Department of Music

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Browsing Department of Music by browse.metadata.advisor "Cousins, Thomas"

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    Perspectives on musical strategies of settlement and migration: four case studies from the Western Cape, South Africa
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-12) Jansen van Rensburg, Claudia Elizabeth; Muller, Stephanus; Cousins, Thomas; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Department of Music.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The current dissertation investigates discursive perspectives on settlement and migration as they apply to musical practice and production, through the presentation of four disparate South African case studies. The first chapter of the thesis explores theoretical issues of settlement and migration relevant to the case studies presented in the subsequent chapters. In the following chapter, I provide a reading of the work A South African Symphony (1927) by English-born composer William Henry Bell (1873- 1946) in conjunction with aspects of settler colonial discourse. In Chapter Three, I turn to the music archive of the Genadendal Mission Museum, which I consider in terms of its long-standing history in the Western Cape as a missionary settlement, and draw inferences about its musical practices from the archive. In Chapter Four, the music of Latozi Mpahleni (‘Madosini’) (b. 1943-) is considered in terms of Madosini’s movement from the rural Eastern Cape to the urban Western Cape. In the Western Cape, Madosini makes a living as a performer of an exoticized ‘pre-colonial’ and ‘indigenous’ practice. Madosini can perhaps be viewed as a migrant in this context; however, the chapter suggests ways in which her art can be viewed as a form of settlement. In Chapter Five the research focuses on the liturgical musical practices of a Nigerian Catholic Community in Stellenbosch. Here I explore music made at these gatherings as metonymic to the sounds of ‘home’. The purpose of this study is not to produce a historically chronological account of settlement and migration in relation to music, but rather to explore these intersections as portals into the ‘undomesticated’ content and discursive problematics of settlement and migration as they relate to musical production.