Häuptling aus Ghana als Schlagzeuger in Texas
DENTON, Texas — For the annual African Cultural Festival at the University of North Texas here, Torgbui Midawo Gideon Foli Alorwoyie, the festival’s founder, is his own promoter, his own publicist, his own street team.
“I do everything myself,” said Mr. Alorwoyie, who has deep blue scars on his cheeks that mark him as a Midawo, or high priest, of the Yewe cult (part of the Ewe ethnic group) of Ghana’s Volta region. A chain with a gold medallion in the shape of Africa glinted on his chest.
Mr. Alorwoyie, 71, is a master drummer from Africa who is a tenured professor of African drumming and dance. In his own country, he is working to pass on traditions in danger of disappearing.
Mr. Alorwoyie, who also carries the title of Torgbui, or paramount chief, in his region of Ghana, is a stern taskmaster to his performers and students.
He has a link to the evolution of American Minimalism: In 1970, the composer Steve Reich traveled to Ghana to study with Mr. Alorwoyie. “Drumming,” Mr. Reich’s groundbreaking piece for nine percussionists, was written after his trip.
At rehearsals for the recent festival, Mr. Alorwoyien tapped the hull of an atsimevu, a massive drum, calling drummers and dancers into action, activating changes in the patterns and movements with nods or shifts in expression. He then joined in a dance.
“African music is not something you just listen to,” he said. “The answer is the dance.”
Mr. Alorwoyie left Ghana in 1976 and took a position as a visiting lecturer at the State University of New York. After stints at the American Conservatory of Music and the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, he joined the North Texas faculty in 1996. The School of Music there is one of the nation’s largest, with an extensive percussion program.
The rhythms Mr. Alorwoyie plays and teaches belong to a language that has been stored in generations of memory, rarely recorded or preserved. Ewe songs are forms of communication; phrases like “the lion is coming” are reinterpreted as drum patterns, part of an alarm system among villages. Without a notational system, the rhythms must be passed from generation to generation.
“There’s not a classroom that’s going to teach you,” Mr. Alorwoyie said. “In the villages and towns and cottages, you’re not going to see nobody teaching nobody how to drum.”
He and the performers he brought to Texas for the festival are part of the group trying to transmit this fragile knowledge. “It’s here,” said Godwin Abotsi, 37, a Ghanaian drummer and dancer who lives in Colorado, pointing to his head.
But even in Africa, the sacred songs and rhythms are struggling, with the drummers and dancers of Ghana’s national ensemble earning salaries that barely sustain them.
Mr. Alorwoyie, who travels to Ghana several times a year, is attempting to pass on his library of music. But rather than updating the old patterns, he is returning to the rhythms he knows. “If I am trying to teach something else creatively,” he said, “I’m going to lose those very important messages.”