‘Sounds of a cowhide drum’: challenges facing a new African musicology

Abstract

This particular line of inquiry begins by invoking Agawu’s challenge (2004) to musicology, namely to take on the imaginative task of framing a new musical aesthetics grounded in African ways of being – what might be understood as a context-driven African musicology. After considering some salient aspects of drumming as a practice contributing to a sense of wellbeing and group identity, I examine three elements of musical categorisation (rhythm, syncopation and intonation) in the light of Bourdieu’s notion of the cultural field (1993), a useful theoretical concept for bringing to light the hidden structures of legitimation and authorisation that undergird discipline-specific discourses. In so doing, I consider the residual heritage of the aesthetic of disinterested contemplation which understands music as product rather than process, an approach nowadays widely perceived as highly problematic following the insights of the New Musicology. In conclusion, I propose some strategies for deconstructing the historical rhetoric of ‘othering’, through which African music was viewed by some as inferior to its counterpart in the West, and some further ways in which musicologists on this continent might begin to respond to Agawu’s rallying call.