Ethnomusicology, the Music Canon,

and African Music: Positions, Tensions,

and Resolutions in the African Academy
Jean Ngoya Kidula

African music entered serious scholarship through disci-

plines such as ethnomusicology. While scholars in African
music have contributed significantly to the development
of theories and methods of culture, the musics of Africa
have been portrayed more as artifact than art, and African
music scholars have been directed by European and other
music practices. The resultant positions and tensions in the
continent’s academic music management are reflected in
ethnomusicological discourse with African music. Drawing
from Kenya, the paper examines the processes through which
the African academy has grappled with the dynamics of eth-
nomusicology, African musicology, and the place of African
music and musicians. An African musicology cognizant of
the contributions of African musicians to the global-music
canon while situating them in the historical development of
African music is proposed.

Introduction

Serious study of African music entered the academy through ethnomusi-

cology as a discipline, a method, or an approach. More that 100 years since
African music began to be documented in print, audio, and video formats,
it continues to be presented and represented by positions, theories, and
methods associated with and derived from Europe and North America.
These positions are usually cloaked in such rubrics as “ethnomusicology,”
“comparative musicology,” and even “systematic musicology”—concepts
originally intended to serve the European and American scholastic cur-
riculum. Music academies in Africa inherited these structures from the
educational systems of their former colonial powers;1 however, little critical
assessment exists on how ethnomusicology and its cousins outside Africa
service the processes and intentions of music and its documentation for
African continental scholars, educators, and performers.2
 The debate about ethnomusicology and African musicology began
at the onset of the postwar (referring to WWII) scholarly study of African
music, specifically in the writings, presentations, and engagements of Klaus
Wachsmann with African and non-African colleagues, and in the ana-
lytical and philosophical output of J. H. Kwabena Nketia. 3. These scholars’
contemplations and discussions should be examined in light of historical
and social contexts and processes undergone by the discipline of ethnomu-
sicology, research in African music, and music academics on the African
africa today

continent. Connections and disparities arise relative to the agenda of each

of these issues with the dominant academic curriculum. That position
favored a European or Eurocentric agenda, placing its music as the standard
measurement, thereby creating tensions particularly for African continen-
tal researchers, musicians, and composers. When the tensions between
ethnomusicology and African musicology were first visited in Wachsmann
100

and Nketia’s discourses, musics of non-Western cultures were situated in

cultural, social, or area studies—fields that became sites for understanding
Ethnomusicology, the Music Canon, and African Music

and presenting these musics.

Wachsmann no doubt believed the human context to be focal in
ethnomusicology. Recognizing practice as a prerequisite for African musi-
cology, he advocated (1969) for the performative and analytical assessment
of African music, albeit with a structural language embodied in European
musicology. For a Western ideology that situated precise records in written
script, the orality of African music complicated matters. This may have
been a tenuous position for Nketia. Oral history was questioned as a reposi-
tory of accurate and reliable historical information and data, particularly
before and during colonial occupation. The notion of an African musicol-
ogy garnered from such sources did not provide plausible grounds for the
exercise of traditional musicology—that of “establishing an accuracy of
texts” (read: written texts) with “surrounding historical records” to “ana-
lyze and classify works” and “synthesize them into a historical narrative”
(Randel 1986:520). Nketia’s heritage and practice could have questioned
this European position, but working in an academy founded on the power
of the written word, he possibly grappled with the implications of support-
ing an African musicology before there was sufficient publication to defend
that position.4 A lack of a dominant African art music as was presented by
Europe hindered the case for an overarching African counterpart. Ethno-
musicology as a study of music in human context, particularly cultural
context, and of music outside Western art music, provided an entry point
for African musics, and possibly prepared a way for an African musicology,
but these musics and this musicology were defined relative to European or
Eurocentric conceptions.
Philip V. Bohlman (2001:201) notes that a definitive determinant of
the characteristics of European music was obtained by comparing European
music with musics outside Europe. V. Kofi Agawu (2003b:230) invokes this
kind of differentiation as a European enlightenment strategy for locating
and managing the other-than-European. Features dominant in African
music were described relative to European frames. Scholars and texts rein-
forced these stereotypes in positive and negative ways. Although African
and nationalist music studies emerged in Africa (Nketia 1986a, 1986b,
1999), they were “genealogically and institutionally bound to Western eth-
nomusicologies” (Bohlman 2004). African responses to, and critiques of,
the situation have relied on discourse by postcolonial philosophers such as
Hountoundji (1996), Mudimbe (1988), Oruka (1990), and others, who have
argued that the academy has continued to subjugate studies in African arts,

africa today
religion, and literature to subservient status by continuing to promote the
positions of the dominant cultures. Research and scholarship about Africa’s
interaction in contemporary society are presented in such terms as imita-
tion, while a similar happening in Europe or America is discussed as a
new trend or development, even when borrowed from or imitating the less
politically or economically powerful cultures.

