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EnYu. Yakimenko, A. Alyabyeva
David Fanshawe’s “African Sanctus”: Towards the problem of interaction between ritual practices in the context of postmodernism ideas
David Fanshawe’s “African Sanctus” (1972–1977) was the first to demonstrate the multi-layered interplay of artifacts from African traditional culture and Islamic religious worship within the Catholic spiritual concert genre. This synthesizing focus, evident in this work at various levels, demonstrates the mass’s readiness for dialogue with various cultures, styles, and genres, manifesting itself at the level of interaction between religious traditions. Thus, Fanshawe’s work charted a new direction for the development of this genre within the context of postmodernist ideas. Moreover, this cultural interaction is realized not only through the “complementary” juxtaposition of religious texts written in Latin, classical Arabic, and African dialects, which are used in ritual practices to address God, but also through specific musical genres and forms of representation. This includes the genre of the mass and elements of the Anglican liturgy, ritual practices of African countries (marriage and war dances, funeral lamentations), and elements of Islamic culture (the adhan, the reading of the Koran, and Sufi dhikr). The mass, in turn, embodies a tendency toward a synthesis of theatrical and ritual principles. At the same time, the composer devotes considerable attention to the audio- and visual elements, utilizing different materials collected during ethnographic expeditions across the African continent. Furthermore, Fanshawe includes the sounds of traditional African instruments in the score, stipulating the participation of professional musicians-performers of the oral tradition. Thus, the following features of postmodernism are found in the “African Sanctus” mass: deconstruction of the genre, synthetic aspirations, multiculturalism, elements of the New Age (the use of sounds of nature), improvisation, conceptuality (the preservation of disappearing musical traditions, as well as the pacifist direction of the mass, indicated by the composer himself).
Key words
postmodernism in music, “African Sanctus” by David Fanshawe, genre of mass, African traditional culture, Islamic worship, ritual practices, synthesizing tendencies.
For citation
Yakimenko Yu., Alyabyeva A. David Fanshawe’s “African Sanctus”: Towards the problem of interaction between ritual practices in the context of postmodernism ideas. In: South-Russian Musical Anthology. 2025. No. 4. Pp. 112–120.
