2022-2023 Tsou Scholar Kofi Agawu
Thursday, April 6, 2023, 5:30 p.m.
Virtual Event
Lecture: "African Art music and the challenge of postcolonial composition".
Kofi Agawu (CUNY Graduate Center) was born in Ghana, where he received his initial education before studying composition and analysis in the UK and musicology in the US. His work focuses on analytical issues in selected repertoires of Western Europe and West Africa, which are not as widely known as Agawu believes they ought to be. In his talk, Composing in the Postcolony: A Perspective on African Art Music, Agawu will 鈥渓ay bare some of art music鈥檚 enabling conditions, starting with its birth out of the twin forces of missionization and colonization.鈥�
鈥淔or many people,鈥� Agawu writes, 鈥淎frican music typically indexes 鈥榯raditional鈥� music of ostensibly ancient origins or varieties of modern 鈥榩opular鈥� music. And yet, since the middle of the nineteenth century, Black Africans have routinely composed and performed for non-participating audiences such items as art songs, choral anthems, piano pieces, folk operas, and music for large and small ensembles. How might we explain the invisibility of this tradition in the competing discourses of music studies today?鈥�
About the Speaker
Kofi Agawu, PhD is the author of five monographs and numerous articles and reviews. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal, the Frank Llewellyn Harrison Medal, the Howard T. Behrman Award from Princeton University, and honorary degrees from Stellenbosch University (2017) and Bard College (2019). He has served on the editorial boards of leading journals in musicology, music theory, African studies and ethnomusicology. A Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, he is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, Honorary Member of the Royal Musical Association, and Adjunct Professor in the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon. He was Music Theorist in Residence for the Dutch-Flemish Music Theory Society in 2008-09 and George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford University in 2012-13. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Music at the CUNY Graduate Center.