Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa最新文献

{"title":"Music and identity in Inxeba (The Wound): the exploration and disruption of representations","authors":"Travis Mc Dowall","doi":"10.2989/18121004.2020.1852788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2989/18121004.2020.1852788","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores the complex and interwoven nature of the scored and traditional music featured in the film Inxeba (2017) in an attempt to bridge these seemingly disparate sound worlds. In identifying their significance to the film’s narrative and plot devices, the article posits that ‘The Wound’ and ‘Somagwaza’ serve as important case studies when regarding the complex identity politics central to the film. ‘The Wound’, a ‘house track’, sub-culturally speaks to the struggles of gay men in the 1990s as they negotiated the identity politics of the time. ‘Somagwaza’ in stark contrast is a traditional Xhosa song that is performed during ulwaluko initiation ceremonies, and explicitly describes particular masculine traits for Xhosa men to embody in order to maintain the status quo of male behaviour. When analysed together, these pieces speak to the identity conflict experienced by three gay Xhosa characters in the film. With an outright rejection of queerness in both urban and cultural spaces as implied by the film and its score, further questions arise on queer identity in a broader South African context, and the spaces in which queer people are ‘allowed’ to exist.","PeriodicalId":41064,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa","volume":"17 1","pages":"107 - 119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82753128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reflections on Nigerian musical arts and culture","authors":"E. Sylvanus","doi":"10.2989/18121004.2020.1851126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2989/18121004.2020.1851126","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41064,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa","volume":"12 1","pages":"viii - x"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87998156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The ‘street’ construct and mass-mediated identities in Nigerian hip hop","authors":"P. Onanuga","doi":"10.2989/18121004.2020.1852786","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2989/18121004.2020.1852786","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The origins, influence and perspectivisation of American hip hop can be traced to African American locational references to the ‘hood’. The global diffusion of hip hop ensures that the ‘hood’ identity is continually localised and appropriated within emergent localities. Within Nigerian hip hop culture, the ‘street’ is a site for asserting identity, as well as for recurring locations, ideas and shared experiences of authentication and credibility. This article contextualises the street and its forms of enactment in selected Nigerian hip hop songs to help understand mass-mediated identities. Relying on a theoretical framework based on Bourdieu’s social theory of agency and Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, the study concludes that the framing of the street is expressed through multiple modes, including linguistics (slang), locational references (places), the glorification of materialism, and the psychological fixation on attitudes (sex, drugs and alcohol), which together accentuate the exotic essence and flavour of street-conscious Nigerian music.","PeriodicalId":41064,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa","volume":"69 1","pages":"61 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91365225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"One Buzzy Evening (2017) for tenor trombone and percussion","authors":"Charles Lwanga","doi":"10.2989/18121004.2019.1700617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2989/18121004.2019.1700617","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract One Buzzy Evening (2017) for tenor trombone and percussion is a creative musicological work that explores the gradual transformation of limited motivic ideas, both rhythmic and melodic. Moving from a percussive sound world to a mixture with melodic sounds, the piece attains structural logic by foregrounding its dialogic character in the form of call and response and/or imitations, as well as through pointillism. It simulates the Kiganda xylophone technique in the vibraphone and, more interestingly, employs a distorted version of a pentatonic scale. In doing so, the piece blends indigenous Kiganda musical idioms and processes, as well as Western techniques, while intentionally concealing the former.","PeriodicalId":41064,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa","volume":"36 1","pages":"119 - 125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81108891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contemplating African art music: a reflection on the Akin Euba Symposium and Concert","authors":"Bode Omojola","doi":"10.2989/18121004.2019.1698169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2989/18121004.2019.1698169","url":null,"abstract":"One of the widely acknowledged features of African music is its organic and proximal connection to social and cultural life. Activities such as marriage ceremonies, funeral rites, the installation of kings and religious festivals depend significantly on musical performance in articulating the social and religious norms that hold a society together. As exemplified in the Yoruba dùndún performance, music in African communities is often an intensely social experience in which musical contemplation – which I define as the act of processing and engaging with music in terms of, and beyond, its formal and aesthetic principles – is socially grounded. The art of musical enjoyment – or the process of musical contemplation – is not limited to the processing of musical aesthetics. Quite often musical contemplation is complete only when there is an extra-musical context (social or religious, for example) within which one engages with the appeal of musical