Browsing by Author "Struwig, Mieke"

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    An intellectual history of institutionalised music studies in South Africa
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Struwig, Mieke; Venter, Carina; Muller, Stephanus; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. Dept. of Music.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis constructs an intellectual history of institutionalised music studies in twentieth-century South Africa that attends to the establishment and consolidation of the disciplinarity of music, the work of individuals instrumental in this larger project, as well as the ways in which the discipline has responded to political changes and paradigm shifts. As such, it considers the establishment of music departments at South African universities, the emergence of scholarly journals and societies as well as important scholarly projects and initiatives. The focus on institutionalised music studies brings to bear an emphasis on work produced by scholars and students affiliated to universities or research institutes. This material has been supplemented with extensive archival research at the National Archives of South Africa, the National Afrikaans Literary Museum and Research Centre, the International Library of African Music and Stellenbosch University’s Documentation Centre for Music. Chapter One places this study within the context of current calls for disciplinary introspection and transformation. The establishment of the first departments of music at South African universities and the individuals who played important roles in this project are documented in Chapter Two. Particular attention is paid to Percival Kirby (the first music scholar appointed to an academic position at a South African university) and Jan Bouws, whose work on South African music and subsequent appointment at Stellenbosch University represented the start of a burgeoning Afrikaans music historiographical practice. Chapter Three documents the way in which academics sought legitimacy and impetus for the field of music studies outside of these educational institutions, tracing these trajectories of disciplinary legitimisation and the networks of individuals they involved. In doing so, it foregrounds societies, periodicals and individuals who emerge from this process as important figures. Hugh Tracey, the African Music Society, the International Library of African Music and African Music are also considered here. The South African Music Encyclopedia (SAME) and its editor, Jacques Philip Malan, are extensively considered in Chapter Four. Through a consideration of SAME’s philosophical and ideological underpinnings, the effect of apartheid on scholars and academic projects is foregrounded. Chapter Five provides an overview of disciplinary consolidation (the establishment of the South African Musicological Society); contestations (by the Ethnomusicology Symposia, scholars such as Christopher Ballantine and Klaus Heimes and the introduction of Marxist critiques) and proliferations (particularly in the work of the South African Music Educator’s Society, the field of multicultural music education and the establishment of music departments at Black universities). In doing so, it addresses the agency exercised by individual academics during the 1980s and early 1990s. This account of personal and scholarly agency troubles the idea of a binary division in South African music studies, roughly equivalent to political categories of reactionary or enlightened thinking.
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    Surveying Post-Apartheid Decolonisation of the BMus Curriculum at Four South African Tertiary Music Departments
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2021-03) Struwig, Mieke; Venter, Carina; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Music.; Thesis (MMus)--Stellenbosch University, 2021.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis surveys post-apartheid curricular decolonisation at four South African tertiary music departments: Nelson Mandela University, Stellenbosch University, the University of Cape Town (South African College of Music) and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Data for this survey were obtained through systematic analysis of archival material, focusing on yearbooks and module outlines between 1994 and 2020. This data is supplemented and contextualised by 27 interviews with current and former staff members at the included music departments. The result is a critical curriculum history which, this thesis posits, has the potential to act as a mechanism for change, drawing on Agbedahin and Agbedahin’s (2019) argument for the need for critical university histories. Eurocentrism and coloniality are found to be pervasive in the hidden and explicit curricula of each of the departments, albeit in varying degrees. Chapter one broaches this stubborn tenacity of coloniality and Eurocentrism in the broader context of the university and the discipline of music. The embeddedness of these notions in institutional curricula and the accommodating rapport between coloniality and neoliberalism are demonstrated in chapter two, which provides an account of institutional crisis narratives to understand the institutional environments in which curricular change takes place. Amongst other things, the survey of curricular changes taken from yearbooks and interviews in chapter three points to the sustained presence of hegemonic terminology, the continued positioning of non-traditional musics as optional and marginal and the reduction of curricular change to bureaucratic procedure. Chapter four makes sense of the survey materials of chapter three through a classification of the surveyed changes, followed by a consideration of positions on decolonisation drawn from my interviews. Taken together, this categorisation and the insights from interviews on decolonisation point to an overwhelming reliance on superficial additive strategies for curricular decolonisation that will, at best, leave intact a Eurocentric centre. In closing, the thesis urges researchers, scholars and students to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) of decolonisation in their efforts to make “a world just a little better” (Stengers and Despret, 2014:165).