Akin Euba: An Introduction to the Life and Music of a Nigerian Composer

Abstract

A (randomly selected) list bearing the names Achebe, Armah, Ngugi, and Soyinka would need no further gloss for readers of this journal. It is safe to assume that we have all read something by each of them. But consider another list, also randomly generated: Amu, Bankole, El-Dabh, Euba, Okelo, and Sowande. Are we not more likely to ask who they are? On learning that they are musicians, composers of so-called a few of us may say that we have heard of one or two of them while the majority of us will probably admit to never having heard a note composed by any of them. Unlike that of their European counterparts, the musical diet of African intellectuals consists mainly of varieties of so-called popular music, a largely urban and international phenomenon propped up by a massive technology that ensures that even unwilling listeners cannot escape from it. Art is significantly absent from this diet. A few self-aware intellectuals may see the potential in so-called traditional music, but few of them listen to it with any regularity and fewer still join in making it. Traditional music, with its close affinities to the routines of village life, is kept alive by rural populations, including several transplanted ones. The point has often been made that the art-popular-traditional classification is at best a flexible and general guide to music in Africa. In some places, traditional music is as popular as popular music; elsewhere, its contents betray as much Western influence as popular music. Similarly, certain forms of Western-derived popular music have been in active and continuous use in parts of Africa to merit the designation traditional. Note, however, that attempts to improve the explanatory potential of this categorization often leave untouched the status of Africa's answer to the high musical traditions of Europe epitomized in the compositions of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. No one would argue that the works of art music composers in Africa are in any sense popular. Nor is one likely to argue that these works, designed for consumption in auditoriums by passive, non-participating audiences, thus mimicking the tradition of European Classical music since the eighteenth century, are traditional, if by traditional one means that they are rooted in some indigenous practice, ritual, or institution. These limitations of African art music prompt several questions. Are our composers simply not as skilled as their European counterparts? Are we lacking institutions of patronage for the dissemination of this small repertoire, a repertoire targeted towards elite audiences? Is the actual musical language of Classical music fundamentally foreign to African sensibilities? Why are many African

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