Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Traditional customs - The musical characteristics of Africa

The musical characteristics of Africa

The main features of African music:

First, multi-line rhythm. Multi-line rhythm is talking about, for example, six-person six-rhythm, which is also improvisational and never chaotic. With this sense of rhythm, it brings a very strong unrestrained power to music. The complex and changeable rhythm is the soul of African music.

An important feature of African music rhythm is compound rhythm, which is not

Many rhythms with the same length and different beats are played in parallel or of the same length.

The staggered rhythm of the same beat will produce wonderful rhythm and harmony.

Second, vocal music echoes, one person sings the harmony of all, which is one of its characteristics, or sings in turn, or overlaps, forming a multi-voice part.

Thirdly, I prefer percussion instruments, drums and xylophones.

Fourth, the use of seven tones, there are a considerable number of five tones.

Fifth, African folk music is powerful and closely related to daily life and religious etiquette. Even though it has satirical songs and litigation songs, it is also sung in court.

Extended data:

Africa has a vast territory, diverse nationalities and different beliefs, so African music is complicated. According to the classification of ethnomusicologists, African music can be divided into four categories: ancient Egyptian music, Andalusian music in North Africa, Ethiopian music and Saharan music.

Black music south of the desert (referring to East Africa, West Africa, Central Africa and South Africa).

African music is a collective concept that contains a variety of musical cultures. The African music we are talking about here is the origin of sub-Saharan Africa (referring to black Africa) in the usual sense.

Various indigenous black traditional music.

The influence of African music

The spread of African music culture mainly depends on African residents-blacks.

The development of the African continent has been relatively backward, and African blacks have joined the societies of other countries and regions as slaves, which has created the possibility for the spread of African music culture. In the process of labor, they preserved the African music tradition in their own way, and made this tradition continue and develop.

In this process, the musical characteristics of African black music were integrated into the music of other countries, which promoted the development of local music, spread African music and preserved and spread African music.

So many countries are influenced by African music to a certain extent, especially the music in North and South America and Latin America, which is influenced by black music, with American music as the representative.

We all know that American pop music can best represent American music, and American jazz can best represent American pop music.

Music, before jazz appeared, there were similar black soul songs, blues,

Ragtime and others, jazz originated from black dance music, two masters.

The main sources are black songs "Blues" and "Ragtime".

African music is vigorous and vigorous, with strong vitality. Primitive, qualitative

Simple, primitive and energetic music is in harmony with the music culture of other countries.

At the same time, it also produced a more distinctive music culture, which had an impact and promotion.

It has promoted the development of world music and made great contributions to the development of world music culture.

China Net-"Fantastic Foreign Folk Songs"