Now Africanists have a reference tool that provides information on a large body of both major and obscure sources of various genres of African music.
John Gray's African Music is a truly outstanding achievement. The work of an experienced bibliographer, Gray's bibliography is likely to become the standard reference tool on African music for the next decade or so. With a staggering 5,802 entries, African Music supersedes all previously available bibliographies in scope, the clear organization of its data, and of course, in its up-to-dateness.
This guide is the most comprehensive bibliography on African music currently available. John Gray knows the dangers of defining "African music" too narrowly, so he adopts an approach in which nothing, in principle, is left out.
African Music: A Bibliographical Guide to the Traditional, Popular, Art, and Liturgical Musics of Sub-Saharan Africa, by John Gray (499 pages, March 1991), covers works from 1732 to the present and offers a comprehensive resource for students and scholars seeking to understand the increasingly popular musics of Africa. The bibliography is divided into six sections: works on cultural policy and the performing arts; ethnomusicology; village or rural music; country or regional studies of African pop music and biographical and critical studies of 275 popular musicians and groups; acculturated or art music traditions; and African church music. Three appendices cover reference works on African culture, archives and research centers, and a selected discography. Four indexes--ethnic group, subject, artist, and author--complete the work and provide a key to its 5,800 entries.
John Gray's African Music is a truly outstanding achievement. The work of an experienced bibliographer, Gray's bibliography is likely to become the standard reference tool on African Music for the next decade or so. With a staggering 5,802 entries, African Music supersedes all previously available bibliographies in scope, the clear organization of its data, and of course, in its up-to-dateness.
African Music is a remarkable achievement. It is by far the most comprehensive bibliographic guide to the subject, and a basic resource for any individual or institution committed to research in African music and culture.
It is a remarkably well-researched bibliography of print materials on African music, including books, dissertations, journal and newspaper articles. He has done a masterful job. . . . John Gray has compiled an excellent reference work that should be of use to scholars of Africa in general and of African music in particular.
Product Description
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.
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