ABSTRACT
Music composition remains a significant aspect of cultural expression and reveals deliberate efforts by composers to capture social, cultural and sometimes, abstract phenomena in sonic forms in various cultural locations. The approaches to this endeavour have followed different paths, combining different creative idioms and tools while also showcasing diverse creative limits and endowments of different composers in oral and written forms. Appearing in both vocal and instrumental forms, the question of appropriate compositional style and idiom of expression has bogged music educators and composers alike in Africa since the encounter with the West, when written composition was formally cultivated and instituted. The search for Africa-based content and method for music composition and education has been one of the primary concerns of music educators and composers in contemporary Africa. The question of deliberate development of Africa-sensitive compositional style of art music has been an issue since the later part of the 20th century. More importantly, the question of deliberate teaching of composition in schools based on African indigenous musical paradigms has been of concern to educators. Using a combination of historical, descriptive and analytical methods, I present a discourse on possible exploration of indigenous paradigms for African art music composition. It reveals the possibility of studying the creative idioms and patterns of African indigenous music and using the same in the composition of African art music for different media in the schools. Drawing examples from existing works in Nigeria, the discourse outlines some contributions to the quest to explore the creative potentials of African indigenous music in the composition of art music, endorsing the possibility of adopting the creative approach for music composition in African schools.
