BIO

Deborah Olivier is an environmental scientist and musicologist who teaches at Florida State University as part of the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP). She has presented at conferences including the Florida Undergraduate Research Conference (FURC), and her research has led her to numerous other achievements including certification as an AAUS Scientific Diver. Her current research focuses on pre-colonial African music history and she plans to pursue graduate school in ethnomusicology.

Historical Perspectives on Music of the Mali Empire and Modern Jeliya Performance Practices

Abstract

Historical musicology has traditionally focused predominantly on the musics of western Europe, and in particular on European traditions preserved in notated scores, written treatises, and other forms of written or iconographic documentation. Unfortunately, this type of research is not frequently applied to other parts of the world, especially on the African continent, where oral/aural modes of transmission have been central and written documentation far less common. There are some notable exceptions, however, and these provide opportunities for deep, documentation-centered research on African musics of antiquity. The rise and fall of the empire of Mali from the 13th through the 17th centuries, for example, is well-documented, with notable travelers like Ibn Batuta having extensively chronicled their visits to this west African court. Considering also that this particular time period for the most part preceded European colonization, study of the Mali Empire provides a unique opportunity to delve into the history of music-making in this part of sub-Saharan Africa. This research aims to examine potential areas of future research in historical ethnomusicology, focusing particularly on modern-day jeliya ensembles and their similarities and differences to mentions of Malian court music in historical documents. This is designed to precede future work in this area, potentially in-situ, to consider the application of historical musicological practices in sub-Saharan west Africa.

Keywords: Music, West Africa, History, ethnomusicology