African Music, Ideology and Utopia

Abstract

In a recent article entitled “Is African Music Possible?” Abiola Irele describes the dilemma of African art music, understood by the author as “a conscious and highly elaborated [musical] form [. . .] bound to the musical language of Europe” (56-57). He depicts in detail the contradictions of a music that, in the face of structural and experiential impediments, “has yet to take root within the contemporary culture of Africa” (56). The article undertakes a wide-ranging description of the ongoing dialogue between “art” and “folk” musics, tracing their intermingling in Western music from Handel and Mozart through Schoenberg, Bartok, and Stravinsky, and in the more recent concert music of the Nigerian composers Fela Sowande, Adam Fiberissima, Akin Euba, and Ayo Bankole. Regarding the former, he concludes that Western concert music has backed itself into a corner of opacity, in which “serious musical composition has come to be understood in certain so-called avant-garde circles in the West in such narrow terms that any work that makes the slightest concession to tonality or that recalls the Romantic convention of musical feeling is rejected out of hand” (66). Not surprisingly, given this argument, the African composers Irele describes appear likewise unable, despite certain limited successes, to articulate a viable musical language using Western musical materials. Lacking workable models of “conscious and [. . .] elaborated [musical] form” from either the West or indigenous cultures, “they are compelled to hover, at best, between the two traditions without achieving a satisfactory integration of both.” Irele’s pessimistic conclusion is that African concert music “which meets a definition of individual art in the