A Review of the Contributions of Early Female Musicologists to Music-Theatre in Nigeria

Abstract

Music-theatre is a developing genre of the Nigerian performing arts, expressed as opera, music-drama, musical-theatre or musicals. Through interview, historical enquiry and literature review, this paper surveys the contributions of selected female music scholars to the genre in both practice and knowledge, and identifies two outstanding female scholars as performers, composers and directors within an otherwise male-dominated field. It concludes with a call for female scholars to build on these pioneering efforts and expand the frontier of knowledge and practice of music-theatre in Nigeria.