Contemporary compositional procedures in Nigerian music practices: types and presentational styles

Abstract

This paper attempts an investigation of the creative processes of Nigerian music and the various genres created and developed over centuries right from our folk background to the contemporary era. In carrying out this exercise, the paper focuses attention on the composers of both the indigenous and contemporary music types, their personalities and compositional techniques, music types created and performed in Nigeria, their forms, rating relevance and continuity and change. The findings of this research shows that the Nigerian contemporary composers have made appreciable efforts in various areas to reach out and homogenize the Nigerian audiences with different genres of music that have capacity to penetrate musical minds and ideations. It concludes that Africans including Nigerians should disabuse their minds and musical sensibility from the Western classical idioms and terminologies and be proud of all African music which identify us as a people with rich music culture.

Keywords: compositional, techniques, performance, practices, styles, Nigerian music