A Transfiguring Tradition of Anglican Music: Localisation and Experimental Church Music at the College of the Transfiguration in Grahamstown

Abstract

This article examines examples of musical localisation at the College of the Transfiguration, an Anglican residential seminary in Grahamstown, South Africa. The article is divided into two main sections. The first presents a brief history of localisation within the greater context of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and an overview of South African scholarship on transformation within the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. Aspects of Western musical identities (displayed through Anglicanism and its hymns) and their co-existence with local southern African norms of music-making are also addressed. The second part turns to the author’s participant observer examination of patterns of localisation. Several transcribed examples of hymn tunes and liturgical music are analysed. A discussion of efforts by the author to encourage localisation through the integration of different musical cultures is included. The article shows that despite the Anglican Church’s official reluctance to pursue active musical and cultural transformation, the process of localisation happens anyway: mainly through unaccompanied singing of hymns, but also through amadodana styled songs.