The Problem of Meaning in African Music

The study of as a universal aspect of human behaviour is becoming increasingly recognized as the focus of Ethnomusicology. Seeger has said that the ultimate task of musicology is to contribute to the study of man what can known of man as maker and user (Seeger 1952:366). Other writers have similarly shown concern for what is conceived to be (McAllester 1954) or what means to those who make it, and have referred in this connection to the close relationship that ought to exist between ethnology or cultural anthropology and (Bukofzer 1954; Rhodes 1956). These and other considerations have led Merriam to propose a new and broader definition of Ethnomusicology, the discipline most concerned with these goals, as the study of in culture, and to suggest further that the discipline regarded as concerned with the of mankind rather than with kinds of music selected as in the past on the basis of geographical and other criteria (Merriam 1959, 1960). We are thus getting to the stage where structural analysis, essential as it is, is no longer an end in itself but only a part of a general and wider quest for 'meaning' in music. This increasing emphasis on 'meaning' as a goal raises a number of problems. Basically of course there is the old bogey of the 'meaning of meaning'. (See Ogden & Richards 1946). How is meaning to interpreted in Ethnomusicology? Is it to interpreted in terms of meaning in cultural Anthropology, or is it to interpreted in the sense in which a musician claims to understand music, that is through structure? Is meaning to investigated and stated in terms of Western philosophical or psychological concepts of meaning in music--in terms of the aesthetic positions of formalists, expressionists and referentialists ?