African Composers

As in all world cultures, a composer/instrumentalist in Africa is defined by specialist skills and achievements, rather than the general knowledge which we normally share with the broader social environment. Special insights and skills constitute the individual cultural profile of an artist. To unravel this dimension, case by case, is one of the objectives of our three-year project.

A basic objective of our various projects, irrespective of specific research questions and topics, e.g. storytelling, healing practice, work analysis of composers, life histories of creative personalities in art etc., has been to put cultural history on record, in all its expressions of individual creativity. Cultural traditions are by nature ephemeral, they change, have always changed, get lost, get replaced, supplanted. And so do the individuals, the cultural carriers who during their life-time contribute both to continuity and innovation. These people we study. The work of these individuals we put on record.

The biographical assessment of personalities active in composition will focus on individual histories and the relationship of creative individuals with their social environment. Local and inter-regional acceptance of a composer, conflicts, dissidence, family and peer-group pressures, as well as experiences of stereotype threat, gender, age and ethnicist discrimination are some of the themes to be addressed. The historical and comparative part of our investigation will focus on basic African compositional processes (e.g. interlocking of tone-rows, skipping process in multipart composition) and the technique, used to create acoustic illusions, phantom melodies as carriers of hidden texts and as stimulants to improvisatory text development by the artists.