Born on 28 April 1935 in
Lagos, Nigeria, Akin Euba studied composition with
Arnold Cooke at the
Trinity College of Music, London, obtaining the diplomas of fellow of the Trinity College London (Composition) and fellow of the Trinity College London (Piano). He was awarded a
Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1962. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees from the
University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied with
Mantle Hood,
Charles Seeger,
J. H. Kwabena Nketia,
Klaus Wachsmann, and Roy Travis. He held a Ph.D. in
ethnomusicology from the
University of Ghana,
Legon (1974). While at Legon, Euba's doctoral work was supervised by Professor Nketia, and his dissertation is titled "Dundun Music of the Yoruba". Euba was professor and director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the
University of Lagos, and also served as a senior research fellow at the University of Ife (now
Obafemi Awolowo University) in Nigeria. He served as head of music at the
Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation for five years. He was a research scholar and artist in residence at IWALEWA House, the African studies center of the
University of Bayreuth in Germany between 1986 and 1992. He was the
Andrew Mellon Professor of Music at the
University of Pittsburgh between 1993 and 2011 and until his death, was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor, Emeritus in music; the founder and director of the Centre for Intercultural Music Arts, London (founded in 1989), and director emeritus of the Centre for Intercultural Musicology at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Euba's scholarly interests included the musicology and ethnomusicology of modern interculturalism. He organized regular symposia on music in Africa and the Diaspora at
Churchill College, Cambridge as well as the
Central Conservatory of Music in
Beijing. These events featured such notable composers and scholars as J. H. Kwabena Nketia and
Halim El-Dabh. With his Elekoto Ensemble, he brought together musicians from Nigeria, China, India, Germany, Malta, and the United States. His compositions involve a synthesis of African traditional material (often from his own ethnic group, the
Yoruba people) and
contemporary classical music. His most ambitious composition is the opera
Chaka: An Opera in Two Chants (1970), which blends West African percussion and
atenteben flutes with
twelve-tone technique. Euba died on 14 April 2020, two weeks short of his 85th birthday. ==Works==