The Music of Fela Sowande. Encounters, African Identity and Creative Ethnomusicology

Sowande began his career as a jazz musician, a fact that may be said to reflect his awareness of black music in America as an extension of African music, elaborated well beyond the forms from which it sprang on the ancestral continent but preserving a connection to its primary origin. This awareness can be ascribed to the value he attached to the creative potential of the folk as a source of musical ideas. It is thus not surprising that, in a lecture delivered at the University of Ibadan in the late fifties, Sowande expressed a kinship with the central European composers we have evoked above. This kinship is felt not only in THE AFRICAN SUITE (for strings orchestra) which has remained his best known work, but also, and more powerfully, in his FOLK SYMPHONY (for full orchestra) composed and performed as part of the Nigerian independence celebrations in 1960, a work whose vivid drama is built upon the foregrounding, in symphonic terms, of the proverbial and symbolic associations of traditional melodies drawn from his indigenous Yoruba cultural background. Omojola presents Sowande's work as a crossing of borders. Coming at a time when the continent appears to be on the verge of a remarkable upsurge of musical expression in a new and original mode. Dr. Omojola's new book not only draws attention to these studies by exploring in scholarly terms this new and rich area of creativity on the African continent but also extends the scope of African musical studies by exploring in scholarly terms this new and rich area of creativity on the African continent. (Excerpted from the Foreword by F. Abiola Irele)