Ozah

AAWM JOURNAL VOL. 3 NO. 1 (2013)

Building Bridges Between African Traditional and Western Art Music: A Study of Joshua Uzoigwe’s Egwu Amala

Marie Agatha Ozah

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Abstract:

The use of folk music in western art composition has its roots in the works of Béla Bartók (1881-1945). Motivated by his interest in folk music and contemporary renaissance of attention in rational national culture, Bartók in 1908, collected and studied old Magyar folk melodies, and later incorporated elements of these peasant music into his compositions. His style thus became a symbiosis of oral folk music, classicism, and modernism. Akin Euba has, in recent times, popularized this approach to musical composition through his theory of creative musicology.

This blending of traditional and Western art idioms have underscored the compositions of many African art music composers, including Joshua Uzoigwe, a Nigerian ethnomusicologist and composer, who have explored and utilized traditional music resources as the principal basis of their modern art music compositions.

Among Uzoigwe’s many works is his famed Talking Drums for Solo Piano. This collection consists of five pieces that draw upon rhythmic and melodic characteristics of Igbo folk music. My paper focuses on one of these pieces, Egwu Amala, because its sonic and rhythmic structures are derived from Égwú Àmàlà, a popular women’s dance genre of the Ogbaru people of southern Nigeria. I argue how Uzoigwe’s ethnomusicological scholarship and compositional skills articulate intercultural approaches to contemporary African art music creativity. Engaging Égwú Àmàlà as a pre-compositional resource, I analyze the musical components of this traditional dance to explain those unique folksy characteristics that influenced the conception, creativity, and the structure of Uzoigwe’s contemporary piano composition, Egwu Amala.

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Contributor Information:

Marie Agatha Ozah, HHCJ, is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Duquesne University.

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