Fela Sowande: African Suite for Strings (1944)
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- Опубликовано: 4 апр 2020
- The Nigerian composer, Fela Sowande (1905-1987) designed his African Suite for radio broadcast from London to West Africa. He sought to integrate native folk material with western music.
This performance includes all five movements of the work, Joyful Day, Nostalgia, Onipe, Lullaby & Akinla. It is performed by the New Symphony Orchestra conducted by Trevor Harvey from a long out-of-print LP issued in 1951. 
Видеоклипы
Was at the Royal Festival Hall 12.5.23. I heard his music for the first time played by the Chineke Orchestra. I'm now on a quest to discover more Black composers and their work.
This is just WOW. I am so glad that Sowande's music is now on RUclips. In his own country (Nigeria) it was suppressed for many years. It needs to be heard and his name placed along with other great composers worldwide.
The opening to the last movement is something that CBC listeners of a certain age love. That was the theme to a popular radio show called "Gilmour's Albums"
Used to love listening to 'Gilmour's Albums' !
We recently recorded two movements at the Baltimore Symphony as part of a streaming concert. What a great discovery!
So glad to hear it's still alive and not just a museum piece!
I found this video from the BSO brochure!
About to play this with the DC Strings! By the way, I was with Steve Hickman and Divine Comedy the other day playing a waltz - we played a lot of your melodies! You've made some lovely stuff~
Just heard this ten minutes ago on Omaha classical music, and had to look it up and listen again!
His music 🎵 is played on Classic FM 🇬🇧
Effortlessly subsumes the African material within the "English light music for strings" idiom which seems to have been a requisite genre for much of a century! Lovely stuff.
Magnificent piece that should be better known. Really like the happy mood at the end.
Came here via Tafelmusik on NTS. Goddamn that part that ends around 11.30 really kills me, epic stuff... Thanks for the upload!
Really enjoyed it - new to me. Your early 50s LP sounds in remarkably good condition!
Beatuiful - Thank you for the listen! Imagine listening to this at first performance with the War still on.
I first heard this around 2006-7 and tried to get the orchestra I was in to play it but couldn't find the score, one of my favorite pieces of music.
The music is really hard to get.
21.......mins in.....what you....need to hear that amazing tune
The last 3 minutes…. Awesome’
Wow just wow
Brilliant!
Very reawakening. ❤
Once heard....always.. in the sphere
Interesting !
Chord progressions of this piece please
Hello. Could I please request you to grant me permission to use this track for a non-commerical, non-profit project (a short video). I am an artist from South Asia. Apart from leaving a comment here, is there any other way I can reach you? Please let me know. Thank you very much. Looking forward to your reply.
I need the sheet music. Pls where can I get it?
Who has sampled the last piece?
Captures an interesting exchange of culture throughout. Some of the intonation from The New Symphony Orchestra is much to be desired, but thank you for an upload of music that otherwise I'd would never have heard.
It's sad really... Africa has such an immense wealth of musical material which remains un-utilised in western
art music. There is so much that is present in African music that would bring much "newness" to orchestral
music. So when I saw this piece, I became excited thinking this African composer might use authentic African
approaches and material for his work. Alas, I was wrong AGAIN. Why do African composers NOT use the
orchestra as a tool to make real African music? Instead, they copy western orchestral music with very minor
references to anything African. So if one was to ask anybody to listen to this piece without telling them it's by
an African composer, they *WOULD HAVE NO IDEA!!!* That's because it sounds no different to any other piece
of western orchestral music.
Sowande was from Nigeria where music is seriously poly-rhythmic, yet he avoids that common African approach
in this composition. (Yes, I know it is his work and he can write what he wants...) However, just putting the word
"African" in the titles of your music, clearly DOES NOT make it African in any way.
And yet many white counterparts that do Chinese this, Bali that Egyptian this, seem to be getting all the commissions in the world.... while misrepresenting the culture with their limited knowledge of said culture I wonder why? And as you ponder, many of the polyrhythms of which we seek to use are very difficult to notate primarily because they require a level of situational virtuosity that is not innate to the Western classical musicians. The same with Balinese gamelan and many Taiwanese musics. As many would like to think of themselves as not a monolith, it is also presumptuous to think that African composers want to or are even interested in writing anything remotely African. And yes while I do agree with you to an extent that the musics of Africa is underutilized.... we should wait for someone who will engage with it and to do it properly. Enough damage has already been done with appropriation and cultural siphoning.
