Collegiate Singers Alumni in Ghana - Reflections

 Singing for a King: My Journeys in Ghana

In November 2022, I and a small choir of BYU-Idaho Collegiate Singers alumni were honored to sing for the Asantahene, His Royal Majesty King Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, chief of the Asanti people in Ghana. It was an experience none of us will soon forget. Our visit added, I hope, another brick to the bridge already growing between BYU-Idaho, the Church, and the people of Ghana. 

A BYU-Idaho choir director in the Asante chief’s court

To understand how I ended up singing for an African tribal king, some background is in order, especially for those whose awareness of Ghana is limited to knowing that it’s a small West African nation which was once a major crossroads for the slave trade, and that their national men’s soccer team has a habit of knocking the United States out of the World Cup. It’s also known to Latter-day Saints as one of the first post-1978 hot spots of Church growth in Africa. (Don’t worry, that was also the extent of my personal knowledge of Ghana until 2013.) 

Briefly, Ghana is one of the most stable democratic countries in West Africa. The Ashanti empire was one of the most powerful of the Gold Coast kingdoms to emerge as the gold and slave trades enriched local tribes. By the mid-18th century, Asante was a rich and highly organized state which resisted European influence through several wars in the 19th century until ultimately falling under British control. The country remained part of the British empire until gaining its independence in 1957.

The influence of British occupation persists in culturally significant ways. While most Ghanaians default to speaking their native languages in daily interactions, English remains the official and unifying language of the country. 70% of Ghanaians are Christian, with the Anglican Church retaining prominence among many other Christian denominations. English-style choirs once common in public schools and churches have gradually declined, but in the last fifteen years an astounding 2000 or so independent young adult choruses have emerged in their place. Leading this mini-Renaissance are musicians like Dr. Albert Dua, who grew up singing in, writing for, and occasionally leading the choir at his Catholic high school, and didn’t want to let the art form die.

The remarkable Dr. Dua is, without qualification, the reason I am writing this article. A resident physician in Kumasi, he is also a self-taught organist and composer who had already founded two Christian choirs when I met him in 2013. While leading the Collegiate Singers on a two-week tour of Ghana, we shared a concert in Kumasi with his group, the Celestial Evangel Choir (CEG). I am not sure how this came about, but it was undoubtedly Albert’s doing. He has an unusual gift for collaboration, networking, and generally making things happen. He made no particular impression on me at the time (I had my hands full keeping a group of Americans healthy enough to sing in Africa), but the next year he found my phone number and called to ask if he could visit BYU-Idaho. I agreed to host him; he sat in on music classes and rehearsals, and we sang a few of his compositions at an informal campus recital. 

In return, in May 2016, Albert invited me to Ghana to conduct a series of concerts and teach workshops on choral music. Eager to return to Ghana, I agreed, and just a few hours after arriving (still horribly jet-lagged) I found myself guest conducting the CEG at a worship service in Kumasi. In addition to its resident traditional choir and a decent organ, the church boasted a contemporary praise band which took over the music halfway through the service. This was my first exposure to the cultural collision that currently characterizes choral music in Ghana. 

The next day, I was introduced to a healthy community of choral conductors at a conference Albert had organized, and to whom I taught conducting, choral literature, and rehearsal strategy.

I spent the rest of my time in intensive rehearsals with the CEG refining their Western repertoire, which included music by Handel, Mendelssohn, John Rutter, and Mack Wilberg, along with a few of my own hymn arrangements. I was also invited to share my faith, and was privilege to answer some of their questions and dispel some misconceptions about the Church and its teachings. The choir has since provided music for a Latter-day Saint stake conference and many sacrament meetings. 

Our concerts in Kumasi and in the National theater in Accra were successful and well-received, but the highlight for me was conducting Handel’s “Zadok the Priest” at a service celebrating the 17th anniversary of the investiture of the Asantahene. Picture it–an American Latter-day Saint conducting a British coronation anthem for an African tribal chief in an Anglican High Service. This improbable moment encapsulates the mind-blowing cultural collision that prevailed through the rest of the ceremony and which remains a defining highlight of my musical career.

