South African Music Studies

Hannes Taljaard at 50: The constellations behind the sounds

Jaco Meyer — 2023-02-18

No abstract

Interview: Re/creating (in) a World of Uncertainty: Memories, Music, and Movement

Jaco Meyer — 2023-02-18

No abstract

Inspired by lullabies: Folk song arrangements by Hannes Taljaard

Catrien M. Wentink — 2023-02-18

This article analyses and discusses some of the characteristics of two sets of piano arrangements of traditional lullabies by the South African composer Hannes Taljaard (1971-). The deceptively simple arrangements in Two lullabies (2001) and Zwikumbu Zwingana (2010) feature interesting accompaniments, colourful harmony and the alteration of melodic contours, as well as metric and harmonic instability and the avoidance of clear cadences.

An overview of the choral music of Hannes Taljaard

Rudolf de Beer — 2023-02-18

Between 1993 and 2020 Hannes Taljaard’s contribution to new music composed is admirable in both quantity and quality. His choral music amounts to about an eighth of his total creative output as composer. None of these works are published though some have been performed by choirs and singing ensembles. Most of these are arrangements of folk melodies, and as with composers such as Bartok and Kodály, most of the arrangements have been reworked to such an extent that it could be referred to as studies on folk melodies. The composer feels that he could reach the audience through the arrangements of melodies which are known to them. Furthermore, he wanted to contribute to the choral repertoire in South Africa’s strong choral tradition. From a work list provided by the composer, the choral genre was not his first engineered establishment as composer. Not only did instrumental music preceded this vocal genre, but lieder for solo voice also laid the path for his exploration of choral compositions. Reference to conversations with the composer presents the background, composing techniques and history of the works, while analytical examples of the works itself highlights different examples of Taljaard’s techniques of creating music for singing ensemble.

The moving force of gestures: Gestural transformation in the Serioso from Hannes Taljaard’s Four Essays (2001-2005)

Jaco Meyer — 2023-02-18

Hannes Taljaard’s string quartet Four Essays is a quintessential work in the South African string quartet literature. Various layers of ambivalence and ambiguity in this work make it a cognitively rich work to listeners and analysts. This article is an analysis of the first movement, Serioso, that shows the composer’s complex compositional technique against the backdrop of influences of metaphors in music, Indian Music and Bharatanatyam, musical gestures, musical forces, Set Theory, French poetry, and lullabies. As with many creative individuals, their lives and their creative outputs are mutually shaped. That is one of the fundamental aspects that are elucidated through the analysis presented in this article. I focus mainly on the thematic material of the work and statements that are based on what Taljaard refers to as the ‘protostatement’.

Embodiment, consciousness, and space-time: Hannes Taljaard’s Setudes for piano

Bertha Spies — 2023-02-18

This tribute to the music of Hannes Taljaard, more specifically his Setudes for piano, takes sensory cognition as its point of departure. The performer’s immediate embodiment of the music and the intuitive auditory awareness of the listening experience facilitate two different ways of perceiving and understanding a kind of music that is not aligned with traditional tonal structures and processes. Insight into the composer’s craft as a vehicle for artistic expression represents a third route towards understanding. Allowing for diverse overlapping of actions, the kinetic-tactile connection with music during performance and unmediated experience that allows music to speak directly to the listener’s consciousness recreate the composition, thereby completing Ernst Gombrich’s ‘magic circle of creation’. Sensory experience is linked with the idea of craftmanship in the service of the art by finally considering the composer’s shaping of music in time and space. This essay deals with the fourdimensional concept of space-time in the discussion of Taljaard’s Setudes in order to show how the static idea of the moment is transformed into the dynamic idea of becoming in musical perception.

