ethnomusicology, the music canon, and african music: positions, tensions, and resolutions in the...

Ethnomusicology, the Music Canon, and African Music: Positions, Tensions, and Resolutions inthe African AcademyAuthor(s): Jean Ngoya KidulaSource: Africa Today, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Spring, 2006), pp. 99-113Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4187723 .

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Ethnomusicology, the Music Canon, and African Music: Positions, Tensions, and Resolutions in the African Academy Jean Ngoya Kidula

African music entered serious scholarship through disciplines such as ethnomusicology. While scholars in African music have contributed significantly to the development of theories and methods of culture, the musics of Africa have been portrayed more as artifact than art, and African music scholars have been directed by European and other music practices. The resultant positions and tensions in the continent's academic music management are reflected in ethnomusicological discourse with African music. Drawing from Kenya, the paper examines the processes through which the African academy has grappled with the dynamics of ethnomusicology, African musicology, and the place of African music and musicians. An African musicology cognizant of the contributions of African musicians to the global-music canon while situating them in the historical development of African music is proposed.

Introduction

Serious study of African music entered the academy through ethnomusicology as a discipline, a method, or an approach. More that 100 years since African music began to be documented in print, audio, and video formats, it continues to be presented and represented by positions, theories, and methods associated with and derived from Europe and North America. These positions are usually cloaked in such rubrics as "ethnomusicology," "comparative musicology," and even "systematic musicology"-concepts originally intended to serve the European and American scholastic curriculum. Music academies in Africa inherited these structures from the educational systems of their former colonial powers;' however, little critical assessment exists on how ethnomusicology and its cousins outside Africa service the processes and intentions of music and its documentation for African continental scholars, educators, and performers.2



The debate about ethnomusicology and African musicology began at the onset of the postwar (referring to WWII) scholarly study of African music, specifically in the writings, presentations, and engagements of Klaus Wachsmann with African and non-African colleagues, and in the analytical and philosophical output of J. H. Kwabena Nketia.3. These scholars' contemplations and discussions should be examined in light of historical and social contexts and processes undergone by the discipline of ethnomusicology, research in African music, and music academics on the African continent. Connections and disparities arise relative to the agenda of each of these issues with the dominant academic curriculum. That position favored a European or Eurocentric agenda, placing its music as the standard measurement, thereby creating tensions particularly for African continental researchers, musicians, and composers. When the tensions between ethnomusicology and African musicology were first visited in Wachsmann and Nketia's discourses, musics of non-Western cultures were situated in cultural, social, or area studies-fields that became sites for understanding and presenting these musics.

Wachsmann no doubt believed the human context to be focal in ethnomusicology. Recognizing practice as a prerequisite for African musicology, he advocated (1969) for the performative and analytical assessment of African music, albeit with a structural language embodied in European musicology. For a Western ideology that situated precise records in written script, the orality of African music complicated matters. This may have been a tenuous position for Nketia. Oral history was questioned as a repository of accurate and reliable historical information and data, particularly before and during colonial occupation. The notion of an African musicology garnered from such sources did not provide plausible grounds for the exercise of traditional musicology-that of "establishing an accuracy of texts" (read: written texts) with "surrounding historical records" to "analyze and classify works" and "synthesize them into a historical narrative" (Randel 1986:520). Nketia's heritage and practice could have questioned this European position, but working in an academy founded on the power of the written word, he possibly grappled with the implications of support- ing an African musicology before there was sufficient publication to defend that position.4 A lack of a dominant African art music as was presented by Europe hindered the case for an overarching African counterpart. Ethno- musicology as a study of music in human context, particularly cultural context, and of music outside Western art music, provided an entry point for African musics, and possibly prepared a way for an African musicology, but these musics and this musicology were defined relative to European or Eurocentric conceptions.

Philip V. Bohlman (2001:201) notes that a definitive determinant of the characteristics of European music was obtained by comparing European music with musics outside Europe. V. Kofi Agawu (2003b:230) invokes this kind of differentiation as a European enlightenment strategy for locating and managing the other-than-European. Features dominant in African

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music were described relative to European frames. Scholars and texts reinforced these stereotypes in positive and negative ways. Although African and nationalist music studies emerged in Africa (Nketia 1986a, 1986b, 1999), they were "genealogically and institutionally bound to Western ethnomusicologies" (Bohlman 2004). African responses to, and critiques of, the situation have relied on discourse by postcolonial philosophers such as Hountoundji (1996), Mudimbe (1988), Oruka (1990), and others, who have argued that the academy has continued to subjugate studies in African arts, religion, and literature to subservient status by continuing to promote the positions of the dominant cultures. Research and scholarship about Africa's interaction in contemporary society are presented in such terms as imita- tion, while a similar happening in Europe or America is discussed as a new trend or development, even when borrowed from or imitating the less politically or economically powerful cultures.

