music and musical instruments: Africa bamboo flutes are little different from modern metal flutes In the Americas flutes were often fashioned of cedar and are still used by Native American tribes to play haunting melodies Also used in some parts of the world were instruments made of reeds and similar materials These instruments evolved into modern-day clarinets, oboes, and other reed instruments Music in the ancient world had purposes that are little different from its purposes in modern life Farmers—and probably slaves as well—chanted songs to make their labor lighter and to make the time pass Soldiers used music in marching as well as to celebrate military victories Music was used during festivals, parades, and celebrations and to accompany theatrical presentations, such as mimes In the ancient world, epic poems, legends, and tales were often sung or chanted to make them more memorable not only for the audience but for the poet or storyteller as well Music also played a key role in religious rituals Like modern people, the ancients believed that music was a way to honor or appease the gods and to take part in the divine spark that gave people life Music has no tangible existence; it disappears as soon as it is produced AFRICA BY DAVID OTIENO AKOMBO Throughout Africa vocal music has been sung for millennia All cultures in Africa have used vocal music, believing that vocalization of thought through some musical medium such as song and chant is effective in reaching out to the supernatural deities ruling the land These ancient beliefs are supported by contemporary production of vocal music in various cultural settings Even though vocal music is a distinctively older genre in the African musical repertory, compared with other genres of instrumental music and declamatory dirges (songs of mourning) such as those performed by griots (oral historians who recount cultural tradition through song), a systematic study of the variety of its forms has lagged for two reasons One is that the use of vocal music among Africans is still an area of esoteric knowledge Another is that the ownership of vocal music is communal rather than individual For example, when a work song is composed, the composer delegates the work to the community, and the community owns it as they sing it within the context of their social events When an individual musician composes a puberty song to be sung at ritual ceremonies such as Orunyege, a tribal courtship dance of the Nyoro (also called Banyoro, Bunyoro, or Kitara) people of western Uganda, the community and the new initiates will eventually claim ownership of both the song and the dance This sense of collective ownership of song and dance artifacts makes it difficult for the work of art to remain purely a solo piece, for it is transformed into a group performance intended as a collective social phenomenon Classification of African musical instruments is generally fraught with difficulty According to one widely accepted 763 classification of musical instruments, there are four broad categories of instruments: membranophones, which produce sound by a vibrating membrane; idiophones, which produce sound by vibrating themselves; chordophones, which produce sound by vibrating strings; and aerophones, which produce sound by vibrating columns of air It has been theorized that the possible sequence of instrumental evolution in Africa can be traced from drums to pipes to strings Since rhythm antedates melody, Africa’s oldest instruments are hypothesized to have been percussive—specifically, hands and feet used to create rhythm Other percussion instruments included pieces of wood or even skulls of animals The drum has been the instrument of religious ritual among many African peoples from prehistoric to present times Later ancient Africans added pipes, such as bamboo woods and horns that easily transformed into the aerophones The chordophones, similar to lyres, were also created from various artifacts, such as the hunting bows of the Kamba people of Kenya Geography influenced the origins of ancient African musical instruments For instance, people living in sub-Saharan Africa migrated slowly, with strong and weak tribes scrambling for richer valleys These migratory patterns reshaped the musical instruments found in sub-Saharan Africa in three ways: Vegetation from swamps and forested areas gave rise to large membranophones and idiophones, aerophones such as reeds were found mainly in the semiarid regions, and unaccompanied choral singing was established mainly in open grassland The African scales (series of notes differing in pitch, varying with the frequency of vibration) and modes (set patterns of notes played over an octave using the white keys of a keyboard) took centuries to develop It is difficult to determine how many modes actually exist, since the music is functional as opposed to contemplative, like that of Western forms The musical scales and modes of African music are based mainly on impassioned speech and as such have never been fully conventionalized In essence, musical melody is subordinated to some form of meaningful tone by following the natural inflection of speech within the language Th is is because most African languages are tonal; hence, the base meaning of the words will change according to the intonation, the rise and fall of the voice’s pitch As such, these idiosyncratic attributes have influenced the way Africans view their scales and modes and have made it difficult to point to the exact tonal and modal characteristics of African music These African modes can also be heard when a drummer plays in the speech mode by reproducing the tonal and rhythmic patterns of speech on the drums This type of transfer is drawn from ritual, work, or play, and so the modes are externally motivated This is, in a sense, contrary to the conventional Western staff transcriptions, because the African scales differ in microtones and the pitch classifications are completely dissimilar