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Fela Sowande  (1905-1987) Nigerian Composer, Organist & Professor Father of Modern Nigerian Art Music
Table of Contents   1 Birth   2 Father   3 Education in Nigeria   4 Jazz in Nigeria   5 Move to London   6 African American Influences   7 World War II Years   8 African Suite   9 Postwar Years in London  10 Homecoming  11 Nigerian Folk Symphony  12 Nationalism  13 Professor  14 Death  15 Honors  16 Centennia	The Organ Works of Fela Sowande: Cultural Perspectives  by Godwin Sadoh Quality Paperback (2007)

Audio Samples
1 Cedille 90000 055 (2000); African Heritage Symphonic series, Vol. 1; Chicago Sinfonietta; Paul Freeman, Conductor; African Suite  Joyful Day
2 Decca LM 4547 (1952); Fela Sowande African Suite for Strings; The New Symphony Strings; Trevor Harvey, Conductor; Digitally Remastered, Mike S. Wright; Akinla

1 Birth
The African composer Olufela Sowande was born in Oyo, Nigeria on May 29, 1905. Bode Omojola, Ph.D., chronicles his life and career in the 1995 book, Nigerian Art Music, in which he observes:

Fela Sowande is undoubtedly the father of modern Nigerian Art Music and perhaps the most distinguished and internationally known African composer. The most significant pioneer-composer of works in the European classical idiom, his works mark the beginning of an era of modern Nigerian Art Music.

2 Father
Fela's father was Emmanuel Sowande, an Anglican priest of Egba descent who helped establish Nigerian church music in the early 20th century.  The elder Sowande taught at St. Andrew's College, a missionary institute in Nigeria which trained young people to become teachers.  Emmanuel Sowande was subsequently transferred to Lagos, and young Fela accompanied him there.  Fela's father arranged for him to be a choir boy at Christ Church Cathedral.

Dominique-René de Lerma is Professor of Music at Lawrence University Conservatory of Music, and a leading authority on composers of African descent.  He notes that Fela went from choir boy to music student, beginning a "20-year association" with the choir's Director, Thomas King Ekundayo Phillips. The professor has posted an excerpt on Sowande from a manuscript on Black composers at a Web site: www.africanchorus.org/Artists/
Sowande.htm 

3 Education in Nigeria
Sowande's education began at the Church Missionary Society Grammar School and continued at Kings College.  Throughout that period, he studied organ with Phillips and faithfully attended his teacher's organ recitals.  De Lerma recounts that those performances included:

...European music and particularly the organ works of Bach, Handel, and Rheinberger, as well as Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha's wedding feast.  On his graduation from Kings College, he was an accomplished pianist and was engaged as deputy organist under Phillips at the Cathedral.  Simultaneously, he taught in a mission school and worked as a civil servant for three years.

4 Jazz in Nigeria
Short-wave radio broadcasts of the music of Duke Ellington introduced Sowande to jazz in 1932.  Radio programs from the United States, France and Britain allowed him to hear recordings of other jazz artists as well.  De Lerma continues:

This led to his organization of the Triumph Dance Club Orchestra, in which he played piano.  He was also a member of the jazz band, The Chocolate Dandies, that had been organized about 1927 in Lagos.

5 Move to London
Sowande went to London to study civil engineering, but he was soon supporting himself as a jazz musician.  He founded a jazz septet, comprised principally of musicians from the Caribbean, and decided to study music. Sowande attended the University of London and the Trinity College of Music as an external candidate, and also studied individually with George D. Cuningham, George Oldroyd and Edmond Rubbra.  De Lerma explains:

However he was influenced by these contacts, it was in 1935 that he began coping with nationalistic impulses, which were articulated in his articles from 1965, the development of a national tradition of music and Language in African music.

6 African American Influences
Sowande took lessons in jazz piano, and began performing on both the piano and the Hammond organ.  A number of African Americans who visited London became his friends.  They included Paul Robeson and Fats Waller. Sowande performed George Gershwin's  Rhapsody in Blue  as part of the show  Black Birds of 1936.  This brought him into contact with J. Rosamond Johnson, who served as choral conductor for the production and who introduced him to the works of Robert Nathaniel Dett, who is featured on another page of this Web site.  Sowande also worked with Adelaide Hall as her cabaret pianist and recording partner in the late 1930s.

7 World War II Years
In 1940, Sowande presented his own compositions as examples on a radio program of the BBC Africa Service,  West African Music and the Possibilities of its Development.  He then joined Britain's Royal Air Force, but was relieved of duty so he could serve as music director for the country's Colonial Film Unit.  In that capacity he composed music for films which were intended to be seen by Africans.  De Lerma adds:

Composed at this time was his personal "signature tune", based on a sacred melody (Obangiji) composed by Rev. Joshua Jesse Ransome-Kuti that served its needs and those of the BBC's African programs from 1943 to the 1960s. It was in 1943 that he earned the Fellowship diploma of the Royal College of Organists, as well as the Limas Prize for music theory, the Harding Prize for his organ playing, and the Read Prize for the overall excellence of his examinations, along with his B.M. degree from the University of London.  He was appointed organist and choir director of the West London Mission of the Methodist Church in 1945 (Kingsway Hall), which stimulated the creation of new works for organ.  His Sunday recitals became very popular.

8 African Suite
Omojola recounts that Sowande collected African melodies for use in his activities for the BBC Africa Service, and says of them:

These were later to be developed into original compositions, in particular,  Six Sketches for Full Orchestra and the  African Suite,  both of which were issued on Decca Records in London in 1953.

The  African Suite  (24:52) was recorded on CD in 1994 on CBC Records SMCD 5135.  The CBC Vancouver Orchestra is led by Mario Bernardi, Conductor.  The liner notes outline the history and composition of the work:

The  African Suite, written in 1944, combines well-known West African musics with European forces and methods. For the opening movement,  Joyful Day,  Sowande uses a melody written by Ghanaian composer Ephrain Amu, as he does in the fourth movement,  Onipe.  In  Nostalgia, Sowande composes a traditional slow movement to express his nostalgia for the homeland (in itself a rather European idea).  At the centre of the work is a restive Lullaby,  based on a folk original. The finale of the  Suite,  Akinla,  traces a very singular musical history. It began as a popular Highlife tune - Highlife being a pungent, 20th-century style, combining colonial Western military and popular music with West African elements and a history of its own.  Sowande then featured it as a cornerstone of his "argument" that West African music could be heard on European terms: the African Suite was originally broadcast by the BBC to the British colonies in Africa.  Years later, in another colony far away, the sturdy Highlife dance tune became famous as the theme song of the long-running CBC Radio programme "Gilmour's Albums", a typically idiosyncratic choice of the host, Clyde Gilmour.

9 Post War Years in London
Sowande's tenure as organist and choirmaster at the West London Mission of the Methodist Church extended from 1945 to 1952.  Omojola says of these years:

It was during this period that he began active composition; it is not surprising that many of his early works were written for the organ.  The church element which formed the basic foundation of his musical career continued to be the axis of his musical life.  Organ works written during this period included  Oyigiyigi, Kyrie, Prayer, Obangiji, Gloria  and  Ka Mura.  These, like virtually all Sowande's organ works, are based on Nigerian melodies.

10 Homecoming
Sowande moved back to Nigeria in 1953 to become Head of Music and Music Research of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation.  De Lerma explains his duties:

In this post he produced weekly radio programs based on field research of Yoruba folklore, mythology, and oral history, presented by tribal priests.

Even after his return to Nigeria, Sowande played a part in British television. Clare Ethel Deniz was a Black British jazz pianist.  Her obituary in Britain's newspaper  The Guardian,  on January 3, 2003, recalled:

She sang in Fela Sowande's choir for the 1954 television series  Club Ebony...

Between 1955 and 1958, Sowande composed four songs based on African American gospel music:  Roll de Ol' Chariot, My Way's Cloudy, De Ol' Ark's a-Moverin, and De Angels are Watchin'.  De Lerma notes that a grant from the United States Government enabled Sowande to travel to the U.S. in 1957 and give organ recitals in Boston, Chicago and New York.  While in the country he also lectured on the findings of his research.

