Files
Abstract
The scholarly and compositional work of Akin Euba, Nigerian composer and ethnomusicologist, serves as a framework for the study of intercultural music within the context of art music as it is typically understood in the Euro-North American academy. Euba was a composer-scholar who trained in universities in Africa, Europe, and the United States. He not only wrote music that pulled from multiple cultures, but defined and published his theories in academic journals, magazines, and books. Euba’s opera Chaka: An Opera in Two Chants (1970) represents an exemplary piece of intercultural music, where intercultural elements are embedded within the structure of the music itself.
Through a combination of ethnographic and experiential research and musical analysis, I consider how Euba uses musical space to tell the story. I consider musical space that is both physical, because we perceive it or are aware of it with our senses, our physical bodies, but also abstract and ephemeral, as an atmosphere created by musical sound. I also consider as musical spaces the span of Euba’s career and Chaka’s place in it, the Mbari Club for artists and writers in Ibadan and its influence on Euba, various spaces where the opera was performed, and a sonic atmosphere based on Euba’s dundun research; in this space the opera’s themes live and move.
Using the language and musical forms of European colonizing countries, Euba subverts them by embedding Yoruba, Ewe, and Akan musics into the structure. With this subversion, Euba is essentially performing musical work akin to what the Négritude poets did with French in the 1930s, “turning its own language and concepts…against it, with the aim of exposing the contradictions in the same norms and values that justified colonial oppression and slavery” (Okoth 2020, VI). Through structural analysis based on the work of Nzewi (2007a, 96) and Ekwueme (1975, 27) combined with an intercultural topical analysis, I argue Euba upends musical norms to convey layered forms of meaning. By interrogating colonial languages and Euro-North American art music in this way, Euba is essentially asking, ‘who is really civilized?’
Through a combination of ethnographic and experiential research and musical analysis, I consider how Euba uses musical space to tell the story. I consider musical space that is both physical, because we perceive it or are aware of it with our senses, our physical bodies, but also abstract and ephemeral, as an atmosphere created by musical sound. I also consider as musical spaces the span of Euba’s career and Chaka’s place in it, the Mbari Club for artists and writers in Ibadan and its influence on Euba, various spaces where the opera was performed, and a sonic atmosphere based on Euba’s dundun research; in this space the opera’s themes live and move.
Using the language and musical forms of European colonizing countries, Euba subverts them by embedding Yoruba, Ewe, and Akan musics into the structure. With this subversion, Euba is essentially performing musical work akin to what the Négritude poets did with French in the 1930s, “turning its own language and concepts…against it, with the aim of exposing the contradictions in the same norms and values that justified colonial oppression and slavery” (Okoth 2020, VI). Through structural analysis based on the work of Nzewi (2007a, 96) and Ekwueme (1975, 27) combined with an intercultural topical analysis, I argue Euba upends musical norms to convey layered forms of meaning. By interrogating colonial languages and Euro-North American art music in this way, Euba is essentially asking, ‘who is really civilized?’