The neo-colonial concept of « world music », is a trap for African musicians as it generally only offers the mirage of hypothetical individual success. This illusion pushes them to emigrate. This phenomenon is devastating African music, which is already in turmoil due to galloping urbanisation. Without a renaissance of cultural policy, and unless they become recognised as an essential part of world heritage, African musics will not make it through globalisation.
« Musical globalisation » is both unavoidable and irreversible, of course. Furthermore, this is the most ancient and most advanced form of globalisation.
We can trace it back to the Palaeolithic age. In fact, organological analysis has recently shown disturbing similarities (in manufacture and tuning) between Siberian reindeer-bone flutes, and those from the Perigord (France) and North America (which Indians from the North-West still played until recently). These flutes are the most ancient musical instruments we know of. Some date as far back as 25,000 years.
With respect to « music », the neologism « globalisation » loses much of its novelty, its « modernity » … and its relevance.
This makes associated contemporary musical lexicography questionable and equivocal. One could even go so far as to use the paradoxical notion of « consensual verbosity ». These terms are widely and carelessly used despite the fact that they are very much relative, being linked to (European) etymology and the use made of it in accordance with concepts and paradigms created by Western society.
Even the very word « music » (from the Greek mousikê) should really be quoted in speech marks.
There is no exact equivalent in the majority of African languages, and it is hard to imagine a griot rendering homage to the « muses »!
Sadly, it is significant that the recently published Dictionnaire des mots de la musique avoids the etymology, and therefore « ethnic » (another Greek word!) origin and relativity of the concept, contenting itself with the following definition: « the art of sounds, their combination and organisation in time. Music is at once universal – being present in all cultures – and multiple, covering numerous forms, styles and traditions » (1). Worse still, the French edition of the prestigious Oxford University Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Music (Dictionnaire Encyclopédique de la Musique de l’Université d’Oxford) does not feature an entry for « musique« , as if the word was « universal » enough to render its definition superfluous! (2)
And it is thus that we arrive at the crux of the problem with globalisation: the reduction of all human activity to the application of concepts that are by no means « global » and are often contrary to « Western cultural exceptions ». Thus, just as we are expected to conform to the contradictory – rules of « democracy » and « economy » (Greek words again!), Africans (a Latin word) find themselves being subjected to an external paradigm that favours universality, in a field that until recently signified the diversity and identity (in all its infinite declensions) of their region, ethnic group and village.
This statement should nevertheless be tempered « musical globalisation », in Sub-Saharan Africa, is by no means recent. The Islamization in the Sahel and along the West coast implanted almost 1000 years ago vocal forms and instruments absent throughout the rest of the continent. This phenomenon has linked these regions to a vast ensemble of traditions encompassing the Arab-Berber world, Southern Europe and Central Asia. Arched harps originating in Mesopotamia and Egypt have been played for numerous centuries in Mauritania and Gabon.
As for European colonisation of the West Coast, this saw the implantation of the Spanish guitar around the trading posts in the 16th Century. The imbalance in musical exchange is blatant from as early as this period. In fact, no African instrument would assert itself in Europe before the end of the 20th Century.
However, the exceptional isolation of forested Africa, a considerable portion of which was still unknown to geographers at the beginning of the 20th Century, has protected many a people from any significant outside musical influence. This is why, in the face of musical globalisation, even in 2003, Africa raises specific issues, exciting some very heated between advocates of one extreme point of view and another. On the one hand, there are those in favour of preserving the musical heritage at all costs. On the other hand, some think that the « cultural blending » of music is necessary.
Here, it is important to return to the issue of terminology as there is no mistake in it. This is all the more significant because vocabulary has always reflected the cultural domination afflicted upon Africa, from colonisation to « globalisation ».
During the colonial period, two terms were used in reference to « African musics »:
– the term (now obselete) of « Negro music », in either the singular or the plural, had no other justification than the triumph of the pseudo-scientific racial theories of the 19th Century. Even musicologists as sensitive as Stephen Chauvet and André Schaeffner have unreservedly made use of this term. André Schaeffner even used it to refer to blues and jazz. Admittedly, this term also had an equivocal equivalent, « negritude », used by Césaire and Senghor…
– the term, « primitive music » considers he history of music (as it is still narrated in the French Pléiade encyclopaedia) as being a lineal and planetary ascension towards intelligence and refined sensibility. African (or Pacific) musicians figure as likeable « primates », and Pierre Boulez is represented as a paragon of civilisation and subtlety…
Curiously, no one dares talk about « primitive music » anymore, whereas in fine arts, African sculptures are quite happily being transferred from the Musée de l’Homme to the Musée des Arts « Premiers » (Museum of Primal Arts)! In the interim, several African musicians have asserted themselves as creators of some considerable added value on the modernity market, which is rarely the case in galleries, where African art is only valued if it belongs to a pre-colonial, bygone past.
