Contemporary art music in Nigeria: an introductory note on the works of Ayo Bankole (1935–76)

Africa ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 533-543 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olabode F. Omojola
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
Introductory Note ◽  
Christian Missionary ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Musical Elements

The introduction of Christian missionary activity and the British colonial administration of Nigeria in the middle of the nineteenth century led to some of the most significant musical changes in the country. Perhaps the most far reaching was the emergence of modern Nigerian art music, a genre which is conceptually similar to European classical music. This study focuses on Ayo Bankole, one of the pioneer composers of Nigerian art music.As an introductory study of Ayo Bankole, the article briefly discusses the musico-historical factors responsible for the growth of Nigerian art music as well as the nature of Bankole's musical training and experience. This provides an appropriate context for understanding and appreciating the stylistic features of Bankole's works. Drawing on examples from his works, the article establishes the eclectic nature of Bankole's style, in which European and African musical elements interact.

Style in modern Nigerian Art music: the pioneering works of Fela Sowande

Africa ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
'Bode Omojola
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Compositional Style ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Christian Music ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Christian Missionary ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Elements Of Style ◽  
New Tradition

The Nigerian musical landscape changed significantly following the advent of Christian missionary activity and British colonial administration in the later nineteenth century. New idioms of musical practice which have evolved as a result of this historical process include a new tradition of religious, Christian, music, urban syncretic popular styles, new operatic forms and European-derived art/ classical music. This article focuses on one of these emerging styles, Nigerian art music, as reflected in the life and works of its most notable pioneer, Fela Sowande. After a brief historical background, the article discusses the circumstances of Sowande's life and the beliefs which shaped his composing career and his compositional style. In discussing elements of style in Sowande's works, it examines the nature of the interaction between African and European elements, a stylistic feature which constantly recurs in his works. The article ends by discussing the need to consolidate the growth of this new idiom by putting in place institutional structures within which it can develop.

INTEGRATING MUSIC INTO INTELLECTUAL HISTORY: NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART MUSIC AS A DISCOURSE OF AGENCY AND IDENTITY

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN E. TOEWS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Production Performance ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
History Nineteenth Century ◽  
Agency And Identity

Few intellectual historians of nineteenth-century Europe would deny that the tradition of art music that evolved between the revolutionary watershed at the end of the eighteenth century and the international wars and domestic convulsions of the first half of the twentieth century—a body of musical works from Haydn and Mozart to Mahler and Strauss that has been passed down to us in canonized form as the “imaginary museum” of “classical music” —was an enormously significant dimension of European cultural and intellectual history, especially in German-speaking central Europe. In the territories of the German Confederation, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg Empire, and later in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the production, performance and consumption of classical music was not just an important element in the history of aesthetic and cultural forms but also a privileged site for imagining and enacting the organization of individuals into historical subjects (the Bildung of modern individuals) and for the integration of individuals into collectivities through processes of subjective identification. Broad interest in the relations between agency and identity among historians, including European intellectual historians, should have drawn many of them, one would have thought, toward investigation of the ways the cultural work undertaken by music was connected to, and interacted with, the cultural role of the textual and visual arts, or of how musical performance and experience helped European individuals organize and perform their self-activity and self-consciousness in relation to the past, to other individuals within the networks of communal relations, and to the transcendent. The history of music would appear to be critical for understanding historical experiences of the relations between memory and expectation at both the individual and communal levels.

The Survival of English Opera in Nineteenth-Century Concert Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 294-315
Author(s):  
William Weber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
German Lieder ◽  
English Opera ◽  
Concert Life

This chapter shows how selections from English operas composed between the 1730s and the 1790s—chiefly by Thomas Arne, Charles Dibdin, William Shield, and Stephen Storace—became standard repertory in concerts throughout the nineteenth century. Such pieces were performed at benefit concerts organized by individual musicians and at events given by local ensembles that blended songs with virtuoso pieces and orchestral numbers. Critical commentary on such songs justified their aesthetic legitimacy as groups separate from pieces deemed part of classical music. By 1900, songs by Arne, Storace, and even Dibdin were often sung in recitals along with German lieder and pieces from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Italy or France. The solidity of this tradition contributed to the revival of the operas themselves from the 1920s, most often Arne’s Artaxerxes (1762). This chapter is paired with Rutger Helmers’s “National and international canons of opera in tsarist Russia.”

Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gold Standard ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Concert Programs

This chapter starts by revisiting a now-familiar text: James H. Johnson’s book Listening in Paris (1995). On the basis of concert and opera reviews, images, and the paratexts of concert programs, Ellis reframes Johnson’s question “When did audiences fall silent?” as “Where and why did audiences fail to fall silent?” Multilayered answers show how (1) many of the noisier phenomena of the eighteenth century resurfaced in new guises from the 1850s onward; (2) the democratization of art music took place in contexts that could not always impose “religious” listening; and (3) there was a resurgent demand, possibly concomitant, for music as pure entertainment in venues where silence was neither required nor expected. The chapter argues that although attentive listening was a gold standard during the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century in Paris, practice rarely lived up to such expectations, and it was in effect a niche activity.

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 32

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Jewish Music ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Jewish Involvement

With its five thematic sections covering genres from cantorial to classical to klezmer, this pioneering multi-disciplinary volume presents rich coverage of the work of musicians of Jewish origin in the Polish lands. It opens with the musical consequences of developments in Jewish religious practice: the spread of hasidism in the eighteenth century meant that popular melodies replaced traditional cantorial music, while the greater acculturation of Jews in the nineteenth century brought with it synagogue choirs. Jewish involvement in popular culture included performances for the wider public, Yiddish songs and the Yiddish theatre, and contributions of many different sorts in the interwar years. Chapters on the classical music scene cover Jewish musical institutions, organizations, and education; individual composers and musicians; and a consideration of music and Jewish national identity. One section is devoted to the Holocaust as reflected in Jewish music, and the final section deals with the afterlife of Jewish musical creativity in Poland, particularly the resurgence of interest in klezmer music. The chapters do not attempt to define what may well be undefinable—what “Jewish music” is. Rather, they provide an original and much-needed exploration of the activities and creativity of “musicians of the Jewish faith.“

The Fonte Gaia from Renaissance to Modern Times

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara E. Scappini ◽  
David Boffa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of

The Fonte Gaia from Renaissance to Modern Times examines the history of Siena's famous public fountain, from its fifteenth-century origins to its eventual replacement by a copy in the nineteenth century (and the modern fate of both). The book explores how both the Risorgimento and the Symbolist movements have shaped our perceptions of the Italian Renaissance, as the Quattrocento was filtered through the lens of contemporary art and politics.

scholarly journals Number 13 / Part I. Music. 10. Communicational Entropy in The Present’s Crisis – Mediation and Community Action through Music Management

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-92
Author(s):  
Oana Balan
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Community Action ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Professional Musicians ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Commodity ◽  
Media Channels

Abstract Present day art phenomena that surround us from all media channels compel us, who have been educated as professional musicians, to find justifications for the sonic abuse that contemporary society is subjected to and to resuscitate, within this vitiated context, the art music meant to re-educate our people, restoring them to the conscience and value of their identity. Educating the public and bringing them closer to contemporary art is a task meant to be fulfilled by music institutions as well, since they should seek to investigate efficient methods of generating connecting bridges to the large masses by transforming music into a shared cultural commodity.

scholarly journals Roland Barthes' "Text" and aleatoric music: Is "The birth of the reader" the birth of the listener?

