Analysis of “Go Tell it to the Mountain” as a Model for Acculturation in Art Music Composition

Composition as an area of specialization is quite vast regarding the divergent genres it covers be it art, sacred, traditional, secular or popular forms. Regardless of a composers interest in the aforementioned, there are basic parameters expected to be met by the composer be it textual or musical criterion. These cover a lot of areas with the former taking care of the textual/literal while the later suitable allocation of pitches to convey understandable meanings. The objectives of the paper are to identify suitable prospects to harness using tonal inflections in the music that conveys aesthetics to approaching acculturation through African rhythmic techniques like hemiola rhythm, hocket technique/rhythm (canonic devices as equivalent nomenclature in the western clime), call and responses (contrapuntal techniques as the western equivalent idiom) arpeggios’, sequences and repetitions (an African music characteristics) amongst other sonic materials. The qualitative design was the research method used while literary materials were been employed as well integrating the participant observation approach and analysis to evaluate the validity of the selected data that were used. Additionally, recommendations were made to contribute to knowledge.