Meki Nzewi’s

“THEORY AND COGNITIVE RESEARCH OF AFRICAN MUSICAL ARTS: Critique & Poser.”

Major issues raised by Meki Nzewi’s contribution match up with perspective and communication in Ethnomusicology. The detonator leading to them follows from a patient review of the audacious arguments and claims circulated by the author about the Ethnomusicology of Africa.

 

About “perception, misperception and fallacies.”

Grievances of misperception and fallacies and finally gripe of non-verbalization of root-knowledge grab namely George List (1963), A. M. Jones (1959), James Koetting, Trevor Wiggins (1999), and Andrew Tracey (1988, 1997), put down to a Mental arrogance in scholars' cognitive perception of the creative theory and logic in African music.

 

Although Simha Arom (1991) and Israel Anyahuru (1975) are respectively given the merit of perceiving "the implicit theory systematically used by the performers in practice" as well as the tactile automatisms complementing experienced performers’ actual cogitations, the contention of nonconformity to the music-in-culture perspective leads to an emphasis on the culture of the owners which results in claims like borrowing culture's creative discretion. The ongoing argument actually about the absence of indigenous verbalization is upturned to assess targeted meta-theories about African music with this time Simha Arom (1991) and Gilbert Rouget (1956) described in flagrante delicto of substituting an internal variation principle to the concept of development in African music, an approach that the author considers as illusions about repetition in African music.

The author denounces misperceptions … woven around the concept of metric organization, which lets him tackle the principle of the fastest equi-spatial impulse... in structural conformations as nonconformist in relation to the axiomatic pulse defined by Cooper & Meyer’s (1960).  The principle of the fastest equi-spatial impulse is described to have been initiated by Koetting (1970) and to have misled a number of subsequent African music researchers into … strange transcriptions and structural analysis. 

 Here the author’s gestaltic thought about the structural/thematic relationships between ensemble parts in the African compositional procedure and practice falls short in the structural operation of delimiting rhythmic from formal structures. In this respect, a global assessment of Meki Nzewi’s structuralism is deferred within the frame of his analytical proposal. In return, deriving the African sense of pulse from philosophical considerations in terms of an African unifying pillar, the author establishes its duration at the level of a crotchet/dotted crotchet, avoiding all equivoque with its subdivisions, which allows him to refute Kubik (1974)’s concept of cross-rhythm and absence of a common guide-pulse to be taken as a reference point by all players… And then he returns to philosophical maxims and findings:

 “Cognitive perception and informed research analysis.”

This represents the author’s broad-spectrum evaluation of perspectives and aims from both the Ethnomusicology discipline and its community. He develops a censoring discourse about colonial and missionary attitudes, sacred franchise of African traditional musicianship, objectivity versus self-promotion, from false hearing to false understanding, false authority and representation, performance ability versus creative authority, before wrapping up with a swift compensation of the performer over the analyst, that “In Africa, musical arts knowledge is articulated and transacted in the public space of participation.”

 Bringing “Some factors of cognitive perception - towards analysis & transcription”

Meki’s proposal of perceptive and analytic approach in African music consists of “a sampling and further elaboration of the signposts of structural-formal rationalization and organization in African music that could enable cognitive appreciation, enlightened analysis and perceptive transcription.” These are about

·        Pulse, with insistence on the African traditional artists’ clear and basic composite pulse sense from the inception and all through a performance.

·        Rhythm, reckoned with the essentiality of pulse as the temporal frame, which goes along with a negation of cross-rhythm.

·        Form, presenting The Ensemble Thematic Cycle as the basic structural form in African music. And – since an impression of staggered entry points would result from failing to reckon with the nature of Ensemble Thematic Cycle… he dwells on a perceptible Starting Point, common to all parts, endorsing finally an external development of themes. Additional concepts enlightening the highway of the African music literature appear here – some out of context – as findings since “Other manifestations include through-composed performance form and chain-song form and further rationalization of form in terms of tension and catharsis, the mood form deriving from the psychological imperatives of African music.”

·        Harmony, which comprises cultural normative codes informing harmonic thought and practice:   the female, the male and the small children in-between the voices among others.

·        Phrasing, with the eye-opener that the Phrasing Reference instrument role …has been mis-perceptually discussed as “time line”.

·        Meter, the most common metric structures being the common time (4/4) and its interface, the compound quadruple time (12/8). But then if “Staggered entry and exit of polyphonic voices will not qualify as chorus part”, this would mean that the staggered entries previously negated by the author at the “Form” signpost are definitely far from being an impression and actually exist. To arrive at such unpredictability, it is conceivable that Meki’s distaste for experts systems impacted on his structuralism. This internal disagreement like a perjury to the whole theoretical framework within an overrunning argumentation probes all the experiment, letting us chew over the uneven structural level carried by the next signposts. Pulse, Rhythm, Form, Harmony, Phrasing, Meter, paving the way to Flexibility and Precision, Significant sound, Starting Point, before linking with Texture, Language, and integrating finally Stress and Cadence.  One would suggest that Pulse, Meter, Rhythm and Stress – although in a part-and-a-whole or in an attribute versus whole concept ratio – get closer, as it would also be proper with harmony and cadence...

