Fela Sowande

Fela Sowande (Oyo, 1905 – Ravenna, Ohio, 1987) was a Nigerian composer and organist who bridged Yoruba traditional music, Christian liturgy and Western musical forms. His output was central to forging a distinctly Nigerian musical identity after independence.

He was trained by his father and by Ekundayo Phillips. In 1934 he moved to London, where he took organ lessons with George Oldroyd, G. D. Cunningham and Rubbra, and became a member of the Royal College of Organists and the Trinity College of Music. In 1941 he earned a Bachelor of Music from the University of London. He directed the organ and choir of the West London Methodist Mission, and his talks for the BBC's African Service, focusing on his own works, established his career as a composer from around 1940 onwards.

He collected Nigeria's indigenous and popular music, which he regarded as an intellectual and compositional resource. This influence is evident in Six Sketches (1953), while African Suite (1955) blends in highlife. He served as music director of the British Ministry of Information's colonial film unit and, from 1953, of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1960 he was commissioned to write a national anthem for independence; the resulting work, Folk Symphony, never became an anthem, although the New York Philharmonic performed it at Carnegie Hall in 1962.

His legacy includes an extensive body of organ music, the most complex in its harmonic and contrapuntal organisation, and a choral output featuring call and response, heterophony, pentatonicism and echoes of African-American spirituals, as in De Angels are Watchin'. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ife in 1972 and fellowships from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. He taught at the University of Ibadan, where many of his manuscripts are preserved, and in the United States at Howard and Pittsburgh universities.