Although ethnomusicologists have reported evidence of individual composition in orally transmitted musical traditions (e.g. Rycroft 1961/62, Kubik 1974), the idea still persists that in the rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, music was and is composed by some kind of ‘folk collective’. This myth is enshrined in the obnoxious and derogatory term ‘ethnic music’, by which people often categorize music that was apparently not created by great or known composers. The rhetoric surrounding the term suggests that there is a belief that social groups can capture and understand the ‘spirit’ of their collective life through quasi-mystical acts of communal creativity.