When John Miller Chernoff published African Rhythm and African Sensibility in 1979, he had been studying African drumming for over ten years. His insights draw on a rare combination of the rigorous analysis demanded by academia and deeply lived experience.
Chernoff’s passion and reverence for, and intimate knowledge of, African drumming are the book’s defining characteristics. David Byrne of ‘Taking Heads’ was so moved that he read it twice.
From the opening statement, Chernoff admits to his deeply personal relationship with his work, confessing that ‘what began as a detailed introduction to African music became a focus for reexamining many crucial concerns of [his] own life.’ For Chernoff, African drumming is not a dry academic subject, from which he must be detached and objective, but a process inextricably intertwined with thinking about music, morality, ritual and relationships.
The introduction hooks in the reader as Chernoff recounts some of his first experiences as a young and green traveller in Ghana, including undergoing a traditional ritual designed to ‘help [him] concentrate [when drumming] and learn better and faster.’ He introduces his teacher, master drummer, Ibrahim Abdulai who is not only a music teacher, but a moral and spiritual counsellor. Throughout the book, Chernoff quotes their many conversations first hand.
Chernoff divides his study into three main sections: ‘Music in Africa’, ‘Style in Africa’ and ‘Values in Africa’, and illustrates how the three interweave.
Music in Africa
‘Music in Africa’ outlines the defining characteristics of African music. Although African music varies from area to area and from tribe to tribe, similar features can be heard all over the continent. Most important is the dominant element of rhythm, which is characterised by the tension and excitement created by cross-rhythms – two or more rhythms played simultaneously. The musicians tend to play off or around the beat, and, while dependent on the other musicians for their part to make sense, they must concentrate on playing their own part correctly, rather than playing ‘along’. Chernoff uses clear notation, accessible to all readers, to dissect the rhythmic relationships between various African drum parts.
As Chernoff illustrates with direct quotations, African songs tend to be highly politicized, in terms of lyrical content. The drums themselves can be played to reflect the intonation of human speech and are used to directly communicate verbal messages.
Style in Africa
In the chapter on ‘Style in Africa’, Chernoff emphasises African music as a site of communal exchange. Both musicians and spectators are necessary to success. The most respected African musicians are the older drummers, who play with wisdom and restraint, rather than with unbridled or self-indulgent expression. Their primary concern is for the drummers and dancers around them; for music that involves and benefits the community, rather than just the individual. Chernoff includes an engaging anecdote in which he, himself, loses his temper, and relates what Ibrahim Abdulai teaches him from the experience. The book always moves quickly, carried by Chernoff’s engaging combination of personal adventures and responses and more general analysis and description.
Values in Africa
In the final chapter, ‘Values in Africa’, Chernoff illustrates that African music is a ‘method of socialisation’. It is through music that African people work out morality, relationships and ways of interacting that reflect their valuing of communality, civility and wisdom.
Written in the late 1970s, John Miller Chernoff’s African Rhythm and African Sensibility remains a classic of ethnomusicology. It is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the music of Africa - the historical basis of much of today’s world and popular music.
Source
Chernoff, John Miller, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1979
Jasmine Crittenden - Jasmine Crittenden (B.A.)(Hons.)(First Class) is a writer and editor specialising in music, literature and travel.
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