I knew I was in for something memorable when the congregation entered, robed in rich, traditional Kente fabric, while the officiant wore European Anglican vestments and would have fit in well at the coronation of King Charles.

The music began innocently enough: black African choirboys in choir robes singing Anglican hymns accompanied by an organ, as if the British had not left in 1957 after all. After “Zadok the Priest”, the King processed to the altar to reenact his coronation, kneeling before the priest to receive his crown. Except for being in a sweltering, tropical cathedral in Kumasi, standing out like a sore white thumb in the midst of colorfully dressed Ghanaians, I could have been in Westminster Abbey. 

And then…the fun began. From my vantage point among the musicians, I could see that the planning had only gone so far. Something in the ceremony was taking too much time; an official asks Albert, can he play such-and-such a hymn to cover? He obliges, comfortable improvising even at this high-profile ceremony. (I can’t imagine the coronation of King Charles going off-script like this.) Then came the Offertory - at which point the praise band ousted the choirboys, and to my delight and amazement, a conga line of smiling worshippers formed and literally danced their joyful way to the collection basket. I couldn’t help but join them. What a wonderfully jarring, infectious, uniquely Ghanaian mash-up of European pomp and Ghanaian exuberance! I had never seen anything like it. 

To briefly summarize the next several years: In 2018 I returned for a second series of concerts with Tabernacle organist Richard Elliott, who accompanied and headlined the concerts I conducted. In 2022, I gathered a group of Collegiate Singers alumni and returned to participate in a grand festival of choral music with some of the best choirs in the region. While there, Albert arranged for us to visit the court of the King to sing for him and attending tribal elders in a formal ceremony of welcome. We chose “I am a Child of God”. (Apparently it went well, as I have been honored with an invitation to return in 2024 to conduct at the 25th anniversary celebration of the King’s ascension.) It has been a decade of musical bridge-building for me, and a professional and personal experience I cherish. 

Therefore, What?

Among the many lessons I’ve learned from my time in Ghana, I’ll close with just one (though it would be easy to fill an entire follow-up article with the others). It’s a lesson from our pioneer past that I had perhaps forgotten, and which might be helpful for us in the next few years, in the light of impending budget constraints: we can choose to create great things with what we have, rather than worry about what we don’t have.

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 "Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is." - Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

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It’s fashionable in some circles to lament the loss and alteration of traditional elements of culture lost by indigenous peoples as worlds and cultures collide in our time, and no doubt we do lose things worth mourning. But Ghanaians don’t seem to spend much time lamented what is “lost”; instead, they use what is there, including colonial era cathedrals, Western hymns, pipe organs, even a religion forced upon their fathers perhaps, but which the children genuinely love and would not trade for former beliefs. (My friends in Kumasi are more enthusiastically Christian, I think, than their former overlords.) They unapologetically retain what they value of British culture, and equally unapologetically make it fully their own. 

And with scarce resources, they create amazing things. Since the equatorial climate wreaks havoc on traditional acoustic instruments, they turn to Yamaha keyboards, which are inexpensive but provide all the orchestra sounds needed to give audiences and choirs an experience with great music. The best community choirs use them brilliantly, and cover every orchestral section of Messiah and Elijah by dividing them among several keyboardists. I can’t help but remember my early years here, in the Ricks College era, when music students rehearsed in elevators and broom closets, yet the choirs performed to great acclaim on national stages. 

And they do it with joy! Our Western model, with its emphasis on professionalism and specialization, is not the only way - in some cases, not even the best way - to create music, art, or maybe anything else worth having. While we appropriately nurture and even demand excellence in our University programs, I now want to take care to preserve the African (and Ricks College) spirit of “amateurism”-- doing something for love instead of profit–in my teaching, and in my living. As Nadia Boulanger said, Thanks to my time in Ghana, I think I understand a little better what Nadia Boulanger meant when she said, “What is done without joy is zero.” When I’m caught up in the stress of producing the BYU-Idaho Christmas show or chasing perfection in my teaching, thinking of that smiling conga line in an Anglican cathedral in Kumasi helps me remember that joy is what we–and our students–were made for.