Tilahun Gessese - "Quality of Music" & Nation building

What a consensus on "Tilahun"! It is "Phenomenal" for the generation. I hope for "Ethiopia" too. Consensus apparently through all the contemporary political spectrum.....resonating something like

"The King is dead ....long live the king"....

...Tilahun seems to have encorporated the "Quality of Music" during our generation....


I used to share a similar joke like:

"Five full decades of failure to replace one super star,.... is a sign of the slow sociocultural dynamism in Ethiopia......."/1

" I am probably wrong on this one. Tilahun was simply unsurpassable."/1

I may share this attitude too but with a slight note of correction:

Not unsurpassable; it seems so due to our own socio-cultural evolution, in which we ourselves are generationally involved; but certainly fascinating and phenomenal...since it is a substantial part of our contemporary "collective consciousness" /3

May "Tilahun" trigger the "AHA" nationwide....? Perhaps not just now.....but for sure some time later, after more "water" through the bridge .....or not......I don't know!

Anyway, Tilahun was and is great in his way, mainly because he has no doubt achieved his objective...of building the human bridge of the Ethiopian sector, on which most Ethiopian intellectuals of the day have, I think so far failed.

Nonetheless, it is certainly not far fetched to sense the formation of the democratic Ethiopian Nation in the nation-wide common feeling shared by all Ethiopians beyond any secterianism, be it political or ethnic, encorporating the touch of "music" Tilahun left to us in the legacy of his musical messages of universal love.

In this context....the following work on the relation of music to nation building may be interesting:

http://www.cambriapress.com/cambriapress.cfm?template=8&bid=200 Title: Music Makes the Nation: Nationalist Composers and Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Europe Author: Benjamin Curtis

"What is new in this book for scholars of nationalism, European history, and musicology,

however, is the comparative study of nationalist music specifically as a

sociopolitical phenomenon. Though few previous works have examined

these issues from a perspective of both politics and culture, nationalist

music and art unmistakably deal with both politics and culture. Therefore,

this book seeks to make a lasting contribution to the understanding of

what role art—and specifi cally music—played in nationalist movements,

which will benefi t historians, political scientists, and musicologists." /2

It remains for me to promote for the objectives of social harmony in the Ethiopian context based on the "thesis" and the "synthesis" I dared to make in the following words:

3) http://berhane-hilina.blogspot.com/2007/11/purpose-of-l-i-f-e-quintessence-purpose.html

1) Ethiomedia; http://www.ethiomedia.com/adroit/2181.html

2) http://www.cambriapress.com/cambriapress.cfm?template=8&bid=200