Applied Ethnomusicology, Music Sustainability, and Ecology: Understanding the Sustainability of Indigenous African Musical Instrument Making

By V. L. K. Djokoto

Across the African continent, traditional musical instruments tell stories that stretch back centuries. The talking drum, the kora, the mbira, the balafon — these are not merely objects that produce sound. They are living expressions of cultural identity, spiritual practice, and communal memory. Yet today, many of these instruments and the traditions surrounding their making face a quiet but serious crisis. The craftspeople who know how to make them are disappearing. The forests that supply their materials are shrinking. And the young people who might carry these traditions forward are increasingly drawn toward different ways of life.

This essay explores how three interconnected fields of thought — applied ethnomusicology, music sustainability, and ecological thinking — can help us understand and respond to these challenges. Its central argument is straightforward but important: the survival of indigenous African musical instrument making rests on three pillars that must all stand together. People must carry the skills. Communities must have the economic means to sustain the craft. And the natural environment must remain healthy enough to supply the raw materials. If any one of these pillars crumbles, the others cannot hold up alone.


Applied Ethnomusicology: Putting Knowledge to Practical Use

Most academic disciplines are content to study things — to describe, analyse, and theorise from a comfortable distance. Applied ethnomusicology takes a different approach entirely. It insists that the study of music should be put to work in the real world, in direct service of the communities whose musical traditions are being studied.

Pettan and Titon (2015) describe applied ethnomusicology as a discipline that moves beyond the library and the lecture hall to engage directly with living people and living traditions. It involves working alongside musicians, instrument makers, and community leaders to find practical solutions to real problems. This might mean designing educational programmes that teach young people traditional crafts. It might mean advocating within government for cultural heritage policies that actually protect indigenous knowledge. It might mean helping communities access economic resources so that their traditional practices can remain financially viable in a changing world.

What makes this approach particularly valuable is its ethical foundation. As Titon (2015) emphasises, applied ethnomusicology is not simply about rescuing exotic cultural artefacts for the benefit of outside observers or academic collections. It is deeply concerned with the rights of communities to own and direct their own cultural futures. Fairness, respect, and social responsibility are not optional extras — they are built into the very methodology.

A Response to Crisis

Avorgbedor (1992) identified something that has only become more pressing in the decades since: musical traditions come under the greatest pressure precisely when societies are undergoing rapid and disorienting change. Rural communities emptying out as people move to cities. Educational systems that replace traditional apprenticeships with formal schooling. Economic pressures that make it impossible for skilled craftspeople to earn a living from their work. Each of these forces, on its own, is damaging enough. When they compound one another, the effect on traditional musical culture can be devastating.

Applied ethnomusicology was developed, in part, as a response to exactly these kinds of moments. Rather than simply documenting what is being lost, Pettan and Titon (2015) argue that it asks what can practically be done to slow or reverse that loss. It designs structured programmes, facilitates community conversations, and builds bridges between traditional knowledge and contemporary institutional support.

The Roots of the Discipline

The intellectual roots of applied ethnomusicology stretch back to the American musicologist Charles Seeger (1939), who argued that music scholarship should serve purposes beyond the walls of universities. Seeger (1939) believed that researchers had an obligation to inform public policy, support education, and contribute to the broader cultural health of society. He was particularly interested in how government and public institutions could be better equipped to support musical traditions.

Seeger's (1939) work was not specifically focused on indigenous music, but it planted a crucial seed: the idea that knowledge about music should have practical social value. Later generations of ethnomusicologists built on this foundation, directing it toward the study and support of non-Western and indigenous musical traditions specifically.

Ecology and Music: A Relationship We Cannot Ignore

Ecocriticism and Ecomusicology

To understand why indigenous African musical instruments are under threat, you have to look beyond the purely human and social dimensions of the problem. You have to look at the natural world itself.

Ecocriticism, as Glotfelty and Fromm (1996) describe it, is an approach that began in literary studies, examining how human culture relates to and depends upon the natural environment. Applied to music, this kind of thinking gave rise to ecomusicology — a field that Titon (2013) defines as exploring how musical traditions are embedded in, shaped by, and deeply dependent on the living ecosystems around them.

For indigenous African musical instruments, this connection is not abstract or metaphorical. It is entirely concrete. A drum cannot be made without wood and animal skin. A kora cannot be strung without specific plant fibres. A balafon cannot resonate without the particular gourds that form its resonators. These instruments are, in the most literal sense, products of specific ecosystems. They carry the forest, the savanna, and the river within them.

