African polyphony and polyrhythm - musical structure and methodology

Abstract

In the past few years, since the publication of this monumental study of the music of various traditions from the Central African Republic, sectors of the ethnomusicologicai community have hailed it as a milestone in musical analysis, especially since it appeared following a period when the purely structuralist approach has been eschewed in favour of contextual study. However, the time-frame of the preparation and publication of the book needs to be examined to gain some perspective on its currency in any debate on methodology. Based on field recordings made between 1972 and 1983, the book was realised between 1978 and 1984 and then published in French in 1985. It is difficult to ascertain when most of the data was collected since the author does not give any details of recording dates of the various repertoires. The bibliography is also revealing in its dearth of citations which postdate the early 1970s. Only three publications from the 1980s are cited, one by Arom himself, another which is a general encyclopaedic work on the Aka Pygmies, and a third on Gbaya “thinking songs” (Dehoux, 1986). Since this article dealt with one of the repertoires in Arom's study, presumably he felt compelled to include a discussion of it in the English translation. There is, however, no attempt to survey the literature of the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s relating to analytical methodology and field recording methods. This is problematic since the study purports to break new ground in these areas.