Re-searching music education for civic activism1

1. Conference keynote from the 5th International Conference for Research in Music Education, University of Exeter, April 2007.

Abstract

I am nurtured by indigenous African musical arts education philosophy and practice, and encountered literary music education and scholarship in adulthood. It is with dual musical sensibilities that I ponder the human mission of school music education.

My reflections will derive from experiences of applying African indigenous musical arts in classrooms and practical research sites. The objective has been to awaken the instincts of students who are searching to know music for a fulfilling musical life. Researching the nature of the fuel (the innate musical disposition of learners) is critical for better determining the nature of the spark (knowledge content and actualization strategies) that will ignite innate capabilities into a fulfilling professional pursuit or amateur engagement with the music of life.

Notes

1. Conference keynote from the 5th International Conference for Research in Music Education, University of Exeter, April 2007.

2. Indigenous Africans do not conceive or practice [European] masquerade theatre. Spirit manifests in African musical theatre conceptualizations are believable extra-terrestrial (masked) agents that adopt extraordinary physical forms, behavior and sometimes voices, and interact in realistic human experiences in order to dramatically transact and accomplish concrete, beneficial societal missions.

3. I use education in the broadest sense that includes what card-carrying musicologists, historians, instrument teachers, theorists, composition teachers, ethnomusicologists, choreographers, music dramatists, etc., accomplish in and out of the regulation classrooms.

4. Israel Anyahuru's recorded deposition during my fieldwork tutelage under him and the other four mother musicians in 1976.

5. My formative research perspectives on musical arts studies and college education were primed by the indigenous knowledge systems of Africa. My seminal and theoretically articulate mentors were five Igbo mother musicians specialized in three species of the tuned drum row, which are indigenous keyboard instruments that play highly structured contextual events. They inducted me into the philosophy, theory and humanist principles of the African indigenous musical arts system. The three orchestral music types furnish complex compositional theory, and are structured into three, five and six compartments (partially comparable to movements in European classical music), respectively.

6. In July 2000, I experimentally applied the indigenous science of musical arts structures to reform the social attitudes and self esteem of a group of street children in South Africa. Within nine months of the Soccajasco Kids project, the participating children performed with the English Chamber Orchestra, the overture of the first International Classical Music Festival of South Africa in 2001. Since then, the same Soccajasco Kids have toured internationally with the Palissander choir, which is a prominent South African modern classical choir. The Soccajasco Kids, some of whom are still school children, have given other performances and workshops internationally, and are currently resident instructors on classical drum ensemble music in the Centre for Indigenous Instrumental Music and Dance Practices of Africa (CIIMDA). CIIMDA is an extra-governmental initiative funded by NORAD of the Norwegian Foreign Office. CIIMDA is re-orientating the mentality and cultural content of musical arts education in southern Africa. The CIIMDA programme trains musical arts educators and learners from the South African Development Community (SADC) countries in the philosophy, theory, health principles and performance goals of indigenous musical arts.

7. When I tried this at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1974 with a music-drama production ‘Ordeal for regeneration’, I received no public support, not even from among my University staff colleagues. So, I was dismissed by the University Council, and remained unemployed for four years while in court.