Bode Omojola
Biographic Data
| ID | 90304 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bode Omojola |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bode |
| FAMILY NAME | Omojola |
| SIGNATURE | OMOJOLA B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Mount Holyoke College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Music of Taiwo Shango: Narrativity, Archive, and Postcolonial Resonances
Emblems of the African Musical Postcolony: Music and the Interrogation of Power in Africa
The power of African music to critically engage with new experiences is demonstrated in its ongoing responsiveness to the historical and power dynamics of colonialism. The overlaps between precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods in terms of the social and political experiences that define them provide the context for my analysis of what I call the African musical postcolony. By linking musical form, styles, and biographies to social and …
Composing and Contemplating African Melo-Rhythmic Polyphony
K. Agawu (2016). The African imagination in music. Oxford University Press, 372 pp. Growing up in the Ekiti region in Western Nigeria, home and school represented two contrasting worlds of music for me. The modal music that I sang at home differed significantly from the tonal harmonies that we
African Theatre 19: Opera & Music Theatre
The Yorùbá God of Drumming: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Wood that Talks edited by Amanda Villepastour
Àyàn Àgalú, the man believed to be the first Yorùbá drummer, is regarded as deity, spirit, and ancestor (Euba 1990: 90; Omojola 2012: 16). This tripartite characterization highlights the multiple resonances of Àyàn Àgalú's identity. For some people, he exists as a religious deity, while for many others, he represents an ancestral spirit believed to reside in their drums. Most traditional Yorùbá drummers, however, regard Àyàn Àgalú (or Àyàn) as th…
African Maestro: The Life and Work of Emeritus Professor J. H. Kwabena Nketia
Engaging Modernity: Asante in the Twenty-First Century
Book Review| January 01 2019 Engaging Modernity: Asante in the Twenty-First Century Engaging Modernity: Asante in the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. Kwasi Ampene and Nana Kwadwo Nyantakyi II. 2016. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing. 329 pp., color photographs, bibliography. Paper, $69.99; online edition available free through https://www.publishing.umich.edu/publications/maize-books/engaging-modernity/. Bode Omojola Bode Omojola Mount Holyoke College…
Music for the Gods
During the 1980s, ethnomusicological literature focused extensively on the problematics of identity in the analysis of music and performance practice. In conceptual terms, Bode Omojola, in Yoruba Music in the Twentieth Century: Identity, Agency, and Performance Practice, does not entirely chart a new course diverging from the presuppositions of, for want of a better term,this paradigm. However, his deep and broad knowledge of Yoruba culture and m…
Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia
Richard C. Jankowsky, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2010, xiv + 237, (with CD) Trance and spirit possession rituals have continued to attract the attention of ethnomusicologists
Igbadun in Yoruba Performance: History, Social Discourse and Indigenous Aesthetics in the Music of Lagbaja
Songs of the King’s Wives: Women, Power and Performance in the Yoruba Public Sphere
Indigenous festivals, which rely significantly on music and dance, often constitute the village public sphere and the social arena within which the structures of power are performed and negotiated in tradi- tional African communities. This article discusses two unique musical traditions which feature prominently at annual traditional festivals in Emure-Ekiti, a Yoruba town in Western Nigeria. The musical traditions are orin olori (songs of the ki…
Politics, Identity, and Nostalgia in Nigerian Music: A Study of Victor Olaiya's Highlife
Research Article| April 01 2009 Politics, Identity, and Nostalgia in Nigerian Music: A Study of Victor Olaiya's Highlife Bode Omojola Bode Omojola Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnomusicology (2009) 53 (2): 249–276. https://doi.org/10.2307/25653068 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bode Omojola; Politics, Identity, and Nostalgia in Nigerian Music: A Stud…
African Pianism as an Intercultural Compositional Framework: A Study of the Piano Works of Akin Euba
Bode Omojola, African Pianism as an Intercultural Compositional Framework: A Study of the Piano Works of Akin Euba, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 32, No. 2, The Landscape of African Music (Summer, 2001), pp. 153-174
Style in modern Nigerian Art music: The pioneering works of Fela Sowande
The Nigerian musical landscape changed significantly following the advent of Christian missionary activity and British colonial administration in the later nineteenth century. New idioms of musical practice which have evolved as a result of this historical process include a new tradition of religious, Christian, music, urban syncretic popular styles, new operatic forms and European-derived art/ classical music. This article focuses on one of thes…
Historical Background of Modern Nigerian Art Music
