【全非资讯·南非】Ghana: Kofi Agawu - the Scholar Who Showed the World That African Mu…

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Kofi Agawu is regarded as one of the world's foremost authorities on African music. The Ghanaian scholar, teacher and researcher has changed how the world hears and studies it.

I am a scholar of indigenous African music. I have researched and written extensively on African indigenous knowledge systems and worldviews.

I also know Professor Agawu personally. He has visited my institution, the University of Venda in South Africa. In this article, I pay tribute to his pioneering work in African musicology while taking issue with one finer point in his theories. This, I think, makes for a more useful tribute than unbroken praise.

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Kofi Agawu, who turns 70 on 28 September 2026, was born in Hohoe in Ghana's Volta region. He is Ewe, which is the dominant group of the region. He finished school at Achimota in Accra, studied in Britain and completed a doctorate at Stanford University in 1982. After many years at Princeton, he now teaches at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Across six books he has made it very hard to go on saying that African music is something that is "felt" rather than something that is thought about analytically.

For most of the 20th century, writing about African music circled a single word: rhythm. Africans were said to have it in abundance, and Europeans analysed it. Harmony and form belonged to Bach and Brahms. The tools used to explain their music were seldom applied to Ewe drumming or Akan court song. Harmonic analysis, for example, which names each chord and its function. Formal analysis maps a piece's sections, and motivic analysis follows a short musical idea as it develops.

African music received description. European music received theory. That difference was never neutral. It decided who counted as a thinker and who counted as raw material.

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来源：AllAfrica (https://allafrica.com/)
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