Ethnomusicology and its cousins can therefore be seen as systems developed by North American and European scholars to understand and "contain" musics of rural, minority, or other cultures-in which case, postcolonial African philosophers, writers, and educators misunderstand and misread the intentions of dominant cultures. Africans should reflect on the long-term effects of music scholarship and either silently acquiesce to the status quo when marginalized, or redefine and document their findings and positions.

African philosophers grappling with what it is to be African denote that it is a way of defining borders that by implication restrict and confine "Africa" into a geographical, conceptual, ideological, and political stran- glehold to reinforce illusory beliefs. One such academic, P. J. Hountondji observes,

African studies were invented by Europeans[!] But Africans should not merely carry on these disciplines as shaped by Europe. Africans must re-invent them. ... Such re-invention implies a sharply critical awareness of the ideological limits and the theoretical and methodological shortcomings of former practices. . . Critical appropriations of existing knowledge [demands we] know when the knowledge is at stake about ourselves and when the appropriations take the form of repatriation (when knowledge is sent back to its country of origin). (1996:xix)

Given European and North American academies' outlook on ethnomusicology, systematic and comparative musicology, and other approaches regarding African music, how or what has been the African academy's response in carrying on the disciplines as invented? or in reinventing, appropriating, or repatriating the knowledge? How has Africa presented itself at home and abroad? Is it a continuity of European invention, perception, intention, and need? or has Africa located its needs locally and

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internationally as an impetus for education about or in itself? How have these questions been approached in music studies? At stake is the question of the disciplining of African music by ethnomusicology, comparative musicology, and systematic musicology versus the study of African music as a discipline. How African music has been canonized in the academy via the discipline of ethnomusicology, which was set up to serve needs different from those that African musicians, music scholars, and music educators may have imagined, is of importance.5

Thesis, Beginnings, and Processes

There are few critical assessments of the positions, tensions, and resolutions extant in African academies on the continent regarding the study of music in general and African music in particular. Hardly any studies evaluate how African music is presented and represented by African and Africanist scholars, theorists, and performers who teach or research for audiences in Europe and North America.6 The situation in Africa is grave, for until the late 1990s, few organizations gathered music scholars on the continent to talk among themselves or with African and diasporic Africanist scholars.7 Since the 1950s, the journal African Music, published at Rhodes University in South Africa, was the lone pan-African voice on the continent. With sanctions against South Africa from the 1960s until the 1990s and other problems, its dissemination to other African countries was limited. Many senior African scholars, researchers, educators, and performers migrated to the North and West partly for better access to materials and for easier dissemination of their work. For a variety of reasons, Africanist counterparts in Europe and the Americas rarely shared their findings with African universities. Little dialogue occurred between music departments in Africa and Africanist musicologists, theorists, and composers abroad. Recognizing a need for all the parties to engage in discourse to work more efficiently, I began conversations with music scholars8 in an attempt to bridge the gulf. It became evident from these encounters that the strongest tensions were related to research facilities and dissemination of findings locally and abroad while minding both personal and national agenda. My approach has been to evaluate the definition, place, role, and impact of music in academies in Africa, serviced or served by the continent's scholars, as well as the dispersion of African music knowledge and ways of experiencing music into the global canon.

To assess the positions, tensions, and resolutions in African music academies, my case study is drawn from Kenya, though this situation is common in other African countries. I therefore present a type of national musicology9 under a broader rubric of African musicology. The academy and the media are the main institutions utilized by governments to rally and promote a kind of national image, in part as a way of asserting imagined borders and identities. They provide a framework for examining the processes of cultural amalgamation, but the two institutions are part of a broader

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global arena, one that affirms or critiques its producers and products. I shall focus on the academy as a fundamental site for creating, promoting, and archiving national products, and as a local community functioning for global representation.

