ABSTRACT
At the close of these journeys, it is well to remind ourselves that the background against which specific arguments have been made is vast, diverse, and complex. Africa, as we all know or should know, is the second largest continent, its population is upward of 800 million (a tenth of the world's), more than 2,000 languages are spoken there (roughly a third of the world's living languages, not counting dialects), its ethnic groups number over 3,000, and human genetic contrasts exceed those found anywhere else. This structural assortment—the poetics of which I do not explore—is, in turn, reflected, though not always directly, in several cultural spheres. In musical life, for example, instruments are numerous and strikingly differentiated both physically and symbolically, compositional styles and aesthetic ideals reproduce something of Africa's larger linguistic and oral-literary plurality, while emergent critical discourses range from the narrowly technical and descriptive to the broadly metaphorical and interpretive.