Let us reflect on this astonishing paradox: the work of an anonymous Fang sculptor who died in a state of utter poverty a century ago is now worth a million US dollars; a Fang musician of just as much interest would have a one in a million chance of being recorded and having his name on the cover of the CD!
The Fang sculptor is deceased but the Fang musician is fast being pushed into disappearance because, despite the fact that ancient values are now being celebrated, they do not exist on today’s world market, just as his sculptor ancestor only had a place a century earlier in « curiosity shows », ethnographic collections and … Picasso’s studio!
But let us return to the exotic words that weigh so much on the destiny of African musicians…
Let us first examine the word « folklore ». This word condemned to anonymity the African musician until « independence ». Another biased word so dear to the Nazis and Stalinites who instigated music’s « folklorisation » (« folk » in English and « volk » in German means « people »), reaching as far the pseudo-socialist African states. Theirs was a form of sterile, totalitarian pre-globalisation that denied ethnic identities as much as individual identities in the name of the Leninist theory of « nationalities ».
Now to the expression « world music ». This expression appeared in England in the 1980s and has since imposed itself worldwide. The English word « music » (which, unlike the French, has no plural) is less collective than it is reductive. Record shops in London and New York have « world music » sections that are the ghetto and Capernaum of musical globalisation. Here, everything that is not « classical » (« great music ») or « Anglo-Saxon pop » is thrown pell-mell. Thus, flamenco, Khaled, Yves Montand, Edith Piaf, Amalia Rodriguez, Ravi Shankar, the « ethnic minorities » of the United States (Cajun, Latino, Indian, Irish… but why not black?) rub shoulders with African music, being classified according to country, with as many geographical bloopers as can normally be found in George Bush’s speeches.
« World » in the larger sense, is therefore basically the « music of others » (that of the poor?) as seen from the point of view of a Texan petrol magnate and Bluegrass fan, or of a white-collar worker from the City who has never listened to anything but the Beatles and the Stones.
« World music » in the stricter sense, is « the music of nobody and everybody », a deliberate « mix » of music of all origins, in the name of a Mac-Luhanian utopia of the « global village ». Furthermore, the expression « global sound » has become synonymous with this meaning of the words « world music » or « world beat » in the English-speaking specialist press.
In France, the word « world » has been taken up to designate more specifically « transversal » music forms born of the fusion between several cultures. The concept of « sono mondial« , or « world sounds », invented at around the same time by journalists at Actual, at least had the merit of being objective, of heralding the birth of a world in which all music forms could be heard almost everywhere in all their diversity and equality, thanks to the Internet and heady progress in communications.
However, in the image of this glorious utopia, « sono mondial » has fallen by the wayside, replaced by the expression « musiques du monde » (« world music »).
This term does not seem to signify anything (up till now there has been no mention of music from outer-space), except that it associates music from the « third world » with the music of ethnic minorities within the Western world. This is rather debatable, given differences between the economic situation in Corsica and Ethiopia.
A rival expression, « musiques ethniques » (ethnic music), which is increasingly used, is even more problematic. Furthermore, it is constantly confused with its antonym, « musiques métisses » (culturally blended music).
All music is both « ethnic » and « culturally blended » although the term métisse, which originated in genetics, should be used with kid gloves since culture does not adhere to the laws of Mendel!
In contemporary Africa these foreign terms (« ethnique » and « métis« ) make less and less sense. Circulation and cultural blending occur here just as much as anywhere else. African cities group together as many different cultures, ethnic groups, languages and styles of music as American, Asian or European cities. Because of this, African urban music could already be said to be on its way to « globalisation », even without being subject to extra-continental exchanges.
Furthermore, these exchanges are extremely active, and have been taking place for a very long time now, or at least in coastal cities.