My appraisal draws from personal experience in the Kenyan education system, where I was a performer, student, theorist, researcher, educator, and administrator before I ventured to the United States as a student, researcher, educator, and performer (the order is important) in African, European, and American music. Further critical discussions and presentations were held with Kenyan, African, and Africanist academics and performers formally and informally, in the discipline of music and in related fields such as history, literature, language and linguistics, anthropology, and religious studies where music is a primary source. A formal discussion culminated in a symposium held in Nairobi in November 2002, with feedback by scholars from South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Germany, Norway, Sweden, England, and the United States. An observation from discussions about ethnomusicology and African music scholars was that, given a definition of ethnomusicology pervasive in writings and teaching, as study of musics of other cultures, African students can call themselves ethnomusicologists when studying Western European music as "the other," and musicologists when engaged in African music. They were ethnomusicologists when they studied African music with European methods; however, it was unclear, given relatively scant documentation available and broad spectrum of cultures, what African methods and practices were. Ambivalence was noted toward approaches and methods in ethnomusicology that had more anthropological or sociological reportage than analysis of music style, form, theory, pedagogy, and performance practice.

In essence, the discussion suggested that each continent or country had different needs for the information, and the most published and established venues for scholarship that dominated the academic industry had saturated the global market (this in reference to scholars from Nigeria, Ghana, and wheresoever they had relocated in Europe or North America). In a globalizing space with increasing economic and political leverage from dominant cultures, the boundaries and needs of Africans might, I think, be gradually sidelined in deference to the larger picture; however, African music scholars on the continent are experiencing a certain transition and desire to represent themselves at home and abroad from their own positions, perspectives, and worldviews that are at the same time both emic and etic. The presentation and representation is evident particularly with the forma- tion of national, regional, and pan-African music associations by educators, musicologists, and performers. Scholarly organizations have begun to hold annual conferences, symposia, and workshops that encourage participation by national, continental, and international participants. Journals, websites, and newsletters have been inaugurated to report on the proceedings or pub- lish articles.'0 I believe this direction will enrich and expand Africanist and African scholarship worldwide.

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Music as a Discipline in the Academy

Nketia's (1986a) article noted that initial studies in African music in many African nations in the 1950s and 1960s were located, not in music departments, but in African-studies institutes. In Kenya, the institute was affiliated with the University of Nairobi. Its primary approach and thrust were ethnography and cultural anthropology. The general output was musical ethnographies with more cultural information than musical analysis (e.g., Darkwa 1982, 1991) in the vein of studies in ethnomusicology and folklore.

Although experiments in composition using African tunes were already a British recognition of Kenyan music in the late 1950s," African music was introduced into the school curriculum for serious study in 1968 as part of the diploma music-teacher's education. Before then, Graham Hyslop, the colonial music and drama officer, trained conductors in the interpretation and performance of European choral music, with injunc- tions about the proper approach to staging African music and a comparative musicological approach to the study of African music (Hyslop 1964). African music became a serious examinable subject in high school from 1974. While the examination included European music history, theory, and performance, the African section assessed performance and sociocultural aspects of music. The basic text, Nketia's Music of Africa (1974), provided a broad survey in the academic tradition of the times-a rubric for the anthropological study of music, positioning African music in a cultural, more than a musical, study, with Merriam's theoretical and methodological axis: rooting the analysis of music in function, use, instrument types, and song text.12 Such approaches provided rich insight in music in the life of Africans more than in the art and science of music in Africa. It is no wonder that music students in Africa had an ambivalent relationship with it (Agawu 2003a:14).

Music was offered at the undergraduate level from 1977 with a curriculum that included the then-current ethnomusicological theories for studying African music and musical performance. The program in Nairobi, a major African airport hub, saw visiting professors and ethnomusicologists such as John Blacking, Gerhard Kubik, and other European scholars intent on demonstrating African music theories and practices from their research.13 The bulk of the university curriculum was European "art" music, present also in any school in Europe or the Americas. The daily musical life of the students and the studied music were separated in profound ways. Methods of acquiring European musical knowledge had to be learned by many students. This process distanced the notion of lived music, studied music, and music appreciation. African music was therefore processed as a cultural artifact and understood as a cultural phenomenon, rather than a lived, historical musical process. The result was a mixed relationship with African music-studied as artifact, but performed as life. It was, and still is, difficult for students to accept African musicianship as viable and

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"elite," since it has been presented in anthropological, rather than musical, terms and locations. The music considered serious for academic pursuit was European music. The enculturation associated with learning and perform- ing African music seemed out of place in a "European" classroom. Students found it difficult to accept African modes of musical knowledge in the academy. The lived musical experience was, and has been, mostly separated from the studied discipline.

