2 - Music for the Gods

Abstract

During the 1980s, ethnomusicological literature focused extensively on the problematics of identity in the analysis of music and performance practice. In conceptual terms, Bode Omojola, in Yoruba Music in the Twentieth Century: Identity, Agency, and Performance Practice, does not entirely chart a new course diverging from the presuppositions of, for want of a better term,this paradigm. However, his deep and broad knowledge of Yoruba culture and music forms lends a resonance that can be considered to be a departure from, or even at other moments, a transcendence of, to employ an alternative designation, the framework. He is certainly an insider in relation to Yoruba culture and language and, as a trained ethnomusicologist with an anthropologist’s outsider’s eye, he is able to generate a welter of perspectives that grant his work a certain degree of magisterial authority.