AFRICAN MUSIC

In Africa it is unrealistic to separate music from dance or from bodily movement. In Europe the body tends to be used as a single block, while in African and African American dance it seems to be “polycentric”—that is, split into several independent body areas or “centres.” Likewise, the playing of African musical instruments involves a whole combination of body movements. This is one reason African music is less amenable to notation than Western music; for analytical purposes, sound filming (rather than just sound recording) is essential.

In Africa music making is very often collective, involving organized collaboration in which performers contribute not identical, but complementary, constituents. Besides polyrhythmic and polymetric procedures, melodic phrases are frequently offset against one another, with different starting and ending points, either in an antiphonal “call-and-response” relationship or in an overlapping relationship that yields polyphony. In addition, melodic phrasing and instrumental accompaniment may be deliberately out of step—a displacement technique described in 1952 by American anthropologist Richard Waterman as “offbeat phrasing of melodic accents.” Complementary participation is also evident in drumming and in flute or trumpet ensembles where each player in turn sounds a different, single note. The Ghanaian musicologist J.H. Kwabena Nketia pointed out the function of this African form of hocket technique in “achieving overall effects of continuity, [and] for building up interlocking, and sometimes complex structures, out of relatively simple elements

https://www.britannica.com/art/African-music/Musical-structure