In South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya, curious musicians living in port towns during the 1920s knew almost as much about the evolution of popular music in Europe, the Caribbean and North and South America as musicians in London, New York and Paris. And, as can be testified by the colossal amount of recordings (which still have to inventoried, including over 500,000 78s), African urban music was regularly « modernised » from traditional heritage, integrating endless external influences that were in fact nothing more than « boomerangs » (as the new single by Senegalese rapper Dara-J so beautifully puts it) from the African diaspora in the New World.
Everything changed with the unexpected success in the West of a few rare African artists such as Myriam Makeba, Manu Dibango, Touré Kunda, Alpha Blondy, Mory Kanté, Youssou N’Dour, and Salif Keita, etc.
Up until that time, record labels were only interested in Africa from the point of view of folk music and ethnology. Suddenly, Africa was producing world « hits ». And « musical globalisation » had struck.
But which globalisation? As we have already seen, globalisation is, in its own right, nothing new to musicians. However, a new player, the Western producer, is changing the course of history. Regardless of their intentions – they are often real artists who are at once humble, passionate, respectful and scrupulous, with a very real desire to help or « push » musicians towards success – they have created an upheaval in the environment of African music. As was so perfectly put by the musicologist Laurent Aubert, « any modification to the role and context of a musical form necessarily implies the structural and semantic displacement of its expressions. Musical forms have admittedly always evolved throughout the course of their history, regardless of the period and scale examined. Since the beginning of time, migration has made it possible for people to compare their knowledge and technical skills, which has contributed to each person’s field of experience being widened. This also incited cultural blending that was often regenerative. Musicians met and shared their experiences, techniques, repertories and instruments. Through their capacity for assimilating this information, they contributed to the enlargement and renewal of their musical idiom. Nevertheless, the generalised cultural hybridisation that can be observed today around the planet is quite unprecedented. Historical blending and syncretism were the result of factors that were to some extent « natural » and were notably related to migration both forced and voluntary and to the resulting meeting between cultures. However, hybridisation stands out primarily because it is experimental, voluntary and utilitarian. Furthermore, it inevitably introduces a relation of power between the parties through the simple fact of their inequality ». (3)
The problem with this unbalanced globalisation is that up until now each of the major cultural regions of the world (and often each of the ethnic groups residing within that region) possessed their own musical system. The Western « tempered » system (most eloquent when you think of the climate!) so brilliantly codified by Johan Sebastian Bach, is nevertheless merely the extreme simplification (and therefore impoverishment of) that which Edgar Varèse the first European composer to radically break with all that so charmingly called « the virgin forest of sound ».
We know that the musical forms of Sub-Saharan Africa are founded on scales incompatible with the tuning used for Western instruments. What is more, African taste with respect to timbre and sound is radically opposed to the Western aesthetic. In Africa, the richer or « impure » the sound, the more interesting it is. On the other hand, « purity » of sound is vitally important to European musicians. Likewise, the cleaner and simpler a rhythm is, the more likely it is that a given rhythm will find favour with Western audiences. On the other hand, the richer, more complex and even inextricable a rhythm is, the more it will interest African listeners, and dancers.
For several years now, increasing numbers of African musicians, in order to facilitate their integration into the Western music world, have been adapting the tuning, and even construction, of their instruments. To my knowledge, the contrary has never been seen. Even balafon »identitarian » instrument par excellence whose tuning has remained unchanged players, on the advice of intelligent producers, are now making instruments tuned to the Western tempered scale.
In principle it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the tastes of an audience that is plural rather than simple dual, being to some extent « pyramidal ». This audience includes the musician’s ethnic group, as well as that of urban-dwelling and immigrant Africans. It also includes (less numerous but wealthier) European or Japanese music lovers in the « authentic » tradition, musicians (notably jazz and pop) with a thirst for « exotic » sounds that enable them to renew their music. Lastly, it also covers the wider « evolved » public of the FM radios, nightclubs, raves, etc.
