Noch bedenklicher als die Aneignung einer afrikanischen Verkehrssprache ist für den Afrikaner der Gebrauch europäischer Sprachen, wenn er ihm unvermittelt aufgedrängt wird. Man pflanzt damit in die Seele ein neues europäisches Denkzentrum, von dem aus alle Dinge, die mit Europa und den Europäern zu tun haben, gedacht werden. Aber daneben bleibt natürlich die alte afrikanische Denkweise für alle afrikanischen Dinge bestehen. Dass ein Mensch mit zwei Seelen eine gewisse Höhe der Leistung nicht überschreiten kann, ist von vornherein klar, und manche harte Urteile über die Afrikaner beruhen auf dieser Tatsache. Aber weiter ist auch handgreiflich, dass man im Umgang mit einem solchen Menschen niemals wissen kann, was er tun wird, denn man kann nicht wissen, von welchem Gedankenkreis er im einzelnen Falle abhängig sein wird, ob er europäischen oder heidnisch-afrikanischen Regungen folgen wird.

Will man diese gefährliche seelische Zerspaltenheit vermeiden, so muss die Vermittlung zwischen dem Eigenen und dem Fremden gesucht werden. Das ist aber nur möglich auf Grund einer soliden Aneignung der Bildungsgrundlagen in der Muttersprache, in einer Erweiterung dieser Kenntnisse in der Verkehrssprache des Landes und schliesslich in der vorsichtigen Aneignung europäischer Sprachen, die man aber nur den sittlich und intellektuell hervorragenden Leuten gewähren soll, denen man die Kraft zutraut, dass sie das Fremde nicht einfach hinübernehmen, sondern es sorgsam prüfen, verarbeiten und so von innen heraus sich aneignen, ohne dadurch dem heimischen Volk und seiner Art fremd zu werden. Dieser Weg ist langsam und mühselig, aber er verspricht Erfolg, und sein Ergebnis ist ebenso bedeutsam für die Zukunft der Afrikaner wie für die Aufgaben des Europäers in Afrika.

Es wäre nun durchaus irrig, zu meinen, dass der Afrikaner selbst unbedingt ein Freund dieser vorsichtig abwägenden Unterrichtsmethode wäre, im Gegenteil, je unreifer er ist, um so mehr strebt er darnach, sich schnell europäische Sprache, europäische Kleidung, europäische Geschäftsgewandtheit anzueignen. Aber es ist nicht weise, diesem Drängen nachzugeben. Die Meinung, dass es der eigentliche Zweck des Lebens ist, Geld zu verdienen, mag sich dem Afrikaner im Verkehr mit manchen Europäern aufdrängen. Ein so

unwürdiges Geschäftsgebaren, wie es der Sklavenhandel war, hat ja den Westafrikaner darüber belehrt, dass für diesen Zweck jede Regung des Gewissens und der Religion bei vielen Europäern schweigen muss, und nun ist der Afrikaner bereit, ihr Schüler zu sein. Aber jeder Freund Afrikas wird diesen Erfolg der Berührung mit Europa als verhängnisvoll erachten und wird wünschen, dass dem Afrikaner eine bessere und höhere Anschauung vom Wesen der europäischen Kultur ermöglicht wird. Zu diesem Zweck muss er aber den Weg einer soliden Durchbildung gehen, die die sittlichen Kräfte und Zusammenhänge seines Volkes nicht zerstört, sondern erhält und kräftigt. Dazu gehört die Freude an seiner heimischen Art, seinem Vaterland, seinem Volkstum, seiner Sprache.

CARL MEINHOF.

AFRICAN NEGRO MUSIC

Br E. M. vON HORNBOSTEL

HE purport of this article is to provide an answer to the follow

Ting questions:

1. What is African music like as compared to our own?

2. How can it be made use of in Church and School?

The answer might be as brief as the questions:

1. African and (modern) European music are constructed on entirely different principles, and therefore

2. they cannot be fused into one, but only the one or the other can be used without compromise.

The attention of most of my readers will only be engaged by the second of these points as being one of practical interest, while the first is of a more theoretical nature. But my second answer being only a conclusion drawn from my first one, I shall have to support it by entering on some theoretical detail; it will not, therefore, be possible to keep altogether clear of musical technicalities. Readers who feel alarmed at the idea of having to find their way through analyses of this kind, or to read music, may safely confine their attention to the last section; as for the preceding ones, they will, it is hoped, be indulgent towards the author, granting him that it would be difficult to state a thing without speaking of it.

