Archiving African Art Music: The Iwalewahaus Music Archive and the Encoded Sound of African Musical Traditions

The Iwalewahaus music archive in Bayreuth, Germany, holds one of the largest collections of African art music scores outside the African continent. This archive, particularly through its association with the Nigerian composer and scholar Akin Euba, has become a pivotal resource in the field of African music studies. Euba’s tenure at Iwalewahaus significantly shaped the conceptualization of African art music, not primarily through sound recordings, but through the encoding of music in scores—a method intrinsic to art music composition. This encoded form of musical documentation contrasts with more traditional sound archives, which rely on recordings to preserve oral musical traditions.

Notably, Kofi Agawu has argued that African art music composition serves as a potential archive of local, oral musical practices, capturing and preserving these traditions through the formal structures of art music. In this sense, the Iwalewahaus archive offers an unusual and powerful model of a sound archive that encapsulates African expressive culture, not through the direct capture of sound but through the written musical material that encodes it. This shift in archival methodology—away from sound recordings and toward musical scores—presents an intriguing space for examining how African art music engages with colonial and postcolonial dynamics of knowledge production and preservation.

Moreover, the non-African location of the archive reflects the complex trajectories of African art music as it has been shaped by both African and European scholarly traditions. In doing so, the Iwalewahaus archive not only preserves African musical heritage but also expands its reach, cementing the notion of African art music within global musicological discourse. This proposal will explore the decolonial possibilities inherent in such a collection, reflecting on its capacity to serve as a bridge between Africa’s musical past and its future, both within and beyond the African continent.