Music and Song in Benin City, Nigeria

By Mark Ighile
Introduction
For if culture is, as Sam Akpabot (1986:91) puts it " a way of thinking, feeling and believing in any given society, resulting in a behavioural pattern which gives that society a distinctive identity", then one remarkable scheme of finding out about the culture of a people is to examine how they conceptualise their music. The argument of Wissler ( 1922 :155) in respect of the cultural potentials of music is appropriate for our present study. According to him "music is a stable trait and therefore provides a useful basis for determining the diffusion of other cultural traits" Alan Merriam posits that:
Music is a

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