THE AFRICAN MASK
To the Western world masks are the most commonly known art form of Africa.
They can be admired for there beauty and craftsmanship. Although the artistry of the African masks is evident, for the people who create them they have a meaning much deeper than surface beauty.
African masks are danced to make a connection between the human and the spirit worlds, to convey ideas, and to reinforce social controls and religious beliefs. Masks are danced or performed at funerals, initiation ceremonies, reenactments of legends, and to ask a spirit's blessing for the prosperity and protection of an individual, family or community.
Some of the spirits these masks evoke are represented in mask depicting women, royalty and animals.
Introduction
Masks are known to have existed for 17,000 years, appearing in infinite variety and in widely scattered societies and cultures through the world.
Evidence of the prehistoric use of masks has been found in both Europe and Africa, and masks survive from the ancient civilizations of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
They have been fashioned out of both durable and ephemeral materials, including bone, terrecotta, stone, ivory, metal, and wood, as well as leaves, twigs, feathers, cloth, and animal and vegetable material.
Used for disguise, concealment, social control, spirit manipulation, physical protection, and entertainment, masks may be essential components of solemn religious observances of adjuncts to secular festivals.
In the West today, masquerades are found exclusively in performance and secular contexts. In many African societies, however, masking continues to play an essential role in the life of the community and provides an aesthetic means of addressing universal human issues such as:
1. a concern for order
2. the nature of reality and the cosmos
3. relationships to others
4. and coming to terms with death.
The masked dancer is accepted as an incarnation of an ancestor or spirit being whose appearance energizes the ritual but the mask itself is only one element in an elaborate and complicated event.
Body-concealing costume, dance, music, song, myth, and , often dynamic interaction between masker and audience, are essential components of the masquerade.
African masks were meant to be part of a total visual and auditory experience which is irrevocable altered once the mask has been removed from its original setting and displayed as an inert sculpture in a private collection or museum.
Nevertheless, the presence of these objects in a museum affords us the opportunity to begin to understand something of the genius of the African sculptor.
The masks demonstrate the great variety of form, content, and medium which characterize mask production in Africa.
Mask represent both humans and animals and exhibit the creators' technical mastery and conceptual creativity, especially in the approach to form, rather than emphasize likeness, the artists concentrate on the essence or the spirit of the subject. Thus for example, the depiction of the emphatic horizontal of the Bwa Butterfly Mask [2] suggests, rather than replicates, the wingspan of the insect in flight.
Masks fascinate people of all ages and cultures. Something magical occurs when a person wears a mask, hiding his or her true identity behind something beautiful, interesting, or frightening. The world of the African mask is particularly intriguing and complex.
Glossary
Ancestor: A deceased person, either immediate or remote, from whom a family or clan traces its identify. Ancestors are believed to be concerned with the welfare of their descendants and can intercede on their behalf or punish them for improper behavior.
Culture: The full range of human activity, represented by objects, buildings, rituals, etc., including religious practices and beliefs and social organization.
Ephemeral: An event or object that lasts for a markedly brief time. Something that is living or lasts only for a day, as certain plants or insects do.
Masks: A physical object designed to cover the face or the head.
Masquerades: An important event involving masked dancers, musicians and their audience.
Myth: A traditional story that serves to explain a practice, belief, natural phenomenon,or world view of a people.
Social Control: The maintenance of harmony and stability in a community through enforcement of laws, including judging disputes and punishing offenders. In many African cultures, masks and other art objects play important roles in achieving social harmony.
Masquerade
The mask is an interesting artifact which has often been studied as such and collected for display in the European context of the museum. When presented this way, as a disinterested visual commodity surrounded by other artifacts which are related only by the significance that the curator has ascribed to the collection, the African mask is no more the potent force it was created to be. For only in the human action context of the masquerade does its deeper cultural significance and efficacy as an oral- aesthetic motif become apparent. The mask provides a visual representation of the otherwise invisible, and the masquerade becomes the metaphor for life, and for the manner in which the divine or ancestral spirits often intervene from behind masks that we have learned to take for granted.
