News
Kofi Agawu elected Visiting Professor
The Faculty of Music is delighted to announce the election of Kofi Agawu, Professor of Music at Princeton University, to the George Eastman Visiting Professorship 2012/13, to be held in conjunction with a Professorial Fellowship at Balliol College.
Professor Agawu will be resident in Oxford for the entire academic year and will be giving twenty-four lectures/classes.
Born in Ghana, Agawu grew up immersed in West African music, but also enjoyed the Western European classical tradition. He came to study in the UK, first at Reading University (where his teachers included emeritus members of the Oxford Music Faculty Bojan Bujic and Harry Johnstone), then at King's College London. He took his doctorate in historical musicology at Stanford University, USA, in 1982.
During the early years of his postgraduate education, Agawu was entrenched in teaching and writing about classical music. But the rhythms of West Africa continued to echo in his head and fuelled his intellectual curiosity. He published one of his first articles on African music in 1982 while an assistant professor at Haverford College. By 1984, he was publishing nearly an equal number of articles on West African music as he was on the works of Chopin, Schubert, Haydn and Mahler. In both genres, he seeks to understand the structure of a composition as well as its social and historical contexts. 'Whether it's a West African children's play song or a Beethoven sonata, I am trying to figure out how the music works and what it means', Agawu has said. 'That is the heart of my interest and what I try to convey to my students.'
Professor Agawu's publications include Playing with Signs: a Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music (Princeton, 1991), African Ryhthm: a Northern Ewe Perspective (CUP, 1995), Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (Routledge, 2003), Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (OUP, 2009).
The Eastman Professorship was established in 1929 by George Eastman, founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, at Oxford University to be filled on a visiting basis by senior American scholars of the highest distinction. The impressive list of previous incumbents includes twelve Nobel Laureates. The Professorship has also been held with distinction by classicists, philosophers, lawyers, historians, and economists. Many eminent literary scholars have spent time in Eastman House, including the very first incumbent, John Livingston Lowes (1930, author of The Road to Xanadu, 1927), Roger Sherman Loomis (1956), Lionel Trilling (1964), Harry Levin (1982), A Walton Litz (1989), Natalie Zeeman Davis (1994), and Peter Brooks (2001).