Nicholas G. J. Ballanta

Nicholas G.J. Ballanta (1893-1962) was a music scholar, composer and educator who engaged in field research of the music of West Africa in the early twentieth century. His education in European music produced western-style compositions. The years spent collecting indigenous African music prompted him to compose musical plays or operas that are set in African villages and combine African and European musical elements.

Biography

Early life (1893-1921)

The child named Nicholas George Julius Taylor was born 14 March 1893 in Kissy near the city of Freetown in Sierra Leone. His early memories included singing in the choir at St. Patrick’s Anglican Church. His mother was a Christian woman of the Mende tribe and his father, Gustavus Taylor, played violin and organ. As a ship’s engineer, his father traveled between Sierra Leone and the Gambia. Nicholas remembered his father performing concerts in the Gambia. Gustavus died in a shipping accident when Nicholas was ten years old. (Jacobs, 11)

In 1905 Nicholas was sent to the CMS Grammar School in Freetown. (Jacobs 11) There he played clarinet and became sergeant of the school band. By 1906 he completed Clark’s Catechism in Music and won first prize in music at the government school exhibition. At that time he began lessons in organ. (Ballanta, “An African Scale”) Completing the high school course in less than the normal three years, he went to work as a clerk in the Sierra Leone Office of the Attorney General. He accepted several promotions for government positions in Sierra Leone and the Gambia. (Jacobs 12)

Beginning in 1911, he served as organist at St. Patrick’s church, and between 1913 and 1917 he studied books on harmony, form, counterpoint and fugue. In 1917 he passed the first examination for the degree of Bachelor of Music at Durham University in England. In order to complete the degree it would have been necessary to travel to England. (Ballanta, “An African Scale”)

Serving as musical director of the choral society in Freetown, he worked with Adelaide Caseley Hayford, who used her influence to promote Ballanta’s further education. He composed a choral work, “Belshazzar’s Feast,” to a text by Felicia Hemans that was performed in Freetown in 1919. When Mrs. Caseley Hayford traveled to America, she took that work with her to continue promoting his career. She urged him to join her and sent funds for his journey to the United States. (Jacobs 12-13)

American period (1921-1924

After working with Mrs. Caseley Hayford to produce African pageants in Boston and Philadelphia (Cromwell, 132), Ballanta went to New York where he wrote two articles for the Musical Courier, “Jazz Music and Its Relation to African Music” (June 1, 1922) and “An African Scale” (June 29, 1922).

At this time he began to change his name from "Taylor", a name given to his grandfather by missionaries, (Ballanta, “Gathering Folk-Tunes,” 3) to “Ballanta.” The first article published in Musical Courier uses “Nicholas G. Taylor.” The second article uses "Nic. G. J. Ballanta-Taylor", and the hyphenated name continued to be used in the US. In 1925 the title page of Saint Helena Island Spirituals states it is “By Nicholas George Julius Ballanta-(Taylor),” while the Foreword is signed “N. G. J. Ballanta.” At least from 1937 forward the articles in the Sierra Leone Daily Mail newspaper consistently used the surname “Ballanta.”

Meeting both Walter Damrosch and Dr. Frank Damrosch in New York, he was given a scholarship to the Institute of Musical Art (later the Julliard School of Music), and received his diploma in 1924. (Ballanta, "Gathering Folk-Tunes", 3) For his thesis he wrote a symphonic work based on African themes titled The Music of Africa. (Southern)

George Foster Peabody persuaded Ballanta to visit Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina to gain knowledge of the music of African Americans. While visiting the Penn School in South Carolina, Ballanta “showed a peculiar facility in quickly and accurately transcribing the Spirituals as he heard them sung by the pupils….” (Ballanta, Saint Helena, Peabody’s Introduction, iii) His collection of 103 spirituals was published by G. Schirmer in 1925 as Saint Helena Island Spirituals.

Field research in Africa

Peabody funded Ballanta’s field research from 1924 to 1926 in the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast (Ghana), and Nigeria. In 1926 he returned to the US, reporting "I traveled about 7000 miles of country in West Africa on research work, during which time I collected over 2000 examples of African songs." (Ballanta, "Gathering Folk-Tunes" 3)

Because he was a composer, he took an interest in technical aspects of the music, such as scales, melody, rhythm, harmony, and form, the relationship between speech tones and melodic contours, and prosody and musical instruments. He observed the effect of social change on the music of West Africa, and tried to classify the region based on the presence or absence of “Western or Eastern influence. (Nketia 20)

In 1925 he received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship "to continue scientific studies of the musical conceptions of the African peoples and compare these ideas with the musical conceptions of ... European music. A second grant was awarded Ballanta Taylor in 1927, to continue his researches into musical conceptions of the African people." (Cuney-Hare, 260)

For information on his work in Germany with Dr. Erich von Hornbostel at the University of Berlin see Tobias Robert Kline’s book, Moderne Traditionene: Studien zur postkolonialen Musikgeschichte Ghanas.

=== Educator (1940s-1960)

External links

• example.com