Composing Apartheid

Martin Scherzinger, Brett Pyper, Grant Olwage, Stephanus Muller, Carol Muller, Christine Lucia, Shirli Gilbert, Michael Drewett, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, David Coplan, Christopher Cockburn, Ingrid Byerly, Gary Baines, Lara Allen

Description

Composing Apartheid is the first book ever to chart the musical world of a notorious period in world history, apartheid South Africa. It explores how music was produced through, and was productive of, key features of apartheid’s social and political topography, as well as how music and musicians contested and even helped to conquer apartheid. The collection of essays is intentionally broad, and the contributors include historians, sociologists and anthropologists, as well as ethnomusicologists, music theorists and historical musicologists. The essays focus on a variety of music (jazz, music in the Western art tradition, popular music) and on major composers (such as Kevin Volans) and works (Handel’s Messiah). Musical institutions and previously little-researched performers (such as the African National Congress’s troupe-in-exile, Amandla) are explored. The writers move well beyond their subject matter, intervening in debates on race, historiography, and postcolonial epistemologies and pedagogies.
Introduction: Grant Olwage
Chapter 1: Back to the Future? Idioms of ‘displaced time’ in South African composition
Christine Lucia
Chapter 2: Apartheid’s Musical Signs: Reflections on black choralism, modernity and race-ethnicity in the segregation era
Grant Olwage
Chapter 3: Discomposing Apartheid’s Story: Who owns Handel?
Christopher Cockburn
Chapter 4: Kwela’s White Audiences: The politics of pleasure and identification in the early apartheid period
Lara Allen
Chapter 5: Popular Music and Negotiating Whiteness in Apartheid South Africa
Gary Baines
Chapter 6: Packaging Desires: Album covers and the presentation of apartheid
Michael Drewett
Chapter 7: Musical Echoes: Composing a past in/for South African jazz
Carol A. Muller
Chapter 8: Singing Against Apartheid: ANC cultural groups and the international anti-apartheid struggle
Shirli Gilbert
Chapter 9: ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’: Stories of an African anthem David Coplan and Bennetta Jules-Rosette
Chapter 10: Whose ‘White Man Sleeps’ Aesthetics? and politics in the early work of Kevin Volans
Martin Scherzinger
Chapter 11: State of Contention: Recomposing apartheid at Pretoria’s State Theatre, 1990-1994. A personal recollection
Brett Pyper
Chapter 12: Decomposing Apartheid: Things come together
Ingrid Byerly
Chapter 13: Arnold van Wyk’s Hands
Stephanus Muller

Sujets

• Musique
• Musique
• Music
• General
• Anthropology
• General officer
• Multiple signal classification

