A Musing on Culture and Music

Hello Nok Readers and Nokviewers,

How are you doing?

Hope you are gearing up for Christmas and all that it entails. Do you know with Christmas come joy, celebrations, memories, a lot of music and shows everywhere. You will be amazed how culture and music works hand in hand, it blends and some times culture and music are inseparable. continue reading to find out…

So today post would be about A musing on culture and music, feel free to check previous post on music and other important topics, like, share and leave a comment.

According to Walter Rodney, “culture is the total way of life…” . Hence, culture also “embodies those moral, ethical and aesthetic values, the set of spiritual eye glasses through which a society view themselves and their place in the universe. These values encoded in culture are all bases of a people’s identity, their sense of peculiarity as members of the human race” . Thus, culture could be said to be the sum total of beliefs, values, customs, art, etc, of a particular society, group, place, or time. It is what defines a particular group of people; a general identity of a particular group. It manifests in both material and non-material forms.

The material culture include the tangible items such as tools, instruments, building, clothes, among others; while the non-material culture include the intangible aspects such as music, songs, proverbs, folklores, ideas, and other abstraction. One certain characteristic of culture is that it is dynamic as it features changes and continuity. Therefore, culture evolves in response to the influence of time, contacts, technology, and other factors.

Since culture is the total way of life which is either in material (tangible) or non-material (intangible) form, and music is a form of art and cultural activity through the medium of sound organised in time and space, it then means that music is itself a culture. One can therefore say that music is an intangible culture by virtue of the sound produced and the messages conveyed (both in the rhythm and in the lyrics).

On the other hand, music also touches the tangible culture as it is produced by or with instruments such as drums, stringed-instruments, trumpets, and other sound-producing objects, which are parts of material culture. Thus, music can be said to be a crossroad where material and non-material forms meet, and as pointed out earlier, it is a culture on its own.

Since it is evident that music is a culture and have element of an individual or societal cultural practices, it could be said that a person or society culture can rob off on the individual music. You would be amazed how it transcends, well one of a trend in the music scene is the evidence of African culture in music. Hence, African music is also African culture.

African culture could therefore be said to the total way of life the peoples of Africa, from Cairo (Egypt) to Cape Town (South Africa), from Nigeria to Ghana to Zimbabwe and Namibia to mention a few. Again, African culture connotes Black Culture found anywhere in the world which was transported through slave trade or any other overseas activity. It is important to note that different African countries have different practices, but they have a distinct features that is evident.

African music and its elements has spread round the world and have gained listeners and momentum to the extent that it is infused into songs around the globe.

Do you want to find out the African elements in global music?

Well stay glued to my blog for the next post.

I also like to find out your musical practices in where you are, or where you are from ( France, China, Russia, South Africa , India, U.K, Korea, etc) so feel free to leave a comment. Thank You

Reference

Rodney, W. 1982. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Enugu: Ikenga Publishers. pp.41.

Ngugi Wa Thiong’O. 2003 [1986]. “The Language of African Literature” in Harris, R and Rampton, B. 2003. The Language Ethnicity and Race Reader. London and New York: Routledge. p.75.

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