When: Thursday, 6 November 2025, 2:45pm
Where: Regency Room, Hyatt Regency Minneapolis
Format: Performance
Presented by twelve performers and qualified experts, this lecture-recital takes a programmatic focus on “African Pianism” (see Omojola 2001, Kimberlin and Euba 2005, Nyaho 2008), expanding awareness of a distinctive movement within contemporary composition and applying novel methods to this repertoire including recent works not previously addressed by music research. The program will include performances, visualizations, and commentary of eight works followed by panel discussion.
Combining elements of lecture-recitals and workshops, this program strives to broaden participation and interest in the growing tradition of African Pianism. The audience will be encouraged and equipped to bring this repertory into educational contexts, as piano works appropriate for student performance, deep listening, and score study. The scores for these works are widely available to faculty students, either through their libraries or the composers’ websites, except for two newly composed works being prepared for the conference that will be shared with attendees and available to the public afterwards.
Featured composers include Halim El-Dabh, a Coptic from Egypt; Nyokabi Kariũki, a Gikuyu from Kenya; Gyimah Labi, an Akan from Ghana; Ayo Oluranti, a Yoruba from Nigeria; Christian Onyeji, an Igbo from Nigeria; Shawn E. Okpebholo, an Edo from Nigeria; and Joshua Uzoigwe, an Igbo from Nigeria. Together, these composers represent five countries and seven ethnicities, and their birth dates span 75 years. The works on this program are largely through-composed, which reflects the composers’ multiple musical consciousnesses, including post-modernist compositional study and upbringing with regular exposure to and participation in African indigenous music.
Halim El-Dabh, as a Coptic Egyptian, stands out from the rest of the composers, who are Niger-Congo peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. However, Halim El-Dabh, unlike many other North Africans, traveled extensively on the continent, embraced a pan-African identity, and was known for leading improvisatory music-making with drums associated with West Africa. Thus, El-Dabh has often been included in what is primarily a sub-Saharan African school of composition, which was intentional on his part (p.c. 2011). A brief video excerpt, never before shown, of El-Dabh improvising at the piano in his 90s in Kent, Ohio, one of his last public performances, will be shared as part of this celebration of African Pianism.
Participants
Andrew Aziz, Piano
Andrew Aziz serves as Professor of Music Theory at San Diego State University, with prior positions at Brown University, Rhode Island College, and Florida State University. He has published in journals such as Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, Music Theory Online, and several others on topics such as form throughout the common practice, Billy Joel, and West Side Story. He studied classical piano at pre-college conservatories, as well as through his college years. He is currently working on a manuscript, tentatively titled A Pianist’s Guide to Musical Form, and serving on the editorial board of Music Theory Spectrum.
Christopher Brody, Piano
Christopher Brody is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Louisville. His research on musical form, Baroque music, and J. S. Bach has received awards from the Society for Music Theory and the American Bach Society. As a pianist, he performs frequently with students and colleagues, and is a member of the Louisville-based group NouLou Chamber Players. Prior to earning his PhD in Music Theory at Yale University, he received MM and DMA degrees in Piano Performance from the University of Minnesota, and a BM in Piano Performance from Northwestern University.
Aaron Carter-Ényì, Piano
Aaron Carter-Ényì is a Scholar-in-Residence at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He holds a Ph.D. from Ohio State University (2016), was a Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria in 2013 and 2019, and a 2022 Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the US Department of State, and the Wallace Foundation. His articles appear in Africa, Analytical Approaches to World Music, Ethnomusicology, Frontiers in Psychology, Intersections, ISMIR proceedings, Music & Science, Music Theory Online, Muziki, Oxford Handbook of Singing, Performance Research, Perspectives of New Music, and Tonal Aspects of Languages.
Quintina Carter-Ényì, Voice and Panelist
Quintina Carter-Ényì is a doctoral student in musicology at the University of Georgia, where she was a 2019 Georgia Innovation Now Fellow, and is a current Southern Regional Education Board Scholar. Prior to graduate studies, she worked as a professional singer and choral director in Lagos, Nigeria. She is passionate about indigenous languages and is fluent in both Ìgbò and Yorùbá. She frequently offers workshops in African instrument making at universities and conferences, including the African Studies Association and Society for Music Theory. She recently completed a collection of 50 African choruses which is available in open access at africangospelcelebration.com. Her scholarship appears in Frontiers in Psychology, Intersections, Music Theory Online, Performance Research, and Yale Journal of Music & Religion.
