My research explores a few related areas of interest that pertain to the perspective and aspirations of a guitarist and composer in the postcolonial African context of South Africa.
First it explores the historical positions of the guitar in Africa as outlined by musicologists like Cynthia Schmidt and John Collins along with Kofi Agawu’s seminal critique of tonal colonisation. I follow the trajectory of the emergence of prototypical West African guitar styles such as palm-wine, highlife and juju with the influences of music arriving back in Africa from the Antilles. Through the lens of tonality I consider the effects and adaptations of the colonial influence along with the syncretic fusions of local idiomatic phraseology and embodied approaches adapted from traditional instruments such as the seprewa harp lute. Through musical transcription and analysis I distinguish between the functional harmony that is introduced into the Africa via Christian hymns vs a more modal expression of tonality that can be traced to the idiomatic sounds of traditional instruments.
Following this line of thinking, I explore the electric guitar bands of 1960’s Guinea such as Bembeya Jazz National which I argue is a potent moment of agency and reinvention that coincides with waves of anti-colonialism and nationalism albeit without
the stultifying effects of nationalism’s telos. The intentional efforts in Guinea and Mali to maintain and transfer traditional Mande music from instruments such the Kora, Balafon and Ngoni leads to highly sophisticated contrapuntal music. In the later chapters I explore this element of the contrapuntal both as a musically generative method as well as in the sense of the contrapuntal that Edward Said deploys in culture and literature. I argue that such a contrapuntal approach brings a tropic expression of the global to comparative musicology and helps us rescue African music from ethnomusicology towards a more
direct and embodied musical engagement. Finally the last chapter considers what a refreshed musical pedagogy or praxis might look like with a contrapuntal sensibility along with the sensory training that is a prerequisite for any high level musical practise such as jazz improvisation. I present this as a model for the broader concerns of an aesthetic education in a time of the ubiquitous adoption of technology and mechanisation.