The Online Program of events for the SEM 2024 Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early October.
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 2nd May 2025, 09:32:19pm EDT
Among instruments, the guitar is perhaps the most over-represented in culture and under-represented in academic writing. The guitar in African music engages many of the same conversations as in the global north, but as a "non-traditional" instrument on the continent, it raises many others. Within African music, the guitar can index the local, the national, or the cosmopolitan; it can sound the traditional, the popular, or the modern. Most frequently its sonic and visual presentation engages a combination of these discourses at once. Dawe calls the guitar “an instrument of global performance” (2010, xvi), and certainly this is true of the contemporary African performer within a digitally networked global guitarscape that is both visual and aural. Africanists have long since discarded the trope of the drum as a synonym for African musicianship, and it can be argued that the guitar has been the definitive instrument of the continent in the recorded music era. While there are some studies of guitar-based African music beginning in the early sixties (Rycroft 1961), there are relatively few that deal with the guitar’s iconicity, physicality, or instrumentality. Following interventions made by the new organology, this panel's contributors examine the guitar in Africa through studies of nationalism and decolonization, circulation and the social life of things, ecomusicology, and the materiality of instruments, of sound, and of "tone."
Presentations in the Session
Strings of Revolution: The Adoption and Transformation of Electric Guitar in Eritrean Guayla
Dexter Story UCLA
Within the vibrant landscape of African musicology, the virtuosity of the guitar often remains in the shadow of indigenous organological studies, thus obscuring a vital link between traditional and modern musical narratives. This paper scrutinizes the Eritrean guayla genre as an exemplary case of cultural tenacity and inventive adaptation, particularly highlighted against the backdrop of Eritrea's challenging journey through liberation, socio-political upheaval, and nation-building. The study spotlights the innovative efforts of practitioners like Tewolde Redda, Tekle “Hiwket” Adhanom, and their contemporaries, who masterfully integrated the complex vocal intonations, strummed kirar lyre melodies, and the distinctive odd-meter syncopation of Tigrinya music into the versatile framework of the electric guitar. This marked a pivotal shift in the region’s musical heritage and soundscape. The paper delves into the electrified dimensions of this musicianship, tracing the electric guitar's rise to a position of prominence in the Eritrean musical panorama—a narrative that mirrors its global reach and its intimate entwinement with local artistry. The investigation aims to enrich the discourse on the electric guitar's instrumental role in elevating and sustaining guayla, showcasing an innovative fusion of traditional essence and contemporary resonance along the African Red Sea coast.
Playing Guitar, Thinking Tidinit
Owen Gardner Berlin, Germany
Located at the crossroads of Arab-Berber North and sub-Saharan Africa, Mauritania has through generations of interchange between these cultures nurtured a unique and highly complex classical music tradition. The custodians of this tradition are the hereditary caste locally called iggawen/tiggawit, and historically the instrument proper to male iggawen has been the tidinit, a small spike lute similar to other neighboring instruments. However, since its introduction in the 1960s the guitar has gradually usurped the tidinit's position, but notably without the music changing to accommodate the capabilities of the guitar: the guitar has been adapted to accommodate the music. Having been adopted without any significant engagement with Euro/American music, the guitar style retains the fundamental instrumental technique, and demands significant alteration to the guitars used, either removing all of frets or adding microtonal frets. The guitar then is not so much translating the tidinit, but the tidinit is in fact cognitively mapped onto the guitar. Recognizing this is a key to understanding the Mauritanian guitar style, a highly developed repertoire of ornamental techniques that articulate the modal structure of the music. I will explore the topic with a focus on the playing and pedagogy of Sidi ould Ahmed Zeidan, with whom I've been privileged to study instrumental technique and theory, the privilege owing both to his rare command of the traditional repertoire of the tidinit and to his reputation as one of the country's best guitarists.
African Electrical Networks
Nathaniel Braddock Boston University
This paper examines the relationship of electric guitarists in sub-Saharah Africa by considering the unique imbrication of materiality and sociality within the cultural work of music. Multiple local and transnational networks impact the work of guitarists, including the movement of musicians, the local and global production of instruments, and the circulation of musical knowledge, of genre, and of instrumental technique. Networks are both embedded in the landscape—such as electrical infrastructure—and lay atop the physical, such as mobile data and social media applications. I draw upon ethnographic interviews with guitarists from Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo to show how these networks of circulation can provide new ways of thinking about guitar music in Africa and the African diaspora. The Ghanaian Akablay and the Congolese Jeannot Bel are both of the generation which came of age in the 1980s, navigating the politics of musical patronage in countries governed by postcolonial dictatorships. As contemporary African guitarists, they position themselves between a set of global, national, translocal, and local concerns. I consider how pedagogy, technique, and genre are affected by the availability of instruments and by evolving systems of communication—from the book, to the dvd, to the mobile phone apps WhatsApp and Instagram. This paper also presents broader arguments that frame the panel.
