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John Blacking and the study of African music

John Blacking (1928-90) was a major and influential figure in the fields of African music and ethnomusicology. Trained as an anthropologist and later as an ethnomusicologist, Blacking began writing scholarly articles in the early 1950s. By the time of his death he had published over 100 books, articles, reviews, recordings and reports. Blessed with a relentlessly enquiring mind, Blacking developed his ideas without much regard for the distinction between public and private intellectual spaces. Given the range of subjects that interested him, it would have been a miracle if he had managed to avoid taking contradictory positions. But the best of his work is unfailingly stimulating, and his activities as lecturer and organiser did much to enhance the development of ethnomusicology in the United Kingdom, to invigorate ethnomusicological theory, and to define the analytical issues raised by African music. Blacking's best-known work is a slim volume entitled How Musical is Man? The four essays are based on the John Danz lectures which Blacking had earlier given at the University of Washington, Seattle. Published in 1973, How Musical is Man? is a distillation of ideas that had occupied Blacking for some twenty years. They concern the nature of musicality, learning, the role of music in society, and musical discourse; and they stage a confrontation between the practices of the Venda musical cultures that Blacking knew well and those of 'Western' cultures. The ideas were presented to a lay audience with passion and conviction, and, although the essays are not free of unsupported assertions or gross generalisations, they nevertheless served to stimulate thinking in many quarters about the significance of music in human experience. It is a fitting tribute to Blacking that the University of Chicago Press has reprinted his Venda Children's Songs and gathered together a number of his essays under the title Music, Culture and Experience, edited by his former colleague Reginald Byron. Readers not familiar with Blacking's broader output can now appreciate the ecology that sustained How Musical is Man? Venda Children's Songs, originally published in 1967, grew out of Blacking's Ph.D. thesis for the University of Witwatersrand. Although it is frequently consulted by specialists, the circumstances of its publication have inhibited its wider dissemination. The current reissue is especially welcome