The discipline of African music became exciting and accessible when social and cultural positions assumed by ethnomusicology as a discipline were perceived as informing, circumferencing, or framing the music, so that students began to look at writings on African music as the musicology of African cultures, rather than the ethnology of African music. The approach was solidified during a nationwide discussion between members of a presidential commission for music set up in 1981, and the public. The discussions, codified in the commission's report (Omondi 1984), became the basis for changes in the schools' curriculum from 1984. This schema provided impetus for the serious study of African music theories, histories, practices, and performances. Enforcing music in grade school as a compul- sory subject from 1986 to 2000 spurred an informed and nationally viable music industry and audience, and provided additional momentum for per- ceiving African music as an art form, rather than just a cultural artifact. More students entered the undergraduate music departments at two public and several private universities. The curriculum included the traditional European canon and African music theory, history, and practice. Musics of Asian and other cultures were included. Since Kenya has a sizeable South and West Asian population, particularly visible and powerful in the last 150 years at the Kenyan coast and moving inland with British employment of Asians as middlemen, South and West Asian music has been part of the national culturescape.

The presidential commission on various occasions attempted to document music in Kenya from a nationalist perspective (Kavyu 1995), and held workshops and symposia for these purposes;14 a larger problem, however, was a lack of pedagogical output to invigorate ethnic and national music in the academy. The broader agenda of the universities sidelined the construc- tion of buildings for performances and archival purposes, so that, while students engaged the music in class and performance, the music still fell short of its intended status in the academy.

Music and other disciplines

A music symposium titled "Africa as the Cradle for a Holistic and Inte- grated Approach to Music," intended to assess critically the African music academy and student expectation of the discipline, was held at Kenyatta University, Nairobi, in November 2002. It included creative folkloristic and reenacted performances of African music, such as those mandated or

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adopted by African governments, particularly at the dawn of political inde- pendence. Governments had congregated music specialists from different ethnic groups to learn each other's musics as performance models, or as a basis for creating new genres for education and entertainment. Kenyatta University houses such a resident folkloristic troupe, quite separate from the music department. The symposium included other performances, such as choral folksongs-a British invention (Hyslop 1958; Kidula 1996) for presenting African tunes on European-type concert stages-and settings of folktunes in European common practice. Graham Hyslop, the British music officer in colonial Kenya, had encouraged these fusions as ways of presenting African music since the 1950s. Popular religious and secular music were staged. All the styles are often located in African studies, ethnomusicology, and companion studies in Europe and North America, and excluded historically from musicology, music theory, and performance.

Papers, workshops, and discussions covered "traditional" ethnomusicology topics, such as "drums of the Akamba people" or critiques of music composition, aesthetics, and technical and interpretative evalua- tion of performances in indigenous practice. Other deliberations included appropriated musics, drawing on interethnic, international, and global exchanges. Scholars assessed the music-education system, examining the place, performance, and transmission of African music in the curriculum and critiquing the perceived European agenda in how African music was introduced, presented, and practiced in the academy. The pervasiveness of music in society was seen, not as a product for commercial or academic consumption, but as a basic daily ingredient. Consequently, while local specialists are respected in their language groups, performers nurtured in the academy did not appear to earn community respect as indigenous car- riers of genres or instrument specialists. Pedagogical paradigms for music and music instruments from African frameworks were therefore reinforced and demonstrated. Chronological developments in African music were performed and analyzed. Animated discussions encouraged the inclusion of African popular music in the curriculum. The term popular was construed in more ways than suggested by the global-music industry. It was clear that popular music, whether sacred or secular, provided primary endroits for negotiating, integrating, and articulating local, national and global music encounters.

Scholars from history, religious studies, language, medicine, and other disciplines provided insight into the dimensions of music: as historical archives, language transmitter, repository of belief-systems and social and cultural values, and facilitator and enactor of feelings, thoughts, viewpoints, and other ideas. It was observed that the location of African music in ethnomusicology from the "Western" school serviced the other disciplines more than it served music itself. Texts with music in the title inferred a musical underpinning, rather than a music centralization. Music departments were challenged to rethink their approaches to the African academy in the study of African music. African musicology enjoyed a better reception among the

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music scholars than ethnomusicology in describing how they would like to present and represent the study of African music.

