Akin Euba (1935–2020) was a Nigerian composer, pianist and musicologist, and the principal theorist of what he called African pianism and intercultural music. Trained at Trinity College of Music in London and at UCLA, he taught at the University of Lagos and the University of Ife, directed the Elekóto Music Centre in Lagos, and later held the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Music at the University of Pittsburgh.
Essays on Music in Africa gathers the lectures and papers in which Euba set out that thinking. Volume I (1988) grew out of public lectures given at IWALEWA-Haus in Bayreuth and at the universities of Hamburg, Duisburg and Liverpool during 1987, and was published in the Bayreuth African Studies series at the suggestion of Ronald Ruprecht, then director of IWALEWA-Haus. Volume 2 (1989), subtitled Intercultural Perspectives, was co-published by the Elekóto Music Centre in Lagos — Euba's own institution at Akoka — and Bayreuth African Studies.
Together the two volumes move from documentation to method: the first takes up Yorùbá ritual music, kingship music, masquerade theatre, the composer Ayọ Bankọlẹ, and the popular forms of jùjú, highlife and Afro-beat; the second turns to fújì and Yorùbá folk opera before setting out Euba's own approach to neo-African music theatre. The OlongoAfrica Library holds both volumes.
