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Bushman Counterpoint*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Nicholas M. England
Nicholas M. England*
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
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Extract

Although contrapuntal practices of the type to be described below will be encountered in most Bushman communities within the Northern Language Group (as well as in several communities of the Central and Southern Language Groups), the Bushmen to whom I refer specifically in the title of this paper are the of South West Africa and Bechuanaland. The speak a dialect of !Kxõ (traditionally, !Kung, in the literature of ethnology), the principal Northern Bushman language. There are approximately 1500 in all, and roughly 1000 of them live within the area called Nyae Nyae over the past decade by members of the Peabody-Harvard Kalahari Expeditions. Nyae Nyae is a corruption (a convenient simplification) of the Bushman name, , which means Great Flat Place and refers to a large water pan prominent among a group of such pans in the northeastern portion of South West Africa.

Type
Multi-Part Techniques in Folk Music and Dance
Information
Journal of the International Folk Music Council , Volume 19 , 1967 , pp. 58 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © International Council for Traditional Music 1967

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Footnotes

page 58 note *

I wish to acknowledge here, with gratitude, the Foreign Area Training Fellowship of the Ford Foundation which made my first field trip possible (1958); also the subsequent grant to help me continue the work.

References

Notes

page 58 note † A recording was played at this point.

page 59 note * A recording was played at this point.

page 61 note * A recording was played at this point.

page 65 note * A recording was played at this point.

1. I continue to use the Bushman language classification of Dorothea F. Bleek; see her A Bushman Dictionary, ed. J. A. Engelbrecht (New Haven, Connecticut, 1956), pp. vii-viii.

2. Sing. = . Bushman words are written here in the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association modified only by the “click” symbols: |, dental; ‡, alveolar; !, palatal; and ||, lateral. High tone is indicated by _ preceding a syllable and low tone by _ ; mid-tone is unmarked. Bushman words have not been italicized because of possible interference with the phonetic symbols.

3. It is my experience that !Kxõ (with 0 quite closed) gives a proper picture of the Bushman pronunciation; see my Introduction to “Symposium on Transcription and Analysis: A Hukwe Song with Musical Bow,” Ethnomusicology, VIII (1964), 232, n. 5.

4. Directed by Laurence K. Marshall who has been a moving force behind more than a decade of Bushman studies in several disciplines. I wish to thank him for his vision and his kind support of my work.

5. See especially “The Kin Terminology System of the !Kung Bushmen,” Africa, XXVII (1957), I-25 ; “!Kung Bushman Bands,” ibid., XXX (i960), 325-55; and “!Kung Bushman Religious Beliefs,” ibid., XXXII (1962) 221-52.

6. See “Symposium on Transcription and Analysis … “ p. 228 ff., especially the transcriptions of Du: by Robert Garfias, Mieczyslaw Kolinski, George List, and Willard Rhodes.

7. The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa (London, 1934), 241-42; Kirby finds particularly appropriate the ”… principles laid down in the marginal notes of the medieval treatise … fonds S. Victor, 813 [latterly, Paris, Bib. Nat. f. lat. 15139] …” (p. 242).

8. This account of the “composition event” is taken from interviews with Medicine Men and the women of Nyae Nyae communities. I have never actually witnessed the birth of a new song (medicine or otherwise) from the time of the Medicine Man's contact with the supernatural to the finished musical product.

9. All measurements given herein have been made by matching the isolated tones in question (on a tape loop) with the tones of a variable frequency oscillator, the results being subsequently re-checked on several occasions.

10. “Un chromatisme africain,” L'Homme, I, 3 (1961), 32-46, with appended recording.