Doctoral Degrees (Music)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/645

Browse

Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Music) by Subject "Archives"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    An Anthology of Existence: Explorations into the Life and Works of Christopher Langford James (1952 - 2008)
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2017-12) Rontsch, Marc Anton; Muller, Stephanus; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Department of Music.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The Christopher James Collection (CJC) in the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, consists of over 100 boxes containing material ranging from hand-written manuscript scores, personal correspondences and diary entries. James was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and studied composition at the University of Pretoria before doing a Doctorate of Musical Arts (DMA) at the University of Cincinnati on a Fullbright bursary. As a composer, James’s style conflated traditional European musical textures with southern African instrumentation, rhythms and harmonies. His compositions include works such as Four portraits for pianoforte in four movements (1982), Songs of lamentation and remonstration (1985), Images of Africa (1987) and Paradise Regained (1999). James was also the original orchestrator of Mzilikazi Khumalo’s musical epic uShaka KaSenzangakhona. James’s music has not received significant attention from performers or musicologists, both during his life and posthumously. Because of this, the archive has become the main source of information in writing the untold story of James’s life. This projects is thus the first exploration into James’s life and music, explorations done through the lenses of archive theory, life-writing/(auto)-biographical theory and musicology. Discussions of selections of James’s music are found within the narrative of his life, a narrative which is structured around the location where James lived during a point in his life’s chronology. The selection criteria for which works have been selected for discussion is informed by the archive: namely the presence of recordings, frequency of the work appearing in letters and diary entries, and works being mentioned by interview participants. This dissertation thus aims not only to present critical discussions of James’s music as read through his life story, but also to explore the possibilities and limitations of the “life-and- works study” paradigm, and experiment with a structural framework which integrates musicological discussions with narrative ones. This work also probes the post-colonial problematic of location, place and ideas of “home” through structural devices.