Department of Music

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Browsing Department of Music by Subject "Apartheid -- South Africa -- Music"

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    The influence of early Apartheid intellectualisation on twentieth-century Afrikaans music historiography
    (Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2009-12) Venter, Carina; Muller, Stephanus; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Music.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis attempts to understand questions of our past in the present. It is broadly premised on the assumption of complicity as an interpretive frame in which the relationship between Apartheid intellectualisation and Afrikaans music historiography can be elucidated. Its protagonists are Gerrie Eloff, Geoffrey Cronjé, H.F. Verwoerd, Piet Meyer, Jan Bouws, Rosa Nepgen and Jacques Philip Malan. In each of the four chapters, I attempt to construct metaphors, points of intersection or articulation between Apartheid intellectualisation and Afrikaans music historiography. Music is never entirely absent: for Apartheid ideologues such as Geoffrey Cronjé and Gerrie Eloff musical metaphors become ways of enunciating racial theories, for the Dutch musicologist Jan Bouws music provides entry into South Africa and its discourses, for J.P. Malan music becomes a conduit that could facilitate national goals and for Rosa Nepgen music constitutes the perfect domain for and the gestating impulse of her own often ornate national devotions. Some of the themes addressed in this thesis include the language and metaphors of Apartheid intellectualisation, discourses of paranoia, struggle, purity, contamination, the ‘Afrikanermoeder’ (‘Afrikaner mother’), the cultural language of Afrikaner nationalism and the reciprocity between cultural fecundity and dominance of the land. The final denouement comprises a positing of the Afrikaans art song ‘O Boereplaas’ and the singing soprano Afrikanermoeder who emerges as the keeper of Afrikaner blood purity, guardian of her race and prophet of its fate and future.
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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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    Die verband tussen vroee apartheidsintellektualisering, Afrikanermusiekhistoriografie en die ontluiking van 'n apartheidsestetika in die toonkuns
    (LitNet, 2011-12) Venter, Carina
    Epistemologiese afhanklikheid van Europese verwysingspunte kenmerk dikwels analitiese modelle van Suid-Afrikaanse kunsmusiek en kunsmusiekhistoriografie. ’n Tipiese voorbeeld is die beskrywing van Stefans Grové se musikale styl aan die hand van sy artistieke aangetrokkenheid tot die werk van J.S. Bach, Olivier Messiaen en Paul Hindemith (Muller en Walton 2006:3). Hierdie soort koestering van estetiese genealogieë wat sigself aanhoudend terugverbeel na Europa, veronderstel die noodwendigheid van ’n Europese paradigma vir Suid-Afrikaanse kunsmusiek. Meer nog: die Grové-voorbeeld illustreer die voortsetting van ’n nasionale program gerig deur sekere propagandistiese idees, die soort ideologiese vertrekpunte wat Afrikaners se “eie” ryk kultuurerfenis verhef tot dié van verligte (Europese) ras in “donker Afrika”. In teenstelling met so ’n Eurosentriese (en problematiese) beskouing poog die teoretisering van Afrikanerkultuur in hierdie artikel om ’n kontekssensitiewe kultuurbegrip van Suid-Afrikaanse kunsmusiek in die 20ste eeu te formuleer. Die interpretatiewe raam wat hier geskep word, put uit ’n konstellasie verwante ideologieë wat krities gelees kan word uit kern historiografiese tekste en geselekteerde primêre dokumente in die argief van die komponis Arnold van Wyk.