African Pianism: An Educator View

Abstract

The quest for solving the impending challenge that hampers the performance of music students in playing pieces composed by African scholar in the African pianism style is one of the major concerns of most piano instructors that embraced the concept of African pianism. The identified difficulty stands as contributing factor downplaying the promotion of African identity via the use of the piano. Generally, this has stimulated lots of debates at different levels, which calls for urgent attention to reposition and promote African pianism. The thrust of this paper is not to re-sound the identified difficulty, but to investigate and propound applicable approaches that could be used as fundamental procedures for correcting the intricacy of this challenge. The Taro Yamane sample size theory was adopted. Questionnaire were administered to music students from two Universities in Nigeria used as case study, interviewing piano instructors from these institutions, interviewing Christian Onyeji, a prominent African pianism composer in Nigeria and Meki Nzewi, a renowned, personate and promoter of African music. The findings reveal that there is a big gap between the music students and their knowledge of their indigenous music and culture. Also, most music students do not have any prior theoretical nor practical knowledge of piano playing before coming to study music, and the ratio balancing of the choice of selected piano pieces given to the students is more of Western oriental pieces than African oriental pieces. However, the suggestive approachable measures to tackle the said problem include, route learning method which, should dominant the teaching method for pieces in African pianism style, African pianism pieces should be the dominant pieces to be given to students learning to play the piano in the departments of music in Nigeria. Composers should compose short pieces in the African pianism style/techniques and make them available for instructional materials. Nevertheless, the proposed suggestions in this study will serve as an eye opener to the need for redirecting and promoting the teaching and playing of African Pianism in the department of music in Nigeria.