Author: Publisher:
ISBN: 9781933459011
Category : Blacks
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Composition in Africa and the Diaspora: Composing music in divergent environments
Author: Composing the Music of Africa
Author: Malcolm FloydPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429864302
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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.
Composition in Africa and the Diaspora: African music in Latin America. African and African American music in China. The music of William Grant Still. The music of Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria in new environments
Author: Publisher:
ISBN: 9781933459011
Category : Black people
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Composition in Africa and the Diaspora: Autobiographical discourse on music compositional creativity. Context of African dynamism in music composition
Author: Composing the African Atlantic
Author: James G. CarrollPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Afrobeat
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Book Description
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.
Emerging Solutions for Musical Arts Education in Africa
Author: Pan African Society for Musical Arts EducationPublisher: African Minds
ISBN: 1920051112
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 359
Book Description
Emerging Solutions for Musical arts Education in South Africa offers peer-reviewed articles prepared for the 2003 Conference of the Pan African Society for Musical Arts Education in Africa held in Kisumu, Maseno, Kenya. Not only does this publication voice the solutions offered by 31 authors from the African continent and beyond, but it presents in a unique and highly accessible fashion the collective voice of the conference participants. True to the spirit of ubuntu - an individual is only a person through other people (their communities) - this publication is a reflection of the essence of an overarching sub-Saharan philosophy; the contents represents a conference where papers were not presented, but where conference participants engaged to discuss solutions for the musical arts on the African continent. While the individual voice has been given its rightful place, the collective voice represents an emergent song composed by the scholarly community in oral fashion. This publication provides insight into the problems of musical arts education in Africa; and solutions for musical arts education.
Composition in Africa and the Diaspora
Author: Akin EubaPublisher: M R I Press
ISBN: 9781933459028
Category : Blacks
Languages : en
Pages : 202
Book Description
The Creative Potential of African Art Music in Ghana
Author: J. H. Kwabena NketiaPublisher: Afram Publication
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 72
Book Description
This booklet is intended as a companion volume to various recordings and aims to create awareness of the creative potential of African art music in Ghana. It is the story of an individual composer and his works, his reflections and comments on his experience as an African composer and on African art music as a contemporary genre and musical idiom. The book is divided into sections on: the creative sources of African art music: the transformation of traditional songs, popular music sources and original works; formative influences on the composer: early sources of influence, the legacy of Amu and the African School of Composition; and performers and audiences: the performer-composer relationship, performances of African art music abroad, local performers and music educators. The author is perhaps Africa's most distinguished and renowned composer, musicologist and scholar. His awards include the Ghana Book Award, the IMC-Unesco Music Prize for Distinguished Service to Music, and the Prince Claus Award for Distinguished Service to Culture and Development. He is a Foundation Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts & Sciences, Honorary Member of the International Music Council and Member of the International Jury for the Proclamation by Unesco of Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
The Other Side of Nowhere
Author: Daniel FischlinPublisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819566829
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 461
Book Description
Scholars, composers and performers write about the art of jazz improvisation.
The African Imagination in Music
Author: Victor Kofi AgawuPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190263202
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389
Book Description
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.