VAFRICAN MUSIC

It was many years ago, among the Bulu, in Kamerun. Dr. Good and myself were holding a religious service in the town of a great chief, Abesula, whose thirty-five wives were seated around him. After we had sung several hymns Dr. Good began to preach, but had not proceeded as far assecondlywhen Abesula, interrupting, exclaimed: “Say, white man, won’t you stop talking and sing again? And I wish you would dance with your singing; for I don’t care for singing without dancing; and I don’t like preaching at all.”

We found that Abesula’s whole family were united in this preference for comic opera. But Dr. Good and I were in hopeless disagreement as to which of us should do the dancing. Besides, the Africans themselves are expert dancers and qualified judges; and if our music had “charms to soothe the savage breast,” I am afraid that our dancing would have made more savages than it would have soothed.

After a few months among the Bulu I had an organ brought up from the coast, a baby-organ, which when folded a man could carry on his head. The people had heard that something wonderful was coming with the next caravan; and on the day of its arrival it seemed as if the whole Bulu tribe had assembled on our hill. Having unpacked the organ I set it on the porch while they all stood on the ground below. The tension of suspense during the slow progress of preparation was a test of endurance. Atlast, everything being ready, I sat down at the organ, filled the bellows, and amidst profound silence suddenly sounded a loud chord. Instantly the crowd bolted. Nothing was to be seen but disappearing legs. The men, being more fleet of limb, reached the hiding-places first; then the women and larger children, the smaller children being left to their fate. To them the organ was of course a fetish, and full of talking spirits. Gradually they came out from their hiding-places. Then, as fear subsided, each one began to laugh at the others and to tell his ancestors all about it. In the ensuing noise the organ had a rest. They soon became devotedly fond of it, and it was a great help in our mission work. Regularly on Sunday morning after the service I would set the organ on the porch and play for them until I was tired—and that was not very long; for in that climate the bellows were soon in such condition that the playing was prominently spectacular, done with the feet, reinforced by all the muscles of the body. In after years, among the Fang of the French Congo, I always carried an organ with me.

To all the interior natives, Bulu and Fang, and even to the coast tribe of Batanga, my playing of that little organ was much the most wonderful thing about me. In going to Africa a second time, after four years’ absence, on my way to Gaboon I landed at Batanga for a few hours. The natives remembered me as having a beard, and I was now shaved. But there was with me a fellow traveller who had just such a beard as mine had been; so that, to the natives, he looked more like me than I did myself. They of course mistook him for me; and the stranger got a friendly reception which pleased him as much as it surprised him. He said he never had met such friendly natives. But upon my protest they discovered their mistake and began to pay me some attention.I insisted that they had forgotten me and that my feelings were hurt; at which they made the most excited remonstrance. They remembered that I had played the organ. One of the boys, in his eagerness to convince me that they had not forgotten me, began to imitate my motions at the organ, which he exaggerated to an outlandish caricature in which hands, feet, head, mouth and eyes were equally active, saying as he performed: “Look me, Mr. Milligan; this be you.” Following his example, they all engaged in a performance that would have scandalized any company of self-respecting monkeys, saying the while: “This be you, Mr. Milligan; this be you.”

My fellow traveller, who may have felt somewhat chagrined at finding that the hearty reception accorded him was intended for me, turned to me and made some remarks that have no rightful place here.

We are all familiar with the legend that Pythagoras invented the first musical instrument after listening to the blacksmith’s hammers. Longfellow repeats it in the poem, “To a Child”:

“As great Pythagoras of yore,Standing beside the blacksmith’s door,And hearing the hammers, as they smoteThe anvils with a different note,Stole from the varying tones that hungVibrant on every iron tongueThe secret of the sounding wire,And formed the seven-corded lyre.”

“As great Pythagoras of yore,

Standing beside the blacksmith’s door,

And hearing the hammers, as they smote

The anvils with a different note,

Stole from the varying tones that hung

Vibrant on every iron tongue

The secret of the sounding wire,

And formed the seven-corded lyre.”