101
Ethnomusicology and its cousins can therefore be seen as systems
developed by North American and European scholars to understand and

Jean Ngoya Kidula

“contain” musics of rural, minority, or other cultures—in which case,
postcolonial African philosophers, writers, and educators misunderstand
and misread the intentions of dominant cultures. Africans should reflect
on the long-term effects of music scholarship and either silently acquiesce
to the status quo when marginalized, or redefine and document their
findings and positions.
African philosophers grappling with what it is to be African denote
that it is a way of defining borders that by implication restrict and confine
“Africa” into a geographical, conceptual, ideological, and political stran-
glehold to reinforce illusory beliefs. One such academic, P. J. Hountondji
observes,

African studies were invented by Europeans[!] But Africans

should not merely carry on these disciplines as shaped by
Europe. Africans must re-invent them. . . . Such re-inven-
tion implies a sharply critical awareness of the ideological
limits and the theoretical and methodological shortcomings
of former practices. . . . Critical appropriations of existing
knowledge [demands we] know when the knowledge is at
stake about ourselves and when the appropriations take the
form of repatriation (when knowledge is sent back to its
country of origin). (1996:xix)

Given European and North American academies’ outlook on ethno-

musicology, systematic and comparative musicology, and other approaches
regarding African music, how or what has been the African academy’s
response in carrying on the disciplines as invented? or in reinventing,
appropriating, or repatriating the knowledge? How has Africa presented
itself at home and abroad? Is it a continuity of European invention, per-
ception, intention, and need? or has Africa located its needs locally and
 internationally as an impetus for education about or in itself? How have
these questions been approached in music studies? At stake is the ques-
tion of the disciplining of African music by ethnomusicology, comparative
musicology, and systematic musicology versus the study of African music
as a discipline. How African music has been canonized in the academy via
the discipline of ethnomusicology, which was set up to serve needs different
from those that African musicians, music scholars, and music educators
may have imagined, is of importance.5
africa today

Thesis, Beginnings, and Processes

There are few critical assessments of the positions, tensions, and resolutions
extant in African academies on the continent regarding the study of music
102

in general and African music in particular. Hardly any studies evaluate how
African music is presented and represented by African and Africanist schol-
Ethnomusicology, the Music Canon, and African Music

ars, theorists, and performers who teach or research for audiences in Europe
and North America.6 The situation in Africa is grave, for until the late 1990s,
few organizations gathered music scholars on the continent to talk among
themselves or with African and diasporic Africanist scholars.7 Since the
1950s, the journal African Music, published at Rhodes University in South
Africa, was the lone pan-African voice on the continent. With sanctions
against South Africa from the 1960s until the 1990s and other problems, its
dissemination to other African countries was limited. Many senior African
scholars, researchers, educators, and performers migrated to the North and
West partly for better access to materials and for easier dissemination of
their work. For a variety of reasons, Africanist counterparts in Europe and
the Americas rarely shared their findings with African universities. Little
dialogue occurred between music departments in Africa and Africanist
musicologists, theorists, and composers abroad. Recognizing a need for all
the parties to engage in discourse to work more efficiently, I began conversa-
tions with music scholars8 in an attempt to bridge the gulf. It became evident
from these encounters that the strongest tensions were related to research
facilities and dissemination of findings locally and abroad while minding
both personal and national agenda. My approach has been to evaluate the
definition, place, role, and impact of music in academies in Africa, serviced
or served by the continent’s scholars, as well as the dispersion of African
music knowledge and ways of experiencing music into the global canon.
To assess the positions, tensions, and resolutions in African music
academies, my case study is drawn from Kenya, though this situation is
common in other African countries. I therefore present a type of national
musicology9 under a broader rubric of African musicology. The academy and
the media are the main institutions utilized by governments to rally and
promote a kind of national image, in part as a way of asserting imagined bor-
ders and identities. They provide a framework for examining the processes
of cultural amalgamation, but the two institutions are part of a broader
global arena, one that affirms or critiques its producers and products. I
shall focus on the academy as a fundamental site for creating, promoting,
and archiving national products, and as a local community functioning for
global representation.
My appraisal draws from personal experience in the Kenyan education
system, where I was a performer, student, theorist, researcher, educator, and
administrator before I ventured to the United States as a student, researcher,
educator, and performer (the order is important) in African, European, and

africa today
American music. Further critical discussions and presentations were held
with Kenyan, African, and Africanist academics and performers formally
and informally, in the discipline of music and in related fields such as his-
tory, literature, language and linguistics, anthropology, and religious stud-
ies where music is a primary source. A formal discussion culminated in a
symposium held in Nairobi in November 2002, with feedback by scholars