Austerity ahead: Music and copyright in crisis (Again)

Claudia Jansen van Rensburg — 2023-02-18

No abstract

Music, Human Rights, The Constitution, Disability and Copyright (Opinion)

Zak Yacoob — 2023-02-18

No abstract

Fair use is not the problem: Neoliberal economic policy drives inequality (Opinion)

Adam Haupt — 2023-02-18

No abstract

Copyright complications and consequences at the International Library of African Music, Rhodes University: A case study

Boudina McConnachie — 2023-02-18

This research aims to explore the position of copyright in contemporary South African legislation, with the International Library of African Music (ILAM) being used as a case study. The catalyst was a contract between the Smithsonian Institution, U.S.A. and ILAM for the Smithsonian Global Sound Network project which requested ILAM to trace and find performers of archived materials to pay out royalties. The research was conducted using various approaches, namely qualitative, quantitative and historical methods which were accomplished through substantial internet and library research coupled with source field research. Recorded interviews provided essential historical and qualitative data, while quantitative data was gathered from various sources. The focus of the investigation concentrated on the 1000 tracks from the Sound of Africa Series, which were delivered to the Smithsonian Global Network under a licensing agreement. In an endeavour to assess the feasibility of the GSN/ILAM Contract stipulations, field work was undertaken using both video and audio recordings to detail the complications of trying to locate, if not the original performer of the contracted tracks, then the surviving members of their families in South Africa. The bulk of the research, however, related to deciphering the contract and its associated implications for ILAM and the musicians recorded. The research took place in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and the trial research intervention was confined to a single performer who was recorded by Hugh Tracey in the Ngqushwa (Peddie) District. The research remains relevant, and findings show that all archives currently involved in field recording need to put careful policies in place. Benefit-sharing agreements and Memoranda of Understandings relating to clear copyright and intellectual property ownership declarations must be signed upfront to reassure creatives and musicians that their rights are valued and that the researchers’ obligations will be followed through.

Singing the Lord’s songs: Hymns on the Eastern Cape Anglican-Xhosa Missions, c.1855-1869

Philip Burnett — 2023-02-18

What insights can mission hymns give us into South African music history, the encounters between peoples, beliefs, languages and cultures that took place on mission stations, and the ways in which the nineteenth century world was imagined? This article explores accounts of how hymns were sung, as found in the archives of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, an Anglican mission organisation that established mission stations in the Eastern Cape among the isiXhosa-speaking peoples and other Indigenous groups in 1855. While these accounts provide only written descriptions and, more often than not, only one view of what was happening, they nonetheless show us that hymns were undergoing constant reformulation, change, and transformation, and point to the factors behind this process. The archival accounts are examined to reveal the role played by both Indigenous people and missionaries in the reation of mission hymnody , and the implications this had for how the repertoire was received and understood.

All the hits and more: Transkei’s Capital Radio and non-segregationist playlisting

Michael Drewett — 2023-02-18

In the 1960s the South African government institutionalised apartheid of the airwaves, implementing separate radio stations in line with its policy of ‘cultural purity’ whereby each ethnic group’s culture was to be treated separately. Music played on government radio was streamlined according to what the government’s South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) deemed appropriate for each ethnic group. Furthermore, there was strict censorship, ruling out controversial lyrical messages. The SABC’s popular music station – Radio 5 – broadcast in English and Afrikaans with a white audience in mind and played middle-of-the-road western pop music. The apartheid government also created separate ‘independent’ homelands for each black ethnic group, and in one of these homelands – the Transkei – an independent radio station named Capital Radio was set up in 1979. Its slogan was ‘All the hits and more’ and, unlike the SABC stations, it did not practise severe censorship or segregation of musical styles according to different race groups. This paper incorporates the memories of Capital Radio’s management, DJs, and listeners in providing an analysis of the way Capital Radio’s broad, relatively eclectic and inclusive music playlisting not only contested apartheid airwaves but attracted listeners of different backgrounds, exposing them to a diversity of musical styles and influences with which they began to identify.