During its construction, the ancestral mask is given features which distinguish it from other masks that may be used in the context of entertainment. Communally-approved artistic codes are used in constructing this mask such as the use of white as the color of death or-- since animals are not believed to exist after death--the rendering of animal forms in the mask-. The particular animal forms used add to the textual content and revelation of what the mask represents, e.g. the lion as strength, the spider as prudence, or horns as the moon and fertility. So the artist provides the first designation of the mask, and the dancer who wears it provides the second designation in performance. Without this second designation in the masquerade, the mask is incomplete because it has no efficacy as Nommo ... again, an art-for-life's-sake ethic.
The musician's role may be to invoke the spirit to enter the masquerader, whereafter the mask and dancer are considered sacrosanct and not to be desecrated for fear of harm to the miscreant. Therefore during the masquerade the masked dancer is granted symbolic status and representational immunity, because any comments that they make (Nommo) are believed to be coming from the particular ancestor or god (indicated by the mask) that is now in possession of their body. And in such ritual the supernatural becomes a tangible presence, accessible for propitiation and intervention in the affairs of the living. Alternatively the occasion may also be used judiciously to convey messages and critiques to members of the community which may, if delivered in a different context produce friction and hostility.
This African masquerade tradition has been maintained in non-traditional contexts and Diasporan communities in variations of its outward forms, much of which was necessitated by authorities who were hostile to the African. For instance the African and Spanish syncretisms that one finds in Afro-Dominican musical traditions came about largely as a result of the Catholic church's suppression of African religious expression in any form amongst enslaved Africans.
This oppressive action by the church forced African religious expression underground to emerge in this disguised creolised form that nevertheless remained more musically and spiritually African.
The adoption of Catholic saints, Christian liturgy, and Spanish melodies and vocal techniques was the mask that Africans created in the Afro- Dominican context by necessity in order to preserve their tradition.
This technique of developing an outward form that appeased hostile authorities while simultaneously maintaining the deeper integrity of African culture was an ingenious application of the masquerade tradition, also notably demonstrated in the black folk church in America.
And it was given dramatic practical application during the African-American period of the underground railroad when enslaved Africans were planning and executing their escape to the north.
Enslaved Africans would sing in codes such as "steal away to Jesus" which, to the slave-owners sounded like a harmless longing to be with the heavenly master, but in reality masked the call-and-response to freedom.
As an oral-aesthetic motif, the masquerade is adaptable in its outward forms to the circumstances within which the deeper African mythoforms operate on behalf of the community.
Whether the oral-aesthetic masks are coded in non-African languages, in Christian liturgy, or in the "entertainment" jargon and paraphernalia of the music industry, the traditional art-for-life's-sake ethic and modes of discourse nevertheless continue to exist and perform dynamically within the larger masquerade of life.
Kinetic Orality
It has been said that a person who "hears" African music "understands it it in dance or some form of physical movement. Movement in the African musical context is not simply about the dance, because in its existential sense it expresses the generative power that constitutes life, that is transported in rhythmic sound, and then transformed into the visual patterns of the flesh.
Taking its cues from the spiritual kinetic or telekinetic that was earlier referred to as kimoyo, this energy is maintained and transformed into a visual kinetic through the oral-aesthetic, thus creating a continuum and culturally-distinctive imperative in the motif kinetic orality.
It is this kinetic imperative that creates the misapplication of formal Eurocentric methods of transcribing, performing, and analyzing "music" (versus "dance") to the understanding of African oral-aesthetic processes.
Rhythm is a crucial element of kinetic orality and a major reason for a relevant Africa-centered approach to its forms and processes of oral- aesthetic expression.
Because it is heavily emphasized in the African context, rhythm creates the weakest link to formalist and isolationist Eurocentric music theories and static forms of transcription, and it reveals African values and their dynamic and conducive forms of cultural agency.
Community is paramount ... and African rhythms, which carry indigenous speech patterns, initiate processes of community by their physical and emotional impact in the dance.
As mentioned previously, it is said that each person has a rhythm to which they dance.
The vast cultural array of rhythmic and dance motifs not only attest to this fact, but the metaphor of the rhythm validates the uniqueness of the individual, even as the polyrhythms that are conveyed in performance suggest and elicit community.
The generative and transformative power of Nommo therefore lies to a great extent in the kinetic modalities of rhythm, and in its unique abilities to functionalize the concept of community.