103
from South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Germany, Norway, Sweden, England,
and the United States. An observation from discussions about ethnomu-

Jean Ngoya Kidula

sicology and African music scholars was that, given a definition of ethno-
musicology pervasive in writings and teaching, as study of musics of other
cultures, African students can call themselves ethnomusicologists when
studying Western European music as “the other,” and musicologists when
engaged in African music. They were ethnomusicologists when they stud-
ied African music with European methods; however, it was unclear, given
relatively scant documentation available and broad spectrum of cultures,
what African methods and practices were. Ambivalence was noted toward
approaches and methods in ethnomusicology that had more anthropo-
logical or sociological reportage than analysis of music style, form, theory,
pedagogy, and performance practice.
In essence, the discussion suggested that each continent or country
had different needs for the information, and the most published and estab-
lished venues for scholarship that dominated the academic industry had
saturated the global market (this in reference to scholars from Nigeria,
Ghana, and wheresoever they had relocated in Europe or North America).
In a globalizing space with increasing economic and political leverage from
dominant cultures, the boundaries and needs of Africans might, I think,
be gradually sidelined in deference to the larger picture; however, African
music scholars on the continent are experiencing a certain transition and
desire to represent themselves at home and abroad from their own positions,
perspectives, and worldviews that are at the same time both emic and etic.
The presentation and representation is evident particularly with the forma-
tion of national, regional, and pan-African music associations by educators,
musicologists, and performers. Scholarly organizations have begun to hold
annual conferences, symposia, and workshops that encourage participation
by national, continental, and international participants. Journals, websites,
and newsletters have been inaugurated to report on the proceedings or pub-
lish articles.10 I believe this direction will enrich and expand Africanist and
African scholarship worldwide.
 Music as a Discipline in the Academy

Nketia’s (1986a) article noted that initial studies in African music in

many African nations in the 1950s and 1960s were located, not in music
departments, but in African-studies institutes. In Kenya, the institute was
affiliated with the University of Nairobi. Its primary approach and thrust
were ethnography and cultural anthropology. The general output was musi-
cal ethnographies with more cultural information than musical analysis
africa today

(e.g., Darkwa 1982, 1991) in the vein of studies in ethnomusicology and

folklore.
Although experiments in composition using African tunes were
already a British recognition of Kenyan music in the late 1950s,11 African
music was introduced into the school curriculum for serious study in 1968
as part of the diploma music-teacher’s education. Before then, Graham
104

Hyslop, the colonial music and drama officer, trained conductors in the
interpretation and performance of European choral music, with injunc-
Ethnomusicology, the Music Canon, and African Music

tions about the proper approach to staging African music and a compara-
tive musicological approach to the study of African music (Hyslop 1964).
African music became a serious examinable subject in high school from
1974. While the examination included European music history, theory, and
performance, the African section assessed performance and sociocultural
aspects of music. The basic text, Nketia’s Music of Africa (1974), provided
a broad survey in the academic tradition of the times—a rubric for the
anthropological study of music, positioning African music in a cultural,
more than a musical, study, with Merriam’s theoretical and methodologi-
cal axis: rooting the analysis of music in function, use, instrument types,
and song text.12 Such approaches provided rich insight in music in the life
of Africans more than in the art and science of music in Africa. It is no
wonder that music students in Africa had an ambivalent relationship with
it (Agawu 2003a:14).
Music was offered at the undergraduate level from 1977 with a cur-
riculum that included the then-current ethnomusicological theories for
studying African music and musical performance. The program in Nairobi,
a major African airport hub, saw visiting professors and ethnomusicolo-
gists such as John Blacking, Gerhard Kubik, and other European scholars
intent on demonstrating African music theories and practices from their
research.13 The bulk of the university curriculum was European “art” music,
present also in any school in Europe or the Americas. The daily musical
life of the students and the studied music were separated in profound ways.
Methods of acquiring European musical knowledge had to be learned by
many students. This process distanced the notion of lived music, studied
music, and music appreciation. African music was therefore processed as
a cultural artifact and understood as a cultural phenomenon, rather than
a lived, historical musical process. The result was a mixed relationship
with African music—studied as artifact, but performed as life. It was, and
still is, difficult for students to accept African musicianship as viable and
“elite,” since it has been presented in anthropological, rather than musical,
terms and locations. The music considered serious for academic pursuit was
European music. The enculturation associated with learning and perform-
ing African music seemed out of place in a “European” classroom. Students
found it difficult to accept African modes of musical knowledge in the
academy. The lived musical experience was, and has been, mostly separated
from the studied discipline.
The discipline of African music became exciting and accessible when

africa today
social and cultural positions assumed by ethnomusicology as a discipline
were perceived as informing, circumferencing, or framing the music, so
that students began to look at writings on African music as the musicol-
ogy of African cultures, rather than the ethnology of African music. The
approach was solidified during a nationwide discussion between members
of a presidential commission for music set up in 1981, and the public. The

