the Larousse Dictionnaire de la Musique, recalls that ‘until very recently, polyphony was regarded as an invention of the learned Western world, where it was first mentioned in a treatise attributed to Hucbald in the ninth century.’

DEFINITION AND GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

Definition

Polyphony by way of polyrhythmics, or hocket, is created by the interweaving, overlapping, and interlocking of several rhythmic figures located on different pitch levels in a specific scalar system.

General characteristics

In Subsaharan Africa, the hocket technique is utilised by ensembles of wind instruments. All the instruments in the ensemble are invariably of the same type (horns or whistles), but of different size. Their pitches are assigned according to a predetermined scale. The number of instruments in the ensemble may vary from five to twenty. Each emits a single pitch chosen from among the degrees of the scale. The factor of melody thus only comes into play at the level of the whole ensemble, as each individual instrument is confined to performing a rhythmic figure, which is inseparable from a predetermined pitch level.

Each musician is assigned his own rhythmic figure for each of the pieces in the repertory of the ensemble. In some cases, this figure allows variations. The fact that these figures are meshed and tiered at different fixed pitches within a predetermined scale results in a very strict type of hocket which stands precisely at the boundary between strict polyrhythmics and polyphony. This is an extremely widespread technique in Africa, which can be found in the west (Cameroon), centre (Congo, Zaïre, Central African Republic), east/northeast (Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia), and south (South Africa).

In the Central African Republic, only the Dakpa and Linda peoples, who belong to the wider Banda ethnic group, seem to use this kind of hocket. Specific repertories employing it are provided for horn ensembles in both communities.

Western culture has been shaped for the past several thousand years by its use of writing as a vehicle for thought, making a written support indispensable for any academic study. Music is no exception to this rule, and would seem extremely difficult to analyse in depth unless first reduced to the form of a written score, i.e., a transcription in the case of music from an oral tradition. The essential transience of music requires that its movement through time be fixed in writing as a substantive ‘reference text’ for the living reality. This is what the ethnomusicologist's attempts at transcription aim to provide, whatever the geographical or ethnic source of his material. If this is true of monodic music, it is even more so in the case of polyphony, where the simultaneity of events results in a much more complex musical lattice. Transcription is thus all the more necessary, though commensurately harder to achieve.

In his Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology (1964), Bruno Nettl highlights both the need for transcription and all the intrinsic difficulties attending it. He distinguishes two main approaches to the description of music: the first consists of analysing and describing what one hears, while the second involves writing down what one hears and then describing the audible phenomena, relying on the observations contained in the transcription.

INTRODUCTION

In the preceding chapters, we have insisted on the fact that the music we are considering here is always based on a system or code. We should, of course, recall that ‘a code has two essential parts: a set of elements and a set of rules defining how these elements must operate and combine’ (Ruwet 1966, 1972: 102). It is therefore obvious that a code implies a theory, and we have already indicated several times that the theory is implicit rather than explicit in traditional African music. All the investigator will encounter there at first are sets of elements, messages.

His description can thus only start from sets of messages, each characterised by a cluster of relevant features which distinguish it from the others in the same cultural setting. Let us also recall that, in Central Africa, these sets are generally musical categories or special repertories defined by a social function, a particular vernacular name, a certain vocal and/or instrumental ensemble, and very often, a characteristic rhythmic formula.

The first step of a description is to pick out what distinguishes each set of messages from all the others, to determine what characterises it, and discover its relevant features. The way the elements comprising each of the pieces in the set are organised must also be determined: in their syntactic aspect, the individual parts in polyphony, and in the aspect of musical simultaneity, the poly-phonic and poly-rhythmic combinations. At the next lower level, the description should provide a characterisation of each operational unit in each part in a given piece, i.e., it should define the smallest formally relevant elements, or ‘morphemes’. This stage of the description proceeds from the whole to its parts and is strictly analytic.

THE LIMITS OF WRITTEN NOTATION

The need for transcriptions in the analysis of Central African polyphony has already been made abundantly clear. This should not, however, obscure the many limitations inherent in the notation of orally transmitted music. In fact, we here encounter the infinitely wider problem of reducing any oral expression whatsoever to a written form of symbolisation. ‘Writing veils language; it disguises rather than clothes it’ (Saussure 1916, 1971: 51–2).

Senghor extols the virtues of the oral transmission of culture in Africa: ‘Black Africa has had the good fortune to ignore writing, even when it was not unaware of its existence … For writing impoverishes reality. It crystallises it into fixed categories and freezes it, when reality is properly alive, fluid, and shapeless’ (1958, 1964: 238–9).

Whether it be language or music, writing is responsible for immobilising reality in a univocal way. Chailley (1967: 118) also stresses the limits to notation, and defines the role of the ‘written sign’ in music as follows:

The method we have described is based on collecting culturally relevant documents. The musicians play their traditional instruments, the proper order of entry for each piece is respected, and temporal reference points are materialised according to internal criteria, such as superposition of the beat by the musicians themselves (an entirely immanent criterion from the cultural standpoint), rather than external ones, such as the use of a metronome or other chronometric systems involving the use of mechanical apparatus. With only material of this kind available, the transcription will have to depend on the musicologist's ear alone, rather than on instruments for measuring pitch and duration on a scale of discrete frequencies.