And here too one notes a significant cultural distinction with the formal Eurocentric separation between performer and audience.
As a collective entity whose oral-kinetic requires an interactive relationship for aesthetic fulfillment, the African communal imperative overrides these hard boundaries, even in performances set on the western context of the stage.
The black audiencearrives at such a venue fully expecting to "come and jam with ... party with ... get down with ... and be moved by" the performance.
As the designated "chorus" they may provide responsorial accompaniment such as "tell the truth" and "sing it baby;" hand-clapping, finger-snapping, foot-stomping, and other body movements which convey the kineticism of communal vitality.
This performance format took off in a big way with a growing young white audience who were in a mood of rebellion against authority and ripe for cultural experimentation during the early years of rock'n' roll.
Their exposure to rhythm and blues artists such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino and the growing popularity of the genre amongst white youth spawned the creation of rock 'n' roll as a white version of this popular style of music.
Artists such as Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, Bill Haley, Ricky Nelson, and Andy Williams earned their initial popularity by covering black rhythm and blues songs.
The overt sexual connotations of the term rock 'n' roll were not lost on "Elvis the pelvis" as the eventual "king" became known from his performance style.
In any event it is interesting to note that such white appropriations of
African oral-aesthetic motifs were interpreted and expressed as a duality of sex and rebellion. Suddenly the "back-beat" and "syncopated" African rhythm (so designated in relation to the metronomic Eurocentric time-line) became a hot commercial property. On its own cultural terms this rhythm demonstrated the "talking drurn" motif by reflecting and informing the kineticism of African/Ebonic speech patterns.
And so the appropriation of these rhythms by rock 'n' roll artists brought them in touch with Nommo and restructured patterns of perception, interpretation, expression, and interaction as they relate to sound and subsequently translate to image. In contrast to formal distinctions and hard boundaries between music as a sound phenomenon and dance as iconographic, Nommo precedes and conceives the Africa-centered image or the visual kinetic which is always itself in a dynamic relationship with sound. And it is through the motif of kinetic orality that one participates in and finds revelation of the deeper mythoforms that govern the oral life-world.
African musicians exploit the visual kinetic elements of dress, facial expressions, and body movements including dance in order to magnify the word--the oral-kinetic-thus optimizing the passage of the spiritual kinetic, and establishing a successful rapport with the community. They consciously use their entire bodies in musical expression, relating to the rhythm as if it were the heartbeat of life itself and conceiving music and movement as an audio-visual unit. The interactive motif of kinetic orality therefore facilitates the being and becoming of life via an Africa-centered spiritual-oral-visual continuum, and the rnusician-dancer-instrurnent unity demonstrates this abundantly. One only need witness the phenomenon of a Michael Jackson performance to understand how potent, integral, and current this Africa-centered motif remains.
And as the almost mythical "moonwalk" has become associated with the King of Pop, so have dances such as the "Charleston," the "twist," and the "funky chicken" been created by musicians James P. Johnson, Chubby Checker, and Rufus Thomas respectively. The "Talking Drum"
As the masquerade trains perceptions of the forces that operate behind outward forms in the universe, so too does 'the musical instrument play a crucial role in reinforcing and adding to this. perceptual training. From the moment of contemplating its construction to the performance on the finished product, the musical instrument plays a symbolic role as co- creator whose "body" and "voice" are an anthropomorphic extension of the African being. The instrument maker who uses the resources of a tree to construct the instrument may go through an initial ritual of offering libations in order to honor the ancestral spirits who are believed to reside therein. The resonating space within the completed instrument is then believed to give fullness to the ancestral voices (Nommo), and it is the musician's performance on particular instruments that enables the ancestors to be present through the medium of the dancers.
As such therefore, the dancer's body is often also considered as an instrument that can be "played" by the sounds of a skilled musician. As modern western science and music therapy have become aware, different sounds speak to different parts of the human body and inform the various responses which in the African context become a dynamic audio-visual call-and-response dialogue. The dancer who is conversant with. the language of the music knows to make certain audible or physical responses to particular sounds and rhythms, thereby entering into the dialogue in a linguistically congruent and visually appropriate way. In so doing Nommo becomes amplified and extended through these audio-visual patterns of socially-constructed movement. In part this explains why it is impossible to understand African "music" by the Eurocentric approach of writing it down in its audible aspects only.