105
discussions, codified in the commission’s report (Omondi 1984), became
the basis for changes in the schools’ curriculum from 1984. This schema

Jean Ngoya Kidula

provided impetus for the serious study of African music theories, histories,
practices, and performances. Enforcing music in grade school as a compul-
sory subject from 1986 to 2000 spurred an informed and nationally viable
music industry and audience, and provided additional momentum for per-
ceiving African music as an art form, rather than just a cultural artifact.
More students entered the undergraduate music departments at two public
and several private universities. The curriculum included the traditional
European canon and African music theory, history, and practice. Musics of
Asian and other cultures were included. Since Kenya has a sizeable South
and West Asian population, particularly visible and powerful in the last
150 years at the Kenyan coast and moving inland with British employment
of Asians as middlemen, South and West Asian music has been part of the
national culturescape.
The presidential commission on various occasions attempted to docu-
ment music in Kenya from a nationalist perspective (Kavyu 1995), and held
workshops and symposia for these purposes;14 a larger problem, however,
was a lack of pedagogical output to invigorate ethnic and national music in
the academy. The broader agenda of the universities sidelined the construc-
tion of buildings for performances and archival purposes, so that, while
students engaged the music in class and performance, the music still fell
short of its intended status in the academy.

Music and other disciplines

A music symposium titled “Africa as the Cradle for a Holistic and Inte-
grated Approach to Music,” intended to assess critically the African music
academy and student expectation of the discipline, was held at Kenyatta
University, Nairobi, in November 2002. It included creative folkloristic
and reenacted performances of African music, such as those mandated or
 adopted by African governments, particularly at the dawn of political inde-
pendence. Governments had congregated music specialists from different
ethnic groups to learn each other’s musics as performance models, or as a
basis for creating new genres for education and entertainment. Kenyatta
University houses such a resident folkloristic troupe, quite separate from
the music department. The symposium included other performances, such
as choral folksongs—a British invention (Hyslop 1958; Kidula 1996) for
presenting African tunes on European-type concert stages—and settings of
africa today

folktunes in European common practice. Graham Hyslop, the British music

officer in colonial Kenya, had encouraged these fusions as ways of present-
ing African music since the 1950s. Popular religious and secular music were
staged. All the styles are often located in African studies, ethnomusicol-
ogy, and companion studies in Europe and North America, and excluded
historically from musicology, music theory, and performance.
106

Papers, workshops, and discussions covered “traditional” ethnomu-

sicology topics, such as “drums of the Akamba people” or critiques of
Ethnomusicology, the Music Canon, and African Music

music composition, aesthetics, and technical and interpretative evalua-

tion of performances in indigenous practice. Other deliberations included
appropriated musics, drawing on interethnic, international, and global
exchanges. Scholars assessed the music-education system, examining the
place, performance, and transmission of African music in the curriculum
and critiquing the perceived European agenda in how African music was
introduced, presented, and practiced in the academy. The pervasiveness of
music in society was seen, not as a product for commercial or academic
consumption, but as a basic daily ingredient. Consequently, while local
specialists are respected in their language groups, performers nurtured in
the academy did not appear to earn community respect as indigenous car-
riers of genres or instrument specialists. Pedagogical paradigms for music
and music instruments from African frameworks were therefore reinforced
and demonstrated. Chronological developments in African music were
performed and analyzed. Animated discussions encouraged the inclusion of
African popular music in the curriculum. The term popular was construed
in more ways than suggested by the global-music industry. It was clear that
popular music, whether sacred or secular, provided primary endroits for
negotiating, integrating, and articulating local, national and global music
encounters.
Scholars from history, religious studies, language, medicine, and other
disciplines provided insight into the dimensions of music: as historical
archives, language transmitter, repository of belief-systems and social and
cultural values, and facilitator and enactor of feelings, thoughts, viewpoints,
and other ideas. It was observed that the location of African music in ethno-
musicology from the “Western” school serviced the other disciplines more
than it served music itself. Texts with music in the title inferred a musical
underpinning, rather than a music centralization. Music departments were
challenged to rethink their approaches to the African academy in the study
of African music. African musicology enjoyed a better reception among the
music scholars than ethnomusicology in describing how they would like to
present and represent the study of African music.

