Comparative processes through adaptation, translation, and experimentation have been a common practice among musicians in Africa, especially among the Yorùbá of Nigeria. Earlier studies on àgídìgbo music have focused on its philosophy and changes with scant attention paid to comparative process and adaptation. This study was, therefore, designed to explore new frameworks for understanding how musical ideas travel, transform, and acquire meaning across space, media, and ideology with a view to examining comparative process and adaptation in àgídìgbo music among the Yorùbá of Nigeria. Ethnographic design was adopted for the study, using in-depth and key informant interviews to gather data from the àgídìgbo exponents. The data were content analysed. A careful analysis of excerpts from àgídìgbo music reveals how musicians adapted religious texts and song texts from other musical genres into their musical engagement as occasions demand during their performances. The study also reveals potentials and limitations of comparative approaches using àgídìgbo music as a point of reference.

Comparative musicology has long relied on frameworks that cast African musical traditions as objects of comparison rather than as sources of theoretical insight. This paper proposes an alternative approach grounded in Asɛmpayɛtsia, an artistic research framework developed through the translocal translation of Kodzi, an Akan–Mfantse folklore practice from Ghana. Drawing on doctoral research into how oral traditions traverse media, institutions, and audiences, I argue that artistic translation offers productive models for rethinking comparison in the twenty-first century. Rather than treating comparison as a classificatory exercise that identities similarities and differences between musical cultures, Asɛmpayɛtsia understands it as a relational process that emerges through cultural excavation, compositional translation, and audiovisual reinscription. Through these interconnected stages, Kodzi is not merely preserved or represented but actively re-authored, generating new forms of knowledge while remaining accountable to its epistemic foundations. The paper examines how this framework challenges inherited hierarchies in comparative musicology by positioning African artistic practices as sites of theory production. It further explores how oral traditions generate their own comparative logics through adaptation, translation, and negotiation across local and translocal contexts. In doing so, the study contributes to current debates on decolonial methodologies, collaborative knowledge-making, and equitable approaches to musical comparison. By foregrounding artistic research as a comparative practice, the paper proposes a model of comparison that is reciprocal, dialogic, and grounded in African worldviews. It presents Asɛmpayɛtsia as a methodological contribution to ongoing efforts to reimagine comparative musicology from the Global South.

This paper examines the incorporation of the trumpet into Borborbor performance as a site of comparative musical adaptation, foregrounding processes of borrowing, indigenization, and creative transformation within Ewe musical practice. While Borborbor emerged in the mid-20th century as a recreational genre rooted in indigenous rhythmic, vocal, and choreographic structures, the later introduction of the trumpet—an instrument associated with Western military bands and Ghanaian highlife—reveals a dynamic engagement with translocal sound worlds. Adopting a comparative framework grounded in African epistemologies, the study analyzes how trumpet performance in Borborbor intersects with, diverges from, and reinterprets brass practices in highlife and colonial-era band traditions. The paper identifies key tertia comparationis, including melodic contour, improvisational strategies, timbral aesthetics, and performer agency, to demonstrate how the trumpet is recontextualized within Borborbor’s ensemble texture and social function. Methodologically, the research combines ethnographic fieldwork, performance analysis, and interviews with practitioners, situating musical change within broader processes of cultural negotiation and identity formation. Rather than framing borrowing as imitation, the study argues that Borborbor musicians actively re-signify the trumpet, transforming it into an idiomatic voice that aligns with local aesthetic values and participatory performance norms. By positioning Borborbor as a locus of theorizing rather than merely an object of comparison, the paper contributes to contemporary debates on decolonial and dialogic approaches to comparative musicology. It ultimately reframes musical adaptation as a reciprocal, creative process through which African musicians shape global sonic possibilities.