Shakespeare also refers to this reputed origin of music in “The Two Noble Kinsmen.” Pirithous, relating the death of Arcite, tells how he rode the pavement on a horse so black that the superstitious would have feared to buy him, a prancing steed whose iron-shod feet seemedonly to touch the stones—as if counting them, rather than trampling them, and—

“thus went countingThe flinty pavement, dancing as ’twere to the musicHis own hoofs made—for, as they say, from ironCame music’s origin.”

“thus went counting

The flinty pavement, dancing as ’twere to the music

His own hoofs made—for, as they say, from iron

Came music’s origin.”

Nevertheless, this story—like many others that cluster about the name of Pythagoras, as, for instance, that he was seen in two cities at the same time—is seriously vulnerable, and is probably pure myth, without enough of fact to qualify as a legend. The obvious objection, that various hammers striking upon an anvil give out, not different notes, but the same—for the notes vary with the anvil and not with the hammers—Longfellow meets by using the plural,anvils.

In the latest of Mr. H. E. Krehbiel’s learned and interesting books,The Pianoforte and Its Music, the writer holds that the first of all stringed instruments was the bow. Every boy knows the musical twang of the bowstring at the moment that the arrow flies. In theIliad, Apollo, the god of music, is also the god of archery, and is called the “bearer of the silver bow.” Mr. Krehbiel also recalls the passage in theOdysseyin which Ulysses tries his bow, after the suitors of Penelope, one by one, had tried and failed; and when Ulysses drew the arrow to its head and let it go, the string rang shrill and sweet as the note of a swallow. This theory of the origin of musical instruments is strikingly supported by the instruments in present use among the savage and primitive tribes of West Africa.

A Kombe cook, at Gaboon, each day after dinner, lay down for a nap and played himself to sleep upon an instrument which was nothing but a bow with a single string. The string was made of a certain runner, thefibre of which is very tough and gives a resonant note. The cook found that by plucking the string with a metal, rather than with his fingers, he produced a better note; so for this purpose he regularly used the bread-knife and took it to bed with him. When I first heard this unclassical music I thought he was playing on a Jew’s-harp.

The native improves this instrument when he attaches to one end of it a gourd or calabash, in the shape of a bowl, to augment the sound—the first sound-box. When he plays he places the flat side of the gourd against his chest. He improves the instrument immensely when he adds three strings, making four in all, successively shorter. The four strings pass over a central bridge, which is notched at different heights for the different strings. This makes eight strings and produces eight different notes. The gourd, or sound-box, is placed in the middle of the bow, opposite the bridge. This instrument is usually made from the midrib of a palm-leaf. The bent midrib itself forms the bow; while the strings are the loosened fibres of its own tough skin. These are made taut by the vertical bridge, and their vibrating length is regulated by strong bands passing around the ends of the strings and the bow.

Another native instrument is a harp, both in shape and in principle. The upper end is a bow, or half-bow; the lower end is an oblong sound-box covered with a perforated skin—monkey-skin or goatskin. The upper ends of the strings are attached to pegs inserted in the bow, by which the strings may be tuned. There is also a five-stringed lyre, with a sound-box somewhat like the harp, but instead of a single bow at the end, there are five bent fingers, each with its string. There is a very rudimentary dulcimer, and a xylophone, and various modifications of the instruments which I have described.

The favourite of all these instruments, and the one oflargest musical capacity, is the harp. The native uses it most frequently to accompany his singing. There are professional singers among them, whose position is somewhat analogous to that of minstrels several centuries ago in Europe. The songs of these professional singers are usually lengthy ballads—traditional tales in lyric form. The monotony of the solo, which is a dramatic recitative, is broken by a somewhat regular and frequent choral response. The singer half closes his eyes and sways his body as he sings. He seems oblivious of time and place. I have sometimes thought that there was an element of hypnotism in his influence upon his audience. Upon the instrument he plays a running and unvaried accompaniment to his song. But it would be a great mistake to judge the song, or the African capacity for melody, by the miserably inadequate instrument. The singer’s voice far exceeds the instrument, both in range and in the division of intervals.