Stanley glasser and the making of King Kong: Introduction, interview and postscript

Christopher Ballantine — 2023-02-20

This article presents an in-depth interview I conducted with Stanley Glasser, the distinguished South African composer who died in 2018. Though recorded in 1986, the interview has not been made public until now. It presents important reflections on the making of Todd Matshikiza’s epochal South African jazz opera, King Kong, in the creation and earliest performances of which Glasser played a crucial role. For a range of complex reasons, some of which are dealt with in the interview, controversy of various kinds has beset King Kong from the start. Because of Glasser’s detailed and fine-grained responses to the questions that were put to him, the interview includes fresh evidence that allows for careful re-examination of much of what has been said for six decades, often dogmatically, about the work and its accompanying controversies. As such, the interview both confirms and – more interestingly – disrupts some wellworn narratives, and does so in ways that will hopefully provoke further scholarship. An introduction lays out the context for the interview and sketches relevant aspects of Glasser’s biography, especially those aspects that, notwithstanding a celebrated career in England, relate to his lifelong involvement with the land of his birth, its people, and its musics. I offer some interpretive remarks in a concluding postscript.

‘Opera has been Dying Down Slowly Even Before Covid-19 in South Africa’: Mapping South African Opera After 1994

Lena van der Hoven — 2023-02-20

This article seeks to address the necessary understanding of the general situation of opera production in South Africa in the last few decades, which to date is a research desideratum, in order to consider the short-term impact of the pandemic on the South African opera scene. It is therefore structured in two parts. Part one works towards an empirical history of South African opera by carving out some major topics for a South African opera historiography post-1994, in which I identify those agencies that have been producing opera and commissioning new opera compositions since 1994. Additionally, I highlight some symptomatic phenomena of the South African opera market, as the predominance of opera concerts over full-length staged opera performances, the predominance of performances of short operas and the precarious situation of opera singers, which leads among other things to an increasing number
of newly established opera companies. In the second part I address the opera scene within an understanding of pre-pandemic trajectories. It will be led by the following questions: Does the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbate the situation of opera production in South Africa? What is the situation like for opera companies and singers? And how are opera companies and artists responding to the situation creatively and practically? This article suggests that already existing characteristics of the opera industry will continue their negative trends, but that the pre-existing precarity of South Africa’s opera scene might indicate that the opera productions of ‘smaller’ companies will resume to a certain degree as before.

Delinking the Practice Room

Visser Liebenberg — 2023-02-20

In this article, the author experiments with options of epistemological emancipation through writing and practice/practise as a process of delinking from colonial institutional knowledge. By viewing the practice room as ‘laboratory’ space (Brooks 2014, 194) combined with ‘decolonial thinking’ from the work of Walter Mignolo (2012, 3), the author explores auto-ethnographic writing merged with self-notated fragments of sound motifs to document, ‘delink’ and experiment with clarinet sound practice. These modes of writing experiment with ways of delinking from the constructs of undergraduate and post-graduate Western music classical education from a global South perspective. Combining decoloniality with artistic research and artistic experimentation, the link between practice and theory is strengthened in the practice room to invite decoloniality into the sounding capacity of the clarinet’s ‘decolonizing embodiment’ in embodied art practice (Spatz 2019, 21). This article concludes that each practice room session has the potential to discover sounding capacities of the clarinet and clarinettist through deconstructing practice room routines as an ongoing process of practising decoloniality in the ‘laboratory’ (practice room).

