Music in Nigeria: Self-Introduction of an African Musicologist

When Dinko Fabris, IMS Immediate Past Pres­ident, and Daniel K. L. Chua, IMS President, asked me to write a brief article for Musicological Brainfood, I was really wondering where to start. I thought the best option for me is to start with a self-introduction. My thinking is that the reading audience of this online publication, by getting an insight into my journey into the world of music and musicology, would already be able to make a great start with regard to—what I would topically describe as—the way we do music in Africa.

First clarification! Notice that I mentioned “Africa” as a way of leading my readers from the world of “known” to the world of “unknown.” Certainly, many readers would be very much at home with the term African music because it is in regular use in musicological as well as ethno­musicological literature. But it must be borne in mind, as Kofi Agawu pointed out, “that [an] African music [that] constitutes a homogenous body” of artistic creation does not exist.¹ As I noted in my doctoral dissertation, the term African music “must be understood in terms of potential commonalities² that can be discerned in different forms of African music.”³

I first got to know of the IMS through Dinko Fabris. That was in 2012/13, during my year of fieldwork experience in Rome. I came as a research student of ethnomusicology from the Ethnomusicology Institute of Indiana University, Bloomington. The institute is situated within the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology of the same university. It was Mons. Vincenzo Di Gregorio, the current president of the Pontificio Istituto di Musica Sacra (PIMS), Rome, who linked me up to Fabris. I guessed then that Mons. Vincenzo must have been fascinated by the fieldwork research I was conducting with the Nigerian Catholic Community in Rome, given that I was an alumnus of PIMS, having graduated from the institute with a master’s degree in Gregorian chant in 2008. Having been enrolled to study at Indiana University from 2009, I became adept in research regarding African worship music in African (including diasporic) setting. This prompted my advisers to suggest that I travel back to Rome and study the religious worship music of diasporic Nigerian communities in Italy by way of ethnographic research. The background to the study was that I had previously worked with the Nigerian Catholic Community in Rome during my time as a student of PIMS from 2003 to 2008 both as a pastoral assistant and a music director. My research culminated in my doctoral dissertation, titled “Joyful Noise and Violent Prayer: Music and Charismatic Worship Performance in Nigerian Catholic Communities in Rome, Italy,” which I began to write as soon as I came back to the USA exactly on the eve of the American feast of Thanksgiving in November 2013 and defended before a panel of four professors (Dan Reed, Ruth Stone, Mellonee V. Burnim, and Katherine Strand) in February 2015.

I came back to Nigeria in September 2015 and began a career of multiple engagements in the area of music direction and pedagogy. I am presently the chairman of the Onitsha Archdiocesan Liturgical Music Commission with the major work of coordinating more than a thousand parish choirs scattered in various nooks and crannies of the Archdiocese of Onitsha in Nigeria. My duties involve that of assuring quality control of the choirs such that every choir does its best to operate within the parameters laid down by the church in such important liturgical music documents as the eighth chapter of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum concilium) and the Instructions on Sacred Music (Musicam sacram). One of the ways of effecting such control is through organization of regular competitions, of which the last proposed for the year 2020 is still in abeyance because of the limitations imposed on the music commission by the global COVID-19 pandemic. The commission also organizes seminars and study sessions for choirs as a way of improving the skills of choir directors and other parish musicians.

I am sure many would like to know the kind of choral singing I am called to preside over as chairman of a diocesan music commission. I say this because I remember rather fondly an experience I had in one of the Italian cities on the Adriatic coast. A lady chuckled having seen me play the organ at the Mass. She told me something that can be paraphrased thus: “I am conversant with Africa of elephants but not with Africa of an African playing an organ.”

I am aware that the readers of Musicological Brainfood would like to know how music performance functions in Africa. It would be difficult to describe how music sounds or functions in all parts of Africa because the continent is composed of multiple ethnic affiliations. For example, in Nigeria alone, there are more than 200 ethnic groups, each with its own cultural approach to music making. But beyond peculiar cultural approaches, there is much of what has been defined above as potential commonalities, for example, dominance of instrumental percussion and use of call and response.⁴

There is also a tendency for African music to be open to intercultural and acculturational influence. Many genres of African music performance incorporate elements of Western pop music giving rise to what is known as Afropop. In the area of sacred music, Nigerians sing and perform religious music in Latin, English, and in Nigerian local languages. They are at home with the ancient Christian monody, otherwise known as Gregorian chant; they are equally familiar with music from all epochs of music history, especially the artistic music of the renaissance, baroque, classical, and romantic eras. Music production and appreciation in Nigeria is not just in the realm of folk minstrelsy and pop music; there are also composers who produce works of small and huge volume for choirs to use in church service or even for stage performance.

