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Paper short abstract:

I explore Bernard Woma's creation and re-creation of original music for the Dagara gyil xylophone within his highly developed performative praxis. Through analyses of his compositional processes, I seek to convey the essence of Bernard's music by exploring both its interior and exterior dimensions.

Paper long abstract:

In my paper, I will explore Bernard Woma's creation and re-creation of original music for the Dagara gyil within his highly developed performative praxis. Bernard Woma is the late gyil guba (master Dagara xylophonist) and founder of the Dagara Music Center. As an innovative performer/composer, Bernard created a vibrant new style of gyil music. It is this neo-traditional music created for the concert hall, yet firmly rooted in Dagara tradition, that is the focus of my paper. Through analyses of his compositional processes, I seek to convey the essence of Bernard's music by exploring both its interior and exterior dimensions. I aim to communicate a robust understanding of his compositional processes; including cultural foundations of his music within Dagara indigenous knowledge systems, his success as a contemporary improviser composer performer moving the gyil xylophone beyond these foundations, and ways in which his music was embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended on the global stage. I explore Bernard's music from a wide-angle view through a transdisciplinary lens encompassing embodied/enactive cognition, indigenous knowledge systems, and African musicology. I simultaneously zoom in on a single seminal composition, Gyil Yeru, that connects to Bernard's larger repertoire and reflects his explorations as a global musician. This composition, created originally for solo gyil, expanded to gyil trio, then developed into an orchestral concerto, forms a bridge between the indigenous wisdom of Dagara musical traditions and the contemporary global concert stage. As such, it provides an ideal vehicle for developing a model of composition-in-performance within Bernard Woma's praxis.