African Musicology and East Africa

East Africa is a productive place to situate African musicology. The overt use of the term is ascribed to Klaus Wachsman (1966), whose major work was in Uganda. He used the term to recognize the parameters under which music studies in Africa or African music had been expanded to embrace a corpus of musical knowledge, rather than just cultural material. The knowledge was being collected, recorded, analyzed, and systematized by European and North American scholars and reported in such journals as Africa, African Music, Anthropos, and Ethnomusicology. African scholars had become regular contributors, postulating theories and methods and writing articles, monographs, and texts."5 Academies in Africa had begun to estab- lish courses that included African music in addition to the European variety in institutions of higher learning, but little was done in the musicological analysis of African music as the core of the music curriculum. Wachsmann sought to document music in Africa, not only from human cultural context, but in its chronology as theory and practice (1969:131-132).

Later usage and popularization of the term occurred in East Africa when a group of scholars at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nairobi started the journal African Musicology to specialize in African materials and encourage an Africa-centered approach to the presentation and representation of the data. The focus was not only to be on the African continent, but to be wheresoever African materials had become the nexus of works derived from African sources. This approach expanded Wachsmann's ideology by recognizing the infiltration of African resources and approaches in the world at large. Nketia (1986b) suggested that the intentions of the journal were premature, as the founders presupposed a tradition of African music scholarship that was "distinctive and separate from musicology in the Western tradition"; while raising this critique, he acknowledged the founders' desire to encourage an "African-centered approach to the presentation and interpretation of data" (1986b:216). That suggests that the journal's editors had intended for writers to provide alternatives to "Western" musicological ideology. Since North American ethnomusicology had already established ways of looking at African music that served its purposes, as had the ethnomusicology of European nations, a journal on African soil to compliment the journal African Music, which was undergoing difficulties because of the political ostracism of South Africa, might have provided theoretical and analytical impetus for scholars in Africa. The founders of the journal, co-opted into a national music-education development project, sidelined the journal after only one issue.

J. C. Djedje and Nketia took up the term African musicology and argued for a take on the definition of the term on geographical grounds with

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a specialization of musicology in Africa (1984:xi-xii). They justified their adoption of the term and prescribed types of writings and data analysis that could solidify the field. The articles in their report focused on items of inter- est in "traditional" ethnomusicology. Musics that bespeak Africa's interaction with other continents are sadly missing-which may be a reflection of the kinds of issues that interested researchers and educators at the time. The term African musicology became the title of two volumes of a festchrift to Nketia (Djedje 1992; Djedje and Carter 1989). While there is a broad range of writers from different continents, the articles embraced the narrower idea of "area" and subject-matter as African music and musicians, but with a cultural and linguistic component (Djedje and Carter 1989:40), narrower than the range including the African diaspora and the musicological orientation of the Nairobi group.

For this paper, African musicology as a discipline presupposes a practice, a methodology, and rules in assessing, directing, or changing African musical behavior, or training to achieve what is construed as African music, both on the continent and beyond. It implies a process or production of events, a historical development of musical materials, and procedures to cat- egorize trends, styles, progressions, or projections. It ought to examine and describe the art of music as physical, psychological, aesthetic, and cultural phenomena. I believe music phenomena in Africa in diverse forms are appre- ciated and critiqued for their artistic and aesthetic attributes, understood in African terms, and exported for those very terms and attributes; otherwise, African or African-derived and infused styles would not enjoy such global appreciation. African and Africanist scholars have been grappling with the definition of African music. Some look beyond the sonic confines of Euro- pean delimitations to video and motion, so that dance, drama, costume, and spectacle are intrinsic to music's definition and presentation.

Ethnomusicology presents different dynamics because of the role it plays as an alternative to the dominant hegemonic European canon, which traditionally repressed other musics, such as folk, "minorities," and popular styles. It has developed its own canon for presenting and representing Afri- can music. It may inadvertently have promoted its stereotypical students, insiders, outsiders, and publishers. Issues such as minority or gender studies sometimes crowd the music in that the contextual underpinnings-social, racial, cultural-marginalize the performative core. Thus, ethnomusicology is a gateway into other cultures or issues, and can well be located in cognate disciplines and area studies. In this case, it would not be difficult to periph- erize African music as one of many minorities. In Europe or North Amer- ica, with dominant European voices, indigenous and powerful European musics are normally at the core of the curriculum, with ethnomusicology legitimizing cultural diversity.

