The Politics of Musical Meaning: The Case of Jeanne Zaidel- Rudolph’s Masada

Abstract

A case study of Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph’s Masada for bassoon and string quartet (1989) and its reception history allows for observations to be made regarding the extent to which musicological debates of the last three decades have shifted ideas on musical meaning and authorial control, including the impact these debates have had on the relationship between composers and musicologists. Masada was conceived in the final hours of apartheid and it greeted the dawn of democracy in the form of a recording. In this guise, it surreptitiously entered the art music canon of the ‘New South Africa’ where its status and importance remained unquestioned for more than a decade. In 2011, my conference paper about Masada stirred a controversy around the work that continues to affect its reception history. Events that followed the conference raise concerns regarding the divided interests of composers and musicologists, which extend to questions around the mandates and ethics of scholarly practices relating to composition and musicology in South Africa. This article flows from that original paper and includes the events that followed, since these now form a crucial part of the discourse on Masada.