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4 - Akin Euba

African Art Music, Intercultural Composition and Creative Ethnomusicology

from Part II - Two Case Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2024

Björn Heile
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
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Summary

The Nigerian-born composer Akin Euba (1935–2020) saw it as his life’s mission to create an ‘African art music’: ‘a form of music [that is] universal to all Africa’. As the chapter will outline, his career took him from Lagos to Bayreuth (Germany) and, eventually, Pittsburgh (USA), in the course of which he came up with the notions of ‘African pianism’, ‘creative ethnomusicology’ and, finally, ‘intercultural composition’, of which he was an acknowledged pioneer. Rather than seeing intercultural composition as a contradiction of African art music, I argue that Euba’s music embodies the concept of cosmopolitanism as a series of concentric circles as proposed by the Stoics, whereby the local (Yoruba) is contained in a wider (pan-African) sphere, which is in turn encapsulated in the universal. Compositionally, this vision is realised through the combination of elements from Yoruba music, such as timelines, other African influences from the likes of xylophone and mbira music and Western modernism, exemplified by serialism. As my analyses show, these elements are integrated to such an extent as to become inextricable.

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Musical Modernism in Global Perspective
Entangled Histories on a Shared Planet
, pp. 153 - 177
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Akin Euba
  • Björn Heile, University of Glasgow
  • Book: Musical Modernism in Global Perspective
  • Online publication: 23 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009491716.005
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  • Akin Euba
  • Björn Heile, University of Glasgow
  • Book: Musical Modernism in Global Perspective
  • Online publication: 23 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009491716.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Akin Euba
  • Björn Heile, University of Glasgow
  • Book: Musical Modernism in Global Perspective
  • Online publication: 23 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009491716.005
Available formats
×