Non-Lexical Vocables: A Contextual Ideology of Meaning in Three Choral Compositions of Alvan-Ikoku Nwamara

Abstract

Indisputably, it has been dully observed that the westerners’ opinion of African traditional music is appalling and their attitude towards appreciation of the music is not encouraging and thereby resulting to the misconception of some indigenous elements used within the African cultures. One of the most influenced elements in Nigeria especially in Igbo community is the exclamatory words which the westerners refer to as nonsensical syllable. But it is an established fact in Igbo community that every syllable used in Igbo music traditionally, makes sense in one way or the other and its sense is dependent on the context upon which it is used (Nzewi 1991, Onyeji 1998, Nwamara 2008). Therefore, in revolt to this myopic understanding of the exclamatory words, Alvan-Ikoku Nwamara, one of the distinctive composers, arrangers, performers and ethnomusicologists in the Igbo community developed a contextual ideology of using the exclamatory words to depict meaningful ideas in some of his choral works. Despite this creative ideology by Nwamara, his choral pieces that harbours the exclamatory words received a belated acceptance and appreciation and as a result, he is considered to be just a performer unlike other composers, Meki Nzewi, Laz Ekwueme, Chirstian Onyeji, Sam Ojukwu, whose works are widely accepted in Nigeria. Therefore, in this work, ‘non-lexical vocables’ has been used as a terminology for exclamatory words, and its scope focuses on the structural arrangement of the non-lexical vocables in three selected choral pieces of Nwamara, Chimamada, Jaga jaga, and Chicken jogily run away which has been examined in order to bring out their contextual meanings. Again, answering questions like, why are non-lexical vocables mostly featured in his choral works? What are the causes of the belated recognition of him as a composer by some choral performers? I therefore situate this contextual ideology of non-lexical vocables in choral works as an evaluation of his compositional style. University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh