Composition in Africa and the Diaspora: Autobiographical discourse on music compositional creativity. Context of African dynamism in music composition PDF Download

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781933459011
Category : Blacks
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Malcolm Floyd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429864302
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
First published in 1999, this volume explores the great diversity of music created by African communities is reflected in this book, which discusses the ways in which a wide range of musical forms are composed and performed from Egypt to South Africa and from Ghana to Kenya. As two composers explain here, this diversity provides much inspiration for western contemporary composition. Particular attention is paid to the contexts generate musical creativity. Ceremonies and festivals celebrating birth, death, marriage or rites of passage provide the impetus for much composition and performance, enabling young people to pick up, early on, some of the techniques and styles of which they then become the new exponents. The book also looks at the role played by formal music education programmes and bodies such as the South African Music Rights Organization and the South African Broadcasting Corporation in fostering musical activity, as well as the contribution of composers to the social and political changes that have dominated South African life in recent years.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781933459011
Category : Blacks
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Kofi Agawu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317794060
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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The aim of this book is to stimulate debate by offering a critique of discourse about African music. Who writes about African music, how, and why? What assumptions and prejudices influence the presentation of ethnographic data? Even the term "African music" suggests there is an agreed-upon meaning, but African music signifies differently to different people. This book also poses the question then, "What is African music?" Agawu offers a new and provocative look at the history of African music scholarship that will resonate with students of ethnomusicology and post-colonial studies. He offers an alternative "Afro-centric" means of understanding African music, and in doing so, illuminates a different mode of creativity beyond the usual provenance of Western criticism. This book will undoubtedly inspire heated debate--and new thinking--among musicologists, cultural theorists, and post-colonial thinkers. Also includes 15 musical examples.

Author: James G. Carroll
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Afrobeat
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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This dissertation undertakes a comparative analysis of the musical, written, and spoken production of Sun Ra and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti with respect to the larger African Atlantic intellectual environment, situating the two artists as both shapers of an Atlantic intellectual culture as well as artists who were, in turn, shaped by that culture. Through a reading of their creative work, the dissertation argues that, even given the obvious cultural, temporal, and temperamental differences between Sun Ra and Fela, both artists' orientations toward musical composition and performance share similar preoccupations with the recitation of cultural memory and the dialogic creation of historical narratives which is called Composing the African Atlantic. In the dissertation the concept Composing the African Atlantic is proposed as a means of describing an African diasporic version of musical composition which includes many of the so-called extramusical elements of text and performance - audience participation and dialogue being key - as constitutive elements of composition such that, in their absence, the music is not fully realized. Stated in the active present tense (Composing), identified as culturally rooted (African), and formed within a broad and discursively contested space (Atlantic), Composing the African Atlantic describes the means by which composers such as Sun Ra and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti conceive of performance as an essential part of composition, enabling the musicians and audience to craft the true Text of the music through the activation of communal memory and the dialogic contestation of history. The result, in the case of both artists, is the creation of a singular compositional and performative style which maintains its connection to its core audience through the use of ritualized concert performance, the challenging of historical myths, and the performance of historical narratives which refute the Hegelian contention that Africa is "no historical part of the world." In the process, both artists assert that there is a common African cultural memory which exists throughout the African diaspora as a result, fundamentally, of the Atlantic slave trade, but which is also a living, contemporary, cosmopolitan dialectic of representation and re-presentation.

Author: Meki Nzewi
Publisher: African Minds
ISBN: 1920051651
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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The 1st three volumes present material in a modular approach. Each volume presents progressively more advanced concepts in the categories: musical structure and form, factors of music appreciation, music instruments, music and society, research project, musical arts theatre, school songs technique, and performance. The 4th volume is a collection of essays. The 5th volume contains printed music.