Hang Ki Choi, Panelist
Hang Ki Choi is a music theorist and mezzo-soprano from Hong Kong. She teaches at Queens College and previously served as an adjunct faculty member at the Hong Kong Baptist University, teaching music theory, ear training, and tonal/post-tonal analysis. In addition to her teaching experience, she was also a research assistant at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, examining the impact of Zoom pedagogy on music and history undergraduates during the COVID era. Outside of work, she has conducted pre-concert talks for the public as part of an educational outreach program in Hong Kong. She holds an M.M. degree from the Mannes School of Music and a B.S. degree in Applied Psychology from New York University. Choi is interested in understanding the impact of memory, emotion, and anticipation on the listener’s perception of form and phrase structure.
Charles Lwanga, Panelist
Charles Lwanga is an ethnomusicologist, composer/theorist, and African percussionist. Lwanga holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology (2020) and a Ph.D. in Composition/Theory (2012) both awarded by the University of Pittsburgh. His publications (articles, reviews) appear in African Studies Review, Analytical Approaches to World Music, Ethnomusicology, and the Journal of Musical Arts in Africa. As a composer, Dr. Lwanga’s creative output is grounded through the lenses of interculturalism, creative musicology and African pianism. He is the recipient of the 2015 Robert M. Stevenson prize awarded biannually by the Society of Ethnomusicology to honor the best composition by an ethnomusicologist.
Ayọ̀ Olúrántí, Composer and Panelist
Ayọ̀ Olúrántí holds a Ph.D. in Composition & Theory from the University of Pittsburgh, USA. He was previously Chair of the Department of Music at Mountain Top University and is a 2024 recipient of the prestigious Fromm Music Foundation commission from Harvard. To celebrate 100 years of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), Ayọ̀ was commissioned to compose, MandEʋe, for Vertice Sonora. His opera, Ọmọ Àgbẹ̀, was premiered by the James Madison University Opera Theatre in 2022 as part of the project, “Enriching and Decolonizing the Opera.” Ayọ̀’s Hẹlẹlẹ was premiered at the 2024 World Choir Games in Auckland, New Zealand.
Christian Onyeji, Composer
Christian Onyeji is a Professor of Music at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He holds a Doctor of Music degree from the University of Pretoria (South Africa). Christian is an internationally recognized composer and scholar specializing in Research-Composition. This compositional approach applies ethnomusicological procedures in the composition of contemporary African art music in continuation of traditional music. His Christmas Choral “N’ihi n’amuworo ayi otu nwa” published by Oxford University Press has been performed by choirs around the world including the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. “Omenala bu ike” received the gold cup at the 2007 National Festival of Arts and Culture (NAFEST).
Andrew Pau, Piano
Andrew Pau is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. His research focuses on the music of the French Belle Époque. He holds a PhD in music theory from the CUNY Graduate Center and a master’s degree in piano performance from the Mannes School of Music, where he studied piano with Inessa Zaretsky and chamber music with Jacob Lateiner, Judith Mendenhall, and Diane Walsh. As a pianist, he has participated in regional premieres of songs and chamber works by contemporary composers such as Marga Richter, Sondra Clark, Gustav Hoyer, Anthony Iannaccone, and Timothy Corlis.
Gilad Rabinovitch, Piano
Gilad Rabinovitch is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Queens College, CUNY, where he enjoys exploring keyboard musicianship and analysis with the musicians and music educators of the future. He has published widely on galant schemata and historical improvisation (in 18th- and 19th-century Europe) and likes to conclude scholarly talks with piano improvisations on audience suggestions.
Anton Vishio, Piano
Anton Vishio teaches music theory and skills at the University of Toronto; current writing projects range from a study of song translation to the relationship of performance and analysis in contemporary music to the musics of Rabindranath Tagore, Priaulx Rainier, and Jeffrey Mumford. As a pianist, he has performed in various contexts, from the Neidhöfer-Vishio Piano Duo to the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble; he has presented several solo recitals in recent years, including two at the Monteux School in Hancock, ME, and is currently preparing lecture-recitals on Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin and Messiaen’s La Fauvette des Jardins.
Robert Wells, Piano
Robert Wells is Associate Professor of Music Theory, Director of Keyboard Studies, and Associate Director of the Honors Program at the University of Mary Washington. He also directs the UMW Indian Music Ensemble, which performs North and South Indian classical music. Wells holds degrees in Music Theory (M.A./Ph.D., Eastman) and Piano Performance (M.M., Eastman; B.M., Furman). Wells’s research interests include rhythm and meter (especially in Liszt and South Indian Carnatic music) and mathematical music theory. His performing repertoire features major piano works by Indigenous and underrepresented composers, including Louis Ballard, Margaret Bonds, and Connor Chee.