SOURCE:

Faculty: Arts
Department: Music

CONTRIBUTORS:

Nnam, J. C.
Agu, C. C. D.

ABSTRACT:

Egwu Nganga: A Set of Original Contemporary Choral compositions is a collection of my original contemporary compositions of choral anthems and songs written generally for Nigerian choirs. Egwu is an Igbo word, which means music (song or dance). Nganga is another Igbo word meaning - pride or style. Egwu Nganga in this work therefore stands for a collection of choral compositions carefully selected from my numerous works that showcase various stylistic features of an average Nigerian contemporary art music. This work is aimed at contributing to the eradication of the problem of choirs having very little or no piece/anthem suitable for their various performances. The anthems have been systematically classified according to their various functions. This classification is hoped to serve as a guide to the choirs while choosing songs for performances. This initiative is very important and necessary as choirs that perform out of context will soon become a story of the past after going through this work. The documentation of this work and its availability in school/college libraries will be helpful during research works on choral music in Nigeria. In an attempt to achieve this feat, the work is divided into two principal parts: I and II. Section I introduces the work while sections II contains the presentation of the work or, in other words, the musical scores and their analysis. In section II, which contains the presentation, there exists a splitting factor, which further divides the section into two parts, namely: Part A – Sacred works and Part B – Secular works. The realization of unity in this work is as a result of my decision to limit the contents to vocal music only. Most of the texts are in English with a few in the Igbo language. In conclusion, this work is hoped to serve as a bold step and an attempt towards documenting new works and ideas of our indigenous contemporary composers of the 21st century.