This is, underneath it all, the new « bobo » (Bohemian Bourgeois unrelated to the ethnic group from Burkina Faso!) with substantial purchasing power. They are increasingly laying down their own laws with respect to the globalisation of African musical forms. More specifically, the presumed taste of this large tribe (in the sense that Mafesoli attributes to this term) is imposing itself upon African music through the filter of FM programmers. Mainly, before the musical product is launched, everything that might upset even faintly the listening experience of the bobo listener and disorient them or induce them to change stations is reduced, or erased. (Although you may find the word « product » slightly trivial, it should be noted that it has established itself in the business. This very morning, a press agent who sent me a new CD by a Malian griot who is, by the way, excellent left me a message asking what « I thought of the product »…)
It is a veritable form of clandestine censorship that is being performed in the name of the Western market, affecting the rhythm (a binary continuum is essential) and particularly on the sound, which is being methodically « de-Africanised ».
Philippe Vandel, a journalist with Canal + and former sound engineer, eloquently describes this manipulation. « One of the keys to the success of « Yéké Yéké » by Mory Kanté is that he was asked to avoid playing on the middle octave of the kora since the sound would be too « dirty », loaded with harmonics (…). Sound mixing has become a veritable craft, and sometimes even an art, on the same level as the music itself. When you’re in charge of a recording studio, you don’t think in terms of authenticity, but rather in terms of the market. The sole obligation is to make the musician sell a maximum number of records. To do this there are rules that even musicians from the third world have to obey: for it to have a chance to « work », a track can’t be more than three and a half minutes long and it has to respect the alternation between chorus and refrain. In short, it has to be « FM-ised ». And it’s also a matter of sound: to work well on radio the frequencies have to be « compressed », the primary chord always has to be played in the bass range, the rhythm box with the bass and drums has become essential ». (4)
Jean-Jacques Dufayet, a producer at Radio France International, goes even further, « The problem with world sound is that when we’ve recorded all the great African musicians with a clear rhythm and synths, we won’t have made a single step of progress. All the more so because everything is anonymous in the studios, everyone comes to do their session and leaves immediately afterwards. There is no more room for meeting others and no real blending ». (4)
While listening to their idol’s latest single, the majority of African listeners would no doubt be extremely surprised to see them sing, alone and enclosed in a glass cage. Behind the glass is an arranger generally European that the producer will have taken on board even if they are African, convinced that this is the key to accessing the world market. The musician them self will, at best, make slight corrections to the result, which is almost definitive. This is of course within the limits of the budget, which is almost entirely spent on production. Sometimes the musician will not even have participated in the choice of backing artists, who are recorded separately and the majority of which will remain perfectly anonymous to the musician.
We should not blacken (nor « whiten »!) the picture. This method, which is becoming generalised, even if it may appear somewhat cynical, has nevertheless enabled a handful of African singers to become worldwide stars. Some (more lucid and demanding than others) have succeeded in sidestepping the negative effects, to some extent. Youssou N’Dour systematically records two versions of each song a « raw » version made entirely in his own studio in Dakar, and produced unedited on cassette for his local public; the other finalised in Paris, London or New York, that is destined for his « international » public.
To be fair, it should be added that nothing is simple and that everything is reversible in this field. My friend Henri Lecomte, has produced a CD by Mah Damba and directed a film on Nahawa Doumbia. He pertinently reminded me that these two marvellous female griots prefer recording in France with traditional instruments, and in Mali with synthesisers. The taste for the authentic, for « whole grain » music is just as strong in Paris as the taste for modernity (even if only an imitation) is in Bamako.
On the other hand, there is obviously no question of contesting the legitimate desire of most African musicians to export their art, to travel freely and, why not, make their fortune, especially when it is reinvested in their own country. The main cause for the increasing subordination of African music to Western tastes (which are also, let us not forgot, a product of the universal influence of the West) is the dramatic decline or even disappearance in cultural investment by African governments.
Dictatorships that inherited from the colonial powers (and perpetuated them, or broke with them as in Guinea’s case) had but one small merit, that of favouring culture, in the name of their re-found identity and independence. Thousands of artists were copiously subsidised, to the point of being unashamedly instrumentalised to serve the policies of the single parties, along the lines of the Soviet model. The same « folklorist » model inherited from Leninism inspired countries as different as Zaire (flagship for American imperialism) and Tanzania (pro-Chinese Marxist). The result was national groups that artificially mingled ethnic groups and modern groups that broadcast in their songs (under threat of imprisonment) the sole ideas of their beloved leader, whether Mobutu or Sékou Touré.
Despite its negative aspects, this system did have some merit. It entertained a feverish musical competitiveness that was extremely creative. It was strongly anchored in the African « musical desire » that was open to « black » influences from abroad (Cuba, jazz, soul, etc.) but was also fiercely reticent about Western cultural imperialism.
