Centring embodied practice in African music studies: creative alternatives

ABSTRACT The two recent doctoral projects compared in this essay explore the affordances of centring the authors’ respective musical practices against the backdrop of the ongoing quest for African (ethno)musicological approaches. Foregrounding the life-long embodied perspectives of the authors as musicians/dancers, they report on seeking out less canonised disciplinary reference points on which to ground these understandings, and share the approaches found to be conducive (viz., creative systems theory and creative musicology). Despite attending to different practice registers and repertoires (musical arrangements within African hymnody compared with art music composition derived from traditional dance principles), they demonstrate how starting from, and centring, their respective practices has allowed local specificity to bring distinctive, new insights to their research in ways that may be of interest to a wider academic community.