African Music is devoted to ethnographic, anthropological, musicological, and popular studies of sub-Saharan African music from the 1890s to the present. The bibliography is organized into six basic sections. Section one covers works on cultural policy and the performing arts in sub-Saharan Africa, while section two provides a selected guide to works on ethnomusicology. Section three, the largest, deals with general works and regional/country studies of traditional sub-Saharan musics, defined most simply as the local village or rural musics of West, Central, Southern, and East Africa. General and regional/country studies of African pop music as well as biographical and critical studies of 275 popular musicians and groups are covered in section four. Section five focuses on the acculturated or art music traditions of Africa's Westernized elite, citing both general works and biographical/critical studies on African composers and performers. The sixth, and final, music section covers general studies on African church, or liturgical music. The items cited in these six sections range from books, dissertations, unpublished papers, and periodical and newspaper articles, to films, videotapes, and audiotapes in all of the major Western languages as well as several African ones. The three appendixes deal, respectively, with reference works on African music and culture; archives and research centers; and a selected discography listing both traditional and popular music recordings and outlets where they may be found. Four indexes--ethnic group, subject, artist and author--complete the work and provide a key to its 5,800 entries.
By covering works from 1732 to the present, African Music offers not only the most up-to-date scholarship on the subject, but also the most comprehensive coverage currently available. It offers a much-needed, and long overdue resource for students, scholars, and librarians seeking to understand the musics of sub-Saharan Africa.
About the Author: JOHN GRAY is Director of the Black Arts Research Center. He is the author of Blacks in Classical Music
he, Traditional Religion and Healing in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Diaspora
Black Theatre and Performance and Blacks in Film and Television, all published by Greenwood Press.