11 Nigerian Folk Symphony
The composer's  Nigerian Folk Symphony  was his last major work.  It was conceived as part of the celebration of Nigeria's independence from Britain. Omojola sees it as the best evidence of Sowande's cultural nationalism:

No other work reveals Sowande's appreciation of Nigerian culture and his strong belief in cultural nationalism more than his  Folk Symphony (1960). At the peak of his research activities at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, just before he became a Research Fellow at the University of Ibadan, Sowande was asked by the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation to write a work to mark the Nigerian Independence celebrations. This work, the Folk Symphony, was premiered on October 1st, 1960 during the Independence celebrations.                           ... The work gives a very strong reflection of African elements and it could be argued that it marked the climax of Sowande's commitment to nationalism.

De Lerma comments on the response to the symphony in the liner notes for three movements of the  African Suite  on Cedille 90000 055 (2000):

When Sowande conducted the New York Philharmonic in his  Nigerian Folk Symphony  in 1964, a critic lamented that it sounded more European than Nigerian.  What he missed was that, although the orchestral sonority was certainly not rooted in Africa, the rhythms, scales, and melodies were idealizations of Nigerian sources. Sowande thus joined the other nationalists, following the same process traveled by William Grant Still.

12 Nationalism
Sowande composed most of his works during a time of rising nationalism, with one African country after another achieving its independence from a colonial power.  He consciously employed both Nigerian elements and European forms, and Omojola writes he remained open-minded:

He believed in the philosophy of cultural reciprocity and argued against what he called 'apartheid in art'. According to him: 'We are not prepared to submit to the doctrine of apartheid in art by which a musician is expected to work only within the limits of his traditional forms of music.'  He therefore warned against: 'uncontrolled nationalism in which case nationals of any one country may forget that they are all members of one human family with other nationals.'

13 Professor
After 1960, Sowande worked mainly as a professor.  During the 1961-62 academic year he was a Visiting Scholar in the Anthropology Department of Northwestern University in the U.S.  He also worked with Roger Sessions at Princeton University.  De Lerma writes that his next position was in Nigeria:

From 1962 until 1965 he was senior research fellow at the University of Ibadan, then becoming musicology professor at the university's Institute of African Studies.  A government grant in 1966 resulted in a series of studies on Nigerian music.

Sowande also studied Yoruba religion from 1962-65 with the aid of a grant from the Ford Foundation.  In 1968 he returned to the U.S. to accept a position on the faculty of Howard University in Washington. D.C.  He held it until 1972.  Between 1968 and 1972, Sowande made at least 48 recordings on the history, language, literature and music of Nigeria, for distribution by the Broadcasting Foundation of America.  De Lerma adds:

He became professor of Black studies at the University of Pittsburgh in 1972, later joining the faculty of the School of Education.  He was affectionately known here as 'Papa Sowande'. His last position was in the Department of Pan-African Studies at Kent State University, which he held until his retirement in 1982, accompanied by Eleanor, his wife.

14 Death
Fela Sowande spent his last days in a nursing home in Ravenna, Ohio.  He was 82 years old when he died of a stroke on March 13, 1987.  De Lerma describes the funeral service:

A memorial service was held at St. James Episcopal Church in New York on 3 May 1987, at which time Eugene Hancock complied with Sowande's 1965 request by performing his  Bury me eas' or wes'. Sowande had received a permanent American visa in 1972 and had become a citizen in 1977.

15 Honors
Throughout his career, Sowande accumulated an impressive array of honors in recognition of his contributions to music.  In 1943 he became a Fellow of Britain's Royal College of Organists.  De Lerma writes:

Queen Elizabeth II named him a Member of the British Empire in 1956, the same year he became a Member of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.  The music department at theUniversity of Nigeria-Nsukka, was renamed the Sowande School of Music in his honor (1962).  In 1968 he was given the Traditional Chieftancy Award, named the Bagbile of Lagos.  He was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Ife in 1972.

The  Fela Sowande Memorial Lecture and Concert Series  is an ongoing tribute which has been held at the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ibadan since 1996.

16 Centennial
The Fela Sowande Centennial Symposia and Festivals took place in North America in 2004, and in Europe and Africa in 2005, to mark the centennial of the composer's birth. 

 

This page was last updated on août 23, 2008