European influenced musical idioms have been emerging in Nigeria since the beginning of this century. These idioms can be classified into four distinct categories: indigenous church music, urban syncretic popular forms, modern folk opera and Nigerian modern Art Music. The emergence of these forms is a result of an historical process which began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Three main factors can be identified as directly responsible f…
Summary and Conclusion
ART MUSIC IN NIGERIA is the most comprehensive book on the works of modem Nigerian composers who have been influenced by European classical music. Relying on over 500 scores, archival materials and interviews with many Nigerian composers, the author traces the historical developments of this new idiom in Nigeria and provides a critical and detailed analysis of certain works. Written in a refreshing and lucid style and amply illustrated with music…
Vocal Works
1. PART SONGS Linguistic Demands and Musical Considerations The writing of part songs which make use of a text in a traditional language poses a considerable challenge to Nigerian composers, especially when the pre-compositional demand of text (that is, the need to maintain the linguistic contour of text) is an important consideration. The prevalence of harmonic parallelisms in African music has been wrongly interpreted by some writers to be stro…
Index
Orchestral Works
There are only a few European-type orchestras in Nigeria. The most outstanding of them are the Apostolic Faith Orchestras in Ibadan and Lagos. Because symphony orchestras are not the norm in Nigeria, composers often prefer to write works for solo instruments, chamber orchestra and choirs, which can be more easily performed; and it is not surprising that those orchestral works written are normally commissioned. Like the piano works discussed in th…
Introduction
Although a considerable amount of research has been carried out on traditional African music, contemporary musical idioms in Africa have received limited attention by scholars. It is only in recent times that scholars began to accept the fact that, while the preservation and documentation of traditional forms are laudable research projects, new, modern musical practices are also worthy of attention. The emergence of new musical idioms in Nigeria …
Nigerian Composers and National Culture: A stylistic survey of Nigerian Art Music
Although it was through the Church that the concept of music as a contemplative art received widespread popularity in Nigeria, it was left to the efforts of formally trained composers and musicologists to forge new idioms and styles in their works to develop a modern tradition of Nigerian Art Music. While the earliest of them, T.K.E. Phillips, started composing in the 1920s followed by Fela Sowande in 1940, it was not until the early 1960s that s…
African Pianism
For those composers interested in cross-cultural musical synthesis (there is) a... line of evolution in the use of the Western pianoforte in combination with African drums and other instruments of percussion. The piano already displays certain affinities with African music, and by creating a type of African Pianism to blend with African instruments it should be possible to achieve a successful fusion. The piano first appeared in Nigeria in the mi…
Towards an Anthology of Nigerian Art Music
Art. Music in Nigeria is essentially a ‘literary genre’. For works in the idiom to be analysed, understood or performed by students, scholars and performers, they have to be available in clear and legible notation. As of now, most of the works in the idiom are yet to be published and exist only in scores, usually in the often illegible musical handwriting of their various composers. The only exceptions include the early choral and instrumental wo…
Art Music in Ghana: An Introduction
The historical development of modern Ghanaian Art Music is very similar to that of Nigeria. As in Nigeria, the activities of British colonial administrators, missionaries and teachers helped to introduce and consolidate the practice and consumption of European liturgical Christian music as well as European classical music — the two musical genres — which provided the foundations for the emergence of modern Ghanaian Art music. As in Nigeria, the m…
Nigerian Art Music: With an Introduction Study of Ghanaian Art Music
ART MUSIC IN NIGERIA is the most comprehensive book on the works of modem Nigerian composers who have been influenced by European classical music. Relying on over 500 scores, archival materials and interviews with many Nigerian composers, the author traces the historical developments of this new idiom in Nigeria and provides a critical and detailed analysis of certain works. Written in a refreshing and lucid style and amply illustrated with music…
Nigerian Art Music: With an Introduction Study of Ghanaian Art Music
ART MUSIC IN NIGERIA is the most comprehensive book on the works of modem Nigerian composers who have been influenced by European classical music. Relying on over 500 scores, archival materials and interviews with many Nigerian composers, the author traces the historical developments of this new idiom in Nigeria and provides a critical and detailed analysis of certain works. Written in a refreshing and lucid style and amply illustrated with music…
Style in modern Nigerian Art music: The pioneering works of Fela Sowande
