African Culture
Music is integral to both public and private lives. From ritual dances to evocative vocal harmonies, the traditional music of Africa continues to uplift listeners. In the public sphere, music has become a huge multinational business and yet at its street level music remains an essentially social event. Informal gatherings of young people singing, rapping, or playing instruments reflects the roots of African music. More formal bands, whether professional or amateur, are direct extensions of the way musicians practiced and performed a thousand years ago. Music is central to all aspects of American public life: from commercial jingles on television to church choirs. The integration of music into all features of public life also stems from the ancient traditions of Africa. As a commodity, though, music has raised serious questions about intellectual property and its ownership: issues that were not present in traditional African communities.
In our personal lives, music is crucial. The music industry depends on millions of consumers who value music as being essential to life: not as a luxury but as a necessity. Many people cannot dream of a day spent without hearing tunes. The iPod is a ubiquitous tool that helps listeners stay connected to the sonic world. When online, I can stream music from any number of sources or download new music I want to hear. Music has become more personal than it was in traditional African societies. In traditional African societies, music was more a communal activity or a function of religion than it was a personal escape. Now music has become a way to meditate or find peace while in a chaotic urban environment. With headphones on, I can isolate myself from the world and discover a sense of peace that the soundscapes provide. The use of music for personal reasons is new social development that depends on technology. In traditional societies like those of Africa, music can be brought into the personal sphere by live performers only. Any person who likes to sing or play an instrument can do so, but cannot control when and where to listen to the music made by others. Technology has transformed music into something that listeners can control, rather than something dependent on time and place. Regardless of the changes to how it is transmitted, music remains central to our personal lives.
The jazz and gospel standard “When the Saints Go Marching In” lends itself well to musical reinterpretation, and is adaptable to many different styles or genres of performance. With strong cultural and geographic ties to New Orleans, the song naturally made its way into the repertoires of musicians the likes of Louis Armstrong, who helped cultivate the early jazz scene. Louis Armstrong himself performed the song in a number of
Music & Personality Music has been acknowledged to be a universal form of communication. Even with the barriers of language, music allows the sharing of feelings, thoughts, and meanings. Research is finding that it can be an invaluable tool of communication, education and therapy for those with special needs or disorders. Music is recognized to be able to evoke profound emotions, but modern technology is only just discovering how many of
Music Few popular music stars today are as colorful as Lady Gaga. Recently on tour, Lady Gaga is again making the headlines. In South Africa, a group of churches has been organizing protests against Lady Gaga's performances, and even just her presence, in the country. Among other complaints, the South African Council of Churches claims Lady Gaga's visit "could lead to an exponential growth of Satanism," (Engelbrecht, p. 1). For others,
Culture is quite a broad term and encompasses a lot of different things. The oldest way of describing a culture is basically talking about the different aspects linked to it. This means that the oldest way includes the mention of the music, sculpture, literature and paintings of that certain kind of culture. It has been noted that a culture of a region becomes more prominent and profound if it is
The major concern is the effect of violence, due once again, to studies that show a connection between watching violence and participating in it. For example, Bushman and Anderson (2002) conducted as study in which they determined that playing violent video games can "engender hostile expectations, leading one to expect that others will respond aggressively" (p. 1679). The Grand Theft Auto series of video games has undoubtedly been a major
This style is best represented by composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 to 1594) and was written primarily for a cappella choirs without instrumentation and was always sung in Latin, the official language of the Roman Catholic Church (Robertson, "Music Through the Centuries," Internet). During the Reformation, sacred music became very closely linked to the congregational singing of psalms and hymns in Calvinist and Lutheran churches as a way of
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