Author: Kofi Agawu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190263229
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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The world of Sub-Saharan African music is immensely rich and diverse, containing a plethora of repertoires and traditions. In The African Imagination in Music, renowned music scholar Kofi Agawu offers an introduction to the major dimensions of this music and the values upon which it rests. Agawu leads his readers through an exploration of the traditions, structural elements, instruments, and performative techniques that characterize the music. In sections that focus upon rhythm, melody, form, and harmony, the essential parts of African music come into relief. While traditional music, the backbone of Africa's musical thinking, receives the most attention, Agawu also supplies insights into popular and art music in order to demonstrate the breadth of the African musical imagination. Close readings of a variety of songs, including an Ewe dirge, an Aka children's song, and Fela's 'Suffering and Smiling' supplement the broader discussion. The African Imagination in Music foregrounds a hitherto under-reported legacy of recordings and insists on the necessity of experiencing music as sound in order to appreciate and understand it fully. Accordingly, a Companion Website features important examples of the music discussed in detail in the book. Accessibly and engagingly written for a general audience, The African Imagination in Music is poised to renew interest in Black African music and to engender discussion of its creative underpinnings by Africanists, ethnomusicologists, music theorists and musicologists.

Author: Minette Mans
Publisher: African Minds
ISBN: 192005149X
Category : Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This collection brings together many African voices expressing their ideas and conceptions of musical practice and arts education in Africa. With essays from established scholars in the field as well as young researchers and educators, and topics ranging from philosophical arguments and ethno-musicology to practical classroom ideas, this book will stimulate academic discourse. At the same time, practical ideas and information will assist teachers and students in Africa and elsewhere, bringing fresh musical perspectives on instrument playing, singing, childrenis literature and play.

Author: Christian Onyeji
Publisher: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing
ISBN: 9783848499625
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This work is a contribution to the research-composition method aimed at deriving a continuum for African indigenous music in the modern art music milieu.It presents a systematic method of research-composition. The work attempts to demonstrate the imperative of research-composition, in research and creative dimensions, as a necessary process in modern African creative works in music. It provides a definitive understanding and application of the African creative theory in modern African art music composition as well as proposing the application of ethnomusicological procedure to modern African art music composition. The theoretical and compositional issues argued in the first part guided the modern classical African music composition as well as its analysis contained in the book. The symphonic work in three movements is the primary objective of this study in African art music composition.This work is recommended as a framework for student composers and professional/mature independent composers within and outside institutions of higher learning.

Author: Solomon, Thomas
Publisher: Fountain Publishers
ISBN: 9970252453
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Ethnomusicology deals with the study of the music of the world. The field is interdisciplinary, and ethnomusicologists draw on theory and method from folklore, cultural anthropology, historical musicology, literature, cultural studies and media studies, among other disciplines. So when ethnomusicologists met at Makerere University's symposium on ethnomusicology in October 2011, the issues dealt with spanned a wide spectrum of concerns which can be grouped under three major categories: Institutions, culture and identity. African Musics in Context discusses the place of performing arts in Ugandan society, archiving music and music sources, performing archival music, performing health and religious issues in music, music and identity in East Africa as well music in motion, which tackles how identity shifts when people move from one place to another. All these are key aspects of our day-to-day lives, and they are the themes that colour the music we listen to. This book follows up on and extends work in an earlier volume (Nannyonga- Tamusuza and Solomon 2012) which included papers from the first symposium in the series. While this book focuses primarily on music and music research in Uganda, the chapters by the contributors from Tanzania, South Africa and Norway demonstrate the importance of scholarly and professional networks that connect the different countries of the African continent with each other and with the larger international scholarly community. If the published proceedings from the first symposium mentioned above represented a first in the history of ethnomusicological publishing in Uganda, this second book in the series shows that professionalised ethnomusicology in Uganda continues to gain ground and make contributions to music research in Uganda, Africa, and the global ethnomusicological community. The chapters collected here show that ethnomusicology in Uganda has a healthy institutional basis and promises to continue to make contributions that are relevant locally, regionally, and internationally.