BOUESTI JOURNAL OF PERFORMING ARTS

Birds occupy a distinctive place in Yorùbá musical imagination because their calls, colours, movements and behaviour are transformed into symbols through song, proverb and oral narrative. This study examines the cultural meanings and musical structures of selected bird related songs in Yorùbáland, with emphasis on pigeon/dove, parrot, hornbill and related avian images. A qualitative ethnomusicological design combines a corpus of 10 purposively selected songs with reported evidence from 20 music practitioners and 15 community/cultural participants. The analysis also uses the surviving score sheets in the source manuscript as documentary evidence of metre, phrase repetition, syllabic text setting and responsorial organisation. Ecomusicology provides the principal theoretical lens, supplemented by semiotic mediation. Findings show that birds function as culturally intelligible signs of peace, honour, good fortune, danger, wisdom, restraint, communication and moral accountability. Musically, these meanings are reinforced through recurring motives, compound metre, syllabic delivery, repetitions and call and response organisation. The paper argues that Yorùbá bird songs preserve indigenous ecological knowledge while simultaneously transmitting ethics, social memory and performance practice.

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