Moreover the iconographic Eurocentric orientation towards dance as a distinct aesthetic category from music is problematic in the African context because it disregards the interchangeable and/or simultaneous roles of dancer as musician, rhythmic collaborator, and musical instrument. In the oral life-world the human body, as the instrument and extension of the Supreme Creator, is the prototype for the secondary models: aerophones; chordophones; membranophones; or idiophones. For instance, sound production through the larynx or human voice-box is caused when air from the lungs cause the lower pair of vocal cords to vibrate. Pitch is controlled by varying the tension on the cords, and volume is regulated by the amount of air allowed to pass through the larynx. These same principles govern sound-production on chordophones- (stringed instruments) and aerophones (wind instruments).
The human body has its own inner resonating spaces which, in the musical instrument as mentioned above, would be where the soul of the ancestor resides, and from where Nommo as life is generated. Also, as a specialized receptor of sound, the human middle-ear (tympanum) is a drum-like structure consisting of a hammer and anvil that acts upon the vibratory membrane of the eardrum. By extension, human biological cells and surfaces that are responsive to touch create a polycentric environment for the various impacts of tactile sound. The body-politic is thus a complex interactive network regulated by the life-sustaining rhythms of breathing in collaboration with the heartbeat, and these principles are incorporated into oral-aesthetic forms and concepts. Oftentimes therefore, African musical instruments will be carved to resemble human forms either in whole or in part in order to train a deeper understanding of what sound-producing entities represent.
As a general rule instruments are constructed individually according to the particular tastes and traditional norms of the musician. The tuning of these instruments is subject to the language patterns of the musician's mother- tongue, as are the rhythms that are generated in performance. The musician thus "teaches" the instrument the traditional language it will "speak" in its role as a speech-surrogate and co-creator. The ability to remain true to linguistic patterns is especially crucial in the many African languages where tones serve phonemically to distinguish the meanings of words. In such cases one word may have a number of different meanings depending upon which syllable is intoned higher or given more stress. This is the principle by which the "talking-drum" (as order to render the thoughts, language, and emotions of the community as faithfully as possible.
As a communications technique the "talking-drum" principle is a quest for truth in which musical instruments as speech surrogates become co- creators and conveyors of Nommo. Often the drum has been used to convey messages over long distances to others familiar with the language. And in a number of instances music has been put to journalistic use in interesting ways such as the performances by Jabo musicians who sit in the Liberian marketplace and offer a running on-scene commentary on their talking-xylophones. This is a variation on the role of the traditional griot who is often attached to leading households in African class-societies or alternatively acts as a freelance poet, in either event exercising their special knowledge of traditional history, language, and the lineage of their patron by way of praise-singing, commentary, and instrumental accompaniment.
As an oral-aesthetic motif therefore, the "talking-drum" principle lends itself in a variety of ways to the understanding of the deep structures of African- derived music in the global village. It also brings into question the Eurocentric distinctions between vocal and instrumental music; music and dance; and musician and dancer. One hears the linguistic imperatives for instance in the African-American blues scale which flatten the 3rd, 7th, and sometimes 5th of the western diatonic major scale, and also in the musical rhythms which, having lost their original ethnic specificity nevertheless inform and are informed by Ebonic speech patterns in the Diaspora. So the fact that African instruments such as the drum were banned from use by the slave master because of their communicative "talking -drum" motif in this context. It simply masquerades in other congruent forms.
Further examples abound of musicians who create within this Africa- centered conceptual tradition. Blues instrumentalist and singer B.B. King and his guitar which he has anthropomorphized in the co-creative person of "Lucille" is one such example. Other examples include the scatting-style of an Ella Fitzgerald, and the performances of a Bobby McFerrin or the group "Take-6" in which they employ their bodies as surrogate- instruments, imitating the sounds of trumpets and various percussion instruments. The tap-dancing tradition also blurs the western distinctions between music-dance and musician-dancer-instrument. Conscious rap music and its proactive journalistic themes of social reflection
commentary, and criticism; its urge to correct the historical record and tc collect on past dues; its praise-singing modes and so on are all additionally valid and notable expressions of the Africa-centered "talking-drum" motif.