The fact is, however, that the only one of his musical instruments which the African regards with profound respect is his dearly-belovedtom-tom—the drum to which he dances. From this some have inferred that, to the African savage, rhythm without melody is music, which of course is a mistake. It is even doubtful whether his sense of melody be not altogether as keen as his sense of rhythm, though not equally appealed to. The drum is very easy to construct; but not so the harp or viol; and the Negro is so lacking in mechanical genius that he cannot invent an instrument capable of reproducing his melodies. Therefore the melodies are always vocal. They do not dance to the drum, by itself; for they invariably sing when they dance. Dancing without singing is almost impossible; at least I have never seen it during seven years in Africa. They are passionately fond of singing and have good voices. The voices of themen are much better than those of the women and have sometimes the resonant sonority of a deep organ-tone, or an exquisite melancholy, which it is to be hoped they may never lose through future conditions of civilization.

The native songs are elementary but fascinating. Few white men, however, can sing them; for the scales, or tone-systems, upon which most of them are based, are entirely different from our major and minor modes. Their scales have not a distinct tonic, that is, a basal tone from which the others in the system are derived, as, for instance, the first tone,do, of our major scale. It follows that the cadences of their music are not clearly defined; or, as a friend of mine would say, “They don’t taper off to an end like ours.”

Although their music is so difficult for the white man, the natives learn our music with astonishing ease, even their oldest men and women, and sing it well—if they have half a chance. But is it surprising that—since our scales are new to them—they at first need a little careful training, or at least the lead of a clear-toned organ reasonably well played? Otherwise they are not unlikely to substitute the tones of their own scales. The result is indescribable. Imagine a large congregation singing the doxology with all their might, and about half of them singing it in G minor instead of G major! But the comparison is inadequate. The singing in some mission congregations is enough to cause a panic. The first Sunday that I spent in Africa was at Batanga, where the people had learned the hymns before any white missionaries went to live among them. I was near the church when the large congregation started the first hymn. It was a translation of “God is the Refuge of His saints, When storms of sharp distress invade.” The tune of thisstorm of sharp distresswas good oldWard, but, alas, in such a state ofdecompositionthat I did not recognize it until they hadsung it through twice. And so it was with many of the tunes. Their own music has no extended range of high and low notes; and so, in these hymns, whenever they came to a high passage, or even a single high note, they sang it an octave lower, and the low notes they sang an octave higher. It was a vocal feat, and no audience of white people could have done it without training; but it did not sound much like music, still less like worship.

So great a musician as Dvorak, when he came to America, was profoundly moved by the original melodies of the American Negro, and became their enthusiastic champion. Indeed, they inspired the most beautiful of all his symphonies, the one entitled, “Aus der Neuen Welt.” I do not refer, of course, to the so-called Negro melodies composed by white men. Some of these are beautiful; but they are not Negro melodies. They do not express the Negro’s emotional life and he does not care much for them. Those wonderful songs of the Fisk Jubilee Singers are the real thing. Some of those very melodies may have originated in Africa. Others are more developed than any that I heard in Africa; but they are very similar, and they use the same strange scales, which makes them unfamiliar to our ears and difficult to acquire. Among them, I really believe, are occasional motives as capable of development as those of Hungary.

For a long time the music of Africa defied every attempt on my part to reduce it to musical notation. Very few persons have made the attempt; for it is easier to reduce their language to writing than their music. At first it seemed as inarticulate and spontaneous as the sound of the distant surf with which it blended, or the music of the night-wind in the bamboo.

The melody of African music is strange to our ears, because, as I have said, it is usually derived from tone-systems that are unlike either our major or minor scales.They have thepentatonicscale, that is, a major scale without the fourth and the seventh notes, thus avoiding the use of semitones; but their other scales are strange to most people. Among them are some of the scales of theplain-songof the Roman Catholic Church—theGregorian chant. The plain-song is the only survival (among ourselves) of ancient music. Modern music is based upon harmony, and consists essentially in a progression of chords. The successive tones of a modern melody acquire their character not chiefly from their own sequence, as do ancient melodies, but from the chords to which they belong; and the chords even when they are not voiced are always understood. But harmony itself is modern, dating from about the thirteenth century. African melodies cannot always be harmonized, and when the harmony is added it is not usually effective.

