Fred Onovwerosuoke
Ecstatic Voices
Songs Of Africa: Beautiful Music With A Violent History
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."
...
'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."
...
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.
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