These checking points may similarly cloud the real interest of the subsequent findings gathered under the heading of Creative principles and cognitive perception dealing extensively with 1) Relativity in Creative Thinking and Production – all about Tuning and Intonation in addition to Shifting Tonality in African music – as well as 2) Ideational Interfaces which include the interface of musical sense and musical meaning, the interface of pitch and tone-level, the interface of melody and melorhythm, the interface of harmony and mellophony, the interface of short and long triplets, the interface of common and compound meter, the interface of text and vocalic lilting, the interface of the tension and the catharsis in performance form and the interface of abstract and poetic dancing.

 Perspectives and communication in Ethnomusicology:

Meki Nzewi’s cognitive research postulates that Cognitive understanding of the theory guiding a ‘musical arts’ product… is accessed through induction into the creative philosophy and structural principles of a music culture or type. This view is in line with the music-in-culture philosophy among others that founded Ethnomusicology, except for its radical aspect. The debate on the African musical Arts extends broadly beyond the above epicenter; it goes far beyond bold reminders like the American publishers’ Black put down, since here grumbles of misperception, misinterpretation and fallacy grasp unenclosed African scholars equally. Through Andrew Tracey (1988 and 1997)’s ‘review’ mostly, Meki Nzewi has come, more overtly than the African heritage empowerment exhibited by historians of the 1970’s, to put dots on the “i(s)” of the whole Ethnomusicology of Africa, cleaning in his radical language, analytical frames and cognitive data torn out on the highway of the African music literature, thus standing for a step towards unbiased theories and treatises on African Music.

 As a result of banning – as it went by – modern classical and popular music from African musical Arts for their “philosophy and practice of individualism and supplementation, which … [are] not a virtue in African egalitarian and communal contexts”, the topic dwells on creative potential and root-knowledge behind performance and oral masterpieces in traditional “Africa”, moving in recurrent surges of heuristics, ethics, methodology, functional and systemic theories as well as organology and aesthetics.

 Even in humanities, cognitive studies would suggest rather than obstruct a supplementation by experts systems as an effort to minimize interfering human factor where not structurally needed: oriented selections of cognitive tools might lead to philosophical glosses put down by internal contradictions as to common sense. Then put at risk, the limit between popular common sense and philosophy would become that humanitarian philosophy with structural contradictions might reciprocate the warped intellectualism. One then would think of not taking for granted unconditional appreciations of scholars’ perspectives in the analysis of African music. One would get stopped up to definite prescriptions that Analysis of African music that abstracts the sound of music from other non musical factors informing formal-structural manifestations, such as meaning, form and structure of context, social organization, philosophy of life, world view, environment etc., is warped intellectualism - perjuring the intrinsic theory and undermining the creative integrity. As a requirement of knowledge making, a cognitive and structuralist approach may still sort, isolate and organize his conceptual workings according to a specific perspective. This would apply for instance to an establishment of pitch, duration, intensity – being all components of every notation – alongside timbre, within a sound culture, if a scholar is interested in the topic. It is understood that at the level of choice-making, a dearth of data about starting points would operate as a jamming factor, as much as no scheme of inferences towards a pyramidal close but without a consequent database is safe from the damned and pervasive common sense that checks all structural constructions implying that between superlatives the margin happens to be unconscious but useful. In the whole African music panorama – East, West, Central, and South Africa – if pitch tolerance happens now to be tempered and normalized at the level of the rhythmic adjustment always overlooked for good sense, which would discredit for instance Charles and Tony Seeger’s need of a melograph for the study of a sample of Vili music, then the claim of being at variance as to musical thought system operates unevenly, unless there is a lapse of data at least concerning the Ngbandi, Nzakara and Vili of Central Africa. Traditional adult singing among the Vili and Woyo, Atlantic coast, a musical culture into which the analysts went astray, involves such speech-like inflexions and non lexical groaning endings that horns made of mangrove roots are most welcome for researchers in re-establishing at least the underlying scholarly pentatonic perception of death and chieftaincy traditional repertoire.   

 

In this respect, it is conceivable that public assessment appears flexible as to authoritative analysis. Or, in view of its ongoing scholarly interest, A. M. Jones’ misperception is far from being just ostracized like a fallacious intention. Its pedagogical interest, because scholarship, as it happens to operate in the present case, wouldn’t stand only as an unclassified repository of principles of musical cultures, but also as a valuable blank organization of those principles into enlightening contextual failures versus steps towards an unbiased representation and environment of theories.

 

Dr. P. Zabana KONGO