Doctoral Degrees (Music)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Music) by Subject "Boeremusiek"

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    Pleasure beyond the call of duty : perspectives, retrospectives and speculations on Boeremusiek
    (2012-03) Froneman, Willemien; Muller, Stephanus; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Music.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Boeremusiek, a form of indigenous, predominantly white folk music in South Africa, remains virtually unexplored in academic discourse. Ridiculed by the Afrikaner middle-class throughout its history, in popular perception today the genre is the reactionary underbelly of white privilege and exclusivity. This thesis explores the juxtaposition of duty and pleasure in the boeremusiek world. The history of boeremusiek – a genre with an historical apolitical character and hybrid racial beginnings – opens up a view on an Afrikaner popular culture often in opposition to Afrikaner nationalist politics. At the same time the impact of political ideology is evident, particularly in the invented sub-genre of “traditional boeremusiek” and in the repeated usage of Afrikaner nationalist symbols. Contemporary boeremusiek performance suffers from this schizophrenic subservience and resistance to Afrikaner nationalism. The creation of a comprehensive master-narrative of boeremusiek is not the objective of this thesis. Rather, inspired by Adele Clark’s notion of “situational analysis”, it aims at a different kind of scholarly depth in a series of semi-autonomous chapters. These chapters employ methodologies as diverse as musical, literary and theoretical analyses, autoethnography, ethno-history, visual ethnography and biography, while also drawing widely from various disciplinary discourses within the arts and humanities. Interspersed with the main chapters there is a series of short ruminations called “Minors” after a common boeremusiek term. The first offers a technical cameo of boeremusiek. The second is an autoethnography exploring the author’s embarrassment about the genre and its practitioners. The third is a display of kitsch boeremusiek tropes, and the fourth critiques the centrality of “fieldwork experience”, especially as it relates to audiovisuality in contemporary ethnomusicology. The main chapters explore the duty/pleasure juxtaposition of the title from various theoretical and methodological perspectives. Chapter 1 is a theoretical, historical and ethnographic reflection on the meanings and mechanisms of the juxtaposition of duty and pleasure at contemporary boeremusiek events. A deep suspicion of live performance, a recurring theme in the genre’s twentieth-century history, is noted, and the notion of “subjunctive pleasure” as it holds true at contemporary events is explored. Chapter 2 offers an alternative historiographic reading of the origins of the genre – one deeply embedded in nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy. This chapter also addresses the various ways in which embarrassment about the racial hybrid origins of the genre has found expression in boeremusiek discourse. Chapter 3 is an interpretive biography of boeremusiek songcatcher Jo Fourie based primarily on archival material. Fourie’s socially ambivalent position as a Dutch female immigrant is linked not only to her interest in boeremusiek but to the tension that exists in her writings between her attempts to discipline the genre and her gradual enrapturement with the music. The commercialisation of boeremusiek and the economic metaphors in the lives and careers of two of the most commercially successful exponents of the genre, Hendrik Susan and Nico Carstens, are the focus of Chapter 4. A commercially profitable relationship between Afrikaner politics and Afrikaner popular culture is suggested: one in which images of nationalist politics are exploited for apolitical ends. The notion that Afrikaner culture is per se an extension of Afrikaner nationalist ideology is hereby challenged. A visual ethnography in the form of a photo-essay of a contemporary boeremusiek festival constitutes Chapter 5. Overturning the duty/pleasure binary, the ironising effects of affective displays on discursive order are explored in collaboration with photographer Niklas Zimmer. The thesis concludes that boeremusiek has been positioned as a “low-Other” throughout the genre’s history. The polarities of “high” and “low”, “duty” and “pleasure” therefore serve in maintaining the genre’s illicit character.