Music As Missions - How Important is Music?

Music & Missions: Music must reflect their sounds.

"Early missionaries to Malawi carted pianos on the backs of porters to the most remote comers of the country as though no African instrument was adequate. I (Palmer) was recently invited to preach in a rural Malawian church. While seated on the platform the pastor leaned over and profusely apologized to me for not using the piano that sat idle in the comer. His explanation: "The man who knew how to play it died five years ago." We sang without instruments that day, as is the practice in most mainline churches in Malawi, because in the absence of the piano no other instrument is deemed acceptable.

Vida Chenoweth, a well-known Christian ethnomusicologist, asks a pertinent question:

"Why would anyone want to capture all the birds of the forest, paint them gray and give them all the same song? God made each one, and each has its song to sing for him. (Chenoweth 1984,35)

By God's grace, there is now an upsurge in the use of local Christian music in churches across Africa and a growing freedom to express worship and praise to God in a more distinctively African manner."

("SING Africa", by Del & Palmer Chinchen, EMQ, July 2002, pg 287)

Music Issues in Africa; A very good section – read

All this is from ("SING Africa", by Del & Palmer Chinchen, EMQ, July 2002, pg 286-297)

"One African admitted to me that he feels very uncomfortable trying to sing with his motionless hands at his side. It is like putting him in a straight jacket. On another occasion we took a Maasai friend, who had lived among his cattle on the open plains all his life, to an Easter musical of Handel's Messiah which combined a massive choir with a full orchestra. Seated in the middle of the awesome All Saints Cathedral of Nairobi, trying to absorb this foreign music, was too much for our Maasai shepherd. Through most of the concert he had his head lowered covering his ears with his hands as the strange sounds reverberated off the walls and ceiling. At the end of the program he described, with a grimace on his face, what he heard by comparing it with the noise of jet engines!"

Music in Africa is a Way of Life. In Africa, nearly every aspect of life is the subject of a song.

"Music is used in all activities of African life: in cultivating fields, fishing, herding, performing ceremonies, praising rulers and warriors, hushing babies to sleep and so on. African music and dance. ...are one of the chief treasures of the African culture and heritage." (Mbiti 1992, 142)

(John S. Mbiti, 1992 Introduction to African religion 2^nd edition, Nairobi: EAEP)

"The Gabra of northern Kenya sing while walking with their camels (Tablino 1999, The Gabra, Nairobi: 142).

"Our security guard, a nomadic Samburu, welcomes each dawn with a song, blending in with the chorus of birds as if they are one. Very few important things happen without music in Africa.

Ashanti children sing special songs to cure a bed wetter. In Benin there are special songs sung when a child cuts her/his first teeth. Among the Hutus, men paddling a canoe will sing a different song going up- stream than going downstream. ( African Rytthm and African Sensibility, Chicago John Chemoff 1979, 94)

"Music is such a powerful medium in Africa that even history and tradition were preserved in song… Oral transmission was the basic means of tranmitting ideas to the next generation."

"Songs and music of the African Christian people have become their unwritten Bible." …………… Music is such an ideal vehicle for carrying God's word deep into the hearts of African Christians.

Illustration:

"Rhythm and music, for the African, comes very naturally because it inundates every part of life. When women pound yams or cassava in the mortar, one of the women has the task of reaching down to the bottom of the mortar and turning the yams or cassava while her friends are rhythmically smashing them with heavy wooden poles. Her fingers could easily get smashed if someone loses the rhythm. It never happens. They are all so rhythmically in synchronization with each other, often singing while beating in their mortars, that there is not the slightest concern by anyone of smashing fingers. The Gabra women sing "while lifting water from the well. Their rhythm keeps the buckets moving quickly and smoothly. "

Illustration: Unity, or and rhythm

"When a group of men in Liberia lift heavy trusses for the construction of a house they sing a special song to prepare themselves to manage the heavy load and to unite themselves, through the rhythm, to lift the load simultaneously."

African hear different:

"Kenyan ethnomusicologists Wamuyu Wamunyu and Jennifer Githaiga explain that one reason Western hymns have been so difficult for Africans to sing is because Western music uses a seven-part diatonic scale while African music is built on a five part panatonic scale. Africans do no hear fa or ti. Western hymns often sound strange, even funny, when sun by Africans because they do not hit these two parts of the scale."

"A Melody sung by one person is not music" Dinka tribe.

"For African Christians, there is an appropriate form of dancing and gestures, not at all provocative, that allows them to express, with their whole body, their joy of God."

"Music's explicit purpose in Africa is for socialization."

("SING Africa", by Del & Palmer Chinchen, EMQ, July 2002, pg 286-297)