For the African academy, the situation is complex. Beginning at such elemental levels as the definition of music, the academy has been slow to adopt is mandates. It has relied on the colonial establishment's initial and continuing efforts to the extent that few theories of African music permeate

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the classroom. Instead, social and other theories serve for the discussion of African music. In practice, African musical traditions are insufficiently analyzed or historicized. African music should be at the core of music studies, with Euro-American music at the periphery; otherwise, African researchers and composers will continue the exodus to the West and North, as this is their fundamental training and orientation.

Most of independent Africa has come a long way in recognizing African performers since the 1960s, when governments sought to develop national identities, display the diversity of African cultural heritage, and archive "africanisms" while amalgamating each country's musical styles. In Kenya, the process of systematizing the pedagogy of traditional instruments continues to assist in developing an educational canon that addresses the population's needs and concerns. The music canon includes music literacy, theory, history, and practice at global and local levels. The symposium in Nairobi grounded, strengthened, and motivated the study and appreciation of African and Kenyan music. We also realized the need to refocus our course offerings, research, and education to benefit the emerg- ing population. Dialogue with scholars, educators, and performers from other countries sensitized Kenyan students and scholars to the uniqueness of their musical heritage.

African Musicology, Ethnomusicology, and the Music Academy

Why would European and American musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and scholars be interested in discussions by African music scholars on the ways they perceive or research and interpret their data?

Scholars in African music have operated in European models, worldviews, approaches, and methods. Scholars in Africa can solidify or provide alternative models to those developed by earlier researchers who argued for African music histories, theories and practices. Many studies from the continent have few outlets in the global academy, inasmuch as the work done by foreign researchers is barely known in much of Africa. Symposia and conferences in Africa with international scholars are significant arenas, not only for discourse, but for experiencing the lived music, one of Africa's foundational documentational resources. Founding continental African music scholars, composers, and theorists seem to have some discomfort in being situated in an African music history. By training and orientation, they have been colonized and grafted into a European or North American academic music history (Agawu 2003a:8), and have long advocated for an Afri- can "art" music, one that recognized their achievements as practitioners in the European "high-art" discourse; however, most invoke their African heritage for "difference" and marketability in research, composition, and performance (Euba 1970). A critical assessment of African music history makes room for these scholars to locate themselves in an African music history and development without the accompanying discomfiture or unease.

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By investigating how new works resolve tensions in both regions, composers can richly impact European canonic directions and African musicological dimensions. Prospective students of African musical instruments can profit from methods developed in African universities, thereby leading to not just a folklorizing of the instruments, but innovating organological shifts, developments, and instrumental repertoire without stereotyped expectations.'6

Ethnomusicology has moved from European positioning of other cultures to viewpoints and reportage by indigenous cultures of their own selves-from dominance of Euro-American scholars as objective outsiders, to a recognition that all scholars are biased by their backgrounds, exposure, and agenda. It now includes local researchers, performers, and voices. It has moved beyond cultural ethnographies to more musicological analyses. Though still situated in European structural expectations and biases and in the dominant cultural agenda and perception of needs, in its disciplinary and methodological dynamism it embraces diverse voices; in fact, the study of all music is in a sense ethnomusicological, for we center, dislocate, and "other" ourselves in time, in space, and even by audience, when we embody music, orally, in writing, or in performance.

Insights by African scholars from the continent situated in music and in other disciplines expand the vista of researchers in Europe and North America. They may provide pieces to a puzzle in our interconnected and multilayered musical encounters. Music research done in African universities is located not merely in the music departments, and that fact expands our interdisciplinary collaborations. Some research reported as new and innovative may already have taken place on the continent, but scholars receive little exposure and credit at the international level, for various reasons. Possible dialogue is lost or curtailed in the process. With little economic leverage, many African scholars do not receive international critiques of their work. I have showcased some conversations that take place on the continent. I believe that with new technologies, which verify the historicity of cultural artifacts and attendant musical structures, it is possible to discuss musical historical knowledge processed in Africa and to analyze and classify works that form the narrative of music in Africa.