African Musicology and East Africa

East Africa is a productive place to situate African musicology. The overt

use of the term is ascribed to Klaus Wachsman (1966), whose major work

africa today
was in Uganda. He used the term to recognize the parameters under which
music studies in Africa or African music had been expanded to embrace a
corpus of musical knowledge, rather than just cultural material. The knowl-
edge was being collected, recorded, analyzed, and systematized by European
and North American scholars and reported in such journals as Africa,
African Music, Anthropos, and Ethnomusicology. African scholars had

107
become regular contributors, postulating theories and methods and writing
articles, monographs, and texts.15 Academies in Africa had begun to estab-

Jean Ngoya Kidula

lish courses that included African music in addition to the European variety
in institutions of higher learning, but little was done in the musicological
analysis of African music as the core of the music curriculum. Wachsmann
sought to document music in Africa, not only from human cultural context,
but in its chronology as theory and practice (1969:131–132).
Later usage and popularization of the term occurred in East Africa
when a group of scholars at the Institute of African Studies at the University
of Nairobi started the journal African Musicology to specialize in African
materials and encourage an Africa-centered approach to the presentation
and representation of the data. The focus was not only to be on the African
continent, but to be wheresoever African materials had become the nexus of
works derived from African sources. This approach expanded Wachsmann’s
ideology by recognizing the infiltration of African resources and approaches
in the world at large. Nketia (1986b) suggested that the intentions of the
journal were premature, as the founders presupposed a tradition of African
music scholarship that was “distinctive and separate from musicology in
the Western tradition”; while raising this critique, he acknowledged the
founders’ desire to encourage an “African-centered approach to the presenta-
tion and interpretation of data” (1986b:216). That suggests that the journal’s
editors had intended for writers to provide alternatives to “Western” musi-
cological ideology. Since North American ethnomusicology had already
established ways of looking at African music that served its purposes, as
had the ethnomusicology of European nations, a journal on African soil to
compliment the journal African Music, which was undergoing difficulties
because of the political ostracism of South Africa, might have provided
theoretical and analytical impetus for scholars in Africa. The founders of
the journal, co-opted into a national music-education development project,
sidelined the journal after only one issue.
J. C. Djedje and Nketia took up the term African musicology and
argued for a take on the definition of the term on geographical grounds with
 a specialization of musicology in Africa (1984:xi–xii). They justified their
adoption of the term and prescribed types of writings and data analysis that
could solidify the field. The articles in their report focused on items of inter-
est in “traditional” ethnomusicology. Musics that bespeak Africa’s interac-
tion with other continents are sadly missing—which may be a reflection
of the kinds of issues that interested researchers and educators at the time.
The term African musicology became the title of two volumes of a festchrift
to Nketia (Djedje 1992; Djedje and Carter 1989). While there is a broad range
africa today

of writers from different continents, the articles embraced the narrower

idea of “area” and subject-matter as African music and musicians, but
with a cultural and linguistic component (Djedje and Carter 1989:40), nar-
rower than the range including the African diaspora and the musicological
orientation of the Nairobi group.
For this paper, African musicology as a discipline presupposes a prac-
108

tice, a methodology, and rules in assessing, directing, or changing African

musical behavior, or training to achieve what is construed as African music,
Ethnomusicology, the Music Canon, and African Music

both on the continent and beyond. It implies a process or production of

events, a historical development of musical materials, and procedures to cat-
egorize trends, styles, progressions, or projections. It ought to examine and
describe the art of music as physical, psychological, aesthetic, and cultural
phenomena. I believe music phenomena in Africa in diverse forms are appre-
ciated and critiqued for their artistic and aesthetic attributes, understood in
African terms, and exported for those very terms and attributes; otherwise,
African or African-derived and infused styles would not enjoy such global
appreciation. African and Africanist scholars have been grappling with the
definition of African music. Some look beyond the sonic confines of Euro-
pean delimitations to video and motion, so that dance, drama, costume, and
spectacle are intrinsic to music’s definition and presentation.
Ethnomusicology presents different dynamics because of the role it
plays as an alternative to the dominant hegemonic European canon, which
traditionally repressed other musics, such as folk, “minorities,” and popular
styles. It has developed its own canon for presenting and representing Afri-
can music. It may inadvertently have promoted its stereotypical students,
insiders, outsiders, and publishers. Issues such as minority or gender studies
sometimes crowd the music in that the contextual underpinnings—social,
racial, cultural—marginalize the performative core. Thus, ethnomusicology
is a gateway into other cultures or issues, and can well be located in cognate
disciplines and area studies. In this case, it would not be difficult to periph-
erize African music as one of many minorities. In Europe or North Amer-
ica, with dominant European voices, indigenous and powerful European
musics are normally at the core of the curriculum, with ethnomusicology
legitimizing cultural diversity.
For the African academy, the situation is complex. Beginning at such
elemental levels as the definition of music, the academy has been slow to
adopt is mandates. It has relied on the colonial establishment’s initial and
continuing efforts to the extent that few theories of African music permeate
the classroom. Instead, social and other theories serve for the discussion
of African music. In practice, African musical traditions are insufficiently
analyzed or historicized. African music should be at the core of music
studies, with Euro-American music at the periphery; otherwise, African
researchers and composers will continue the exodus to the West and North,
as this is their fundamental training and orientation.
Most of independent Africa has come a long way in recognizing
African performers since the 1960s, when governments sought to develop

