Culture, concept, aesthetics: the phenomenon of the African musical universe in Western musical culture

African American Review, Summer, 1995 by Amon Saba Saakana

The Clash of Modes of Production and Cultures

The historical mode of production in Europe has been based upon slavery; that is, the mechanism by which wealth was accrued depended on the existence of classes. This foundation goes back to the Greek city states, where free citizens subjugated the masses, who were slaves. In Africa, slavery, as we understand its application from Greece, was non-existent: A "slave" could become a leading and influential citizen in the society, and no African legislation enforced slavery. In Greece, however, slavery was a legal condition, and any attempt to alter this mode by Solon in the sixth century B.C., for example led to vilification and attack (Aristotle 43). In Rome, this mode of production persisted until slaves numbered 2 to 3 million (Watson 2), or 35 to 40 per cent of the population. In Africa, a system of gift exchange among the king, the state, and the general population did not lead to slavery until the sixteenth century, when the arrival of the European's colonization policies led to total confiscation of the land and enforced labor to derive material benefits from the land.

The basis of all wealth is land. In Europe land was private property, while in Africa, up to this century, land was entrusted to the monarchy for use by the majority. No settler could be refused the use of land. Referring to the right of land allotment of an African prince, Diop says:

This singular personage . . ., still the master of the soil, in the ritual sense of that term[,] he is the one who allots land to newcomers. . . . He has received the land in trust; he never sells it - he would not dare to do so for religious reasons. So that private property never became a reality until the notorious European laws during the period of colonization in this century. (149-50)(2)

Moreover, the presence of both class and ethnic identity throughout European ancient, medieval, and contemporary times is an expression of a particular rabid form of racism which the system of Caucasian economic modes produced. In sum, ethnocentrism and racism were endemic in the Indo-European cradle before the existence of African slavery.

The fundamental differences between African and Caucasian modes of production reemerge when we examine the music of the two cultures. In the African context, music making was an aesthetic attempt to express the sounds in nature. These sounds - from the lion, the elephant, the bird, the wind, the river, thunder, etc. - became the principle for artistic formulation and expression. Francis Bebey states that African musicians "do not attempt to combine sounds pleasing to the ear. Their aim is simply to express life in all its aspects through the medium of sound" (3).

Jazz musicians also use this model. Compare the "singing" of an African dove (which I witnessed in Ibadan, Nigeria) in which the dove's riff is repeated endlessly; the jazz musician, as well as other African musicians globally, organize music from the fundamental concept of chordal, melodic, or rhythmic repetition. Thus, a musically illiterate Caucasian such as James Phillippo, the 18th-century cleric and landowner, could refer to African musical practices in Jamaica as "rude music," "hideous yells, discordant sounds," etc. (242-43).

This base ignorance has been perpetuated in the 20th century by no less respectable a music journal than The Melody Maker. In 1926, a John B. Southar painting, The Breakdown - of a jazz musician performing before a naked Caucasian woman, and above the shattered body of the Roman goddess Minerva - elicited an hysterical response toward the painting's creator because of the association of jazz with the African musician. The editor, who wrote the article, clearly perceived Southar's work as a threat to the moral fabric of the young, an affront to the Caucasian female, and a condemnation of jazz musicians. The article begins rationally by praising the painter for his realism and artistic ability, making laudatory remarks about the hanging committee of the Royal Academy (where it was exhibited), and protesting that, although jazz musicians are not thin-skinned, the public would inevitably draw inferences from the picture that jazz musicians did not deserve. The writer is obviously warming up to something which becomes ominously apparent beginning in the fourth paragraph:

It is not our intention to labour the point, and so to give this picture a publicity disproportionate to its value, but we state emphatically that we protest against, and repudiate the juxtaposition of an undraped white girl with a black man. Such a study is straining beyond breaking point the normal clean interferences of allegory. We demand also that the habit of associating our music with the primitive and barbarous negro derivation shall cease forthwith, in justice to the obvious fact that we have outgrown such comparison.

. . . We see Minerva lying shattered and neglected in the background. It is said that, for the purpose of this picture, she presented the "old order of things" which the iconoclasm of jazz has hewn down. Minerva, however, was the Roman goddess of wisdom, and the neglect of wisdom . . . is not the indiscretion of our modern dance-loving girlhood . . . but the un-wisdom of the artist himself who so thoughtlessly stressed and unconsciously perpetuated a phase of human association in its repugnant and least representative form.