Now we can approach traditional music in terms of its structure, aiming to pinpoint
as many of its musical characteristics as we can, so that we can classify it, through analysis, correlation of derived facts, and so on and so forth. This is a valid approach, which has its place in the scheme of things. But apart from the fact it would be of real interest only to professional musicians, I have always thought its value was greatly over-rated. For an analytical approach can give us, at best, only the anatomy and physiology of the music considered; it can tell us nothing about the informing life of the music, nothing about its essence, nothing of what it meant to its creators and why, and at the end we are left with the mere skeleton of what was a living art.
But we can also approach traditional music in terms of its function rather than its structure; its content, rather than its form; its purpose and meaningfulness, rather than its size and shape, always aiming to relate it to the tradition from which it sprang, and the day-to-day life of the people who gave it birth. At once we find ourselves facing a vast canvas, full of symbols; some of these are relatively easy to decipher; others are not so easy; still others appear to be weird hieroglyphs which may well defy all our efforts to fathom.
~ Fela Sowande