These two pieces incorporate elements from the music of the Aŋlø-E√e (Anlo-Ewe) people of coastal Ghana — music that I studied for about a decade, first with Kobla and Alfred Ladzekpo at CalArts, and then with Gideon Alorwoyie in Chicago.

The first piece, All Our Ancestors, starts out as a “modern” Western piece and morphs into something like a traditional Anlo piece of dance-drumming, with singing in the winds (harmonized as in traditional Anlo style). One more specific effect that I tried to include was a feature of the traditional Anlo music Adzida. Adzida features two choruses, which each do their own thing without paying attention to the actions of the other chorus. In All Our Ancestors, I also included two master drums, which are independent of each other in a similar way. Another similarity with Adzida is the way the singing continues on for a while after the drumming has stopped.

It’s Just Too Deeply Felt is more complicated. Several different styles of western harmony are used, none of them Anlo. When materials are layered, the texture is contrapuntal, not mutually oblivious.  A motif of  three sixteenths and then two sixteenths runs through both pieces, but in All Our Ancestors it just gets wrapped up in traditional Anlo style, while here it turns into other things. The different materials blend more than in All Our Ancestors, but they also collide more violently.

These pieces are both performed by the Chicago Contemporary Players.

It’s Just Too Deeply Felt is too large (24 minutes) for streaming through WordPress, so it is available through a dropbox download:
It’s Just Too Deeply Felt