아프리카 음악의 원천과 혼종성

Abstract

In much of Africa, music is as large a part of everyday life as conversation or cooking or the bird song. It enhances the significance of all the important way stations of life, from birth through initiations to death. thus African peoples have a song or a dance for every occasion. The first time the western ear listens to African music the result is disorientation. Tough to expect simple linear rhythm consisting of four beats to a measure, with first and third accented, the Western classical musician finds it difficult to handle what ethnomusicologist, John Chernoff calls the dynamic clash and interplay of cross rhythms."African music is polyrhythmic. It's not uncommon to have three or four different rhythms at any one time, which may strike our ears as hopelessly chaotic. The Western brain tries to entrain with this chaos and pick out a dominant rhythm but, finding none, gives up, agreeing with Hornbostel that this music is beyond comprehension. Basically Africans get their drums to talk by created multiple tones or rhythms - combinations of high and low, long and short. some african languages are tonal, so relative pitch affects meaning: a sound rising means one thing: the exact same sound dropping off means something quite different. in non-tonal languages, rhythmic patterns can symbolically represent these differences. by creating drums capable of handling pitch at the same time as rhythm, the African figured out a way to turn rhythm and noise into speech. Today, the old societies that preserved the language of drum are almost completely wipe out, overturn by telephones, cars, and TV, all of which convey information more quikly and perhaps with great accuracy.