The Nigerian musical landscape changed significantly following the advent of Christian missionary activity and British colonial administration in the later nineteenth century. New idioms of musical practice which have evolved as a result of this historical process include a new tradition of religious, Christian, music, urban syncretic popular styles, new operatic forms and European-derived art/ classical music. This article focuses on one of thes…
Music of Taiwo Shango: Narrativity, Archive, and Postcolonial Resonances
Politics, Identity, and Nostalgia in Nigerian Music: A Study of Victor Olaiya's Highlife
Research Article| April 01 2009 Politics, Identity, and Nostalgia in Nigerian Music: A Study of Victor Olaiya's Highlife Bode Omojola Bode Omojola Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnomusicology (2009) 53 (2): 249–276. https://doi.org/10.2307/25653068 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bode Omojola; Politics, Identity, and Nostalgia in Nigerian Music: A Stud…
Historical Background of Modern Nigerian Art Music
European influenced musical idioms have been emerging in Nigeria since the beginning of this century. These idioms can be classified into four distinct categories: indigenous church music, urban syncretic popular forms, modern folk opera and Nigerian modern Art Music. The emergence of these forms is a result of an historical process which began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Three main factors can be identified as directly responsible f…
Summary and Conclusion
ART MUSIC IN NIGERIA is the most comprehensive book on the works of modem Nigerian composers who have been influenced by European classical music. Relying on over 500 scores, archival materials and interviews with many Nigerian composers, the author traces the historical developments of this new idiom in Nigeria and provides a critical and detailed analysis of certain works. Written in a refreshing and lucid style and amply illustrated with music…
Vocal Works
1. PART SONGS Linguistic Demands and Musical Considerations The writing of part songs which make use of a text in a traditional language poses a considerable challenge to Nigerian composers, especially when the pre-compositional demand of text (that is, the need to maintain the linguistic contour of text) is an important consideration. The prevalence of harmonic parallelisms in African music has been wrongly interpreted by some writers to be stro…
Index
Orchestral Works
There are only a few European-type orchestras in Nigeria. The most outstanding of them are the Apostolic Faith Orchestras in Ibadan and Lagos. Because symphony orchestras are not the norm in Nigeria, composers often prefer to write works for solo instruments, chamber orchestra and choirs, which can be more easily performed; and it is not surprising that those orchestral works written are normally commissioned. Like the piano works discussed in th…
Introduction
Although a considerable amount of research has been carried out on traditional African music, contemporary musical idioms in Africa have received limited attention by scholars. It is only in recent times that scholars began to accept the fact that, while the preservation and documentation of traditional forms are laudable research projects, new, modern musical practices are also worthy of attention. The emergence of new musical idioms in Nigeria …
Nigerian Composers and National Culture: A stylistic survey of Nigerian Art Music
Although it was through the Church that the concept of music as a contemplative art received widespread popularity in Nigeria, it was left to the efforts of formally trained composers and musicologists to forge new idioms and styles in their works to develop a modern tradition of Nigerian Art Music. While the earliest of them, T.K.E. Phillips, started composing in the 1920s followed by Fela Sowande in 1940, it was not until the early 1960s that s…
African Pianism
For those composers interested in cross-cultural musical synthesis (there is) a... line of evolution in the use of the Western pianoforte in combination with African drums and other instruments of percussion. The piano already displays certain affinities with African music, and by creating a type of African Pianism to blend with African instruments it should be possible to achieve a successful fusion. The piano first appeared in Nigeria in the mi…
Towards an Anthology of Nigerian Art Music
Art. Music in Nigeria is essentially a ‘literary genre’. For works in the idiom to be analysed, understood or performed by students, scholars and performers, they have to be available in clear and legible notation. As of now, most of the works in the idiom are yet to be published and exist only in scores, usually in the often illegible musical handwriting of their various composers. The only exceptions include the early choral and instrumental wo…
Art Music in Ghana: An Introduction
The historical development of modern Ghanaian Art Music is very similar to that of Nigeria. As in Nigeria, the activities of British colonial administrators, missionaries and teachers helped to introduce and consolidate the practice and consumption of European liturgical Christian music as well as European classical music — the two musical genres — which provided the foundations for the emergence of modern Ghanaian Art music. As in Nigeria, the m…
Nigerian Art Music: With an Introduction Study of Ghanaian Art Music
