African Music Traditional and Contemporary

It is customary in the Western world for people to use the term 'African music' as if it were a single clearly identifiable phenomenon. Yet when one considers the size of the continent (the second largest in the world), the enormous differences in climate and terrain producing contrasting ways of life across the land mass, and, above all, its extreme multilingualism (more than 1800 different languages constituting a third of the world's languages), one should not be surprised at the diversity of music and the difficulty of isolating distinctly African features common to the whole continent. Besides, the study of its music did not proceed everywhere with equal thoroughness, insight or purpose. This new and important book is an overview of music in Africa.