I. PHONOGRAPHIC RECORDS

New and unusual phenomena call forth two contrasting tendencies in our minds both of which falsify the real facts. On one hand we look at things in our own way and assimilate them to things we know. On the other hand obvious outward differences at first sight strike us so much that we even exaggerate them-overlooking, hereby, essential but less obvious features. Woodcuts in old cosmographies and travellers' books show bodies depicted in the fashion of the day made to represent Negroes simply by thickening the lips, flattening the nose, and blackening the skin. The portenta of the Middle Ages

I

bodies lacking head or trunk or one leg or having a cyclop's eyehave outlived even the age of exploration. The ear is deceived as easily as, or even more easily than, the eye: how many people indeed can repeat a folk-song even of their own country without mistake? How many can distinguish a melody by Bach from one by Schumann? While our visual perception has been corrected by the photographic plate and film in many respects, our insight into foreign music can be said to be due altogether to the phonograph. Our knowledge of it, therefore, hardly goes back fifty years and, accordingly, can be neither extensive nor thorough. The few thousand phonographic records hitherto collected in museums and archives are only a beginning; they are haphazard fragments instead of giving a general view. What we need above all is to register systematically the musical material of all the peoples of the world by means of the phonograph. This could be done with comparatively little trouble and expense provided that contributions were made by all those who have opportunities for collecting music, especially by missionaries who stay in foreign countries for a long time, and get into close contact with the natives. The advantages of the phonograph appear to be not yet universally known. The phonograph, i.e. a machine which registers sounds on cylinders, is small, portable, and cheap, and records music, especially song, with quite sufficient accuracy. (Gramophones, i.e. machines which register sounds on discs, yield better acoustic results, but cannot be used in field work, being too large, heavy and expensive, and too complicated to work.) In contrast to the manipulation of cameras, that of phonographs is so easy that anybody can handle them at once without having technical skill or musical knowledge. The method is still imperfect in so far as it does not permit of making records by stealth and from a distance; the singer has to sing straight into the horn of the machine, and it must be kept in mind that even loud sounds produced near the side of the horn are not registered.

The phonograph was invented by Edison in 1877. It was used in ethnological field-work in 1891 by W. Fewkes who worked with Zuñi-Indians; these records were transcribed by B. J. Gilman (Journ. Amer. Archaeol. and Ethnol., i, 1891).

• Phonographic outfits in boxes for tropical use can be had on hire from the Berliner Phonogramm Archiv, Schloss, Berlin C 2, or bought from the Photozentrale Wira G. m. b. H., Karlstr. 33, Berlin N.W. 6, for 200-300 marks.

The collector need not be musically gifted; on the contrary if he consults his own musical taste, he is likely to choose songs which show traces of European influence. The machine can reproduce music immediately after registering it. The reproduction never fails to delight native musicians, and so the phonograph is often used by travellers as a means of forming friendly relations with the population; curious persons come from neighbouring districts and crowd round to see the miraculous instrument.'

As material for study, phonograms are immensely superior to notations of melodies taken down from direct hearing; and it is inconceivable why again and again the inferior method should be used. To begin with, only by means of the phonograph can we get the 'real thing'. It is generally supposed that the substance of a song can be written down in staff notation, with the help, may be, of diacritical marks and an explanatory text. But this is a typically European prejudice brought about by the evolution of our music and by our general way of thinking. The singers themselves attach as much importance to the timbre of the voice and the mode of recitation as to anything else, and very often more. In fact, timbre and recitation appear to be racial characteristics deeply rooted in physiological functions and give therefore valuable evidence of anthropological relations and differences. Peoples and their music, then, are not so much distinguished by what they sing as by the way in which they sing. What should we think of a student of languages who disregarded phonetics? And how could anybody study a language phonetically without having heard it spoken? But even confining ourselves to what can be expressed by musical notation, we are apt to go wrong unless we proceed with the utmost care. This is true even when we transcribe phonograms, although in this case there are a great many facilities at hand: difficult passages, even intervals and notes can be singled out and repeated over and over again; sounds can be intensified or softened down; pitches and intervals can be fixed precisely by means of a tonometer, time and rhythmical pro

I Cf. R. Pöch, Sitzungsber. d. Wiener Akad. d. Wiss., Mathem.-naturw. Kl., Abt. II, 126, 3, 1917.

2 Melos; 1921, Heft 9 ('Musikal. Exotismus').