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32rhythmic component in African music goes beyond our (western) appreciation of thiselement of music. Scholars noted, that in some regions of Africa (for example, in SouthAfrica) rhythmic component of music (and the resulting meter) is considered to be moreimportant than the pitch. Therefore, rhythm alone without the pitch (for example,drumming, or reciting) is considered music, whereas the vocalization without meter inSouth Africa is not considered as music (Kaemmer, 1998:701).Rhythm in sub-Saharan Africa is generally clearly pronounced and strictlyfollowed. Duple rhythm is dominating. According to another famous generalization ofGeorge Ballanta, “duple time is the only time used in Africa” (Ballanta, 1926:11). Laterstudies found the misleading simplicity of Ballanta’s overgeneralization, although wemay say that duple time does play the leading role in most of the sub-Saharan Africanmusical traditions. Arom presented an excellent survey of African rhythms and worksconnected to them (Arom, 1991).African drums have found followers all across the cultures (particularly in thewestern world), and the appreciation of African sense of rhythm became a common placein popular accounts about African music and African musicians. If the reader of this bookhas ever attended a workshop of African traditional drumming, she (he) would alreadylearnt the most important lesson, that the extraordinary complexity of African drummingensemble sound is based on the simultaneous repetition of several layers of relativelysimple drumming patterns. This phenomenon is known as “polyrhythmic” (see Arom,1991).Unity of singing and dancing is another crucial feature of Africantraditional musical life. As a matter of fact, most of the music in sub-Saharan Africainvolves dance and body movements. Ruth Stone wrote: “Honest observers are hardpressed to find a single indigenous group in Africa that has a term congruent with theusual Western notion of “music”. There are terms for more specific acts like singing,playing instruments, and more broadly performing (dance, game, music); but the isolationof musical sound from other acts proves a Western abstraction, of which we should beaware when we approach the study of performance in Africa” (Stone, 1998:7). Thisprimordial syncretic unity of singing and dancing, which is well documented from themost archaic layers of traditional cultures, is still a very active part of traditional culturaland social life of sub-Saharan African peoples.Tone languages and polyphonyOne of the important issues that fundamentally affect African music (andtraditional polyphony as well) is the tone (or tonal) character of most of Africanlanguages. According to Pike’s classical study (1948), all the languages of Africa “westof Ethiopia and south of the Sahara” are tone languages. Despite the fact that more thanhalf of human languages of our world today are tone languages, it is amazing how littleare they known among the general public. Every year, when I start discussing tonelanguages among my students at the University of Melbourne, only one or two studentsout of the group of twenty or twenty-five students usually know something about them.In tone languages tone modulation (rising or falling of the pitch) during theirspeech have lexical (and sometimes grammatical) significance. In more simple words, ifyou pronounce a word with a rising intonation, and then pronounce the same word withthe falling intonation, this word will have two totally different meanings in tone