During the 80s and 90s, the WMF’s restructuring policies and multipartite attitudes saw the fall of this model. The Ministers of Culture were the first to suffer. Their restructured budgets were barely enough to maintain a wardrobe and cars so that they might respectably haunt the cocktail parties held by Western embassies in order to scrounge a few subsidies.
As with film, music is an expensive business these days far more so than poetry, painting, sculpture or the theatre. Modern instruments, and sound and studio equipment are beyond the means of most African capitals, due to prohibitive customs duties (over 100%!), of which not a single CFA Franc is reinvested in music of course. Cinema has always been expensive. Today’s economy is consubstantial with the seventh art and through feast and famine African filmmakers have succeeded in finding funding elsewhere on their own. However, musicians are generally not economists, nor able investors, save a few rare exceptions.
While Youssou N’Dour, from the end of the 1980s, succeeded in building a well-equipped studio in Dakar, with an efficient production and distribution set-up (now under threat from the Senegalese tax department), Mory Kanté in Conakry, Salif Keïta in Bamako, Alpha Bondy in Abidjan (or rather Grand-Bassam), have for various reasons had trouble implementing similar projects.
Immigration is quite obviously the major cause of their failure to reconstitute a « successful » music scene locally. The first African musicians to become successful on the « world music » scene found themselves sucked by a kind of vacuum effect towards the big Western cities mostly Paris, London and New York but also Brussels and the major German cities. Veritable networks of musical emigration were set up, the results of which were devastating for local music industries.
The pioneers, the West African griots cleverly created a double life for themselves whereby a profitable « black business » between Paris’s typically African suburbs and Bamako or Conakry ably sustained the economies of both their caste and their home country, as well as maintaining the traditional cultural life of their fellow expatriate countrymen. Their lives provide an example of well-balanced globalisation.
Elsewhere, music has become an easy pretext for extensive and very profitable – illegal immigration, as highlighted by the Papa Wemba case.
However, this is nothing new. A long time ago, NGOs such as Zone Franche, which promotes the free circulation of artists, were already confronted with this problem. In fact, when an African orchestra tours Europe, it will often return home with less than half its members. This is not simply a case of « human trafficking », as the police and European media tend to make out.
The truth is that in the age of « globalisation », money, capital and merchandise circulate ever more freely, while humans circulate with increasing difficulty. This flagrant contradiction is the alibi of an extremely violent planetary police-run system that has replaced the arbitrariness of colonialism, Stalinism, and the post-colonial dictatorships, outdoing them all. Almighty economic liberalism, which supposedly rules the world, is perfectly content with, and even goes so far as to feed off, the fact that an unprecedented 90% of the world’s population is imprisoned. Being forbidden to travel, which did not even occur during the darkest hours of the Middle Ages, is unbearable for any human being who treasures their freedom. It creates, as does all illegitimate oppression, a sense of revolt and kind of transgression that only the oppressors term delinquency.
In the field of music which Westerners think of somewhat ostentatiously as the most universal of human activities this attack on the freedom of circulation is perceived as a veritable regression and totally unjust, especially in Africa.
This situation has the sad merit of making us reflect on the true nature of « musical globalisation ». Far from the delightful utopias comfortably dreamt up by the bobos, it is speeding up the rate at which the South’s music is becoming a commodity intended to momentarily and superficially compensate for the North’s obvious lack of musical inspiration. In order for this to occur, the African musicians do not even really need to be physically present.
The fact that the pseudo-group Deep Forest sold millions of CDs is proof that all you need to do to strike gold is cleverly re-mix several bars played by a few Pygmies who will remain forever anonymous.
Talking about Pygmies, a personal anecdote will prove to you that the aim of this article is not to defend illusory notions such as musical « authenticity », « purity » and « tradition ». When staying in the encampment of Baka Pygmies in Cameroon, close to the Congolese border, I was amazed one evening by one of their fireside dances, which was accompanied by flutes and drums and which seemed at once familiar and foreign to me. They explained to me that the dance was called « Empire ». Under the effects of the grass the Baka had offered me to smoke, I soon began to elaborate all sorts of hypotheses for this. Had there once been a Pygmy empire? Was this the memory of the empire of the Pharaohs, who had the Pygmies once prolific at the Nile’s source captured in order to take advantage of their dances and songs?