africa today
national identities, display the diversity of African cultural heritage, and
archive “africanisms” while amalgamating each country’s musical styles.
In Kenya, the process of systematizing the pedagogy of traditional instru-
ments continues to assist in developing an educational canon that addresses
the population’s needs and concerns. The music canon includes music
literacy, theory, history, and practice at global and local levels. The sym-

109
posium in Nairobi grounded, strengthened, and motivated the study and
appreciation of African and Kenyan music. We also realized the need to

Jean Ngoya Kidula

refocus our course offerings, research, and education to benefit the emerg-
ing population. Dialogue with scholars, educators, and performers from
other countries sensitized Kenyan students and scholars to the uniqueness
of their musical heritage.

African Musicology, Ethnomusicology, and the Music Academy

Why would European and American musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and

scholars be interested in discussions by African music scholars on the ways
they perceive or research and interpret their data?
Scholars in African music have operated in European models, world-
views, approaches, and methods. Scholars in Africa can solidify or provide
alternative models to those developed by earlier researchers who argued
for African music histories, theories and practices. Many studies from the
continent have few outlets in the global academy, inasmuch as the work
done by foreign researchers is barely known in much of Africa. Symposia
and conferences in Africa with international scholars are significant arenas,
not only for discourse, but for experiencing the lived music, one of Africa’s
foundational documentational resources. Founding continental African
music scholars, composers, and theorists seem to have some discomfort in
being situated in an African music history. By training and orientation, they
have been colonized and grafted into a European or North American aca-
demic music history (Agawu 2003a:8), and have long advocated for an Afri-
can “art” music, one that recognized their achievements as practitioners
in the European “high-art” discourse; however, most invoke their African
heritage for “difference” and marketability in research, composition, and
performance (Euba 1970). A critical assessment of African music history
makes room for these scholars to locate themselves in an African music his-
tory and development without the accompanying discomfiture or unease.
 By investigating how new works resolve tensions in both regions, composers
can richly impact European canonic directions and African musicological
dimensions. Prospective students of African musical instruments can profit
from methods developed in African universities, thereby leading to not just
a folklorizing of the instruments, but innovating organological shifts, devel-
opments, and instrumental repertoire without stereotyped expectations.16
Ethnomusicology has moved from European positioning of other
cultures to viewpoints and reportage by indigenous cultures of their own
africa today

selves—from dominance of Euro-American scholars as objective outsiders,

to a recognition that all scholars are biased by their backgrounds, exposure,
and agenda. It now includes local researchers, performers, and voices. It
has moved beyond cultural ethnographies to more musicological analyses.
Though still situated in European structural expectations and biases and
in the dominant cultural agenda and perception of needs, in its disciplinary
110

and methodological dynamism it embraces diverse voices; in fact, the study

of all music is in a sense ethnomusicological, for we center, dislocate, and
Ethnomusicology, the Music Canon, and African Music

