| Summary: | This doctoral study discusses emergent worlds of Nigerian migrants in Greece. Music making is a key aspect of the ways in which these worlds are formed, experienced and manifested; thus, it is a powerful means to understand Nigerian presences in Greece. My ethnographic accounts draw from fieldwork I conducted for a period of fifteen months, from May 2012 to September 2013, during which I followed musical activities among Nigerians mainly in the capital city of Athens, but also in the Greek island of Santorini. This work concerns musical practices that shape and reflect experiences of belonging and community making. My preliminary focus is on Nigerian-initiated Pentecostal congregations in Athens, which I discuss in relation to gospel music making and the ways in which particular ways of practising faith, in both musical and spiritual terms, establish tight-knit communities of belonging and broader networks of such communities among Nigerian Christians in the diaspora. Some music ministers, as the musicians working for Nigerian Pentecostal congregations are called, appear to make music for 'sacred' settings exclusively, while others extend their endeavours to professional music contexts outside church. This work, therefore, also focuses upon a second arena in which Nigerian musicians engage in the 'secular' realm, where they collaborate with primarily Greek musicians. For those musicians whose activities span both gospel music making and secular music genres and environments, performance qualities and aspects of sociability between worlds in and outside the church seem to overlap, whilst generating negotiable, ongoing reconstructions of the socio-musical worlds in which musicians situate themselves and develop senses of belonging. Even in their collaborations with Greek musicians and audiences of diverse backgrounds, however, a degree of Nigerian-ness is evident in performances. This Nigerian-ness manifests itself through 'participatory music making' and 'music ministration', two modes of being musically that typify belongings in the sacred realm and are carried into the secular world through the musical practices of Nigerian musicians whose musical background lies within Nigerian Pentecostal Christianity.
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