The Compositional Thought in Godfred Sackey’s Ebiawonkasama: An Analytical Presentation

Abstract Over the last six decades or so, art music compositions in Africa have been described as a symbiosis of Western and African musical elements by music scholars such as Euba, Agawu and Dor. The description was based on the fact that African composers such as Amu, Nketia, Bankole, Mereku, and others have focused on the usage of indigenous African musical elements in Art music compositions to either identify themselves with their compositions or to situate the compositions in the framework of interculturalism. Ebiawonkasama, an art composition based on Ebibindwom of selected syncretic churches in Winneba was composed by Godfred Sackey, a Ghanaian creative ethnomusicologist. In Ebiawonkasama, Sackey exploited both the indigenous Ghanaian (African) and Western musical elements. This article aims at exposing the reader to the compositional thought and analytical narrative of Ebiawonkasama using Donald F. Tovey’s descriptive communicative type of formal analysis to unravel the several compositional styles that were used by the composer. The writers utilized purposive sampling technique and document analysis for data collection. The consequence of this paper is to provide a clear compositional and analytical presentation of a research-based composition (creative ethnomusicology) that utilizes diverse compositional scopes to add to the literature on intercultural music compositions.

Keywords: Ebiawonkasama, ebibindwom, syncretism, interculturalism, African art composition