Lemons, Westra, and Goodland (1998) made a point that seems obvious once stated but is often overlooked: human culture and economy do not float free of the natural world. They rest entirely upon it. Music is no exception. If the ecosystems that supply instrument-making materials collapse — through deforestation, desertification, the disappearance of animal species, or environmental degradation — then the instruments themselves become impossible to make. The cultural tradition does not merely decline; it loses the very physical basis for its existence.

Music Sustainability: Keeping Traditions Alive, Not Just Archived

There is a well-intentioned but ultimately insufficient response to the loss of musical traditions that might be called the archival impulse: record everything, document the instruments, capture the performances on film and audio, store it all in a museum or a database so that future generations can study what once existed. This is not without value, but it fundamentally misunderstands what a living musical tradition actually is.

Titon (2009) argues compellingly that preservation of this kind is not the same as sustainability. A recording of an instrument being played is not the tradition. A photograph of an instrument in a museum case is not the tradition. The tradition is the living, breathing ecosystem of people, knowledge, practice, economic exchange, and environmental relationship that produces and perpetuates the music over generations. Sever any of those connections, and you may have an archive, but you no longer have a tradition.

Music sustainability is the framework that addresses this more complex reality. It asks not how we can store evidence of what a tradition once was, but how we can maintain the conditions under which the tradition continues to live.

The Music Ecosystem

Titon (2009) uses the concept of a “music ecosystem" to capture the full range of elements that must work together for a musical tradition to survive. This ecosystem includes the musicians themselves, of course — but also the instrument makers, the teachers, the learners, the audiences, the economic structures that allow people to earn a living from their craft, and the natural environment that supplies the raw materials. Think of it as an intricate web in which every thread is connected to every other. Pull on one thread, and the whole web shifts. Snap enough threads, and the web collapses.

This is why music sustainability is never simply a matter of cultural policy or education alone. It requires a holistic approach that addresses multiple dimensions simultaneously.

Three Dimensions of Sustainability

Ecological sustainability, as Lemons et al. (1998) define it, is the foundation. It concerns the health of the natural world and specifically the availability of the materials needed to make instruments. Trees must be allowed to grow back. Animal populations must be able to regenerate. Plant materials must be harvested at rates that do not deplete them faster than nature can renew them. Without this, even the most determined cultural revival efforts will eventually run aground on the hard reality that there is nothing left to make instruments from.

Economic sustainability is equally essential. It is all very well to speak of preserving traditional crafts, but if the craftspeople cannot earn a reasonable living from their work, they will eventually be forced to abandon it in favour of more remunerative employment. This is not a failure of values — it is a simple economic reality. The rise of cheap, factory-produced instruments has placed enormous pressure on traditional instrument makers, whose handcrafted work cannot compete on price alone. Economic sustainability also encompasses what Lemons et al. (1998) call “human capital" — the accumulated skills, knowledge, and expertise that make the craft possible in the first place — and “natural capital," meaning the raw material resources on which the craft depends. Both must be invested in and protected.

Social sustainability is the thread that holds the other two together. Ultimately, as Titon (2009) reminds us, a musical tradition survives because it is passed from one human being to another, from one generation to the next, through relationships of teaching and learning, mentorship and apprenticeship, shared ritual and shared identity. Instruments are not merely functional objects; they are carriers of history, markers of identity, and participants in the spiritual and ceremonial life of communities. When young people are no longer taught how to make and play them — whether because the teachers have left, or because the instruments are seen as old-fashioned, or because the economic incentives point elsewhere — the living chain is broken in a way that is very difficult to repair.

The Specific Challenges Facing Indigenous African Instrument Making

One of the most significant forces working against traditional instrument making in Africa is rural-urban migration — the large-scale movement of people from villages and rural communities to cities and towns in search of work, education, and opportunity. This is a global phenomenon, but it has particular consequences for traditional crafts that depend on the presence of skilled specialists within specific communities.

Avorgbedor's (1992) research in Ghana illustrates this clearly. In communities like Seva, the master instrument makers — the people who hold the accumulated knowledge of generations — are among those most likely to migrate to urban centres. They are skilled, they are capable, and the city offers them opportunities that the village does not. When they leave, they take their knowledge with them. The informal, participation-based systems by which that knowledge would traditionally have been passed on simply stop functioning, because the population that sustained them has dispersed.

Pettan and Titon (2015) suggest that the response to this challenge must be proactive rather than passive. Rather than waiting for organic transmission to happen, communities, cultural organisations, and governments need to create more structured frameworks for knowledge transfer — formal workshops, community-based training programmes, and apprenticeship schemes that can function even in conditions of demographic change.

The Environmental Foundation

As Lemons et al. (1998) emphasise, the materials for African musical instruments — hardwoods, animal skins, gourds, reeds, fibres — all come from specific ecosystems, and those ecosystems are under increasing pressure from deforestation, agricultural expansion, climate change, and overuse. The connection between ecological health and musical survival is direct and urgent.

Traditional African communities often developed sophisticated resource management practices over centuries — seasonal harvesting limits, rotational use of forest areas, careful attention to which trees or animals could be taken and which must be left to regenerate. These systems embody a kind of accumulated ecological wisdom that is itself at risk of being lost. Applied ethnomusicologists, drawing on Titon's (2013) ecomusicological framework, argue that these traditional knowledge systems deserve serious respect and study, not only for their cultural value, but for their practical utility in designing sustainable resource use practices.

The precautionary principle — the idea, articulated by Lemons et al. (1998), that we should act to protect the environment before serious damage is visible, rather than waiting until a crisis forces our hand — is particularly relevant here. Once a forest is gone or a species is extinct, no amount of cultural revival can bring back the materials needed to make the instruments.

Technology as a Double-Edged Tool

Modern technology offers both opportunities and dangers for traditional instrument making. On one hand, new tools and techniques can make production more efficient and help craftspeople compete in contemporary markets. On the other hand, industrialised production methods often carry a higher environmental cost, and the pressure to produce quickly and cheaply can erode the quality and authenticity of traditionally made instruments.

There is also a subtler danger: when modern tools replace traditional methods, the traditional knowledge embedded in those methods can be lost along with them. The knowledge of how to select the right piece of wood, how to treat a hide, how to shape a resonating chamber — this is not merely technical information. As Avorgbedor (1992) and Titon (2013) both suggest in their respective analyses, it is a form of cultural intelligence, refined over generations, that has value far beyond its immediate practical application.

Conclusion: People, Economics, and Nature in Harmony

The survival of indigenous African musical instrument making is not a problem that can be solved by any single intervention, however well-intentioned. It is a systemic challenge that requires systemic thinking.

Skills must be actively transmitted from experienced practitioners to new generations through structures and programmes that can function even as communities change and people move, as Pettan and Titon (2015) recommend. The economic conditions must exist for instrument makers to earn a sustainable living from their craft, so that they are not forced to choose between their cultural practice and their economic survival, a concern central to Lemons et al.'s (1998) framework of ecological and economic sustainability. And the natural ecosystems that supply the materials for these instruments must be protected and managed with care, because without them, as Titon (2009; 2013) consistently argues, the physical basis for the entire tradition disappears.

Applied ethnomusicology, as Pettan and Titon (2015) articulate it, offers both the intellectual framework and the practical orientation needed to address these challenges. By committing to direct engagement with communities, by respecting and amplifying traditional knowledge, and by insisting on the ethical importance of cultural rights and social responsibility, it provides a road map for action that is both rigorous and humane.

Indigenous African musical instruments are not relics of a vanishing past. They are living expressions of human creativity, ecological relationship, and cultural identity that have survived and adapted across centuries. With the right support — thoughtful, respectful, and practically grounded — they can continue to do so.

References

Avorgbedor, D. K. (1992). The impact of rural–urban migration on a village music culture. Yearbook for Traditional Music, 24, 146–174.

Glotfelty, C., & Fromm, H. (Eds.). (1996). The ecocriticism reader: Landmarks in literary ecology. University of Georgia Press.

Lemons, J., Westra, L., & Goodland, R. (Eds.). (1998). Ecological sustainability and integrity: Concepts and approaches. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Pettan, S., & Titon, J. T. (Eds.). (2015). The Oxford handbook of applied ethnomusicology. Oxford University Press.

Seeger, C. (1939). Music as a factor in cultural strategy. Proceedings of the Music Teachers National Association, 34, 124–137.

Titon, J. T. (2009). Music and sustainability: An ecological viewpoint. The World of Music, 51(1), 119–137.

Titon, J. T. (2013). The nature of ecomusicology. Música e Cultura: Revista da ABET, 8(1), 8–18.