IASA 2018 Annual Conference

From 1952 to 1960, Professor Emeritus J.H. Kwabena Nketia served in the University of Ghana’s Sociology Department where he directed fieldwork projects focused on documenting traditional performing arts practices in Ghana. The resulting recordings and documents are now housed in the Nketia Archives within the Institute of African Studies and have been in the process of digitization since 2015. Drawing from Nketia’s vision of an “African Musicology,” in which scholars not only study, record, and preserve traditional art forms but also practice them as living arts, the authors of this paper explore linguistic and musical resources of seperewa (Akan harp) recordings in the archive. Korankye, as the primary living practitioner of the seperewa tradition examines these recordings as material in reinstating the disappearing tradition in contemporary performance practice. Harper provides context in musical and linguistic structure analysis of the recordings. This paper is part of an ongoing project between Harper and Korankye that explores pedagogical approaches and generative processes in seperewa music.