‘Never the twain shall meet’: Africanist Art Music and the end of apartheid.

Abstract

Art music composition in South Africa was an increasingly contested artistic and ideological space through the late apartheid period (1980-1994). Rapidly declining institutional and political support threatened activities long associated with white ‘superiority’ and distinctiveness under apartheid and threw the field into crisis. ‘Africanist’ art music was a means by which composers negotiated the crisis. This history chronicles the fates of the various Africanisms that emerged in the context of South Africa’s democratic transition. ‘Africanist’ or ‘cross-cultural’ works are compared to analogous ‘cross-over’ styles in popular music. Specific composers’ responses are considered, including: Kevin Volans’s ‘African Paraphrases’ (1980-1986), Stefans Grové’s ‘Music from Africa’ series (1984‑), Hans Roosenschoon’s ‘African-inspired’ music (1978-), and works by Peter Klatzow. These various Africanisms took on very different political valences and precipitated an acrimonious debate and power struggle over what a ‘reconciliation of aesthetics’ could or should entail. At first ‘reconciliatory’ composers were ostracized from the academy with Hubert du Plessis proclaiming, “never the twain shall meet.” But by the early 1990s the balance of power had shifted and establishment composers developed a ‘new Africanism’ that employed self-consciously ‘African’ texts, titles, and ‘elements’ in a largely exoticist, ‘accessible’ mode of representation for a ‘new’ South Africa.