In recent years, a debate has caught fire among historians about whether or how to bring colonialism and the Holocaust together in one frame. We might listen for classical music’s place within this fraught discussion in the work of the brilliant Nigerian choirmaster Fela Sowande, who composed orchestral pieces for the British Ministry of Information during World War II.

While Strauss and Britten were both tucked away in the countryside in 1944, Sowande conducted his “African Suite,” a blend of West African melodies and European instrumentations, for BBC radio in a bombed-out London. The suite takes on a new register when we hear it as an artifact that amplifies the complicated position of a colonized subject tasked with serving the war effort on behalf of the empire.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/books/review/times-echo-jeremy-eichler.html