Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the emergence of literary choral music among Ibibio of Nigeria. It explores the changes of oral music culture as a product of disruptions, and how practitioners of the genre treat connections in the global church music to preserve a written culture, language and identity.

Paper long abstract:

Renewed interest in the relationship between music as expressive culture and identity draws its vigour from strongly divergent sources. Globalized musical culture in the Ibibio church supplies new paradigms for understanding the central tasks of contemporary indigenous music and their responsibility to a multicultural ethic of diversity, hybridity and difference available as connections and disruptions. Yet recent studies in ethnomusicology and African musicology emphasise both the centrality of ethnic and cultural particularism to the formation of musical awareness and expressive orientation, factors in which such particularism is embedded.

Composers of literary choral music in Ibibio culture in the "Old-Calabar Region" in Nigeria are caught in the web of these connections and disruption in their expedition. Yet they have explored these seemingly contrasting perspectives on the relationship of music to culture and identity. By the use of Ibibio language and global church music models, they have evolved a new genre which offers a fertile context for redefining the place of music in acquiring a global consciousness in expressive culture within a linguistic enclave.