Scenes from Nigeria, Op. 1

• Akpabot composed this orchestral work while he was a student at the Royal College of Music.¹
• Akpabot wrote this piece in 1960, the same year that Nigeria gained independence from Britain.²
• This work premiered on Oct. 2, 1965, in a broadcast performance by the BBC Welsh Orchestra.³

“Scenes from Nigeria, written in 1960 for the Nigerian Independence Celebration, was a first attempt at writing orchestra music ‘with an African flavor.’ There were problems on how to tackle this since in African music there are no developmental sections as we know it in Western music – so, these have been omitted and episodes and bridge passages substituted. The music is very repetitive because African music is repetitive, continuity being maintained by means of variations. There are three scenes: ‘Pastorale’ where the melody is original and therefore unusually long for an African melody; a ‘highlife’ scene featuring the most popular dance in West Africa and a ‘blues’ scene, reflective in character and having no connection with the Blues as known in American music.”

Samuel Akpabot, on Scenes from Nigeria⁴

1. Godwin Sadoh, “The Orchestral Works of Samuel Akpabot, a Nigerian Composer-Ethnomusicologist,” The Musical Times 151, no. 1913 (2010): 79, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25759519.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 80.
4. Quoted in Ibid., 79-80.