Abstract
In our increasingly diverse society, music teachers are often “on the hunt” for musical material representing a wide range of cultural groups. For those who wish to sonically venture to the African continent, the Smithsonian Folkways record label provides an opportunity to explore musics from the vast area. In this article, we first chronicle the genesis of the Folkways record label, then describe the current website, the ability to download music, and the availability of African music within the site. Next, three recordings from Africa are examined in more detail, with attention paid to specific musical selections and cultural context within each recording.
It’s a long distance from the study of close-to-home American musical styles to the expressions of a distant African village, but the journey is a worthy one. For those who wish to venture to the African continent, and in particular to draw children into one of the innumerable ethnic-linguistic groups of sub-Saharan Africa (from the Akan to the Zulu), the “hunt is on” for sources of the songs, the instrumental music, the stories, and the wide spectrum of the arts that are alive and well in the villages and urban communities in Western, Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa. Such a search may entail the identification of human resources—people living locally, along with collections of recordings, print, and other media resources such as those associated with libraries, museums, universities, and public institutions. Perhaps there is even a national archive of sources for those who wish to teach African music to children?
Indeed. A national recording archive, housed at the Smithsonian Institution, is one such comprehensive collection of “materials”—a treasury of musical resources for teaching African music, as well as African American music, Anglo-American music, Latin American music, and every other “people’s music” of the world’s cultures. Moses Asch, founder of Smithsonian Folkways Recording in 1948, worked toward meeting the mission of strengthening people’s engagement with the musical expressions that comprise our world. He and his colleagues sought out musical and cultural diversity and preserved it through an expansive repertoire of audio recordings, educational materials, liner notes and, more recently everything from DVDs to podcasts. Thus, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, a real physical presence on the national mall in Washington, DC, is also a virtual presence through its access as an online archive by teachers, folklorists, and scholars at www.folkways.si.edu.
Smithsonian Folkways as National Archive
There is a world of sound within the Smithsonian Folkways collection, including songs, poetry, instrumental music, other sorts of spoken word (plays, read-aloud books, historic speeches), and instructional recordings in numerous languages—including Spanish, French, and Ga (spoken in and around Accra, the capital of Ghana). There are documentary recordings of natural sounds, of industry and inventions, and of children on playgrounds. The genius of the archive’s founder, Moses Asch, is that he tracked people who sang and played music, from folk to jazz to “children’s genres” and that he pursued the likes of folk music giants such as Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie at a time when few were listening to them beyond those who attended the occasional political rally, the tiny club, or the freedom march. He was fascinated by the entire world of music, and identified musicians from the African continent, Asia, and the Americas whom he could record and make available to listeners on disk. The archive founder heard something genuine, rare, electric, and magical in these performers, recorded them, and preserved them for posterity.
Ironically, the young Moses Asch did not enjoy music class. As he recalled,
I went through the school system [in New York City] where the teacher would bang a note and say “What note is that” and I never passed that, I couldn’t, so I hated music. I hated anything to do with anything like that.
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Yet this experience did not extinguish his passion for music. His interest in recording, stoked by souvenirs from his father’s world travels, eventually led him to establishing a record label and the beginnings of a national archive. Today, under the direction of the Smithsonian Institution, Folkways continues to release new albums as well as to uphold Asch’s directive that the entire catalogue remain in print regardless of market sales.
Listeners may select music from the archive to suit their needs. Each track may be downloaded as a file or can become a part of a user-designed compilation album. A song from the Akan of Ghana is as readily available to listen to and learn as are children’s songs (e.g., “On the Mountain” and “Little Bird”), songs by Pete Seeger (e.g., “Abiyoyo”) or Woody Guthrie (e.g., “This Land Is Your Land”), or the music of Mexican mariachi and conjunto, of Japanese kabuki, or of southern African cultures such as the Xhosa and the Zulu. Smithsonian Folkways is intent on providing music and other oral lore to teachers, their students, and various listening others—a continuation of the dream that was begun by Moses Asch.
Natural Connections: African Music, Children, and Elementary Music Education
Many elementary educators are looking beyond the African American and Anglo-American music that constitutes most curricula in the United States, in an effort to broaden students’ sound base and reflect the population of our increasingly diverse country. The musical expressions of the many distinct cultural groups of the African continent have an important place in the music classroom. Throughout the western, eastern, central, and southern regions of the continent, the music is pulsive and often driving in its rhythmic (and polyrhythmic) features. Melodies of three, four, and five pitches are common, and call-and-response forms offer a role for everyone’s participation. Whether it’s the music of the Wagogo of Tanzania, the Akan of Ghana, the Yoruba of Nigeria, or the Shona of Zimbabwe, these qualities of rhythm, pitch, and form appear in much of the music of sub-Saharan Africa, and children as well as adults find themselves fulfilling this natural human impulse to make music. The word ngoma is a pro-Bantu word that refers to something much more than music: It is an event and a process that accompanies music, dance, drama, poetry, masks, and costumes, filling the musical expression of adults and children in Africa alike. Such facets make the music of African cultures applicable to the music curriculum and accessible to children.
African Music Within Smithsonian Folkways
Smithsonian Folkways is a one-stop resource for recordings, liner notes, video recordings, and sequential lessons on the music of sub-Saharan African cultures. The video recording collection (http://www.folkways.si.edu/explore_folkways/video_africa.aspx) features a Ghanian durbar ceremony: an inauguration celebration in which music, dance, and ceremonial clothing and customs are shown as the narrator explains various aspects of the celebration (use of kente cloth, “drum language,” ceremonial dance). There are also two colorful examples of “por por” music, a genre that is played by members of a truck drivers’ union in Ghana using horns and truck parts as musical instruments. (What possibilities there exist from this music to the making by children of a “found-sounds” ensemble of kitchen utensils and basement discards!)