creativity and the dynamics of performance. If the Yoruba tradition is indicative, traditional African musicians often situate and conceive the aesthetic or entertaining elements of their performance (the aesthetic or congeneric space) within the specific context of that performance (the embodied space), and do so in ways that are referential to the values of the larger society (the social space).1 What they generate in the process is an integrative system of musical signification. The connections between aesthetic, embodied and social spaces provide an important background for understanding how modern African performances tend to depart from traditional practices. In a contemporary work for piano and Yoruba dùndún drums, for example, changes are apparent in the context of performance (concert hall), the musical sound (piano as well as the syntactical and aesthetic constructs marking its use), and the social significance (elitism, modernism and/or individuated contemplation). More significantly, however, the process of connecting these spaces in ways that facilitate an integrated system of contemplation is often unarticulated by the composer or unbeknownst to the listener. The degree to which such connections are forged and the mode of forging them would certainly","PeriodicalId":41064,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa","volume":"72 1","pages":"163 - 171"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83945753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In memoriam: Dr Oliver ‘Tuku’ Mtukudzi (1952–2019)","authors":"C. Dutiro","doi":"10.2989/18121004.2019.1698171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2989/18121004.2019.1698171","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41064,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa","volume":"32 1","pages":"145 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80760755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Highlife music without alcohol? Interrogating the concept of gospel highlife in Ghana and Nigeria","authors":"A. Emielu, G. Donkor","doi":"10.2989/18121004.2019.1690205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2989/18121004.2019.1690205","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The term ‘gospel highlife’ has been in use in Ghana and Nigeria for a long time, without examination of its underlying ideology and ambivalences. As West Africa’s pioneer popular music and as a social construct, highlife is a socio-musical phenomenon with diverse interpretations and appropriations. Drawing on three decades of academic and professional engagements in Ghana and Nigeria, as well as the literature on gospel music by notable scholars, this article asks: What exactly is gospel highlife? How does the concept of gospel highlife fit into or challenge the idea of social stratification which characterised highlife at its inception? How does the concept of gospel highlife speak to issues of social identity and economic determinism in a postmodern and neoliberal age? Overall, this article interrogates the epistemological basis of the term ‘gospel highlife’ compared to what may be described, for want of a better term, as ‘secular highlife’, as well as narratives of its historical development. This article argues that the concept of gospel highlife goes beyond the mere idea of ‘highlife without alcohol’. Rather, the concept is nested in an interest-bound epistemological premise that reflects social, economic and gendered imperatives. We conclude that both gospel and secular highlife, just like the music minister- musician constructed binary, is a paradox of sameness and difference.","PeriodicalId":41064,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa","volume":"1 1","pages":"29 - 44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82972155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In memoriam: Minette Mans (1950–2019)","authors":"P. Campbell","doi":"10.2989/18121004.2019.1698168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2989/18121004.2019.1698168","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41064,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa","volume":"75 1","pages":"143 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84739565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ingoma and St Matthew’s Tune Book: two South African missionary tonic sol-fa hymn-tune collections","authors":"Andrew-John Bethke","doi":"10.2989/18121004.2019.1686231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2989/18121004.2019.1686231","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Christopher Birkett’s Ingoma (1871) and Cyrill Wyche’s St Matthew’s Tune Book (1902), both collections of hymn tunes assembled in South Africa, have proven influential in contemporary Xhosa Anglican hymnody. This article provides the first detailed commentary on the contents of these tune books as well as an introduction to the context in which they were produced. The influence of John Curwen’s tonic sol-fa system in South Africa is also addressed. Brief biographies of the compilers of the collections are provided. Birkett composed new tunes or adapted existing Western tunes for his Ingoma, giving many of them Xhosa names, or dedicating them to significant figures in the local church music scene. The author analyses selected tunes from the collection and assesses Birkett’s compositional style. The contents of Wyche’s collection are also assessed, with particular reference to any locally composed material.","PeriodicalId":41064,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa","volume":"1 1","pages":"1 - 27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84040938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thailand ICTM 45","authors":"J. Kidula","doi":"10.2989/18121004.2019.1698159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2989/18121004.2019.1698159","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41064,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa","volume":"54 1","pages":"157 - 161"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79846368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}