Apart from working with local choirs through the music commission, I am also a regular university teacher. I presently lecture in one of our local universities, namely, Chukwuemeka Odu­megwu Ojukwu University, Anambra State, Nigeria. I handle courses like “Music History,” “Music and Cybertechnology,” or “Composition and Basic Tonal Harmony.” I also belong to the Nigerian Association of Musicologists and attended my first conference of the association in August 2021. Previously, I had attended annual colloquia of the Church Music Association of America (2014, 2017, 2018, and 2019) and even given lectures during breakout sessions of the association colloquia in 2017 and 2019. Then came 2019, when I met Fabris again together with some other IMS members during the international conference “Church, Music, Interpreters: A Necessary Dialogue,” organized by the Pontifical Council for Culture (November 7–9, 2019).

Now, serving as a music lecturer in the south-eastern part of Nigeria is an intriguing experience because while Igbo people love music and are very much at home with music making, the idea of “wasting one’s time” engaged in academic study of music is seen as rather novel and even problematic. As I mentioned in one of my articles,

music in Igbo culture is seen as what Italians define as passatempo but never as an occupation or a profes­sion­al career. In pre-colonial Igbo culture, only “riff-raff” would devote themselves full-time to the pro­fessional practice or study of music.⁵

In my country, particularly in the south-eastern part of Nigeria, music is studied by relatively few students, however, in—more or less—the same way as it is done in the Western academies but with the exception that learning resources might not always be as adequate as those found in many Western music departments. A typical good and hardworking Nigerian university president would likely spend a huge sum of money to procure some heavy equipment for a science laboratory or technology workshop but would not be as quick to “waste” the same amount of money or its equivalent on a grand piano or pipe organ. Therefore, the music lecturer would have to make do with what is available and encourage his or her few students to persevere.

Another music phenomenon that is presently engaging my attention in Nigeria is that of informal music academies for young people. I became fascinated with this aspect of music education partly because I saw the wonderful results of my previous engagement in similar work during my time as a music director in a junior seminary (high school) before my studies in Rome. I noticed on my return from the USA (after my studies) that many of the students I trained in music—some of whom are now priests—are really doing well in their areas of assignment because of the intellectual refinement that came with their music training.⁶ Some of them had already founded functional academies of music for young people in their places of assignment. I was also motivated to engage in kids’ music academy because such venture falls within the purview of my study of music education as my doctoral minor in Bloomington.

So, I joined the fray by starting a similar academy in my parish of residence, namely the George Handel Music Academy. I was personally fascinated by the children’s appreciation of Western music and their attachment to musical training, which they pursue with an uncommon zeal. In trying to understand this zeal, an expert in child education helped to inform me that the children must have felt “gentrified” by the exposure I was giving them to the world of classical music. For me this implied that “the children’s advertence to music opened up the door to their feeling of greater self-confidence and self-esteem.”⁷

I will conclude with an Igbo proverb which says: “Different nations speak in different tongues but in all nations, human beings cough in the same way.” There could be nuances in the way the study (and/or practice) of music (and musicology) is approached in the different continents but in the end, there is always a distinction between the musical folklore of the people, a folklore whose definitive form is seen in their folk music and classical music, sometimes referred to as Western music. In Nigeria, as in other African countries, attention is paid to these two branches of world music at all levels of formal education. While African music praxis has something to do with the use of the percussive beat as well as physical and choreographic expression, it is much more than playing drums and dancing. Besides, various levels and intensities of African versus Western acculturation and similar cultural evolutions can also lead to hybrids of musical production as can be seen in such genres as Afropop or Afrobeat. At this level, one is dealing with music making in urban life in Africa; and the contemporary evolution and emergence of urban life in Africa is presently a burning and living issue in anthropology.

Finally, I wish to thank the officials of the IMS for the outreach to Africa—through me and others—in what I would want to term ecumenical musicology or musicological ecumenism. Hopefully, as more Africans join the IMS, more sharing of ideas can lead to a development of fuller musicological knowledge and literature that is more balanced and globally encompassing.

1. Kofi Agawu, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (London: Routledge, 2003), 59.
2. Ibid., xiv.
3. Jude Orakwe, “Joyful Noise and Violent Prayer: Music and Charismatic Worship Performance in Nigerian Catholic Communities in Rome, Italy” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2015), 9. The dissertation is currently published on ProQuest.
4. I will deal with such commonalities in the future.
5. Jude Orakwe, “From Indianapolis to Nigeria: A Narrative of the Sacred Music Apostolate in the Onitsha Archdiocese Liturgical Music,” Sacred Music 144, no. 3 (2017): 28–33.
6. I am a fanatic of the Mozart effect and similar musico-educational theories.
7. Jude Orakwe, “Gentrification of Young People through Study and Practice of Music” (unpublished essay, 2020).