ART MUSIC IN NIGERIA is the most comprehensive book on the works of modem Nigerian composers who have been influenced by European classical music. Relying on over 500 scores, archival materials and interviews with many Nigerian composers, the author traces the historical developments of this new idiom in Nigeria and provides a critical and detailed analysis of certain works. Written in a refreshing and lucid style and amply illustrated with music…
Style in modern Nigerian Art music: The pioneering works of Fela Sowande
The Nigerian musical landscape changed significantly following the advent of Christian missionary activity and British colonial administration in the later nineteenth century. New idioms of musical practice which have evolved as a result of this historical process include a new tradition of religious, Christian, music, urban syncretic popular styles, new operatic forms and European-derived art/ classical music. This article focuses on one of thes…
African Pianism as an Intercultural Compositional Framework: A Study of the Piano Works of Akin Euba
Bode Omojola, African Pianism as an Intercultural Compositional Framework: A Study of the Piano Works of Akin Euba, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 32, No. 2, The Landscape of African Music (Summer, 2001), pp. 153-174
Igbadun in Yoruba Performance: History, Social Discourse and Indigenous Aesthetics in the Music of Lagbaja
Songs of the King’s Wives: Women, Power and Performance in the Yoruba Public Sphere
Indigenous festivals, which rely significantly on music and dance, often constitute the village public sphere and the social arena within which the structures of power are performed and negotiated in tradi- tional African communities. This article discusses two unique musical traditions which feature prominently at annual traditional festivals in Emure-Ekiti, a Yoruba town in Western Nigeria. The musical traditions are orin olori (songs of the ki…
Politics, Identity, and Nostalgia in Nigerian Music: A Study of Victor Olaiya's Highlife
Research Article| April 01 2009 Politics, Identity, and Nostalgia in Nigerian Music: A Study of Victor Olaiya's Highlife Bode Omojola Bode Omojola Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnomusicology (2009) 53 (2): 249–276. https://doi.org/10.2307/25653068 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bode Omojola; Politics, Identity, and Nostalgia in Nigerian Music: A Stud…
Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia
Richard C. Jankowsky, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2010, xiv + 237, (with CD) Trance and spirit possession rituals have continued to attract the attention of ethnomusicologists
Music for the Gods
During the 1980s, ethnomusicological literature focused extensively on the problematics of identity in the analysis of music and performance practice. In conceptual terms, Bode Omojola, in Yoruba Music in the Twentieth Century: Identity, Agency, and Performance Practice, does not entirely chart a new course diverging from the presuppositions of, for want of a better term,this paradigm. However, his deep and broad knowledge of Yoruba culture and m…
African Maestro: The Life and Work of Emeritus Professor J. H. Kwabena Nketia
Engaging Modernity: Asante in the Twenty-First Century
Book Review| January 01 2019 Engaging Modernity: Asante in the Twenty-First Century Engaging Modernity: Asante in the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed. Kwasi Ampene and Nana Kwadwo Nyantakyi II. 2016. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing. 329 pp., color photographs, bibliography. Paper, $69.99; online edition available free through https://www.publishing.umich.edu/publications/maize-books/engaging-modernity/. Bode Omojola Bode Omojola Mount Holyoke College…
African Theatre 19: Opera & Music Theatre
The Yorùbá God of Drumming: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Wood that Talks edited by Amanda Villepastour
Àyàn Àgalú, the man believed to be the first Yorùbá drummer, is regarded as deity, spirit, and ancestor (Euba 1990: 90; Omojola 2012: 16). This tripartite characterization highlights the multiple resonances of Àyàn Àgalú's identity. For some people, he exists as a religious deity, while for many others, he represents an ancestral spirit believed to reside in their drums. Most traditional Yorùbá drummers, however, regard Àyàn Àgalú (or Àyàn) as th…
Composing and Contemplating African Melo-Rhythmic Polyphony
K. Agawu (2016). The African imagination in music. Oxford University Press, 372 pp. Growing up in the Ekiti region in Western Nigeria, home and school represented two contrasting worlds of music for me. The modal music that I sang at home differed significantly from the tonal harmonies that we
Emblems of the African Musical Postcolony: Music and the Interrogation of Power in Africa
The power of African music to critically engage with new experiences is demonstrated in its ongoing responsiveness to the historical and power dynamics of colonialism. The overlaps between precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods in terms of the social and political experiences that define them provide the context for my analysis of what I call the African musical postcolony. By linking musical form, styles, and biographies to social and …
Music of Taiwo Shango: Narrativity, Archive, and Postcolonial Resonances
Art (19 works) · Diverse Musicological Studies (14 works) · Music History and Culture (12 works) · Literature (11 works) · Visual arts (10 works) · History (9 works) · Musical (8 works) · History (7 works) · Linguistics (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works)