Epistemic and Ethical Expression in African Musical Improvisation — Epoche B2
Drum Language and the Limits of Musical Expressiveness Philosophers of music have spent a century arguing about how a piece of music can be sad [1] . The debate is narrow by design: it concerns expressiveness, the property we hear in the music itself rather than any feeling it happens to provoke. A recurring complaint is that the narrowness is provincial, and that traditions elsewhere show music carrying knowledge and moral instruction, so the theory of expressiveness ought to be widened to accommodate them. This research note tests the complaint against its best case, the drum languages of the Akan and the Yoruba, and argues that the case does not support it. Those drums do carry propositional content, in quantity and with precision. They carry it by reference rather than by expression, and the mechanism that makes this possible is borrowed from language, not from music. Where sound acquires the power to state something, it does so by ceasing to work in the way expressiveness works. The property under discussion Eduard Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854 [2] ) set the terms by denying that music's content is feeling. What music presents, on his account, are forms in motion; the dynamic qualities of feeling — rising, swelling, hurrying, subsiding — can be mirrored in sound, but joy and grief themselves cannot, since they depend on thoughts about particular things and music supplies no such thoughts. The dominant modern accounts accept Hanslick's negative point and rescue expressiveness anyway. Peter Kivy in The Corded Shell (1980 [3] ) and Stephen Davies in Musical Meaning and Expression (1994 [4] ) argue that music is expressive of emotion as a face or a posture is: a St Bernard's face is sad without feeling anything, and a willow droops without grief. Music resembles, in its movement and bearing, the way an emotion shows in human carriage and gait, and we hear the emotion in it as a quality it has. Davies calls this appearance emotionalism, and stresses two things about it. The expressiveness is heard, not inferred. And what is heard is a resemblance to human bearing and gait, so the listener need know nothing about the composer's intentions or about any object the emotion is directed at: a slow, low, falling line is heard as heavy without any of that. One clarification is worth making because the word invites confusion. Expressivism in ethics is a doctrine about what moral sentences do, namely voice attitudes rather than state facts. Expressiveness in music is a property of sounds. They share a root and nothing else, and treating a theory of the second as a form of non-cognitivism about the first is an equivocation. The case for widening the theory The complaint about narrowness has a genuine basis. Among the Akan of Ghana and the Yoruba of Nigeria, drummers do transmit historical, genealogical and moral material, and they do it in performance rather than alongside it. A specialist drummer at a chief's court opens proceedings with texts naming ancestors and reciting the history of the stool. Nothing in the theory sketched above accounts for that. Sadness heard in a falling line is one thing; a genealogy is another. The question is what follows. If the drumming transmits its content by being expressive of it, the theory is too narrow and must be enlarged. If it transmits it by some other means, the theory is untouched, and the case belongs to a different chapter. How the drums actually work Twi and Yoruba are tone languages: the pitch on which a syllable is spoken is part of the word, so that a sequence differing only in pitch pattern is a different sequence of words. This makes a form of surrogate speech possible. The Akan atumpan , a pair of tuned drums, and the Yoruba dùndún , whose tension can be varied in play to slide through pitches, reproduce the tone contour and the rhythm of the spoken phrase. J. H. Kwabena Nketia's Drumming in Akan Communities of Ghana (1963 [5] ), and the chapters on speech and melody in The Music of Africa (1974), set out the correspondence in detail: the drummed text is a text, recoverable word by word by a listener who knows the language and the conventions. Two features of this deserve emphasis. First, the content is recovered compositionally. The listener does not grasp a mood and interpret it; she parses a phrase, and the phrase has parts, and rearranging the parts changes what is said, in the way rearranging words does. Second, the capacity is parasitic on the language. Drum language works because Twi is tonal, and a drummer cannot transmit what Twi cannot say. The system's expressive reach is the reach of the spoken tongue, narrowed by the loss of everything except tone and duration. Why this does not widen the theory Compare the two mechanisms directly. Expressiveness, on Davies's account, is a resemblance between the movement of the music and the bearing of an emotional person; a listener hears it without instruction, and it cannot be decomposed, because there are no parts of the sadness corresponding to parts of the phrase. Drum language is a conventional mapping from pitch and duration onto the phonology of a particular language; a listener without that language hears nothing propositional whatever, and the content decomposes exactly as the sentence does. These are different relations between sound and content, and the second is the relation words have. The drums do not show that music can express more than the theory allows. They show that a musical instrument can be used to speak. Kofi Agawu's Representing African Music (2003 [6] ) is worth invoking at this point, because it identifies what goes wrong when the material is handled the other way. Agawu argues that scholarship on African musics has repeatedly manufactured difference: taking practices that yield to ordinary analysis and presenting them instead as manifestations of a distinct communal ontology. The drum languages are a striking case, because the honest description is more impr