Composing and Contemplating African Melo-Rhythmic Polyphony

Introduction

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 performed at school and in church, two public spaces where the cultural impact of British colonial rule lingers. At variance with Handel and Bach's diatonic and triadic harmonies are the secundal harmonies of Ekiti music, sung to articulate cadential points. The cultural practice of harmonizing in major seconds was at the core of the dual consciousness that typified my childhood musicality. The minimalist use of harmony in Ekiti music raises pertinent questions. What, for example, is the significance of cadential seconds within a predominantly unisonous piece? Should the intentional nature of cadential harmony accord it more harmonic weight than parallel harmonies, which are sometimes considered to represent mere melodic duplications? However, if the aesthetic significance of cadential seconds raises questions, its utilitarian value in Ekiti is indisputable. As demonstrated on many occasions that I witnessed, neighbors often harmonize with one another in songs that signal the end of a domestic altercation. Social harmony is the ultimate goal of Ekiti music.

The subject of harmony is the focus of my response to Kofi Agawu's (2016) book, The African Imagination in Music. In his discussion of African "Harmony, or Simultaneous Doing" (pp. 267–304), Agawu provides a survey of harmonic environments and analyzes modal procedures and principles of part formation. He draws attention to the relative paucity of ethno-theoretical musings in Africa and tackles the issue of terminology. He prefers the use of the term harmony because it enables the interrogation of vertical and linear dimensions, undermines difference-oriented discourses, and enables cross-cultural comparisons (p. 274). His discussion of harmony is part of a wide-ranging exploration of the musical facets of the African imagination, which also includes melody, rhythm, and form. Richly illustrated with recordings, transcriptions, and analysis of musical examples from different parts of the continent, Agawu's book expands the discourse of African music far beyond the scope and depth covered in earlier textbooks by authors like Kwabena Nketia (1974) and Francis Bebey (1999).

Building on Agawu's discussion of the music of Nigerian composers (see p. 300), I provide a chronological sketch of post-traditional harmonic practices in Nigeria to highlight the significance of harmony in the search by Nigerian composers for a truly African idiom of modern art music. And drawing on the critical elements of his discussion, I analyze a recent composition of mine, Dance of the Crossroads (Omojola, n. d.), to illustrate the concept of melo-rhythmic polyphony as a premise for interrogating African harmonic practices.

A Chronological Sketch of Nigeria's Post-traditional Harmony

Theophilus Ekundayo Phillips, one of the major pillars of modern musical composition in Nigeria, drew similarities between Yoruba music and the European harmony "of the period of the old modes, beginning with plainsong and culminating in the sixteenth century" (Phillips, 1953, p. 14). He urged his colleagues to adopt the European idiom in their compositions, adding that the "semitonal leading-note and its associated functional dominant chords" of the common practice era should be avoided. He continues:

If then as I have endeavoured to prove, there is a close similarity between our present Yorùbá music and the Plainsong of the Europeans, should we not be proud of it and regard our music as a noble heritage worth preserving? This is exactly what should be our aim in planning our church music (Phillips, 1953, 14).

It is important to note that, despite Phillips' strong advocacy and the strong impact of modal procedures in his compositions, functional dominant chords recur in his music. In his Èmi Yíó Gbé Ojú Mi Sókè Wonnı (choir and organ), a Yoruba setting of Psalm 121, for example, pentatonic melodies are sometimes enclosed within V-I cadences, generating a mixed modal language.

Some younger composers, although they may be inspired by Phillips, have charted different...