Robert Farris Thompson, a professor emeritus of art history at Yale University, wrote in an email that Dr. Nketia was “one of the finest scholars in all of post-colonial Africa,” adding, “He showed that the African history of music was a sacred tradition revealed.”

Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia was born on June 22, 1921, in Asante Mampong, Ghana. In the Akan language, Kwabena is the name for boys born on Tuesday. An only child, he was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents after his father died. He credited his grandparents as his first music teachers.

He received training in European music theory as a high school student at the Presbyterian Training College in southeastern Ghana. In 1944, he was one of 20 Ghanaians in the first class awarded Britain’s Commonwealth scholarship, which sent him to England to study linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He also took classes at the Trinity College of Music and Birkbeck College at the University of London.

In 1952, back in Ghana, he accepted a research fellowship in African studies at what is now the University of Ghana and traveled the country recording musical performances and festivals. He began developing interdisciplinary programs at the university that explored the intersections of language, dance, music and folklore.

Dr. Nketia traveled to the United States for the first time in 1958, on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship; over the course of a year he studied at Juilliard, Columbia University and Northwestern University, and developed relationships with such prominent American musicians and folklorists as Charles Seeger and Henry Cowell.

Dr. Nketia performed “The Republic Suite,” perhaps his defining musical composition, at Ghana’s Republic Day Concert on July 1, 1960, celebrating the election of his friend Kwame Nkrumah as the nation’s first president. The suite’s formal elements aligned it with Western classical music, but many of its melodies were drawn from traditional songs recognizable to Ghanaian listeners.

Dr. Nketia became the deputy director of the University of Ghana’s new Institute of African Studies in 1961. Three years later, having attained tenure as a full professor, he became the first African to serve as the institute’s director. Soon after, he became the founding director of what is now the School of Performing Arts, and he filled its faculty and research positions with prominent Ghanaian artists, including the playwright Efua Sutherland, the author Ama Ata Aidoo and the choreographer Albert Mawere Opoku.