African Music Formal Response

Formal Response 1 In the last two weeks I have listened to three CDs, all of which represent the work of different African and African American musicians. Africa is a continent of many countries and within these countries are many regions with their own musical cultures. The music on the first of these CDs was sampled from all over Africa and for that reason there were a huge variety of musical styles in the CD. The second CD was a collection of music from the Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest, and most of its music held a consistent, though very foreign song style. My final CD sampled African blues musicians from all over Africa as well as the United States. This CD also had a wide selection of musical styles due to the different cultural and …show more content…
It sampled music from all over the continent of Africa. The reoccurring theme that pretty soon stood out to me was how common the pattern of alternating between a solo vocalist and a group of singers was. Over half of the songs on the CD used this type of vocal interaction. Out of the songs that had this back and forth between a soloist and a group, it was also common for the group to alternate between singing together in social unison with high vocal blend and to interlock their voices, singing different parts of the tune. Having the singers split between these two styles so frequently makes me think that this is a song style that is more common in the African folk tradition. Among the songs on the CD that did not have this tradeoff between soloist and group there were some other similarities. Solo singers often took on nasally tones or alternated between singing in a nasal tone in one verse and singing without it in another. In songs with multiple soloists, one often sang is a nasal tone while the other did not. There were also usually intricate and quick-paced instrumental accompaniments to the music. The accompanying musician would take turns playing with the melody or phrase that sang by the soloist. This is a style that I have noticed is also common in Western …show more content…
In this interlock, several, possibly dozens of voices were singing dramatically different parts of a complicated tune to the same single loosely following rhythm. The sheer number of voices and parts made the melody incredibly complex and hard to ever listen to as a whole, as opposed to an accumulation of several distracting parts. Each voice sang a very short repetitive bit of the song, usually alternating between high or low pitch. This alternating gave me the sensation that the voices were circling back and forth. Everyone once and a while a voice would sing a larger phrase, clearly enunciating their syllables so that their message could be understood. Most of the voices were slurring their syllables however. The rhythm of each song has been rather loose, slow, and unimposing in most of the music so I was surprised when I came to a track with an rapid and complicated rhythm carried by a tonal drum