The method of transcription itself is based on the same theoretical assumptions as the recording method, but works in the opposite direction. It aims to reconstitute the entire piece in writing as a synthesis of the separate parts collected in the field by the recording method, which allowed us to ‘take the music apart’ into a temporal sequence of elements.

The first step in transcription is to organise the durational reference points. Extremely useful for this purpose is lined music paper which is also graduated with fine vertical lines. These can be used to show the arithmetic ratio of the durations: a given number of lines will mark the duration between two isochronous pulsations, which can be represented, for example, as a crotchet or a dotted crotchet, depending on whether the basic value contains a binary or a ternary division. We then prepare a strip of such paper long enough to hold a representative fragment of the piece, and with as many staffs as there are parts.

The first part may then be transcribed from the recording with the superposed beat.

At this point, we must set out the theoretical foundations of our method. We will first have to state a postulate. Any polyphonic piece of music can be looked at as a complex sound structure characterised by the superposition of a given number of coherently related monodies. This leads us to the following assumption: insofar as a polyphonic piece is based on a coherent structuring of all its parts, each of these parts must be coherent in itself. If this is true, each part should be playable separately, i.e., have its own individual existence in sound, just as it exists in the mind of the person who performs it. By this hypothesis, if we can isolate each part and determine the points at which it fits together with the others (or at least one other), we may assume that we have all the elements we need to reconstitute the polyphonic structure. For insofar as the relationships between parts, or between any part and the whole, are coherent, the number of linkage points must be relatively small. The whole can thus be reconstructed, even without the complete set. These interrelations are furthermore based on the principle that all the musicians performing a polyphonic piece will start to play or sing their parts, not simultaneously, but consecutively. This principle holds not only for traditional African music, but also for almost all known forms of orally transmitted polyphony. The only reference used by the individual musician will thus be the part of the musician (or one of the musicians) who has already come in.

The order of entry varies from one repertory to another. It may be fixed by tradition or remain undetermined. This should be ascertained during a preliminary investigation.

GEOGRAPHICAL SURVEY

The area with which we are concerned is the former Oubangui-Chari, which became the Central African Republic in 1958. It is situated between the second and the eleventh degree of latitude north and between the fourteenth and twenty-eighth degree of longitude east. Neighbouring states include Chad to the north, Sudan (ex-English Sudan) to the east, Cameroon to the west, and the People's Republic of Congo and Zaïre to the south.

From east to west, the Central African Republic measures 1200 kilometres by 600 kilometres and occupies a quadrilateral of 617,000 square kilometres, a surface area roughly equal to that of France and of the three Benelux countries.

The course of the river Ubangi, joined by the Mbomu forms its Southern frontier. Together with the Congo, of which it is a tributary, the Ubangi (which is navigable as far as the capital, Bangui) connects the country to the Atlantic. Two mountain masses, to the east (Fertit, whose highest point is 1,400 metres) and to the west (Yade, 1,420 metres), frame a vast plateau, whose attitude averages 600 to 700 metres. Separating the two basins of the Congo to the south, and of the Chad to the north, this plateau is traversed by numerous important watercourses, which serve as channels of communication and, in former times, of migration.

It is usual to distinguish between four different geographical zones. From south to north, we find:

1. (1) in the far south, a zone of equatorial forest

2. (2) from the south to the centre, a zone of shrubby savannah, transected by strips of forest that follow the watercourses

3. (3) from the centre to the north, a zone of savannah that becomes more and more arid

4. (4) in the far north, a Sahellian zone.

PERIODICITY AND THE FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF RHYTHM

Strict polyrhythmics consists of an ordered and coherent superposition of different rhythmic events. We must therefore carefully examine how its component elements are organised before we approach the concept itself.

Pure rhythmics

A clear initial distinction must be made between the rhythmic phenomena found in music where relative pitches form a scalar system (i.e., melodic music); and in music where the melodic parameter is neutralised, leaving only pure rhythmics. We wish to deal here with the latter case.

Pure rhythmics can be based on accentuation, on changing tone colour, or simply on contrasting durations. Pure rhythm can be produced in Africa, as elsewhere, by various sorts of musical instruments (in the main classifiable as idiophones or membranophones); however, parts of the human body may also be used, as for example, when people stamp their feet on the ground, clap their hands, and so on. Pure rhythmics is frequently not incompatible with the perception of melodic sequences resulting from the simultaneous use of diverse pitches and tone colours. There is, however, no immanent (i.e., cultural) basis for interpreting such sequences as melodic entities, because their constituent elements are not integrated into a preconceived system of relative pitch.

Fundamental characteristics

If one listens carefully to a Central African percussion ensemble, one will quickly perceive the fundamental characteristics prevailing in the rhythmics of this region:

1. – regular, stable movement, free of accelerando, rallentando, or rubato; the music is measured and contains strictly proportional durations.

2. – strict periodicity, evident from the predominance of uninterrupted repetitive formulae in which similar material reappears at regular intervals of time;

3. – formulae which are not completely identical; the repetitive system allows a certain degree of variability;

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