There is little doubt that serious scholarship on African music entered the academy through ethnomusicology; nor is there any doubt that some founding fathers, theorists, and analysts of the discipline were informed by their research in Africa. There is also no question that African music scholars were incorporated into the academy by engaging the dominant music canon. A disciplinary introspection permits scholars to evaluate their efforts and impact. It is through dialogue and the exchange of ideas that the discipline is enriched and vitalized. In recent years, more voices have become audible on the continent and abroad, particularly as Africans have become aware of, and have participated in, discourses that engage the music in, musicians of, and scholars on Africa. That in itself is a testament to the impact of ethnomusicology and its expansion into dimensions that were either contested or seemed inconceivable fifty years ago. Thus, while some

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tensions are resolved, new vistas emerge-vistas that energize the dynamic discourse that constitutes the vibrant life of the disciplines.

NOTES

1. The use of the term academy includes the idea of educational institutions as places, but also

as specific disciplines.

2. This discussion was presented as a seminar paper at Kenyatta University (Kidula 2001) and

revised for the SEM conference in Tucson, Arizona (Kidula 2004). It focuses on research in,

writing about, and education of African music from the view of ethnomusicology's role and

place in bringing African music into the academy.

3. Wachsmann and Nketia set the stage for later developments (positive and negative) in the

perception, study, and performance of the music of Africa in the discipline of ethnomusicol-

ogy from the late 1950s. Both bring African, European, and North American perspectives

and concerns by their national heritage and how they interfaced with the three continents

in their philosophical, theoretical, and other positions.

4. Nketia and Djedje (1984:xiii-xv) noted that while there was an accumulation of data on Afri-

can music, these data had not been analyzed and published in sufficient amounts to create a

repository of materials for classification and synthesis. They observed the regionalization of

studies and focus on select problems were problematic in creating a holistic approach, one

that would "facilitate systematic comparison of African materials" to present overarching

African principles.

5. I read Agawu's (2003a:xix) comments on the "incongruities of postcolonial musical Africa"

as a juncture for this discussion.

6. Agawu's writing is probably the most visible in recent years.

7. Including The Pan African Society of Musical Arts Education (PASMAE), a branch of the

International Society for Music Education (ISME), the International Center for African Music

and Dance (ICAMD), and the Center for Intercultural Music Arts (CIMA)-all of which gained

momentum in the late 1990s. Only PASMAE meets primarily on the continent.

8. "Diaspora" refers to African scholars formerly on the continent who have relocated to other

continents but continue to work in and/or with African music.

9. I use the term nationalist, rather than national musicology, particularly drawing from Bohl-

man's discussion on national music and nationalist music (2004b:81-160). I defer to the

notion that national music "seeks to reflect the image of the nation" in such a way that

"those living in it recognize themselves in basic but crucial ways" (83-84), while nationalist

music serves more political, economic, or cultural functions in competition against other

nations (119).

10. Books, CDs, videos, journals, and articles resulted from collaborations among PASMAE mem-

bers to promote and document the concept of musical arts as an African view or definition

of the discipline and art. The seminal text is MusicalArts inAfrica (Pretoria: Unisa Press 2003)

with an offshoot journal: Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa, launched in 2004. Regional

bodies also exist. The Kenyan branch KASMAE was discussed in 2002. Other bodies include

the Association of Music Educators of East Africa, launched in Kenya in May 2005, with an

accompanying journal.

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11. For example, Hyslop's Magnificat, published by Oxford University Press in 1962.

12. Nketia's linguistics education is evident in section 4. Nketia dedicates two chapters to

speech, and draws song texts with examples from groups in Ghana and Nigeria.

13. I joined the program in 1978 as an undergraduate and profited from this interaction.

14. Two conferences held in 2001 and 2002 brought together the variety of musicians in Kenya.

Choirmasters, rather than music teachers, dominated the event. Select papers from the

conferences were compiled for the commission's archive.

15. West Africans, particularly Nketia of Ghana, were in the forefront of this movement (Djedje

and Carter 1989:16-27); however, Euba (1969) felt that there was already a musicology of

African music going on, but done by non-Africans. An examination of musical reportage

in African Music in the 1960s and early 1970s demonstrates that analysis of African musical

structures ("folk," popular, and religious) was a vibrant exercise. Samples were drawn from

all regions of sub-Saharan Africa.

16. For example, Makubuya's analysis of organological adaptation and repertoire expansion of

the Baganda Endingidi (2000).

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