“other” ourselves in time, in space, and even by audience, when we embody

music, orally, in writing, or in performance.
Insights by African scholars from the continent situated in music and
in other disciplines expand the vista of researchers in Europe and North
America. They may provide pieces to a puzzle in our interconnected and
multilayered musical encounters. Music research done in African universi-
ties is located not merely in the music departments, and that fact expands
our interdisciplinary collaborations. Some research reported as new and
innovative may already have taken place on the continent, but scholars
receive little exposure and credit at the international level, for various
reasons. Possible dialogue is lost or curtailed in the process. With little
economic leverage, many African scholars do not receive international
critiques of their work. I have showcased some conversations that take
place on the continent. I believe that with new technologies, which verify
the historicity of cultural artifacts and attendant musical structures, it is
possible to discuss musical historical knowledge processed in Africa and to
analyze and classify works that form the narrative of music in Africa.
There is little doubt that serious scholarship on African music entered
the academy through ethnomusicology; nor is there any doubt that some
founding fathers, theorists, and analysts of the discipline were informed
by their research in Africa. There is also no question that African music
scholars were incorporated into the academy by engaging the dominant
music canon. A disciplinary introspection permits scholars to evaluate their
efforts and impact. It is through dialogue and the exchange of ideas that
the discipline is enriched and vitalized. In recent years, more voices have
become audible on the continent and abroad, particularly as Africans have
become aware of, and have participated in, discourses that engage the music
in, musicians of, and scholars on Africa. That in itself is a testament to the
impact of ethnomusicology and its expansion into dimensions that were
either contested or seemed inconceivable fifty years ago. Thus, while some
tensions are resolved, new vistas emerge—vistas that energize the dynamic
discourse that constitutes the vibrant life of the disciplines.

Notes

1. The use of the term academy includes the idea of educational institutions as places, but also

africa today
as specific disciplines.
2. This discussion was presented as a seminar paper at Kenyatta University (Kidula 2001) and
revised for the SEM conference in Tucson, Arizona (Kidula 2004). It focuses on research in,
writing about, and education of African music from the view of ethnomusicology’s role and
place in bringing African music into the academy.
3. Wachsmann and Nketia set the stage for later developments (positive and negative) in the

111
perception, study, and performance of the music of Africa in the discipline of ethnomusicol-
ogy from the late 1950s. Both bring African, European, and North American perspectives

Jean Ngoya Kidula

and concerns by their national heritage and how they interfaced with the three continents
in their philosophical, theoretical, and other positions.
4. Nketia and Djedje (1984:xiii–xv) noted that while there was an accumulation of data on Afri-
can music, these data had not been analyzed and published in sufficient amounts to create a
repository of materials for classification and synthesis. They observed the regionalization of
studies and focus on select problems were problematic in creating a holistic approach, one
that would “facilitate systematic comparison of African materials” to present overarching
African principles.
5. I read Agawu’s (2003a:xix) comments on the “incongruities of postcolonial musical Africa”
as a juncture for this discussion.
6. Agawu’s writing is probably the most visible in recent years.
7. Including The Pan African Society of Musical Arts Education (PASMAE), a branch of the
International Society for Music Education (ISME), the International Center for African Music
and Dance (ICAMD), and the Center for Intercultural Music Arts (CIMA)—all of which gained
momentum in the late 1990s. Only PASMAE meets primarily on the continent.
8. “Diaspora” refers to African scholars formerly on the continent who have relocated to other
continents but continue to work in and/or with African music.
9. I use the term nationalist, rather than national musicology, particularly drawing from Bohl-
man’s discussion on national music and nationalist music (2004b:81–160). I defer to the
notion that national music “seeks to reflect the image of the nation” in such a way that
“those living in it recognize themselves in basic but crucial ways” (83–84), while nationalist
music serves more political, economic, or cultural functions in competition against other
nations (119).
10. Books, CDs, videos, journals, and articles resulted from collaborations among PASMAE mem-
bers to promote and document the concept of musical arts as an African view or definition
of the discipline and art. The seminal text is Musical Arts in Africa (Pretoria: Unisa Press 2003)
with an offshoot journal: Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa, launched in 2004. Regional
bodies also exist. The Kenyan branch KASMAE was discussed in 2002. Other bodies include
the Association of Music Educators of East Africa, launched in Kenya in May 2005, with an
accompanying journal.
 11. For example, Hyslop’s Magnificat, published by Oxford University Press in 1962.
12. Nketia’s linguistics education is evident in section 4. Nketia dedicates two chapters to
speech, and draws song texts with examples from groups in Ghana and Nigeria.
13. I joined the program in 1978 as an undergraduate and profited from this interaction.
14. Two conferences held in 2001 and 2002 brought together the variety of musicians in Kenya.
Choirmasters, rather than music teachers, dominated the event. Select papers from the
conferences were compiled for the commission’s archive.
15. West Africans, particularly Nketia of Ghana, were in the forefront of this movement (Djedje
africa today

and Carter 1989:16–27); however, Euba (1969) felt that there was already a musicology of
African music going on, but done by non-Africans. An examination of musical reportage
in African Music in the 1960s and early 1970s demonstrates that analysis of African musical
structures (“folk,” popular, and religious) was a vibrant exercise. Samples were drawn from
all regions of sub-Saharan Africa.
16. For example, Makubuya’s analysis of organological adaptation and repertoire expansion of
112

the Baganda Endingidi (2000).