Book Review: Musical Bows of Southern Africa

Bronwen Clacherty — 2023-02-20

No Abstract

Book Review: A Passage of Nostalgia: The Life and Work of Jacobus Kloppers

Andrew-John Bethke — 2023-02-20

No Abstract

Book Review: Sulke Vriende is Skaars: Die Briewe van Arnold van Wyk en Anton Hartman, 1949-1981

Matildie Wium — 2023-02-20

No abstract

CD Review: Too Late for the Prayers

Malcolm Dedman — 2023-02-20

Too late for the Prayers: Music by Justinian Tamusuza and Michael Blake, Recorded: 8-9 January 2019, Studio of Stellenbosch Conservatorium, Stellenbosch, Recording technician: Aret Lambrechts, Editors: Michael Blake and Gerhard Roux, Producers: Michael Blake and Justinian Tamusuza, Mix and Master: Gerhard Roux
Tracklist: 1. Okwanjula Kw'endere (11:14)
2. Shoowa Panel (14:15)
3. Umngqokolo (11:31)
4. Naakutendanga Emirembe Gyonna (07:20)

A personal reflection on the Moerane Project 2013-2020

Christine Lucia — 2023-02-20

This personal reflection on the Andrew Mellon-M.M. Moerane Digital Scholarly Edition (https://african-composers-edition.co.za/edition/michael-mosoeu-moeranescholarly-critical-edition) focuses on the context and production of a nearly 700-page new edition of African music scores. It explains this major new edition’s position in relation to an earlier one, of music by Joshua Pulumo Mohapeloa (https://africancomposers-edition.co.za/edition/michael-mosoeu-moerane-scholarly-criticaledition/), and the location of these editions and other music on the website African Composers Edition (ACE; https://african-composers-edition.co.za/). It reveals that Moerane, who only published two choral works in his lifetime (Liphala and Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen) and is known in the South African choral industry mainly by three others (Ruri, Sylvia, Della), nevertheless wrote far more choral music than was previously imagined. Indeed, many of the choral works published for the first time here have never been seen, let alone performed. Not even Moerane’s only foray into writing for full orchestra, the symphonic poem, Fatše La Heso (My Country), has been published before. This article reflects on the Moerane Edition both as an extensive heritage reclamation project and as a product, a commercial publication available online that was brought to fruition by a small research team at Africa Open Institute, Stellenbosch. It ends by situating the edition within the growing field of digital online editions produced globally and asks what potential it has to contribute to digital humanities in South Africa.

Notes from the field: Making applied ethnomusicology count for students and communities in Keiskammahoek, South Africa

Lee Watkins — 2023-02-20

This report describes a project in which applied ethnomusicology was combined with development studies. Ethnomusicology became ‘applied’ as it addressed various concerns which were pedagogical, musicological, and socially relevant. Ethnomusicology entered the realm of development studies as its research partner was a non-profit organisation with clear developmental goals related to early childhood development (ECD) and food security, among others. The integration of ethnomusicology with development studies was tested in a music heritage research project, in which students and staff of Rhodes University in Makhanda (Grahamstown), and staff of the Ntinga Development Centre (NDC) in Keiskammahoek, pooled their resources to conduct research on the heritage of this community. The question was, how could this collaboration unfold ethically, taking into account the connotations of the prefix, ‘ethno-’ in ethnomusicology and the reputation of ‘development studies’ in the ‘developing world’? The question is relatable to my argument, namely, that the very interdisciplinary nature of ethnomusicology provides it with the potential for reaching out, beyond the classroom, while rendering ethnomusicology a compelling opportunity for addressing the mandate for transformation within the institution. The case-study described in this paper provides an example of how ethnomusicology can be applied in a broader social context where music is but one of many concerns.

Obituaries : Kissing the joy as it flies: A Memoir of June Schneider (1939-2020)

Michael Blake — 2023-02-20

No abstract

Obituaries : Peter Klatzow (1945-2021)

Hilde Roos — 2023-02-20

No abstract

Obituaries : Sibongile Khumalo (1957-2021)

Sibongile Mngoma — 2023-02-20

No abstract

Obituaries : Deon Lamprecht (1950-2022)

Nicol Viljoen — 2023-02-20

No abstract

Obituaries : Werner Nel (1941-2022)

Antoinette Olivier — 2023-02-20

No abstract

Editorial: On Committing (the Journal to Print)

Matildie Wium — 2023-02-18

No abstract