A Brief History Of African Music Through The Colonial PeriodEssay Preview: A Brief History Of African Music Through The Colonial PeriodReport this essayA Brief History of African Music through The Colonial PeriodMusic before the 20th century was very different when compared to the music of the 21st Century. There were distinctive occasions for each type of African music. West African music, the African Diaspora, and the music of the Colonies each had different musical instruments.
West African music was the music of the African people before the Europeans captured and sold them into slavery in the Americas. It was unique in the manner in which it was played as well as the reasons why it was played. West African music was documented around the 1600s when explorers wrote journals about what they had found while traveling.
Every West African village had its own professional musicians and singers who would perform for the community. Musicians were idolized in their villages. They normally sat with the king or chief because of their elevated status.
West Africans made music for ceremonies surrounding agriculture, the crowning a new king or chief, and the reenactment of an important event that happened in the past. Special kinds of music were played during war ceremonies, hunting excursions, and other victory celebrations. Hunting songs, war songs, and boating songs were performances of men. Music performed by women was associated with children, young girls, and funerals. An example of a festival the West Africans celebrated was called the “Annual Customs of Dahomey”. This was a festival worshiping the king of their capital. The West Africans also had music for litigation. They would come before a judge and sing or chant their argument.
Dance was also a big part in the music of West Africa. Dance was performed at ceremonies surrounding fertility, death, worship, adulthood, and other kind of certain concerns of the village.
Mainly the West Africans used percussive instruments. These drums came in all sizes ranging from ten to twelve inches to ten to twelve feet. Their drums were made out of hollowed out logs and gourds with a tight skin over the hollow. They also used idiophones to make music. They used a variety of bells, castanets, gongs, and sometimes they made small xylophones or small pianos. Aerophones werent as prevalent as the percussions or idiophones. Some explorers made small flutes, horns and trumpets from elephant tusks. These instruments as well as the drums were used as “talking instruments”. Chordophones were exclusive in Africa. West Africans didnt have many harps, fiddles, or musical bows. When they did they were made out of gourds and deerskins with holes. Fiddles were made from cow or horsehair for the strings and a narrow box made from alligator skin. Harp strings were made from the roots of a palm wine tree.
During performances on-lookers often participated by clapping their hands, tapping their feet, and dancing. They shouted encouraging words or words of disapproval to the performers indicating whether they enjoyed the performance or not. Call-and-response was big in West Africa. There would be a lead singer with a few others would act as a chorus to the one lead singer. That lead singer would sing a refrain while the others would almost sing back to the lead singer while singing their refrain. This call-and-response technique was representative of poetry as well as music.
During the seventeenth century Africans were brought to the mainland colonies. The earliest black settlers were indentured servants. Black people werent the only indentured servants, white people and native Americans were also forced to work. African Diaspora was the music of the slaves and indentured servants. It connects to the Colonial Era
Around 1650 the first indentured servants were released after completing their respective amounts of servitude. Around that same time more and more Africans were being brought to the colonies as servants of some time but for most part, as servants of all time. During this period, black slavery was being established as law throughout the colonies. Although slavery was illegal in Massachusetts at that time, the slave traders had found ways to work around that law. They were technically slaves but they werent directly called slaves.
Black slaves were being taken away from their families and were not permitted to bring material objects with them. In the Colonies, Africans werent allowed to read, write, or learn anything except for what their master taught them. Some Africans learned to play a musical instrument by watching other white male musicians. Some became relatively famous. They had memories and their culture of music to keep their minds off of their enslavement. Their music in Africa was reflected in the new songs they sang as a release from the physical and mental cruelty of their new slavery.
During the Colonial Era slaves were allowed to attend church Sundays. This brought congregational singing into their lives. Black men and women had there own special pews and they would chant one or two lines at a time ending on a definite pitch and then the congregation would follow singing with the same line. This was called “lining out” which still lingers on in black churches today. They learned to sing psalms by hearing them and then ach time they were sung, the tune would change a little. Singing schools eventually started appearing so people could receive “correct singing”. Organs were brought into churches. During the 1730s a more upbeat singing pattern
for the church congregations was adopted in the South-West, although it was not yet widespread. While not universally accepted as being a form of worship, it was considered as an option for women. In 1754-5 James Sowell said, “To sing in public is a sign that God has given her the right of private life and she is being taken as a child who could not sing of herself without consent or reason.” Sowell was also opposed to women wearing dress, as she considered men a nuisance and not worthy of respect. In 1774, however, she wrote that, while the Lord called women to the service, he did not specifically invite them to sing as a symbol of authority. “If no man should be ordained for our business, we should be obliged to sing in public, or with the same ceremony, except to God.” Sowell’s song, which was popular across the country, drew many young black men, a great number of them black ministers who were invited to sing the show. During this and other years, black musicians were introduced from the South, but only from other parts of the country. “The Lord chose me to live “” black musicians of all kinds. They were given black garments, black dress, and black aprons and had white shoes. Black men wore the name “ to which they also gave birth.
When many in the black churches came into the South, they found it very difficult if not impossible to integrate their congregation. The earliest African-American religious revival continued in South Carolina, in the late 18th century, and soon after that in Illinois, in the late 19th century as did most churches which started in the early 20th century. The revival began with a meeting at the Church of Saint Mary of Central Tennessee in 1625 to elect their first black member and then they formed an African congregation in the churches of various South Carolina counties and on the first day after their election, they offered to marry the black bride.
In fact black churches did not have much control over members of their congregations but could have easily chosen white congregations if whites had been less concerned with keeping black women on the road to membership. The early revival of black music led to a revival of black music, much like the black American revival of music during the mid-18th century. The Revival of Black Music was first introduced in New Orleans in 1833. In the same year some African-American churches, especially ones in the Southern states, tried to promote a revival of white music, calling for a revival of white music. Many of the churches in New Orleans rejected this call for a