In the first decade of Nigerian independence (1960-1970), writers, artists, musicians, playwrights, and other scholars gathered in clubs dedicated to the arts, not unlike the cabaret cultures of Paris and Berlin. These clubs, called Mbari, were physical and intellectual spaces where creatives could meet and exchange ideas independent of the colonial gaze. As Abdul Yesufu (1982) has noted, the Mbari Clubs are a direct response to creative works of French-speaking Africa and the diaspora; the impetus of which was the Négritude movement. Négritude, as conceived by Léopold Senghor, the poet and first president of Senegal, bring notions of interculturalism and hybridity that are visible and audible in the cultural products that came out of the Mbari clubs. Senghor (1964) felt he and his colleagues needed to be not only West African, but French, international, and “afro-français” (14; see also Bâ 1973). Mbari club member and Nigerian composer Akin Euba (1935-2020) wrote his opera Chaka: An Opera in Two Chants in 1970, and it is a prime example of this kind of integrated, intercultural art. I suggest that Euba, in setting Senghor’s poetry for the opera, mirrors many of the ideals of the Négritude movement as envisioned by Senghor. As I will demonstrate, Euba achieves this in multiple ways, namely: instrumentation, vocal modes, and harmonic materials. The opera would become a touchstone of Euba’s career, revised repeatedly over almost four decades, and it still has much to say to us today concerning cultural identity, representation, and expression.

During what Chika Okeke-Agulu (2015) calls the “independence decade” (1957-1967) in Nigeria, musical intellectuals faced a substantial set of questions: As Nigeria became an independent nation, what kind of music would its new status require? How would this music measure up on the world stage? What should it be made out of and who should make it? This paper considers the work of four musical intellectuals active in the independence decade as they developed answers: Steve Rhodes, Cyprian Ekwensi, Akin Euba, and Fela Sowande. Running through their work was a shared interest in traditional music as the key to a music suitable to independence. For Rhodes, traditional music was a fast diminishing but precious resource. For Ekwensi, it was a means for fostering inter-ethnic solidarity. For Euba, it was a beacon for metropolitan modernism. And for Sowande it was the trace of a once-universal sonic ontology. Tracking these ideas through their expressions in radio programming, scholarship, journalism, fiction, and musical composition, I read these four intellectuals as engaged in a project of “ethnographic modernism”—an appropriation of the techniques of colonial ethnography to suture the pre-colonial past to the post-colonial future. What this project reflected, I argue, was these thinkers’ commitment to an “Africanist humanism” that saw recentering traditional aesthetics, ethics, and ontologies through music as necessary for the reconstruction of a universalism that could be shared by both the formerly colonized and former colonizers.

Cultural and ethnic diversity in the United States opened market opportunities for close harmony groups at the beginning of the twentieth century, a trend that reached its zenith by the end of the 1950s. As perceptions of racial segregation began to shift during this time, some consumers became more open to ethnically diverse vocal harmony groups, including doo-wop singers. Through music opportunities in close harmony singing in the U.S., racial divisions were contested, and African-American artists gained recognition and popularity among increasingly diverse audiences. Some of these audiences included trio romántico musicians In Mexico, who negotiated musical ideas coming from the north, racist ideologies within Mexican culture, and the rapidly changing musical taste of a new generation. Ensembles such as Los Tecolines and Los Tres Reyes, incorporated elements of doo-wop such as chord progressions and the use of non-syllables into their romántico style. Although quite evident in the music, little to no mention of this African American contribution can be found in the literature. In this presentation, I highlight the importance of African American musics in the trío romántico style, and explore the ways in which Mexican vocal harmony ensembles navigated issues of race while transcending musical genres and political borders. Based on archival research, musical analysis, and interviews, this paper shed light on musical, social, and political transformations during the late 1950s and early 1960s within vocal harmony groups on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico Border.