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Shona Urban Music and the Problem of Acculturation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2019

Robert Kauffman*
Affiliation:
Univeristy of Washington, Seattle, Washington
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Extract

Musical scholars often have great difficulty in studying acculturated music. It is somehow easier to deal with an older tradition which has been purified from spurious external influences over a period of years and can now be studied as a product of a particular culture. When we encounter acculturation, and there are few areas of the world where strong acculturative influences are not at work, we tend to ignore it, and retreat, instead into an ethnocentric idealism which will allow us to retain our image of what a music should be.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 1973 By the International Folk Music Council 

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References

Footnotes

1. It is curious that the opponents of acculturated music fail to criticize Arabic influence upon African music or the influence of one African area upon another. Acculturation is too complex to dismiss so easily.Google Scholar

2. Abraham Maraire. Mbira Music from Rhodesia. LP Record and Booklet. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971.Google Scholar

3. Op. cit. Google Scholar

4. In 1970 Salisbury bands were paid £65–90 per week in contrast to some Bulawayo bands that make only about £90 per month.Google Scholar

5. For further discussion, see Kauffman, “Some Aspects of Aesthetics in the Shona Music of Rhodesia,” Ethnomusicology, XIII (September, 1969), 507–511.Google Scholar