Advancing indigenous church music

Abstract

The number of publications on the use of indigenous music in Christian worship is increasing with every year. The writers are mainly missionaries or indigenous ministers of religion; but also well-known ethnomusicologists, such as, Kunst, Jones, and Nketia have written on this subject. To my knowledge, they have dealt either with the theological aspects of musical indigenization or the technical problems connected with it, or both. In this paper I intend to discuss the potential that lies in an operational study where theoretical knowledge, gained from investigation and analysis, is put to test in the actual process of creating new indigenous music by indigenous composers. The fact that this action study has been made under field conditions 3 should help to give an insight into the inter-action of some social factors affecting such a process.