Editorial Note
Editorial Note
The Benin Journal of Music and the Arts (BENJMA), which was established in 2021, is a publication of the Music Programme of the Department of Theatre Arts, Faculty of Arts, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria. BENJMA operates an open access policy of internet publication to facilitate easy accessibility and wide readership, and also produces complimentary print versions to meet the desire of readers who would want to obtain hard copies as alternative
and/or supplementary acquisitions. BENJMA is designed to publish at least one (1) Issue yearly, and to undertake the publication of Special Issues from time to time when the need arises.
BENJMA receives and publishes well-researched scholarly articles in music and the arts to promote scholarship and support the dissemination of research findings at local and global levels. It provides the forum for discourses on the historical, contemporary, and evolving subject matters that would serve as bases for the formation of future perspectives, the making of impactful predictions, and the galvanisation of developmental ideas.This present publication, Volume 1, is the maiden edition of BENJMA published in May 2022. This volume is a kaleidoscope of articles on music and the arts, featuring twelve (12) articles from a range of thematic areas such as musical syncretism, traditional festival, music education, music administration, church music, music copyright, music in drama, music in literature, music in movie, theatre for development (tfd), and aesthetics. Readers would most assuredly find the articles interesting, informative, educative, and thought-provoking.
Volume 1 , May 2022
Copious literature abound on music and Nigerian traditional film productions, and on the enduring relationship between them. However, pragmatics import and musical rhetoric in traditional movies have not really occupied the minds of scholars in comparative terms, hence, the rather scarce scholarly writings on the subject matter. Whereas the descriptive and narrative capacity of music, especially, in Yorùbá movies is overwhelming, this has not been properly elucidated and documented by scholars.
Administration is the function of leadership at the highest level of an organisation. The duties of the chief executive is to establish and formulate policies that facilitate the administration towards achieving the objectives of the organisation. The success and failure of an organisation depends largely on it.
This paper examines the significance of songs in selected Chinua Achebe’s short stories in the collection, Girls at War. In the paper, the selected stories “Vengeful Creditor,” “Chike’s School Days” and “The Voter” are analyzed qualitatively with a view to ascertaining their type, content, meaning and general significance in their contexts towards illustrating the themes of the stories. The sociological theory is adopted as the theoretical frame work to guide the analysis of the texts.
In all significant ages of human development and progress, there has always been a close association of symbolic creative or artistic expressions to uncover the various principles which have institutionalized the notions of good and bad, right and wrong , beauty and ugly, truth and false, and patterns stability and shaved expectations. These creative or artistic expressions are symbolic designs, prescriptions, and responses, which are deliberately fashioned to guide all aspects of a people’s life.
Syncretism is said to be in effect when different phenomena across diverse spheres interplay. Nigerian hip-hop music (also colloquially referred to as Naija hip-hop) is Nigeria's local adaptation of the global hip-hop genre. This paper investigates the functions of the standard pattern (a traditional African rhythmic pattern) in Naija hip-hop musical syncretism. The purposive sampling method was employed in selecting three popular music of this genre, which constitutes the primary data for this study.