They can be admired for there beauty and craftsmanship. Although the artistry of the African masks is evident, for the people who create them they have a meaning much deeper than surface beauty.
African masks are danced to make a connection between the human and the spirit worlds, to convey ideas, and to reinforce social controls and religious beliefs. Masks are danced or performed at funerals, initiation ceremonies, reenactments of legends, and to ask a spirit's blessing for the prosperity and protection of an individual, family or community.
Some of the spirits these masks evoke are represented in mask depicting women, royalty and animals.
Introduction
Masks are known to have existed for 17,000 years, appearing in infinite variety and in widely scattered societies and cultures through the world.
Evidence of the prehistoric use of masks has been found in both Europe and Africa, and masks survive from the ancient civilizations of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
They have been fashioned out of both durable and ephemeral materials, including bone, terrecotta, stone, ivory, metal, and wood, as well as leaves, twigs, feathers, cloth, and animal and vegetable material.
Used for disguise, concealment, social control, spirit manipulation, physical protection, and entertainment, masks may be essential components of solemn religious observances of adjuncts to secular festivals.
In the West today, masquerades are found exclusively in performance and secular contexts. In many African societies, however, masking continues to play an essential role in the life of the community and provides an aesthetic means of addressing universal human issues such as:
1. a concern for order
2. the nature of reality and the cosmos
3. relationships to others
4. and coming to terms with death.
The masked dancer is accepted as an incarnation of an ancestor or spirit being whose appearance energizes the ritual but the mask itself is only one element in an elaborate and complicated event.
Body-concealing costume, dance, music, song, myth, and , often dynamic interaction between masker and audience, are essential components of the masquerade.
African masks were meant to be part of a total visual and auditory experience which is irrevocable altered once the mask has been removed from its original setting and displayed as an inert sculpture in a private collection or museum.
Nevertheless, the presence of these objects in a museum affords us the opportunity to begin to understand something of the genius of the African sculptor.
The masks demonstrate the great variety of form, content, and medium which characterize mask production in Africa.
Mask represent both humans and animals and exhibit the creators' technical mastery and conceptual creativity, especially in the approach to form, rather than emphasize likeness, the artists concentrate on the essence or the spirit of the subject. Thus for example, the depiction of the emphatic horizontal of the Bwa Butterfly Mask [2] suggests, rather than replicates, the wingspan of the insect in flight.
Masks fascinate people of all ages and cultures. Something magical occurs when a person wears a mask, hiding his or her true identity behind something beautiful, interesting, or frightening. The world of the African mask is particularly intriguing and complex.
Glossary
Ancestor: A deceased person, either immediate or remote, from whom a family or clan traces its identify. Ancestors are believed to be concerned with the welfare of their descendants and can intercede on their behalf or punish them for improper behavior.
Culture: The full range of human activity, represented by objects, buildings, rituals, etc., including religious practices and beliefs and social organization.
Ephemeral: An event or object that lasts for a markedly brief time. Something that is living or lasts only for a day, as certain plants or insects do.
Masks: A physical object designed to cover the face or the head.
Masquerades: An important event involving masked dancers, musicians and their audience.
Myth: A traditional story that serves to explain a practice, belief, natural phenomenon,or world view of a people.
Social Control: The maintenance of harmony and stability in a community through enforcement of laws, including judging disputes and punishing offenders. In many African cultures, masks and other art objects play important roles in achieving social harmony.
Masquerade
The mask is an interesting artifact which has often been studied as such and collected for display in the European context of the museum. When presented this way, as a disinterested visual commodity surrounded by other artifacts which are related only by the significance that the curator has ascribed to the collection, the African mask is no more the potent force it was created to be. For only in the human action context of the masquerade does its deeper cultural significance and efficacy as an oral- aesthetic motif become apparent. The mask provides a visual representation of the otherwise invisible, and the masquerade becomes the metaphor for life, and for the manner in which the divine or ancestral spirits often intervene from behind masks that we have learned to take for granted.
