Form and Meaning in Ewe Song. A Critical Review

This study documents musical form and meaning in Ewe song, covering both the southern and northern Ewe regions of Ghana. Utilizing written sources, Dr. Nissio Fiagbedzi examines various models of interpretation dating from 1890 as he seeks to explain Ewe song as a unified form of expression in its own right. Using an analytical process in examining four songs, he explains why this is so with insightful deliberation.

The following excerpt comes from the Foreword written by Kofi Agawu: ...Form and Meaning in African Song offers a comprehensive analytical study of Ewe song. It is not a quick read, however. This is not because its use of technical vocabulary might be a stumbling block for the uninitiated; rather, it demands that the committed reader take time to hear and rehear various songs and song fragments through the constrasting filters proposed by various scholars. Among the issues fruitfully explored in the book are brief life histories, motivating social functions, indigenous intellection as expressed in the use of terms like nyagbe (word sound) and hagbe (song melody), the dynamics of call and response as a formal principle, and the disposition of pitch according to the constraints of various modal collections. What Fiagbedzi has achieved here is, in his own words, a 'rationalization of principles of Ewe song.' The fact that this process of rationalization demands recourse to a variety of voices, among them indigenous practitioners (Akpalu and Atsubota), Africanists (like Jones, Amoaku, Anyidoho, Nketia, Fiagbedzi himself, and myself), and Western aestheticians and semioticians (Like Wilson Coker and Suzanne Langer), may serve to reassure us that such dialogues are not only possible but necessary; they point to the very condition of humanistic knowledge production today.