18 november 2008

Tonality as Colonizing Force in Africa by Kofi Agawu

Tonality, understood as a hierarchically-organized system of relations animated by desire, accompanied Europe’s ostensibly civilizing mission to Africa (from the 1800s on). Church music, anthems and light music for dancing and entertainment enhanced or even defined civic and religious life in communities in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, South Africa and elsewhere. These and other accoutrements of modernity were built on tonal scaffoldings. Although recent postcolonial criticism has continued to interrogate aspects of Europe’s legacy in Africa—in matters broadly cultural, in language, and in political and educational systems—the pervasive and lasting impact of hymn-derived functional tonality and the concomitant suppression of the richness and potency of indigenous or precolonial African tonal resources have not received adequate attention. I argue that a program for decolonization that ignores the transformation in African musical consciousness wrought by tonality, or that overlooks the fact that many modern Africans are trapped in a prison-house of tonality, cannot achieve its ultimate emancipatory goals.

V. Kofi Agawu is professor of music and African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, having taught earlier at Princeton University, Yale University, Cornell University, King’s College London, Duke University, and Haverford College. Agawu is author of three scholarly books: Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music (Princeton University Press, 1991), African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (Routledge, 2003). The first book, an analysis of the use of signs and symbols in the works of 18th- and 19th-century European composers – including Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven – won the Society for Music Theory's 1994 Outstanding Publication Award. Among European composers, Agawu has also written extensively on Mahler, and on Chopin, Schubert, and Stravinsky.

A native of Ghana, Agawu earned a bachelor's degree in music from Reading University in the United Kingdom in 1977, a master's degree in musical analysis from King's College London in 1978, and a Ph.D. in historical musicology from Stanford University in 1982. He is also certified by the Royal Academy of Music in the teaching of singing and by the Royal College of Music in musicianship and theory. His honors include the prestigious Dent Medal in 1992, awarded by the Royal Musical Association and International Musicological Society.