During its construction, the ancestral mask is given features which distinguish it from other masks that may be used in the context of entertainment. Communally-approved artistic codes are used in constructing this mask such as the use of white as the color of death or-- since animals are not believed to exist after death--the rendering of animal forms in the mask-. The particular animal forms used add to the textual content and revelation of what the mask represents, e.g. the lion as strength, the spider as prudence, or horns as the moon and fertility. So the artist provides the first designation of the mask, and the dancer who wears it provides the second designation in performance. Without this second designation in the masquerade, the mask is incomplete because it has no efficacy as Nommo ... again, an art-for-life's-sake ethic.
The musician's role may be to invoke the spirit to enter the masquerader, whereafter the mask and dancer are considered sacrosanct and not to be desecrated for fear of harm to the miscreant. Therefore during the masquerade the masked dancer is granted symbolic status and representational immunity, because any comments that they make (Nommo) are believed to be coming from the particular ancestor or god (indicated by the mask) that is now in possession of their body. And in such ritual the supernatural becomes a tangible presence, accessible for propitiation and intervention in the affairs of the living. Alternatively the occasion may also be used judiciously to convey messages and critiques to members of the community which may, if delivered in a different context produce friction and hostility.
This African masquerade tradition has been maintained in non-traditional contexts and Diasporan communities in variations of its outward forms, much of which was necessitated by authorities who were hostile to the African. For instance the African and Spanish syncretisms that one finds in Afro-Dominican musical traditions came about largely as a result of the Catholic church's suppression of African religious expression in any form amongst enslaved Africans.
This oppressive action by the church forced African religious expression underground to emerge in this disguised creolised form that nevertheless remained more musically and spiritually African.
The adoption of Catholic saints, Christian liturgy, and Spanish melodies and vocal techniques was the mask that Africans created in the Afro- Dominican context by necessity in order to preserve their tradition.
This technique of developing an outward form that appeased hostile authorities while simultaneously maintaining the deeper integrity of African culture was an ingenious application of the masquerade tradition, also notably demonstrated in the black folk church in America.
And it was given dramatic practical application during the African-American period of the underground railroad when enslaved Africans were planning and executing their escape to the north.
Enslaved Africans would sing in codes such as "steal away to Jesus" which, to the slave-owners sounded like a harmless longing to be with the heavenly master, but in reality masked the call-and-response to freedom.
As an oral-aesthetic motif, the masquerade is adaptable in its outward forms to the circumstances within which the deeper African mythoforms operate on behalf of the community.
Whether the oral-aesthetic masks are coded in non-African languages, in Christian liturgy, or in the "entertainment" jargon and paraphernalia of the music industry, the traditional art-for-life's-sake ethic and modes of discourse nevertheless continue to exist and perform dynamically within the larger masquerade of life.
Kinetic Orality
It has been said that a person who "hears" African music "understands it it in dance or some form of physical movement. Movement in the African musical context is not simply about the dance, because in its existential sense it expresses the generative power that constitutes life, that is transported in rhythmic sound, and then transformed into the visual patterns of the flesh.
Taking its cues from the spiritual kinetic or telekinetic that was earlier referred to as kimoyo, this energy is maintained and transformed into a visual kinetic through the oral-aesthetic, thus creating a continuum and culturally-distinctive imperative in the motif kinetic orality.
It is this kinetic imperative that creates the misapplication of formal Eurocentric methods of transcribing, performing, and analyzing "music" (versus "dance") to the understanding of African oral-aesthetic processes.
Rhythm is a crucial element of kinetic orality and a major reason for a relevant Africa-centered approach to its forms and processes of oral- aesthetic expression.
Because it is heavily emphasized in the African context, rhythm creates the weakest link to formalist and isolationist Eurocentric music theories and static forms of transcription, and it reveals African values and their dynamic and conducive forms of cultural agency.
Community is paramount ... and African rhythms, which carry indigenous speech patterns, initiate processes of community by their physical and emotional impact in the dance.
As mentioned previously, it is said that each person has a rhythm to which they dance.
The vast cultural array of rhythmic and dance motifs not only attest to this fact, but the metaphor of the rhythm validates the uniqueness of the individual, even as the polyrhythms that are conveyed in performance suggest and elicit community.
The generative and transformative power of Nommo therefore lies to a great extent in the kinetic modalities of rhythm, and in its unique abilities to functionalize the concept of community.
