Traditional music in Africa

1 Jun 2018 - 15:47

Traditional music in Africa is a rich source of knowledge that has been on a steep decline for many years. Instead of looking for inspiration at home, many African musicians opt to mimic American and European trends with an aim to be commercially successful. Although some are effective in marrying African sounds and Western styles, many in the industry believe that a bigger effort should be made to preserve the musical traditions on the continent, which are time and again credited as the progenitors of modern music, especially in the US.

Traditional music plays an important part in African identity.

But the loss of African musical identity is not only based on musicians' ambition to be current and hip. Traditional music, which often goes back thousands of years, has found many barriers to keep its relevancy in a globalised and tech-driven world. This is owed to the failure of educational institutions across Africa to infuse traditional music in their syllabuses; the blame often falls on the lack of archived, and transcribed, traditional music in some of the most culturally rich parts on the continent. Internal conflict, colonialism and oppressive political systems have been cited as the reasons ancient knowledge of any kind is lost for good.

Many African societies are also steeped in rich oral traditions, where languages and music, as just two examples on the cultural spectrum, are informally passed on from one generation to the next. A disruption in this lineage – such as displacement, genocide or disease – spells doom for any kind of knowledge that has been passed from parents to their children over generations.

Many organisations are currently working on immortalising traditional music by going out in the field and recording the last practising musicians of various traditional genres. Their aim is to capture, transcribe and digitise traditional music for tomorrow's generations. Their job is not easy, as there are myriad traditional genres and their offshoots still to be formalised in a manner that allows anyone to replicate and learn from them in the future.

At Music In Africa we try to preserve traditional music in our own way. We commission experts from across the continent to compose Overview articles on traditional music. We also conduct offline activities such as the Traditional Instrument Building and Repair Workshop, and give traditional musicians as much exposure as possible.

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