Vol. 38, No. 18

2-28-2007
By: Julia Harris

The beat of a different drum

OSU Newark professor introduces Afropop to students and community

To one Ohio State Newark professor, listening to a group of performers with limited music-making ability is an enjoyable experience.

What sounds like a recipe for a painful time is actually the successful formula crafted by Ron Emoff, assistant professor in the OSU Newark departments of music and anthropology.

His Afropop Ensemble, now in its sixth year, consists of a group of students from different disciplines who meet once a week to learn about and play a form of dance music that blends African folk music with modern performance techniques.

“Afropop is based on the older, more traditional kinds of music that were played in the villages and rural areas on acoustical instruments,” Emoff explains. “It’s usually ‘plugged-in’ music, which means it uses electric guitars and basses, keyboards, whatever people have available to play on.”

It’s a form of music that Emoff, as an ethnomusicologist, has studied throughout his academic career, one that includes receiving several teaching awards, including the 2006 OSU Newark Award for Teaching Excellence.

Emoff was introduced to the genre while working at the Case Western Reserve student radio station in Cleveland.

“They had a huge record library when I was a programmer on that station, and I’d just pull out things from the stacks that I wasn’t familiar with,” he recalls. “That’s how I started listening to a lot of the dance music from Africa.”

A classically trained guitarist and violinist, Emoff became interested in the role of music in rural African cultures after earning his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Texas in 1996. He spent two years in a tiny, remote Madagascar village, studying and learning to play a form of devotional music used in traditional healing ceremonies. And in Tamatave, Madagascar’s large east coast port, Emoff met and performed with numerous leading Malagasy pop stars.

In the course of his travels and research, Emoff has acquired an impressive African instrument collection. His favorite is the West African kora, which he describes as a large 21-string instrument that sounds like a harp.

“It’s used to accompany the oral historians in West Africa,” Emoff says. “They play it when they’re singing their vital stories, histories and genealogies of specific people, places and events.”

Another African instrument Emoff has a fondness for is the kabosy, a stringed instrument from Madagascar. He even went so far as to make one himself — without using any power tools, he adds.

His house, he says, is full of more instruments than he can count, and he plays all of them with varying degrees of skill and frequency.

Emoff has parlayed his love of African music, his zeal for teaching and his vast instrument collection into the Afropop Ensemble, a class of eight to 16 students that meets weekly. His students often enroll in the class with no idea how or what to play, and so the class is a combination of informal instruction and boisterous jam sessions.

“I’ve had classes where almost no one played any music at all, so we’re dealing with a wide array of skills — which is sometimes not so easy,” Emoff admits with a rueful laugh.

One student he didn’t have to work too hard to train is Josh Patrick, a sophomore in business who has taken part in the ensemble three times.

“I’ve learned how to play a special genre of music that’s not your typical jazz or rock ensemble,” he says. “Plus in other classes I’ve had with Dr. Emoff, I’ve learned about instruments and cultures I had no idea existed.”

Patrick’s experience is the goal Emoff has in mind for all of his students. In the Afropop Ensemble, he says, “I try to give the students some background about the genre of music they’re playing, why it’s significant and who the big stars are, but mostly it’s an exercise in learning how to interact and participate with other people of all different skill levels. Part of the experience is just to have a good time and to make music as part of a group, rather than standing out as a virtuosic performer.”

He is always amazed, he says, that by the end of every quarter, the ensemble is able to put on a performance — an experience that involves not only the musicians but the audience.

“African music is very participatory. There’s often not a real clear distinction between the musicians and the audience,” Emoff says. “We’ve had performances where people in the audience have actually gotten up and danced.”

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