Between the Musical Anti- and Post-Apartheid: Structures of Crisis in Kevin Volans’s String Quartet No. 5, Dancers on a Plane

Abstract

Composed in 1994, Kevin Volans’s String Quartet No. 5, Dancers on a Plane, is a work that in many ways resounds the crisis faced by anti-apartheid artists during the transition to democracy in South Africa, which has to do with maintaining a sense of critical traction while imagining the post-apartheid in music. In this article, I frame the quartet’s use of theoretical concepts of Venda music and soundscape recordings, along with a double strategy of non-teleological and teleological formal design, in broader discussions of post-apartheid cultural theory. In particular, I draw on J. M. Coetzee’s notion of ‘bondage’ and Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane’s pursuit of ‘interiority’ as dialectical positions in which I situate two seemingly contradictory analyses of the work. While these two concepts demarcate vastly different artistic responses to the post-apartheid condition, they are both founded in the realisation that after apartheid ends, critical artistic practices are plunged into a crisis of moving beyond an anti-apartheid expression. My aim in this article, through a third analytical turn, is to show how Volans’s quartet can be read as articulating the structure of this crisis. It is through this turn that I show how the work strongly resounds tensions that mark the birth of the post-apartheid cultural arena. Read in this way, the work not only reveals the difficulties of moving beyond anti-apartheid art, but it produces the conditions of possibility necessary for a critical music and, importantly, a critical musicology, to satisfy in the years after the first democratic elections.