A Historical and Typological Analysis of African Xilophones

Abstract

Theories resulting from early comparative morphological analyses came to be closely associated with the Culture Area of the early 20th century which regarded the quantitative characteristics of the study of a given culture as qualitative factors measuring development. Because of this tendency, cultural anthropologists and ethnomusicologists of the 1960s increasingly emphasized the phenomenon of cultural change and focused on the study of the development and transformation of any given culture. However, the dominance of music-oriented research in ethnomusicology forced the morphological study of ethnographic objects, and earlier research on the rich ethnographic material in museums was largely replaced by purely fieldwork-based research on contemporary cultural phenomena. Yet an inescapable conclusion suggested by the bulk of ethnomusicological research is that the distribution musical styles and that of instruments are two independent processes, with the geographical distribution of instruments showing quite different patterns from that of musical styles and reflecting cultural groupings, albeit not distinct culture areas. A close analysis of historical sources and the morphology of objects is indispensable for any adequate reconstruction of the geographical and temporal distribution of musical instrument types. Indeed a comparative morphological analysis of such objects, based on well-documented historical data and a sufficient pool of recent regional data and taking into account the instruments of neighboring continents as well as the interethnic relations evidenced by historical sources, may well suggest historical contacts on the basis of otherwise unexplained similarities in the morphology of ethnographic objects. Thus a historical and typological analysis of the xilophone types of Sub-Saharan Africa shows clear Southeast Asian influences, which even in the absence of written sources seem to substantiate theories of migration and interethnic contact. The analysis also points to a mixed heritage of borrowed as well as locally created instruments among the xilophone types. For instance, while the so-called leg xilophone of the Zambezi valley (Malawi) shows similarities of morphology and playing technique with comparable instruments in Madagascar and therefore seems to have originated across the Mozambique Channel, West African specimens of this instrument type may have arisen independently of any migration and interethnic borrowing, since its very simple morphology allows the possibility of local origin as well. On the other hand, simplified, more primitive forms of the instruments may also be due to secondary processes subsequent to the appearance of sophisticated xilophone forms due to immigration from Southeast Asia. It is probable that vessel-resonator (individual resonator) variants of the leg xilophone developed locally as a sound-amplifying technology and spread owing to inter-African migrations, since no ethnographical parallels of these are attested in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Morphological and musical analogues of various types of log, trough and frame xilophones strongly suggest that these instruments also spread through interethnic contacts along an East-to West route, a theory further reinforced by the analysis of the nomenclature of these instruments. Constrastingly, it is a near certainty that portable bridle xilophones developed locally from frame xilophones, since the data known to us at present offer no ethnographic parallels outside Africa.