Ecstatic Voices

Songs Of Africa: Beautiful Music With A Violent History

by Neda Ulaby

August 3, 2013

For the next year, NPR will take a musical journey across America, which is one of the most religiously diverse countries on earth. We want to discover and celebrate the many ways in which people make spiritual music — individually and collectively, inside and outside houses of worship.

The founder of the choral group Sounds of Africa is Fred Onovwerosuoke. He was born in Ghana and brought up in Nigeria, and his choir in the heart of the U.S. — St. Louis, Mo., to be exact — has recorded his arrangements of African sacred music by a composer named Ikoli Harcourt Whyte.

Whyte lived in a leper colony run by the Methodist Church. He formed a choir of those also confined there and, Onovwerosuoke says, "composed and wrote for them some of the most moving spiritual music."

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'A Kernel Of What Is Possible'

Rose Fisher is Songs of Africa's assistant director. She's guiding the choir through lyrics in Yoruba, a tonal language from West Africa. An hour later, they're singing it as part of a service at Pilgrim Congregational Church.

Music from Africa can be incredibly challenging for Western singers, says soprano Marlissa Hudson, who has recorded music arranged by Onovwerosuoke. She says none of her classical training prepared her for the complexities of its rhythms.

"You can't count when you're singing that kind of music, so Fred actually danced it for me," Hudson says. "As soon as he danced, it clicked."

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A Better Peace

This is music born of pain, and it insists on life, on resilience, on a connection to something beyond human suffering. Part of the power of these hymns comes from how they assimilated customs and musical traditions rooted far from Christianity, Onovwerosuoke says.