I, like Sowande, am Nigerian. 'Africa' is a big place, a continent. Don't make that mistake. The music doesn't have to sound one particular way or have only a set of elements to be deemed 'African'. What does that even mean?
Also, the modern symphonic orchestra with its sections of instruments - strings, woodwinds, brass, even the percussion - is decidedly not an African invention. Talk about 'appropriation'. The argument that that orchestra (and Western classical music as a whole) was 'forced' upon us is a pointless one.
Look, Sowande is just one composer of many on the continent. He had his own life and unique approach to music (ruclips.net/video/yOnc4SqRC8I/видео.html), and that's that. You can look elsewhere for 'authentic' music from other composers.
@@musical_lolu4811
What does it matter if you like or dislike him? I expressed a personal observation regarding his music. In this particular composition any music student would find it difficult to identify it as African. There is nothing that distinguishes it as such. I spend significant time in Africa and I'm aware it's a continent. With regards to your question about what "African" means, the answer is certainly no unknown mystery. Any serious music listener will be able to identify music as Asian, African, European, Latin American or whatever, by listening to it.
African music is identifiable by some pretty distinct characteristics which I won't lecture about here. For the most part, (if not altogether), those characteristics are absent in this work. That's not a sin of course, but it's why this piece won't be identified as African, unless the listener is told so beforehand.
I am familiar with quite a number of works that employ more authentic African approaches and material than this. If African classical music composers do not want to draw from the beautiful musical wealth on their continent, then it's altogether their loss.
@@razakza hello! Fela Sowande's father was an Anglican priest. In his youth he heard and sang traditional Nigerian music as well as J.S. Bach and Haendel's.
J.S. Bach composed beautiful "Suites francaises"! He was not French and never put a foot in that country!
I hope I am answering your comment in a way.
Like you I regret there are not too many opportunities to listen to traditional musics. That needs some research but it's possible!
I wish you happy listenings.
@@musical_lolu4811 thank you very much for the link 🤩😍
disappointingly trite and uninspired... :/
Why does black music have to be skilled everywhere? If it was good people would find it and listen to it naturally. It's not that good.
I prefer this to Chevalier de St. Georges.
What a ridiculous concept. The financial existence of symphony orchestras requires them to play the same commercial repertoire over and over for the paying fans. They rarely can afford to deviate from that unless they are affiliated with a university or college. Because of the sheer number of composers around the world since 1900, the chances of all the great music making itself known to the public is slim. The fact is, much of the world's great classical music has not even been recorded. Think of the twelve symphonies of Phillip Greeley Clapp or the fifteen symphonies of Paul Hastings Allen or the nine symphonies of Frederick Shepherd Converse. Or the Symphony in C of Burnet Corwin Tuthill. Although the Memphis Symphony made an acetate of that latter work in 1942, it has been lost. I have at least seen the score, and can tell you that it is a great work. I also transcribed the first movement for piano so I could at least get an idea of what it sounds like. But that is an example of the ugly reality of classical music in the 20th century. Then, Black composers had it worse yet, for obvious reasons. William Grant Still, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Howard Swanson all managed to get some of their works recorded.....they are great. More recently the female composer Florence Price is getting some notice.....her works are pleasant and enjoyable if not experimental. But everything that has been done so far is a drop in the bucket.....why do we have so little of Anatolii Aleksandrov's works? Leonid Polovinkin's? Lehman Engels'? Chalmers Clifton's? Wilhelm Grosz's? Much of the greatest work remains unperformed and unrecorded. Many more great works exist only in recordings of indeterminate origin (ROIOs) exchanged among cognoscenti. And a handful are being recorded commercially by some groundbreaking labels like CPO, Supraphon, Channel Classics, WDR, Naxos, etc. Break out of the box. Music is not obscure necessarily because it isn't good. People don't know what they don't know.
@@jdoggtn7 Brilliant comment. The original commenter has no knowledge whatsoever of how music becomes well known and enters the standard repertoire. I am lucky to play in an orchestra where our music director consistently programs lesser-known works like this one, and many of them are objectively more inventive and masterful than some (although of course not all) famous works by the great western composers. I also see the same issue with modern works, which I worry will never make it past a couple performances by their commissioners even if it is a truly great composition. A couple modern pieces that have shocked me with how well they stand up with famous works of the past are Leshnoff's piano concerto and Demeter Prelude by Margaret Brouwer, both of which are worth checking out.
@@jdoggtn7 If you're interested in works by obscure composers, I have plenty on my channel! Hope you enjoy
@@jdoggtn7 Converse only has three symphonies I am aware of. Where do you get 9?