When I had checked the story out, I discovered that in exchange for a few kilos of bush meat a passing truck driver had given the chief an old tape recorder and a cassette of a famous Congolese group called « Empire Bakuba, which pioneered the entry of electric guitars into central Africa.
For the Mayos Baka, musical globalisation had just begun!
Let us return a final time to the question of vocabulary. « Words govern the world », as Montesquieu said …
A quarter of a century ago, all African musicians without exception woke up to find that they performed « world music ». In any case, record shops and the media, without their consent, had thus classified their records, including the least « mondialist » of them. Does this mean that previously griots were already making « world music », as Mr Jourdain had been writing prose, but did not know it?
The truth is somewhat more mundane! During the summer of 1987, twenty-five Anglo-Saxon recording bosses, concerned about the proliferation of musical genres that might harm the progress of their business, met in London and decided that from then on everything that was not part of Anglo-Saxon culture (that is, classical, jazz variety, etc.) would be regrouped under the label of « world music ». Three years later, Billboard magazine (the bible of show-business) ratified this decision by inaugurating a column and hit parade for « world music » (5).
Thus, from one ghetto (that of « Negro music ») that at least had the merit of maintaining a cultural link between the continent and the diaspora, African musical forms suddenly found themselves thrown into a new ghetto whose only logic was financial. « World music » is the music of the poor, and when you say that you instantly think poor music.
Thus triumphed a typically ethnocentrist and imperialist point of view. Even in Spain, Japan, Russia and Australia, you will not find a single African CD anywhere but in the « world music » section.
Musical globalisation, which was once anarchical or promoted by contradictory movements throughout history, has thus found itself policed, standardised, and regulated by a recording marketing that is 90% dominated by half a dozen international companies.
This « gentle « enslavement of musicians may seem minor compared with many more tragic consequences of globalisation. However, we should not forget the immemorial role that music has played in exercising power over populations.
Jean Duvignaud is worth listening to on this subject. « Music has been much used to lead soldiers into war, to encourage worked to increase productivity, to inspire in believers divine solemnity, to convince many a sovereign’s subjects of their greatness. A collective affectivity is moulded in order that it might be subjected to a given project or simply in order to ensure that the group remains cohesive. Is there not an agreement between the harmony of sound and unanimity? Did Plato not ask that the audacious individuals who dared to modify the chords of the lyre be banished from the city? »
The « city » to which Plato referred is at present the entire planet. It is imperative for those who try to govern it to control music as much as possible. It is the most highly practised cultural activity behind sport. However, in that field, it is long since a fait accompli!
Africa, like Asia, remains one of the last bastions of musical diversity. Anyone who tries to reduce this diversity, be it in the name of values as noble as « cultural blending » or a « meeting of cultures », seems to me far more suspect than the foil of « differentialism ».
The « world music » applied to Africa, far from being a form of exchange, is often no more than a form of domination, one of the last manifestations of colonialism masked by economic liberalism.
To be convinced of the contrary, I am waiting for the day when I will hear of a pianist tuning their piano to a balafon in order to play Mandingue music with the same urgency that griots change the tuning of their koras to record with a rock band.
As Jean Duvignaud once again says, « We all know the concept of ‘Dog, don’t bark’. The concept of the ‘art of the Muses’ and the metaphysics of the West do not cover the infinity of sound configurations imaginable. Far from being a universal language, the creation of musical frameworks would seem to incite incompatible aims that we have to tune in to. Incompatible or not, they are different. » (6)
Long live African musics, even when incompatible!
1. Jacques Siron, Dictionnaire des mots de la musique, Paris, Outre-Mesure, 2002.
2. Dictionnaire encyclopédique de la musique, 1983, French translation in two volumes in the Bouquins collection, Robert Laffont, 1988.
3. Laurent Aubert, La Musique de l’Autre, Geneva, Georg, 2001.
4. Quoted in « Danger sur la sono mondiale », Gérald Arnaud, L’Autre Journal, February 1991.
5. Read: Timothy Rice, « World Music in Europe », in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music.
6. Jean Duvignaud, « L’Enigme », in Les Musiques du Monde en question, Internationale de l’Imaginaire N° 11, Babel Maison des Cultures du Monde, 1999.///Article N° : 5686
