90 years of The Nairobi Music Society: A journey across secular, religious, political, social, technological and cultural identities

About

An ISM Fellows Lunch Talk with guest speaker Levi Wataka.

This event is free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided.

Open to Yale Community only. Part of the ISM's Fellows Lunch series.

The Nairobi Music Society (NMS) was founded in 1938 in colonial Kenya, on the eve of the Second World War. Within a decade it was joined by the East Africa (now Kenya) Conservatoire of Music in 1944 and the Nairobi Orchestra in 1947. Together they formed the foundational triad of community art music in East Africa (Moss; Music in Africa 2014). Led by the Society, these three institutions have sustained a performing culture through nearly a century of sweeping social change.

The colonial setting encouraged an exclusive, "country club" approach to culture. All Saints' Cathedral, Nairobi, long regarded as the church of the colonial establishment, reflected the same exclusivity. Both the Society's world and the Cathedral outlived those origins. The Nairobi Orchestra fell silent during the State of Emergency (1952–1960) and was revived only in the late 1960s. The Cathedral was consecrated in March 1952 and later became a sanctuary for the mothers of political prisoners during Kenya's democratization struggle in the early 1990s. Every decade since independence has brought further upheaval: a vibrant and contested political scene, socioeconomic uncertainty, the internet and social media, Covid-19, and now AI.

This talk asks elementary questions about sacred concert music in Kenya and about the wider role of art music in society. For the past thirty years almost all of the Society's concerts have drawn on the sacred concert repertoire, which has given community music quasi-religious foundations. The partnership with All Saints' Cathedral is central to this. The Cathedral has been the traditional home of the NMS Christmas concerts, with its 1934 pipe organ, and it hosted the Society and the Nairobi Orchestra in Beethoven's Mass in C as early as 1976. Pulchra Musica, whose recent program The Glory of Gabrieli explored the sacred polyphony of Renaissance Venice, carries this lineage into a new generation of ensembles.

Drawing on Kidula's work on how Western-derived styles have been absorbed into Kenyan Christian music (1995; 2013), Levi asks how this music continues to survive around the world while gaining fresh perspectives from new waves of enthusiasts. Recent evidence is encouraging. A June 2026 Business Daily feature reports that Nairobi Orchestra audiences are now roughly 80 percent Kenyan, with young people a significant and growing share (Saya 2026). The model behind this is volunteer-run and largely ticket-funded, with musicians who are not paid. As Chair of the Society approaching its 90th anniversary in 2028, Levi argues that sustaining this tradition requires a deeper understanding of the many roles the Society plays: as a concert presenter, a para-liturgical community, a training ground, and a civic institution.