Muzikologija ◽  
2002 ◽  
pp. 263-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Jeongwon ◽  
Hoo Song
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Music History ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Interesting Phenomenon ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Compositional Control

The history of Western classical music and the development of its notational system show that composers have tried to control more and more aspects of their compositions as precisely as possible. Total serialism represents the culmination of compositional control. Given this progressively increasing compositional control, the emergence of chance music, or aleatoric music, in the mid-twentieth century is a significantly interesting phenomenon. In aleatoric music, the composer deliberately incorporates elements of chance in the process of composition and/or in performance. Consequently, aleatoric works challenge the traditional notion of an art work as a closed entity fixed by its author. The philosophical root of aleatoric music can be traced to post structuralism, specifically its critique of the Enlightenment notion of the author as the creator of the meaning of his or her work. Roland Barthes' declaration of "the death of the author" epitomizes the Poststructuralists' position. Distinguishing "Text" from "Work," Barthes maintains that in a "Text," meanings are to be engendered not by the author but by the reader. Barthes conceives aleatoric music as an example of the "Text," which demands "the birth of the reader." This essay critically re-examines Barthes' notion of aleatoric music, focusing on the complicated status of the reader in music. The readers of a musical Text can be both performers and listeners. When Barthes' declaration of the birth of the reader is applied to the listener, it becomes problematic, since the listener, unlike the literary reader, does not have direct access to the "Text" but needs to be mediated by the performer. As Carl Dahlhaus has remarked, listeners cannot be exposed to other possible renditions that the performer could have chosen but did not choose, and in this respect, the supposed openness of an aleatoric piece is closed and fixed at the time of performance. In aleatoric music, it is not listeners but only performers who are promoted to the rank of co-author of the works. Finally, this essay explores the reason why Barthes turned to music for the purpose of illustrating his theory of text. What rhetorical role does music play in his articulation of "Work" and "Text"? Precisely because of music's "difference" as a performance art, music history provides the examples of the lowest and the highest moments in Barthes' theory of text, that is, those of Work and Text. If, for Barthes, the institutionalization of the professional performer in music history demonstrates the advent of Work better than literary examples, the performer's supposed dissolution in aleatoric music is more liberating than any literary moments of Text. This is because the figure of music - as performance art-provides Barthes with a reified and bodily "situated" model of the Subject.

scholarly journals Contemporary art music and its audiences: Age, gender, and social class profile

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Grebosz-Haring ◽  
Martin Weichbold
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Music Festivals ◽  
Social Patterns ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Movements ◽  
Motivational Structure

Contemporary art music (CAM) has experienced significant aesthetic changes in recent decades and has acted as a seismograph for socio-cultural movements. New music festivals have had a significant influence on the development and perception of this music by promoting aesthetic pluralism, introducing new concert formats, and expanding to unusual venues. These movements induce changes in the social patterns of CAM consumers and have an impact on the traditional high culture audience profile. This article relies on audience surveys at three European CAM festivals and draws on Bourdieu’s (1984) and Schulze’s (1992) class and lifestyle concepts in order to explore demographic characteristics and social class in CAM audiences. As the results show, consumption of CAM is still a distinctive practice sustained by an exclusive community having considerable education and “musical capital”. Nevertheless, the festivals show heterogeneity in the age structure and motivational structure of attendees as well as in specific patterns regarding knowledge, experience and active involvement with CAM. The analysis shows that aesthetic pluralism can lead to greater social openness regarding social class affiliation.

Celts, Hottentots, and “white chimpanzees”

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
African Apes ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
New Development

This chapter discusses the racialization of the Irish in the nineteenth century. The English had long compared the Irish with the “savages of America”; a practice dating back to the seventeenth century. However, there was a dramatically new development in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when Darwinian science posited an evolutionary chain of being in which humans were descended directly from African apes. In this context, British commentators created a “simianized,” or apelike, Paddy whose likeness to the “backward” races of Africa was inescapable. At least four major historical factors were at work in Paddy's devolution. They can be encapsulated in the words “empire,” “Fenianism,” “emigration,” and “science.”

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