Teachers seeking fully formed lesson plans using the materials available from Smithsonian Folkways will find a great variety of activities inspired by many different culture groups in the “Tools for Teachers” section of the website (http://www.folkways.si.edu/tools_for_teaching/lessons.aspx). “Mbiras, Marimbas, and You: Zimbabwean Music for the General Music Classroom,” for example, includes a step-by-step plan to introduce students of all ages to the music of Zimbabwe. Links to tracks, a resource list, hands-on activities, an extensive reading list, and notated arrangements of traditional and modern Zimbabwean music for Orff ensemble are all included in sections designed for use as either one large unit or as bite-size additions to the curriculum currently in use.
Smithsonian Folkways features audio recordings of music from a multitude of West African cultures, each recording replete with “liner notes” that offer detailed descriptions of the instruments, the musical functions and contexts, and the musicians themselves. Three recordings noted below have special relevance for those who teach music to children.
Ghana Children at Play: Children’s Songs and Games
Ivan Annan, who grew up in Ghana, believed in the importance of children’s singing games, as is evident in the liner notes of Ghana Children at Play. In the introduction, he notes that “with a little patience and careful listening, we shall achieve something worthy of doing, as we sing and play with children.” 2 Selections on this recording range from the popular “Tse Tse Kule” to the lesser known (but just as fun) “Abaa Ee.” In this game, “it” begins by singing “abaa ee . . .” holding the final note of the phrase as she passes in front of each child in the circle. When “it” cannot hold the note any longer, she stops, the circle of singers responds with the chorus, which includes the name of the person whom the leader stopped in front of. “Let’s see what we can do with our breath,” Annan suggests, “holding a tone as long as we can, and see how beautiful this can be.” The selections are as playful as singing games should be.
Annan’s careful explanations of each song offer those who are auditory learners a quick, comfortable way to learn new singing games. As Ghana Children at Play was released in 1954, many of the recordings are not of the quality one would expect of newer recordings. However, there are prized and precious songs within the collection, and the value of learning songs in the oral/aural tradition—by listening—cannot be underestimated.
Children’s Songs for Games From Africa
The collaborative efforts of a young American music teacher and a Ghanaian art history professor resulted in a little-known gem of an educational album within the Folkways archives. Children’s Songs for Games From Africa (Fosu & Hunter, 1979) contains six short songs from Ghana–complete with pronunciation guidance, detailed background information on each song and game, performance with appropriate instruments, performance of each instrument individually, performance of body percussion substituted for instrument parts, and instructional suggestions. Additionally, liner notes include lyrics with translations, background information on each song and game, directions for each game, and songs written in Western notation (for all but one track). “Kro Kro Kro” (see Figure 1) is a song sung by weavers while fabricating Ghana’s famous Kente cloth. A simple two-part song, “Kro” becomes a challenge with the addition of drums and the firikyiwah (a metal instrument worn on the middle finger and struck with a ring worn on the thumb).
“Kro Kro Kro,” a Ghanian weavers song. Notation by Jessica Blackwood.
African Songs and Rhythms for Children
Ghanian educator W. K. Amoaku’s relationship with the composer, Carl Orff, began in 1966 during a visit to the Orff Institute as a member of a traveling Ghanian performance group. The composer later sent Amoaku a gift of glockenspiels, metallophones, and xylophones, which Amoaku used (along with traditional Ghanian instruments) in teaching music and dance at a preparatory school in Ghana. A few years later, Amoaku returned to the Institute, spent a year studying the Schulwerk, and published the book African Songs and Rhythms for Children (Amoaku, 1971; Hetrick, 2002). In 1978, the companion recording was released on the Folkways Record label. In that album’s liner notes, Amoaku states that
this small volume . . . re-emphasizes the close interrelationship between the traditional African approach and rhythm, movement and improvisation, which for many years were not considered by most music educators as an important aspect of music education.
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The use of the Folkways album is notably helpful to teachers who feature the notated pieces in the volume as well as those who prefer to teach the music “by ear.” Tricky pronunciations present in any song in a foreign tongue become relatively simple (and more accurate) when learned from the recording. Seemingly complicated compound rhythms that appear too difficult for younger children may become effortless through a few listenings to Amoaku’s collected works.
African Music in Their Ears, Bodies, and Minds
The aural/oral transmission method practiced throughout the African continent requires careful and concentrated listening by both teacher and student. Although trained musicians in the West are comfortable learning music using Western notation, there is considerable benefit to “stepping outside this comfort zone” to learn music (and to teach it to others) in the aural/oral way that is most faithful to many sub-Saharan African cultures. This is the “meat-and- potatoes” of the Smithsonian Folkways archive for the practicing music teacher: recorded music that can be learned by ear.
The archive’s recordings can be “sampled” for free on the website for 30 seconds (and purchased for 99 cents). For a small percentage of the music budget, teachers can bring the sounds of African music to their classrooms and students. Teachers responsible for bringing music to children will do well to familiarize themselves with the Smithsonian Folkways collection, whether searching for a fully-formed lesson plan, an elusive song from the past, or the perfect piece to complete a favorite unit.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.