Ethnomusicology, the Music Canon, and African Music

References Cited

Agawu, V. Kofi. 2003a. Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions. New York:
Routledge.
. 2003b. Contesting Difference: A Critique of Africanist Ethnomusicology. In The Cultural
Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard
Middleton. New York: Routledge. 227–237.
Agawu, Kofi Anri Herbst and Meki Nzewi. 2003. Musical Arts in Africa: Theory, Practice and Education.
Pretoria: Unisa Press
Bohlman, Philip V. 2001. The Musical Culture of Europe. In Excursions in World Music, edited by Bruno
Nettl et al. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 196–226
. 2004a. Ethnomusicology: III. Post 1945 Developments: 6. Other Ethnomusicologies. Grove
Music Online Retrieved on 28 October 2004 from http://www.grovemusic.com.
. 2004b. The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History. Santa
Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO.
Darkwa, Asante. 1982. The Marakwets and Keiyo in Music: A Socio-Cultural Study. The Black Perspec-
tive in Music 10(2):149–166.
. 1991. Sengenya Dance Music: Its Instrumental Resources and Performance. African Music
7(1):48–54.
Djedje, J. C., ed. 1992. African Musicology Current Trends: A Festschrift Presented to J. H. Kwabena Nketia.
Vol. 2. Los Angeles: African Studies Center & African Arts Magazine; Atlanta: Crossroads
Press.
Djedje, J. C., and W. G. Carter, eds. 1989. African Musicology: Current Trends: A Festschrift Presented to
J. H. Kwabena Nketia. Vol. 1. Los Angeles: African Studies Center and African Arts Magazine,
Atlanta: Crossroads Press.
Djedje, J. C., and J. H. K. Nketia. 1984. Introduction: Trends in African Musicology. Selected Reports in
Ethnomusicology Volume V: Studies in African Music 5:ix–xx.
Euba, Akin. 1969. Musicology in the Context of African Culture. Odu (new series) 2:3–18.
 . 1970. Traditional Elements as the Basis of New African Art Music. African Urban Studies
4:52–62.
Hountoundji, P. J. 1996. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. 2nd ed. Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press.
Hyslop, Graham. 1958. African Music for Festivals in Kenya. African Music Society Journal 2(1):31–35.
. 1962. Magnificat. London: Oxford University Press.
. 1964. Since Singing Is So Good a Thing. Nairobi: Oxford University Press.
Kavyu, Paul. 1995. National Songs of Kenya. Nairobi: Permanent Presidential Music Commission.

africa today
Kidula, Jean Ngoya. 1996. Cultural Dynamism in Process: The Kenya Music Festival. Ufahamu 24(2&3):
63–81.
. 2001. Ethnomusicology and African Musicology: Defining Music in the African Academy.
Seminar Paper, Kenyatta University, 19 Nov.
. 2004. Ethnomusicology, Comparative Musicology, Nationalist Musicology and African Music
Studies: Positions, Tensions and Resolutions by African Music Scholars. Paper presented at

113
the forty-ninth annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Tucson, Arizona, 3–7
November.

Jean Ngoya Kidula

Makubuya, James. 2000. Endingidi (Tube Fiddle) of Uganda: Its Adaptation and Significance among
the Baganda. The Galpin Society Journal 53:140–155.
Mudimbe, V. Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.
Nketia, J. H. Kwabena. 1974. The Music of Africa. New York: W. W. Norton.
. 1986a. African Music and Western Praxis: A Review of Western Perspectives on African
Musicology. Canadian Journal of African Studies 20(1):36–56.
. 1986b. Perspectives on African Musicology. In Africa and the West: The Legacies of an Empire,
edited by Isaac James Mowoe and Richard Bjornson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
215–253.
. 1999. The Scholarly Study of African Music: A Historical Review. In Africa, edited by Ruth
Stone. Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, 1. New York and London: Garland Publishing.
13–73.
Nketia, J. H. Kwabena, and J. C. DjeDje. 1984. Introduction: Trends in African Musicology. Selected
Reports in Ethnomusicology Volume V: Studies in African Music 5:ix–xx.
Omondi, Washington. 1984. Report of the Presidential National Music Commission. Nairobi: Govern-
ment Printers.
Oruka, H. Odera. 1990. Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy.
Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill.
Randel, Don Michael, ed. 1986. Musicology. In The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Wachsmann, Klaus. 1966. The Trend of Musicology in Africa. Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology
1(1):61–65.
. 1969. Ethnomusicology in African Studies: The Next Twenty Years. In Expanding Horizons
in African Studies; Proceedings of the Twentieth Anniversary Conference 1968. Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press. 131–142.