Conference Agenda

Over the past three decades, scholars and practitioners have explored African art music through compositional studies, academic research, and practical examinations of creative works. However, Africanists and non-Africanist composers and ethnomusicologists have debated its place in African music, particularly regarding identity and authenticity. Àkójọpọ̀, a non-profit arts organization, after an open call for compositions, staged its 2021 and 2022 concerts as a site for enquiry, seeking to engage with Nigerian composers on compositional frameworks through a national lens. As a result, these concerts revealed diverse and indeterminate interpretations surrounding African art music. The following year, Àkójọpọ̀ organized the 2023 African Art Music Commissioning Project (AAMCP), premiering works by eight composers from Brazil, Ghana, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States, demonstrating how Àkójọpọ̀ explores and expands African art music practice across borders.
Drawing on Georgina Born’s concept of mediation (2005), this presentation examines how Àkójọpọ̀ used its institutional structures across different stages of the AAMCP’s production, including the selection of musicians, the compositional process, rehearsals, dialogues among diverse composers, and performance as a form of mediation that shapes and negotiates authenticity and identity in African art music.
I argue that Àkójọpọ̀’s AAMCP, through mediational practice, challenges the exclusive notions of African art music, resituate it, and positions it as a Pan-African and transnational form of artistic expression. I reflect on my 2023 ethnographic experience in Lagos, Nigeria. My analysis draws on my direct involvement as a musician, rehearsal director, scholar, and part of the production team.

The growing interest in the performance, recording, and appreciation of African pianism broadens the scope of scholarly inquiry within and beyond African art music discourse. While scholars have underscored the creative processes of composing and performing African pianism, its aesthetics and significations within the African art music tradition, necessary to examine how works of African pianism resonate with diverse audiences through empirical inquiry. This paper interrogates the idea of the piano as a surrogate instrument, the impressionistic perspective of African pianism, and the involvement of audiences in meaning-making processes. With excerpts from works of West and North African composers, it foregrounds translative prospects situated within the broad lenses of composers’ intention, performance practices, and the perception of audiences. Critical questions include what it means to hear the piano and listen beyond the instrument, the possibilities and limits of imaginative listening, and the significance of cultural knowledge in the appreciation of African pianism. The paper therefore describes the translative imaginary as a meaning-making process for composers, performers, and listeners based on different methods of translation reinforced by imagination. Methodologies include descriptive analysis, interviews, and survey results. Ultimately, the paper underscores the translative perspective of African pianism, its complexities and contradictions, and argues for it as an approach towards the making of meaning.

How does African art music negotiate gender? In exploring the genre, scholars have focused on its relationship to traditional music (Euba, 1975), memorialized its composers (Omojola, 2007), and interrogated its intercultural style (Sadoh, 2004). The literature has, however, rarely centered women and gender. This presentation bridges this critical gap, examining gender in African art music. Until recently, African art music has been largely shaped by male composers and scholars. While women participated in the creation and performance of traditional music, their agency in the formation of the new African art music verged on nonexistent. By acknowledging contemporary African women composers and their absence in the canon, I underline the necessity of putting gender, race, and citizenship at the heart of decolonizing musical discussions. As part of my interrogation, I locate gender in the repertoire of pivotal 20th-century figures: Fela Sowande, Ayo Bankole, Akin Euba and Joshua Uzoigwe. Analyzing their music through an intersectional feminist lens, I emphasize how colonial narratives shaped gender concepts in the African musical imagination. I argue that the restructuring of gender during colonial rule (Oyewumi 1997, 2016; Bertolt, 2018) was mirrored by the arrival of Western tonality, a nested oppression which led to the sonic sidelining of African women. To resist this sonic sidelining, I propose a method that reclaims the African woman’s voice as a primary source of theoretical and musical knowledge. I consider my historical research a starting point for new creative frameworks. Drawing on my experiences as a performer and composer, I explore creative autoethnography, which, by marrying Akin Euba’s creative ethnomusicology and Patricia Hill Collins’ Black feminist epistemology, centers autoethnographic writing as a starting point for musical composition. Through scholarship and creative practice, I aim to contribute to larger conversations around the empowerment and visibility of African women in music.