The history of popular music is generally hardly comprehensible without taking into account transcultural exchange processes. The fundamental significance of such cultural exchange, particularly with the USA, has been highlighted in research both at the global level (Regev 2013) and in relation to countries as diverse as Ghana (Jaji 2014) and Germany (Maase 2010). In this paper, we aim to discuss the benefits of integrating diverse strands of transnational connections to music from the United States within a comparative framework. To this end, we focus on a traveling artist, namely the Black American jazz musician Louis Armstrong, who was popular in both Ghana and Germany during the period from 1950 to 1970. By combining a re-reading of established, previously separate scholarly discourses with additional analyses of historical sources, we attempt to take a comparative look at the histories of Highlife in Ghana and Schlager in Germany, using Armstrong as a point of comparison (tertium comparationis). Armstrong performed six times in West Germany during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1959, he sang the bilingual hit ‘Uncle Satchmo’s Lullaby’ as a duet with the German child star Gabriele (Clonisch). This collaboration brings together representatives of American jazz and German Schlager; two genres whose presence in media discourse had previously been the subject of heated debates: Whilst German-language Schlager songs still dominated the radio schedule of the RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) in 1954, by 1957 it was mainly Englishlanguage tracks that were played, including those by Armstrong (Mrozek 2021, p. 386). In Germany, Jazz was regarded as a ‘collective term for modern, lively, rhythm-driven music’ (Maase 1992, p. 178) and was associated with the American Allies. Using the example of ‘Uncle Satchmo’s Lullaby’, one presentation in our panel outlines how the popular Schlager is imbued with notions of German nationality within the context of US Allied cultural policy. The second presentation will discuss Armstrong’s cultural and political significance during the same historical period in Ghana, where he performed in the year before indepence, 1956, and in 1960 (Collins 2018). Armstrong’s visits to Ghana mirror his role as a ‘jazz ambassador’ for the US with his first visit including representative appearances like meeting with and performing for prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, all of that documented in the USproduced biopic Satchmo the Great (1957), and with the second visit being sponsored by the State Department (Stein 2012). Whilst Armstrong’s popularity among urban audiences is evidenced in newspaper articles and record advertisements, he also left his mark in the production of Highlife music. Exemplary cases for the latter are documented in research on Highlife’s history, like the story of the trumpet player Zeal Onyia who witnessed Armstrong’s performance with E. T. Mensa in 1956 (Coester 2026). By comparing the relations of Armstrong with Schlager and Highlife, we aim to shed a new light particularly (1) on the transcultural intricacies of diverse popular musics and their discursive designations and (2) on the political ambivalences implied in the relations to a Black American musician in the two different countries being studied. The joint panel will present results from our ongoing research project “Low Pop global” which examines music in processes of democratisation and the constitutions of nation-states with regard to Schlager in (West) Germany and Highlife in Ghana.

Ecocriticism, in its various disciplinary and activist articulations, aims to be highly specific, looking for the historical, socio-political, and regional particularities of human-nature imaginaries and concepts within cultural texts. Therefore, many ecocritical scholars approach comparative research with apprehension as it tends to focus on economic, socio-ecological, and cultural differences or stress commonalities while downplaying the contextual complexities. (cf. Heise 2013).
I begin this paper by addressing central concerns raised against comparative approaches in ecocriticism and then explore how I could reframe them as a thinking with that centers not on normative environmental concepts or musical phenomena but rather focuses on the ways in which environmental scholars choose to address them. Here, I want to enter a dialogue with the work of two influential Nigerian environmental scholars in order to address ongoing debates in the environmental humanities about disciplinary boundaries and the question of urgency.
Musicologist Olusegun Stephen Titus develops a transgressive ecomusicological approach by linking matter, music, performance, and politics while strengthening the activist potential of music for addressing environmental concerns (cf. 2019; 2022; McCartney 2025). Bayo Akomolafe, a celebrated ecological thinker, proposes the notion of ‘post-activism’ as a site where continuity becomes impossible, where we slow down and relish in the cracks and ruptures (cf. Akomolafe 2019; n.d.). Both scholars challenge my own work as a popular music scholar in Germany and inspire me to rethink difference and commonality, activism in popular music and agency in a more-than-human world. By entering a dialogue with their work, I want to look for common grounds, where comparative ecocriticial research could be reframed as a chance for grappling with a decidedly post-environmental world (cf. Certomà 2016).