But in African music another scale is employed which is not Gregorian, but oriental. It is a minor scale with an augmented interval—a tone and a half—between the sixth and seventh notes, that is, with a minor sixth and a major seventh. This peculiarly effective interval imparts an intense melancholy. Verdi, with delightful propriety, makes use of this very scale in Aïda, in the hymn of the Egyptian priestesses in the first act, where an extant Arab melody is introduced. This scale is probably the oldest tone-system in the world and may have come originally from the banks of the Ganges, in the far-distant past.

The African, like the oriental, conceives of the scales, and the melodies derived from them, as moving downward, instead of upward like our own. All African music sings downward. Another striking peculiarity is that they lacktonality, as the musician would say; that is, they seem not to be in any particular key. The strong feeling of the key-note which characterizes our majorscale is entirely absent; and this, of course, accounts for the absence of a well-defined cadence, to which I have alluded. The weird fascination of the African dirge is largely due to this absence of tonality. Musical genius could hardly surpass this instinctive expression of despair—the desolation of an everlasting farewell.

The emotion which it represents, however intense, is rather disappointingly transient. Sometimes it is even unreal; I mean to say that it is sometimes indulged for its own sake. And this is true of the Negro everywhere. A few days ago I came upon an article in an old magazine, in which a Southern woman, in “Rambling Talks About the Negro,” tells of a mourning party of Negroes that assembled one night beside her house to finish a mourning ceremony that ought to have been a part of a funeral a few days earlier; but a storm had interrupted it. The unearthly mournfulness of their music was intensified by their beautiful voices until it became unbearable, and the woman bowed her head upon the window sill and cried without restraint, while imagination conjured up fictitious woes, such as the sudden death of her children and of all her friends, until she was alone in a bleak world. Then it occurred to her that it was wrong for people to indulge a voluntary anguish and make a luxury of misery; so she sent a servant to offer a barrel of watermelons to the party of mourners on condition that, instead of mourning, they should dance and jollify; to which they heartily responded, after first making sure that the melons were in good condition, for they really preferred to mourn.

When, to the peculiar scales which Africans employ, one adds the further fact that in African music (and indeed in the Negro melodies of our South) the note which corresponds to our seventh in the scale (a step below the tonic) is seldom a true seventh, but is slightly flatted,enough to make a distinct note with a character of its own, one has probably accounted for the peculiar plaintiveness, the elusiveness, the vague mysteriousness, which constitutes the charm of all true Negro music.

The rhythm of African music is a further impediment to our appreciation. In the music of the dance the rhythm is of necessity somewhat regular. But even in this music it is variable and does not conform throughout to any one time-scheme but changes back and forth from duple to triple within the same melody. This also is characteristic of oriental music. In most African music the rhythm is regulated by the words, like the recitative, the rhythmic imitation of declamatory speech. But it has the symmetry that feeling secures. The best way to learn the African’s song is to watch the swaying of his body and imitate it, and if the words have meaning let their feeling possess one. Mr. William E. Barton, the compiler of a small collection of choice Negro melodies, tells how that “Aunt Dinah,” who had been trying to teach a Negro hymn to a young lady, at last seeing her begin to sway her body slightly and pat her foot upon the floor, exclaimed: “Dat’s right, honey! Dat’s de berry way! Now you’s a-gittin’ it sho nuff! You’ll nebber larn ’em in de wuld till you sings ’em in de sperrit.”

The African sings not only his joy, but his grief; not only his love, but his anger, his revenge and his despair. Livingstone was greatly surprised, upon approaching a slave caravan, to hear some of them singing. But as he listened he found that they were singing words of grief and vengeance—for usually they were betrayed and sold by some of their own people. So it was everywhere, as old men of Gaboon have told me; they went away chanting their desolation and their curses upon those who had betrayed them.

There is no doubt that music is the art-form of the Negro. He is the most musical person living. His entire emotional life he utters in song. He has not yet done any great thing. His day is still future. But I believe that when he comes, he will come singing.

DANCE SONG OF MPONGWEThe time signature is only approximately correct, and forces a rhythmic symmetry which African music does not possess. The energetic momentum is characteristic of African dance music.

CANOE SONG OF GABOONAll African music, like Oriental music, sings downward.

A MOURNING DIRGEThis is chanted by an individual, or a succession of individuals, and is not the usual wail in which all join, though it is much like it. African music is not always based upon harmony; nor does harmony always improve it.

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