And here too one notes a significant cultural distinction with the formal Eurocentric separation between performer and audience.
As a collective entity whose oral-kinetic requires an interactive relationship for aesthetic fulfillment, the African communal imperative overrides these hard boundaries, even in performances set on the western context of the stage.
The black audiencearrives at such a venue fully expecting to "come and jam with ... party with ... get down with ... and be moved by" the performance.
As the designated "chorus" they may provide responsorial accompaniment such as "tell the truth" and "sing it baby;" hand-clapping, finger-snapping, foot-stomping, and other body movements which convey the kineticism of communal vitality.
This performance format took off in a big way with a growing young white audience who were in a mood of rebellion against authority and ripe for cultural experimentation during the early years of rock'n' roll.
Their exposure to rhythm and blues artists such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino and the growing popularity of the genre amongst white youth spawned the creation of rock 'n' roll as a white version of this popular style of music.
Artists such as Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, Bill Haley, Ricky Nelson, and Andy Williams earned their initial popularity by covering black rhythm and blues songs.
The overt sexual connotations of the term rock 'n' roll were not lost on "Elvis the pelvis" as the eventual "king" became known from his performance style.
In any event it is interesting to note that such white appropriations of
African oral-aesthetic motifs were interpreted and expressed as a duality of sex and rebellion. Suddenly the "back-beat" and "syncopated" African rhythm (so designated in relation to the metronomic Eurocentric time-line) became a hot commercial property. On its own cultural terms this rhythm demonstrated the "talking drurn" motif by reflecting and informing the kineticism of African/Ebonic speech patterns.
And so the appropriation of these rhythms by rock 'n' roll artists brought them in touch with Nommo and restructured patterns of perception, interpretation, expression, and interaction as they relate to sound and subsequently translate to image. In contrast to formal distinctions and hard boundaries between music as a sound phenomenon and dance as iconographic, Nommo precedes and conceives the Africa-centered image or the visual kinetic which is always itself in a dynamic relationship with sound. And it is through the motif of kinetic orality that one participates in and finds revelation of the deeper mythoforms that govern the oral life-world.
African musicians exploit the visual kinetic elements of dress, facial expressions, and body movements including dance in order to magnify the word--the oral-kinetic-thus optimizing the passage of the spiritual kinetic, and establishing a successful rapport with the community. They consciously use their entire bodies in musical expression, relating to the rhythm as if it were the heartbeat of life itself and conceiving music and movement as an audio-visual unit. The interactive motif of kinetic orality therefore facilitates the being and becoming of life via an Africa-centered spiritual-oral-visual continuum, and the rnusician-dancer-instrurnent unity demonstrates this abundantly. One only need witness the phenomenon of a Michael Jackson performance to understand how potent, integral, and current this Africa-centered motif remains.
And as the almost mythical "moonwalk" has become associated with the King of Pop, so have dances such as the "Charleston," the "twist," and the "funky chicken" been created by musicians James P. Johnson, Chubby Checker, and Rufus Thomas respectively. The "Talking Drum"
As the masquerade trains perceptions of the forces that operate behind outward forms in the universe, so too does 'the musical instrument play a crucial role in reinforcing and adding to this. perceptual training. From the moment of contemplating its construction to the performance on the finished product, the musical instrument plays a symbolic role as co- creator whose "body" and "voice" are an anthropomorphic extension of the African being. The instrument maker who uses the resources of a tree to construct the instrument may go through an initial ritual of offering libations in order to honor the ancestral spirits who are believed to reside therein. The resonating space within the completed instrument is then believed to give fullness to the ancestral voices (Nommo), and it is the musician's performance on particular instruments that enables the ancestors to be present through the medium of the dancers.
As such therefore, the dancer's body is often also considered as an instrument that can be "played" by the sounds of a skilled musician. As modern western science and music therapy have become aware, different sounds speak to different parts of the human body and inform the various responses which in the African context become a dynamic audio-visual call-and-response dialogue. The dancer who is conversant with. the language of the music knows to make certain audible or physical responses to particular sounds and rhythms, thereby entering into the dialogue in a linguistically congruent and visually appropriate way. In so doing Nommo becomes amplified and extended through these audio-visual patterns of socially-constructed movement. In part this explains why it is impossible to understand African "music" by the Eurocentric approach of writing it down in its audible aspects only.