Comparative music research has increasingly sought to move beyond Euro-centric models of analysis, yet the questions remain regarding the epistemological foundations of comparison itself. While Indigenous musical practices are frequently included in comparative studies, Indigenous philosophies rarely inform the frameworks through which comparison is conducted. This article proposes Wu Munhu, a Southern African philosophy grounded in relationality, reciprocity and collective well-being, as an Indigenous comparative framework for music research.
Methodologically, the study employs a qualitative, multi-sited, comparative ethnography approach, combining participant observation, semi-structured interviews and musical analysis practice in Cabo Delgado and Inhambane in Mozambique. Drawing on fieldwork on music for social cohesion and healing traditions, the analysis moves beyond form and style to relational dimensions of musical life. It identifies community participation, knowledge transmission, cultural responsibility and collective benefit as productive tertia comparationis for understanding how indigenous music contributes to communal life and cultural continuity across distinct social contexts.
The article further explores the implications of these relational functions for the integration of indigenous music into contemporary music industry structures. It argues that sustainable integration requires not only recognition of musical expressions, but also the social values, responsibilities and networks embedded within them. By positioning Wu Munhu as comparative and evaluative framework, the study contributes to ongoing efforts to decolonise comparative music research, while offering an Indigenous perspective of rethinking culturally sustainable music industry in Mozambique.

Adowa remains one of the most significant performance genres among the Akan of Ghana, distinguished by its rhythmic organisation, expressive dance vocabulary, communicative gestures, vocal practices, and close integration of music and social life. Yet while Adowa has been extensively studied within indigenous performance contexts, less attention has been given to how its performance principles are reconfigured within contemporary popular music. This paper addresses that gap through a comparative analysis of indigenous Adowa performance and Torwia, a highlife song by Ghanaian musician Asabea Cropper. Situated within recent efforts to rethink comparative musicology through musical practices, the paper examines how performance knowledge travels across genres and contexts. I draw on musical and performance analysis to explore the ways Cropper incorporates Adowa-derived rhythmic patterns, vocal inflections, linguistic expressions, and performative aesthetics into a contemporary highlife framework. I argue that Torwia functions as a site of translation in which indigenous performance practices are neither reproduced unchanged nor abandoned in favour of modern popular forms. They are selectively adapted and recontextualised through modern instrumentation, commercial recording practices, and contemporary performance environments. The paper demonstrates how highlife musicians actively negotiate relationships between inherited cultural forms and contemporary musical demands. It contributes to broader discussions on how popular songs can serve as a dynamic arena in which indigenous performance traditions are continually reimagined, reinterpreted, and given new social meanings.

This paper explores the transformation of osoode, an indigenous musical tradition of the Fante people in Ghana's Central Region, into osoode highlife, a contemporary musical form blending traditional and modern elements. The paper further examines the historical, social, and cultural factors that contributed to the transformation of osoode, including urbanisation, changing audience preferences, technological developments, and the influence of highlife music in Ghana. Employing a comparative approach, the paper analyses the musical structures, performance practices, instrumentation, song texts, and socio-cultural functions of both traditional osoode and osoode highlife. Data was collected through interviews with performers and community members, as well as observations and musical analysis of selected songs. I argue that the comparative approach provides a valuable framework for examining the transformations that have occurred within the osoode musical tradition over time. By comparing traditional osoode with its contemporary version, osoode highlife, the paper highlights the processes of continuity, adaptation, and innovation that have shaped the musical practices of the Fante people of Ghana. The findings demonstrate that osoode highlife serves as both a vehicle for musical innovation and a medium for the sustenance and transmission of Fante cultural heritage. Through an exploration of the dynamic relationship between tradition and modernity, this paper contributes to scholarship on indigenous music and musical transformation in contemporary Ghana.

In the twentieth century, Ghanaian music witnessed a symbiotic relationship between art choral and popular highlife musical compositional and performance practices. Art choral music, traditionally associated with Christian worship and regarded as sacred, increasingly interacted with the secular popular tradition of Ghanaian highlife, as evidenced by Amu’s 1929 composition Yɛn Ara Asaase Ni (This Is Our Land). Drawing on a comparative musicological perspective, this paper examines the sacralisation of Choral Highlife by comparing its earlier secular manifestations with its later adaptation within Christian worship, demonstrating how the movement of highlife musical practices between secular and sacred domains shaped Choral Highlife as a predominantly sacred choral tradition. Focusing on the late 1970s and early 1980s, the study traces how Choral Highlife, initially rooted in secular community-based performance contexts, was incorporated into the church. Through this process, highlife-derived musical practices acquired new liturgical meanings, leading to their adaptation and establishment in mainline churches. Although historical in approach, the study is situated within comparative musicology by examining how musical practices were maintained, adapted, and reinterpreted across secular and sacred contexts while retaining identifiable features of the popular highlife tradition. By comparing the historical transformation of Choral Highlife across secular and sacred performance domains, the paper contributes to comparative musicology by demonstrating how musical interaction, adaptation, and reinterpretation transformed an existing tradition while retaining identifiable elements of its earlier forms, resulting in new musical identities. Using a qualitative approach, data were collected through archival research, interviews, and a review of relevant literature

