Music out of doors

UNESCO Courier, April, 1992 by Francois Bensignor

No song I had even heard had affected me so profoundly. The melody carried a message of salvation and benediction from the whole nomad race for one little foreigner brought by chance to those arid lands. It said more than any book or any speech about the shepherd's way of life and his cosmic rapport with nature. I will always treasure that unique moment of intense communication with those proud men of the high plateaux.

An inseparable companion

A simple refrain carried on the wind can express the essence of an entire way of life. How many masterpieces have flowed from the flutes of goatherds or camel-drivers to vanish into thin air? Music born in the dust of the mountain trails is ephemeral. Yet it is also the truest music, the closest to life.

If you ask musicians how they composed their finest pieces, many will tell you that they got their inspiration while walking. Some fill their pockets with scraps of paper on which they scribble phrases and fragments of melody as they come into their heads. Others, more up-to-date, never go anywhere without dictaphones, which are even more direct and convenient than paper for capturing ideas, moods or just evocative sounds.

Walkers know that, when they stride out to the rhythm of their breathing, it never takes long for some tune or other to fall in step with them in their mind. The swelling of the lungs easily transforms itself into the skirl of bagpipes leading Scottish highlanders over the moors to some glorious encounter with destiny. Or maybe the rhythm of the strides suggests the bala of a griot giving heart the Bambara warriors marching out to do battle in the savannah. For there is no moment of African life that does not have its own music: even beyond life, there is a music for death and to sustain the soul in its extraterrestrial wandering. Music floats down the river with the canoe, fertilizes the fields with the cultivators, bobs on the water with the fishing-boats, speaks through the forest spirits. Everywhere men, women and masked dancers caper to its rhythm.

Can one still talk of it as street music, when it is the voice of the street itself, even down to the vocal intonations that shape the music of the tongue the people speak? Here music is part and parcel of a whole way of life. It carries within it memory and knowledge, reality and myth. It is society's cement, the inseparable companion of the human race.

FRANCOIS BENSIGNOR is a French journalist who specializes in music. The author of Sons d'Afrique (Marabout, Paris 1988), he was general editor of a guide to music in the French-speaking world, Sans visa (CIR, Paris 1991), a second, enlarged edition of which will be published this year. He was also general editor of and a contributor to Scenes de musique en ville (CENAM/CIR, Paris 1991). He is a founder of the Paris-based association "Zone Franche", which seeks to encourage and promote forms of music produced in the French-speaking world.