Composers of African Art Music in Contemporary Ghana: Locating Identities

• Author / Creator

  Smith, Patrick F.

• African art music composers in Ghanaian universities negotiate a multiplicity of identities in a time characterized by frequent international communication and travel. This thesis explores these identities and asks, what does African art music, a combination of Western and indigenous African musical elements, mean today? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European Christian missionaries introduced Ghanaians to Western styles of composition. During the pre-independence era, Ephraim Amu (1899–1995) first began to explore what it means to be African in the realm of Western-inspired art music by incorporating traditional music that could be appreciated by Ghanaians. Composers in subsequent generations, such as J. H. Kwabena Nketia (b. 1921), studied and continue to study and teach composition in Ghanaian and foreign universities, placing African art music amidst global flows of Western-inspired art musical practices. Students and professors at three Ghanaian universities navigate Christian, Pan-African, national, ethnic, and cosmopolitan identities through their compositions.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Music
  • Identity
  • Ghana
  • African art music

• Graduation date

  Fall 2012

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3M89M

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.