1. African music was so highly integrated as a part of their everyday life that for almost every activity there was an appropriate music to accompany it. In other cases, music was also used as code to communicate messages between Africans during slavery. This makes it easier to describe how this music was able to survive and evolve in spite of the persecution and oppression of its people. 2. Through the 17th and 19th centuries, African music had already evolved highly into a complex art form built around concepts of structure. It was used ritually as an important part of life events. It was used to commemorate such major events as crowning a king, religious ceremonies, the birth of a child, and even the moment of someone’s passing. 3. The African heterogeneous sound idea was a term first described by African American composer Olly Wilson. It was a term used to describe an assortment consisting of many contrasting elements. This assortment was described as the interaction and combination of a wide variety of instruments. The degree of complexity within each assortment varied among individual African ensembles. 4. One notable aesthetic in African music is call and response. It is when a statement in music is made, either vocally or instrumentally, so that it may be responded to. The response can be the repetition of the first statement or the completion of it. This musical attribute is popular in jazz, ragtime, blues, gospel, and R&B. This is one of the many ways in which African music has greatly helped to shape American popular music. Other musical attributes derived from African music include different vocal styles (such as guttural effects, lyric improvisation, vocal rhythmization, blue notes, falsetto, metaphors and codes), rhythmic features (such as syncopation, rhythmic improvisation, the groove, swing, and body rhythm), and melodic features (such as microtones in ambiguous modes and minor pentatonic and blues scales). 5. There are four principal groups of instruments in traditional African music. These include membranophones (drums), idiophones (other percussion), aerophones (wind instruments), and chordophones (stringed instruments). 6. More than a few instruments originating in Africa embodied hybrid forms in the United States. The banjo, the flute, and the quills (panpipes made of reeds) are only a few examples. 7. In places like Brazil and Cuba, European slave owners allowed the slaves to keep drums, play their African music, and practice their own religions. In Cuba, slaves were sometimes even allowed to buy their own freedom, which further propagated the music and culture they were allowed to retain. In America, slaves were stripped of their musical and religious culture and forced to adhere to the cultural and religious institutions of their Christian owners. They were often not allowed to keep their drums or sing songs, unless they were work songs. 8. Musicianers were African slaves that played music professionally to entertain whites. The two slave instruments that were most commonly played were the banjo and the fiddle. 9. Camp meetings were large outdoor religious celebrations that lasted days and included blacks and whites participating in Christian worship. The hymns that were sung at these events were the improvisational basis for the development of spirituals. 10. African American slaves eventually embraced Christianity as a result of being stripped of the ability to practice their own religion and culture. With this embrace, slaves created new worship styles such as spirituals, gospel, and blues. 11. New musical developments brought about the creation of gospel, blues, and jazz as a result of increased personal freedom that the Emancipation of 1865 gave to African Americans. These new genres had a lasting impact on American culture.