Explain the significance, uses, and wider influence of West African music
Please provide the best answer for the statement
1) West African music is part of the fabric of everyday life, accompanying work, poetry, ceremony, and dance, and often evoked by visual art. The Western idea that music can be isolated from everyday experience is almost incomprehensible to the African sensibility
2)Typically consisting of a single line of melody without harmony, African music is generally communal in nature, encouraging a sense of social cohesion by promoting group activity. As a result, one of the most universal musical forms throughout Africa is call-and-response music, in which a caller, or soloist, raises the song, and the community chorus responds to it.
3) Call-and-response music is by no means simple. The Yoruba language, for instance, is tone-based; any Yoruba syllable has three possible tones and this tone determines its meaning. The Yoruba reproduce their speech in the method of musical signaling known as talking drums, performed with three types of batá drums, which imitate the three tones of the language. In ritual drumming, the drums are played for the Yoruba gods and are essentially praise poems to those gods.
4) Characteristic of this music is its polyrhythmic structure. Here as many as five to ten different “voices” of interpenetrating rhythms and tones, often repeated over and over again in a call-and-response form, play off against one another. This method of playing against or “off” the main beat is typical of West African music and exists to this day in the “off-beat” practices of Western jazz.
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