Transcending Distinctions between Religious and Secular Musicianship: Nigerian Pentecostals across Popular Performance Settings

ABSTRACT

This article explores the understudied thematic of Nigerian Pentecostal musicianship, by focusing on overlapping practices, perceptions, and experiences of musicians performing across religious and secular settings in Greece. The implementation of Nigerian Pentecostal music-making principles in secular performance contexts generates transcendent experience and fulfills politics of venue-popularity, similarly to congregational contexts. Largely informed by ethnomusicology and the anthropology of music, I employ a threefold analytic tool to show how music-making blurs the boundaries between popular religious and secular culture, and why this blurring broadly shapes and reflects popular cultural practice.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive reviews on this article. In addition, I am thankful to Georgia Vavva and Athanasia Asyllogistou for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article. I am grateful for the funding support by the Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland (DEL), and the Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. “Art-song,” the common translation for the Greek term έντεχνο (or έντεχνο τραγούδι) [éntehno tradoúdi], is a Greek music genre born in the late 1950s and developed from musically arranged poems. Initially associated with political activism in and around the period of the 1967–1974 military junta, art-song has gradually become one of the most popular genres in contemporary Greek musical scenes. For a discussion of art-song in ethnomusicological texts, see Tsioulakis.

2. According to Lalioti, “‘skyladiko’ is a term that, during the decades of 1970s and 1980s, was used to denote specific night-clubs with cheap, popular (λαική) music performed by second class singers. Today the term refers to all music clubs that play folkpop music (μπουζούκια) whether singers are first- or second-class names. All bad quality songs based on banal music patterns and cliché lyrics are called ‘skyladika’” (143). The aesthetic judgments of this quote are widely shared in Greece among particular audiences.

3. I use the term Nigerian Pentecostalisms in plural not only to account for the different types of Charismatic practice within the broader religious movement in Nigeria, but also to indicate the presence of elements of Nigerian Pentecostal culture in the nonreligious settings with which this article is concerned.

4. For the use of the terms “African Christianities” and “Nigerian Christianities” in plural, see Ukah (2), and Ayegboyin (43).

5. I employ the ethnographic present as a form of evocative writing, and by no means should my use of the present tense be seen as disregarding the circumstantial and unique nature of particular events that belong to the past.

6. “Buzz” is a pseudonym I use to refer to the particular venue.

7. “Tosinopoulos” was used as a stage name, and it is also the name by which the musician in question wishes to be represented here.

8. Daniel’s body movement is more intense than that of Michalis and Tosinopoulos, in part because whilst they are seated at their instruments, he is standing and thus is freer to move his whole body while performing.

9. All translations from Greek to English are made by the author, who is a native Greek speaker.

10. “Καληνύχτα” is the Greek word for “good night.”

11. “Πάμε” translates from Greek as “let’s go.”

12. “Πρόβα” translates from Greek as “rehearsal,” but “practice” can be used as an alternate translation, as indicated by Daniel’s use of the term.

13. Michalis was one of the beloved students of Kontrafouris.

14. Interviews with the Nigerian band members were conducted in English, whereas with the Greek band member in Greek. Extracts from interviews with the Greek band member are translated from Greek.

15. During one of the interviews I conducted with Daniel, he stressed that, despite tensions, the mode of speaking among colleagues should be indicative of appreciation, rather than discouragement, especially when musicians are valuable to the group. Interestingly, Daniel explained that he tried to resolve the issue with Michalis in a respectful way to avoid making Michalis feel like Daniel himself felt when he decided to leave his post upon being disrespected by the music director of a Pentecostal parish in Lagos.

16. Interestingly, a similar observation is made by Rommen about the DJ-like orientation of Trinidadian gospel musicians to “maintain the right mood for the concert” (106).

17. This is not to suggest that negotiation of performance repertoires takes place between musicians and their audiences only in performance contexts where a fusion of musical genres is employed. For example, Elina Hytönen-Ng shows that for the contemporary British jazz-music scene “the live performance can be considered as a series of negotiations between the musician and the audience” (79). However, in this jazz context, the performing musician negotiates the repertoire by considering what the audience wants and “how much he is permitted to pleased himself” (79). This contrasts with Daniel’s approach, which underlines an inseparable relation between the pleasing of himself and his audience. In other words, Daniel’s celebratory claim that his performance is “like DJ playing” contrasts with the jazz musician to whom Hytönen-Ng refers, who feels “like a jukebox when the audience is making several requests” (79), compromising his own preferences. This observation underlines distinct orientations to performer-audience interaction. For musicians largely exposed to the Nigerian Pentecostal tradition, music performance is inseparable from audience engagement and participation, as I explain next.

18. This is from a quote by the ninth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, David O. McKay: “Wisdom is the right application of knowledge; and true education…is the application of knowledge to the development of a noble and Godlike character” (440). The quote may derive from the British Particular Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892), according to whom: “Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom” (Manser 399).

19. It was through practicing musical repertoires, prayers, and the study of the Bible at both individual and communal levels that music ministers in Pastor Kayode’s parish prepared for music ministration in public services.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland (DEL) under Grant DEL Research Studentships, and from the Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) under the Postdoctoral Fellowship No. 17/08316-8.

Notes on contributors

Evanthia Patsiaoura

Evanthia Patsiaoura got her Ph.D. from Queen’s University Belfast and she currently is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Campinas and a visiting fellow at the University of Manchester, funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). Evanthia presently conducts a multi-sited ethnographic research on Nigerian Pentecostal worship, whilst participating in the FAPESP-funded projects “Local musicking: new pathways for ethnomusicology” and “Processes of subject constitution in African contexts: differentiation, iteration, intersectionality.” Her research interests lie in the intersections of music, religion, locality, and popular culture. Evanthia also specializes in Nigerian gospel music performance, having conducted workshops and public performances in both academic and local community settings in the United Kingdom and Brazil.