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Contemplating African art music: a reflection on the Akin Euba Symposium and Concert

One of the widely acknowledged features of African music is its organic and proximal connection to social and cultural life. Activities such as marriage ceremonies, funeral rites, the installation of kings and religious festivals depend significantly on musical performance in articulating the social and religious norms that hold a society together. As exemplified in the Yoruba dùndún performance, music in African communities is often an intensely social experience in which musical contemplation – which I define as the act of processing and engaging with music in terms of, and beyond, its formal and aesthetic principles – is socially grounded. The art of musical enjoyment – or the process of musical contemplation – is not limited to the processing of musical aesthetics. Quite often musical contemplation is complete only when there is an extra-musical context (social or religious, for example) within which one engages with the appeal of musical creativity and the dynamics of performance. If the Yoruba tradition is indicative, traditional African musicians often situate and conceive the aesthetic or entertaining elements of their performance (the aesthetic or congeneric space) within the specific context of that performance (the embodied space), and do so in ways that are referential to the values of the larger society (the social space).1 What they generate in the process is an integrative system of musical signification. The connections between aesthetic, embodied and social spaces provide an important background for understanding how modern African performances tend to depart from traditional practices. In a contemporary work for piano and Yoruba dùndún drums, for example, changes are apparent in the context of performance (concert hall), the musical sound (piano as well as the syntactical and aesthetic constructs marking its use), and the social significance (elitism, modernism and/or individuated contemplation). More significantly, however, the process of connecting these spaces in ways that facilitate an integrated system of contemplation is often unarticulated by the composer or unbeknownst to the listener. The degree to which such connections are forged and the mode of forging them would certainly