Supplicatory Discourse in Yoruba Art Music: A Contextual Study of Christopher Ayodele’s ‘Oluwa L’oluso Aguntan’.

Abstract:

One of the age long practices in religious worship is the usage of music for supplication. The practice of using music for supplication in African religious space, predates the coming of the colonial masters and missionaries. The coming of the missionaries in the mid nineteenth century also saw a good number of supplicative songs as part of the liturgy of the newly found faith. The wave of decolonization that began to blow in the later part of the nineteenth century in the Nigerian Church also provided some African alternatives for the liturgy. Yoruba Art Music emerged from the negotiation between Western Choral training/exposure and the indigenous Yoruba musical and linguistic practices. A good number of African Church musicians with bi-musical exposure contextualized their compositions for several purposes, one of such purposes is, the supplicative purpose. Christopher Ayodele, a post-independent composer used his bi-musicality in composing a Yoruba choral art supplicative music. In contextualizing the composition, he used the Yoruba translation of Psalm 23, which is an affirmative prayer. The paper is anchored on ‘Supplicative Musicology’, a theory I postulated in my paper, ‘Study of some Nigeria Art Music: Towards a Theory of Supplicative Musicology (2022). My primary sources of information are interview, the score of the song and the various YouTube performance of the music. I also used secondary sources such as journals and internet sources in achieving the goals of the research. The paper recommends a furtherance in the usage of ethno-compositional materials in African art music compositions and expanding African compositional musicology with a focus on supplicative contextualization.