Your Work or Our Music? A Contextual Analysis of Nigerian Contemporary Music in the Twenty-first Century Nigerian Urban Soundscape

Abstract

As a continuation of my MMus research which I started in 2019, this research investigates how Nigerian urban cultures influence hybridity in twenty-first century Nigerian contemporary music. hybridity is a fundamental creative resource to Nigerian contemporary music because the genre emerged through a blend of Nigerian tribal music and Western classical music. To investigate how the genre engages with the daily lived experiences of Nigerian urban residents, the author interviewed leading Nigerian composers such as Sam Ojukwu, Ayo Oluranti, Stephen Olusoji, Christian Onyeji, and Jude Nnam. The author also analysed musical scores of the interviewees and other Nigerian composers composed between 2000 and 2020 and collaborated with artists from different genres. The aim of the collaboration is to create a new sound world for my composition where all the genres are equal. From the analysis and interviews, the study discovered that Nigerian contemporary music is ideologically placed as a superior to other genres in the county. Thus, the composers strongly maintain the binary hybridity that spawned the genre and ignore compositional resources such as urban cultures that constantly emerge from the environment. I have challenged this narrative both in the dissertation and in the ten composition that constitute the portfolio section of the research. The argument I advance is that Nigerian/African contemporary music, is an artistic representation of the lived experiences of twenty-first century Nigerians, especially the urban residents who constitute most of the country’s population.