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781868149391
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
South Africa
http://witspress.wits.ac.za
Introduction, selection and compilation: © Grant Olwage, 2008
Individual essays: © as per authors indicated, 2008
Artwork: © institutes and individuals indicated, 2008
First published 2008.
ISBN 978-1-86814-456-3
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express permission, in writing, of both the copyright holder and the publishers.
Cover, layout and design by Hybridesign
Printed and bound by Creda Communications
F OR B RONWYN
CONTENTS
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I NTRODUCTION
Grant Olwage
C HAPTER 1
Back to the Future? Idioms of ‘displaced time’ in South African composition
Christine Lucia
C HAPTER 2
Apartheid’s Musical Signs: Reflections on black choralism, modernity and race-ethnicity in the segregation era
Grant Olwage
C HAPTER 3
Discomposing Apartheid’s Story: Who owns Handel?
Christopher Cockburn
C HAPTER 4
Kwela’s White Audiences: The politics of pleasure and identification in the early apartheid period
Lara Allen
C HAPTER 5
Popular Music and Negotiating Whiteness in Apartheid South Africa
Gary Baines
C HAPTER 6
Packaging Desires: Album covers and the presentation of apartheid
Michael Drewett
C HAPTER 7
Musical Echoes: Composing a past in/for South African jazz
Carol A. Muller
C HAPTER 8
Singing Against Apartheid: ANC cultural groups and the international anti-apartheid struggle
Shirli Gilbert
C HAPTER 9
‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’: Stories of an African anthem
David Coplan and Bennetta Jules-Rosette
C HAPTER 10
Whose ‘White Man Sleeps’ Aesthetics? and politics in the early work of Kevin Volans
Martin Scherzinger
C HAPTER 11
State of Contention: Recomposing apartheid at Pretoria’s State Theatre, 1990-1994. A personal recollection
Brett Pyper
C HAPTER 12
Decomposing Apartheid: Things come together
Ingrid Byerly
C HAPTER 13
Arnold van Wyk’s Hands
Stephanus Muller
C ONTRIBUTORS
I NDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
G RANT O LWAGE
This book, like many, began its life as a conference. That conference, unlike most, was a prelude to a music festival: the annual New Music Indaba of 2004, a contemporary music festival that then took place in Grahamstown, South Africa. Both the festival and conference were the brainchild of Michael Blake, a South African composer who more than anyone in the decades either side of the millennium has sought to assault and assuage the ears of the South African public with new art music. That Michael’s vision has been able to extend to the academic project is to acknowledge him as one of the ideas-men of the South African music scene.
But how did a conference on the music of apartheid find a place on the programme of a new music festival? The year of the conference, 2004, was the first decade anniversary of South Africa’s post-apartheid democracy. Pace the uncritical public festivities for which the arts are typically roped in to support, the New Music Indaba of that year sought also to explore the musics of the apartheid past. It was in that spirit that the parallel conference was conceived. My intentions for the conference were twofold. I wanted to gather together in person and then on paper as many as possible of the most interesting thinkers working on South African music and I wanted to focus their thoughts on the topic at hand: the musics of apartheid, on how apartheid was constituted through music. The themes of the topic I elaborate on in the Introduction and need not detain us here; save to say that a book-length exploration of this topic does not to date exist, a sure motivation for the enterprise.
Writing the Acknowledgements of course signals the end – finally! – of this four-year project. As such it is a pleasure to pen. It is also a pleasure to name those whose knowledge and skills have shaped the book. As a first-time editor I’ve had a pretty easy time of it I suspect. For this thanks both to my contributors and the Wits University Press team, the latter expertly managed by commissioning editor Estelle Jobson, who has guided the manuscript to publication and who has asked me to thank, specifically: Barbara Ludman as editor, David Lea for proofreading, Margie Ramsay for indexing, and Karen Lilje of Hybridesign for the book and cover design.
To conclude. In the spirit, if not quite in the form, of a Festschrift I want to dedicate Composing Apartheid to Christine Lucia: as personal thanks to her ongoing guidance of my thinking and career, as public acknowledgment of her influence on this book, and as celebration of her contribution to South African music scholarship at large. For many – and many of the contributors to this book – Christine has been chief interlocutor on many and diverse matters of South African music during the recent past. The conversations no doubt will continue.
The publishers and I wish to thank all those institutions from whom their publications and archives have been cited and those individuals who have been interviewed. Acknowledgement has been cited accordingly. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, but should any infringement have occurred, the publishers apologise and would welcome any information that would enable them to amend any errors in the event of a reprint.
INTRODUCTION
G RANT O LWAGE
The dual terms of Composing Apartheid combine in a double act: primarily, the book explores facets of the musical make-up of apartheid, but simultaneously, and more broadly, it reveals how, through this cultural composition, apartheid itself was variously made. 1 But what is ‘apartheid itself’? It was – is – a horror, notorious the world over; to the extent, as Jacques Derrida pointed out, that the word has never been translated, ‘as if all the languages of the world were defending themselves, shutting their mouths against a sinister incorporation of the thing by means of the word’ (1986a: 331). The word, importantly as Derrida emphasises, references a concept and reality (1986b: 362); or, in the case of apartheid: words, concepts and realities – plural. The relations among these are always complex, seldom stable. And so, while it would be irresponsible scholarship not to resolutely historicise apartheid – officially a period of South African history from 1948 to 1994 – we can only do so ‘thickly’ by looking beyond apartheid’s geographic and temporal borders. Thus, as some of the concepts of apartheid preceded its naming, so some of its realities persist after its dethroning; and vice versa. Composing Apartheid endeavours to trace the relationships between some of the names, concepts and realities as they variously interacted, and continue to interact, on the musical landscape, and it does so as historically and socially responsible scholarship: genealogising our musical histories, as Michel Foucault would say, in the name of a critical ‘history of the present’.
What a collection like this cannot do, and this Introduction does not attempt, is to map out the totality of that history. Rather, I want to explore just some of the topography of apartheid’s musical landscape as revealed by the essays collected here. I do so by proceeding from the logic of apartheid, named in the word, which Derrida highlighted with typical deconstructionist flair:
APARTHEID: by itself the word occupies the terrain like a concentration camp. System of partition, barbed wire, crowds of mapped out solitude … the glaring harshness of abstract essence ( heid ) seems to speculate in another regime of abstraction, that of confined separation. The word concentrates separation, raises it to another power and sets separation itself apart : ‘apartitionality’, something like that (1986a: 331).
M USICAL SEPARATIONS OF RACE AND ETHNICITY
In the popular imagination apartheid is synonymous with race and racism. For Derrida it was the apogee of racism and it is the racialisedness of apartheid on which he focuses. Unsurprisingly, then, several essays in this volume cast their analytical gaze on race. But if this volume looks back, it is also a body of thought situated in the present. For race of course is an inescapable part of dominant public discourses in post-apartheid South Africa: inquiries into racism, legislation on black economic empowerment, exposés on white poverty, the discourse of ‘representivity’ – our everyday existence is saturated with language on race. Our scholarly excursions too record this. These have been encouraged by the relatively recent appearance of postcolonial and race studies in music scholarship; it was not so long ago that Philip Bohlman and Ronald Radano spoke of the paucity of studies on music and race: ‘the racial quietude of musical scholastics’ (2000: xiii).
The effectiveness of apartheid’s racisms was also to effect other separations from within race, to apportion other partitions. One of the most important of these separations was ‘ethnicity’, often conflated in the apartheid imagination with ‘nation’ (see Sharp, 1988). 2 It was particularly on the terrain of culture that ethnicity was separated from race and through which ethnicity itself was separated out into ethnicities (see Thornton, 1988: 26).
Martin Scherzinger’s essay in this volume on Kevin Volans, one of the world’s most successful art music composers of the late twentieth century, hinges on the duality of race-ethnicity. Much of Volans’ early, internationally popular ‘African’ works of the early to mid-1980s are indebted to the musics of ethnicity, such as Shona mbira , nyanga panpipes, Basotho lesiba ; Volans himself briefly ventured into the southern African field to record African music for German radio in the late 1970s. Scherzinger explores how Volans’ composition provides a critique of certain racialising topoi commonly hel