Palmwine music has long served as a site of musical exchange, adaptation, and creative experimentation as one of the foundational traditions in the history of Ghanaian popular music. Although often associated with earlier generations of musicians, the tradition continues to find new life through contemporary revitalisation initiatives that bring together performers, audiences, and researchers in processes of transmission and reinterpretation. Drawing on ethnographic reflections from Nsadwase Nkomo, a performance circle dedicated to the revitalisation of palmwine music in Ghana, this paper explores what such initiatives reveal about the possibilities of comparative musicology in the twenty first century. This paper argues that performers themselves engage in comparison as a musical practice, negotiating meaning across generations, contexts, and media, that extends the concept beyond its familiar role as a scholarly tool. Within revitalisation spaces such as the Nsadwase Nkomo, musicians engage in continuous acts of comparison as they learn from older practitioners, reinterpret inherited repertoires, negotiate questions of authenticity, and adapt musical practices for contemporary audiences. These interactions unfold across multiple sites, including live performance, informal apprenticeship, festivals, university classrooms, and digital platforms, which creates opportunities for the translation and transformation of musical knowledge. The paper proposes an African-centred framework that understands comparison as dialogic, collaborative, and embodied by foregrounding the experiences of musicians as active agents of comparison. The Ghanaian palmwine music case demonstrates how comparative processes emerge through shared musical practice itself. The paper contributes to ongoing discourse on musical revitalisation offers a productive lens through which to examine how musical ideas travel, transform, and acquire new meanings in contemporary African contexts.

Women have long occupied a central place in Ghanaian highlife music, appearing variously as lovers, wives, mothers, moral exemplars, temptresses, economic actors, and symbols through which broader social anxieties and aspirations are articulated. Yet despite extensive scholarship on highlife as Ghana’s first homegrown popular music tradition, relatively little attention has been paid to how representation of women has shifted across different historical moments and what such changes reveal about evolving gender relations in Ghanaian society. This paper explores constructions of womanhood in Ghanaian highlife across two contrasting periods: the late 1950s and the late 1980s. I approach highlife lyrics as cultural sites where ideas about femininity, morality, marriage, labor, sexuality, and social identity are negotiated and contested, rather than treating them as straightforward reflections of social reality. I ask how women are represented in highlife songs from these periods and what continuities and shifts emerge in the ways female subjects are imagined and narrated. The analysis draws on a comparative corpus of recordings from the two periods. I investigate the relationship between musical narratives and changing understanding of gender in Ghana through a close reading of the lyrical texts situated within their respective social and historical contexts. I argue that the changing representations of women in highlife provide a productive lens through which to examine broader transformations in Ghanaian social life. It contributes to ongoing discussions on gender, popular music, and social change in Africa while demonstrating the value of popular song as a historical archive of shifting social imaginaries.

This study examines stylistic continuity and innovation in Ghanaian art music through a comparative musicological analysis of selected works by first-generation composers Gaddiel Acquaah and Jacob Paulinus Johnson and second-generation composers Augustus Adu-Sarfo and Robert Ndɔ. Adopting a generational comparative perspective, the study examines how compositional practices are retained, adapted, and developed across successive generations of Ghanaian art music. Drawing on comparative musicology and informed by historical and ethnomusicological perspectives, it integrates score analysis, archival research, and historical contextualisation.
The findings show that first-generation composers established a distinctly Ghanaian art music tradition by adapting European art music conventions to indigenous tonal languages, rhythmic structures, and folk materials. Second-generation composers built on this foundation while expanding harmonic language, texture, formal organisation, and contemporary compositional techniques. The analysis identifies shared features, including diatonic harmonic practices, call-and-response textures, folk-derived melodies, and dance-inspired rhythms, alongside innovations in harmonic treatment, instrumental writing, and expressive design.
By using generational comparison as an analytical framework, the study demonstrates how stylistic continuity and innovation reflect both individual creativity and changing historical contexts. It argues that comparative musicology provides a useful approach for examining stylistic transmission and transformation within a single musical tradition, extending comparative inquiry beyond cross-cultural comparison. The study contributes to scholarship on African art music by offering a framework for understanding the relationship between tradition, innovation, and cultural identity across generations.