Moreover the iconographic Eurocentric orientation towards dance as a distinct aesthetic category from music is problematic in the African context because it disregards the interchangeable and/or simultaneous roles of dancer as musician, rhythmic collaborator, and musical instrument. In the oral life-world the human body, as the instrument and extension of the Supreme Creator, is the prototype for the secondary models: aerophones; chordophones; membranophones; or idiophones. For instance, sound production through the larynx or human voice-box is caused when air from the lungs cause the lower pair of vocal cords to vibrate. Pitch is controlled by varying the tension on the cords, and volume is regulated by the amount of air allowed to pass through the larynx. These same principles govern sound-production on chordophones- (stringed instruments) and aerophones (wind instruments).
The human body has its own inner resonating spaces which, in the musical instrument as mentioned above, would be where the soul of the ancestor resides, and from where Nommo as life is generated. Also, as a specialized receptor of sound, the human middle-ear (tympanum) is a drum-like structure consisting of a hammer and anvil that acts upon the vibratory membrane of the eardrum. By extension, human biological cells and surfaces that are responsive to touch create a polycentric environment for the various impacts of tactile sound. The body-politic is thus a complex interactive network regulated by the life-sustaining rhythms of breathing in collaboration with the heartbeat, and these principles are incorporated into oral-aesthetic forms and concepts. Oftentimes therefore, African musical instruments will be carved to resemble human forms either in whole or in part in order to train a deeper understanding of what sound-producing entities represent.
As a general rule instruments are constructed individually according to the particular tastes and traditional norms of the musician. The tuning of these instruments is subject to the language patterns of the musician's mother- tongue, as are the rhythms that are generated in performance. The musician thus "teaches" the instrument the traditional language it will "speak" in its role as a speech-surrogate and co-creator. The ability to remain true to linguistic patterns is especially crucial in the many African languages where tones serve phonemically to distinguish the meanings of words. In such cases one word may have a number of different meanings depending upon which syllable is intoned higher or given more stress. This is the principle by which the "talking-drum" (as order to render the thoughts, language, and emotions of the community as faithfully as possible.
As a communications technique the "talking-drum" principle is a quest for truth in which musical instruments as speech surrogates become co- creators and conveyors of Nommo. Often the drum has been used to convey messages over long distances to others familiar with the language. And in a number of instances music has been put to journalistic use in interesting ways such as the performances by Jabo musicians who sit in the Liberian marketplace and offer a running on-scene commentary on their talking-xylophones. This is a variation on the role of the traditional griot who is often attached to leading households in African class-societies or alternatively acts as a freelance poet, in either event exercising their special knowledge of traditional history, language, and the lineage of their patron by way of praise-singing, commentary, and instrumental accompaniment.
As an oral-aesthetic motif therefore, the "talking-drum" principle lends itself in a variety of ways to the understanding of the deep structures of African- derived music in the global village. It also brings into question the Eurocentric distinctions between vocal and instrumental music; music and dance; and musician and dancer. One hears the linguistic imperatives for instance in the African-American blues scale which flatten the 3rd, 7th, and sometimes 5th of the western diatonic major scale, and also in the musical rhythms which, having lost their original ethnic specificity nevertheless inform and are informed by Ebonic speech patterns in the Diaspora. So the fact that African instruments such as the drum were banned from use by the slave master because of their communicative "talking -drum" motif in this context. It simply masquerades in other congruent forms.
Further examples abound of musicians who create within this Africa- centered conceptual tradition. Blues instrumentalist and singer B.B. King and his guitar which he has anthropomorphized in the co-creative person of "Lucille" is one such example. Other examples include the scatting-style of an Ella Fitzgerald, and the performances of a Bobby McFerrin or the group "Take-6" in which they employ their bodies as surrogate- instruments, imitating the sounds of trumpets and various percussion instruments. The tap-dancing tradition also blurs the western distinctions between music-dance and musician-dancer-instrument. Conscious rap music and its proactive journalistic themes of social reflection
commentary, and criticism; its urge to correct the historical record and tc collect on past dues; its praise-singing modes and so on are all additionally valid and notable expressions of the Africa-centered "talking-drum" motif.
