Music professor's range spans genres and disciplines

by Patricia Allen
Kofi Agawu sways and snaps his fingers as he leads his undergraduate students in singing an infectiously rhythmic West African call-and-response play song during a Monday morning class in the Woolworth Music Center.

The next day, Agawu hunkers over a score of Beethoven's String Quartet in F, Op. 59 No. 1, moderating a laborious, measure-by-measure, note-by-note analysis of the sonata by graduate students in a seminar at a conference table in the music library.

A music professor with expertise in two disparate genres, Agawu is something of an anomaly in his field.

"It is extremely rare to have a scholar who is absolutely fluent in classical and Western music and fluent in an area of world music. It's very astonishing," said Scott Burnham, professor and chair of the Department of Music. According to Burnham, scholars who study African, Asian and other world music tend to disassociate themselves academically from Western music altogether.

Although the two forms of music are radically different, Agawu's interest in classical European music and African music are fused and have equal significance for him as a scholar, a listener and a one-time aspiring composer.

"I have always had trouble separating these things out," Agawu said, "because they have always been meshed with one another, they have always been intertwined."

Read the full story in the Weekly Bulletin.