African Music Ethnography

For my ethnography project I will be doing the study of African music. This tradition and culture started around the 15th century. Miriam Makeba is a popular artist of African traditional music. He played folk, pop rock and jazz. I picked this topic because their religions, feelings and rituals. This stuck out too me in so many different ways. Another reason why I picked this topic was because of the interesting instruments they play. This music is some of the oldest extant music traditions in the world. It is mind-blowing how meaningful this music is to their culture. This takes place all over African countries from West, Central, Southeast and South Africa. These parts of Africa have different genres of music but is the same culture …show more content…
Next will be the Central region of Africa. Something I learned about Central Africa is that there national anthem is called La Renaissance. Genres that are popular in this region are Latin, Afrobeat and soukous. The countries that are related to these genres are Central African Republic, Congo and Zambia. This also is including the Pygmy music. Last is West Africa music, this kind of music is taken place in Gambia and the plains of Mali and Niger. All of these types of music and places I named are similar to each other but are in different places. Mostly all of these genres were influenced by Arabic music and Indonesia. This style of music doesn’t just happen in Africa but has grown to the United States and to the Caribbean genres, as well. The rhythms and textures of this style of music is different than most of music you hear, from reggae to rock and from hip-hop to mambo also have roots in African music. When African music is played, to them their music is more than just a song. Something that is interesting to me about their music is mostly all of it is not written down, it is passed down traditionally. They let their music be a part of their everyday