MUSIC IN SOUTH AFRICA: FOREWORDAuthor(s): Chris WaltonSource: Fontes Artis Musicae, Vol. 54, No. 3, South Africa (July-September 2007), pp. 251-253Published by: International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres(IAML)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23510769 .

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MUSIC IN SOUTH AFRICA: FOREWORD

Chris Walton1

So much about South Africa can seem, at first sight, so black-and-white. The re alities of the country, of course, are far more complex than any colour analogy could convey. Alongside its obvious history of colonialism followed by fascist

'apartness', with all the concomitant acts of separation, domination, oppression and resistance, there are innumerable parallel and intertwined histories of

comings-together, of interactions and interminglings. The closer one looks, the more even the most radical of boundaries can turn out to be a subtle act of tran sition. And, as in any other country, South Africa's social, economic and politi cal developments have been mirrored, often to an uncanny degree, in its cul tural life. Some of these mirrorings will, we anticipate, become evident in the course of the articles presented here.

This issue of Fontes Artis Musicae—the first time, to our knowledge, that

any international music journal has devoted an issue to South Africa—aims to

present at least some of the complexities of the country by focussing on topics both 'obvious' and, we hope, unexpected. We open with an article by Kofi

Agawu, the distinguished Ghanaian musicologist and professor at Harvard

University, who investigates how the current citational practice in western aca demic practice fails to understand or properly engage with cultures that are based on an oral, not a written, tradition. Agawu confronts issues head-on that are as relevant to the rest of the formerly colonized 'third' world as they are to South Africa, and he points to ways in which western scholarship could, and

should, reconsider both its means and its ends. If there is one area in which South African music has achieved world fame,

then it is in its popular music of the past fifty years. Artists such as Miriam

Makeba, Johnny Clegg, Abdullah Ibrahim and Ladysmith Black Mambazo (of Paul Simon/Graceland fame) have made South African popular music styles in

stantly recognizable across the globe. These international megastars, not sur

prisingly, derived their art from a vast heritage of South Africa popular music; but it is a little-known fact that much of that heritage would have been lost for

good, were it not for the archives of Gallo Music, for many years South Africa's

biggest record company. Lara Allen, a researcher in the Institute for Social and

Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, here traces the history of the Gallo Archive. As is not infrequently the case in

the history of South Africa, it turns out that this huge recorded repertoire was

1. Chris Walton is a professor of music history in the Music Department of the University of

Pretoria.

251

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252 FONTES ARTIS MUSICAE 54/3

saved, thanks not to the efforts of the state, but to one man who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Mogomme Masoga, an Associate Researcher at the University of South

Africa, then takes up once more the problems and possibilities posed by the African oral tradition. He does so here by focussing on a case study of

Rangwato Magoro: composer, choreographer and 'oral archive', and in the

process he raises vital issues with regard to the active preservation of indige nous music. Elsabé Kloppers, a Research Scholar at the University of South

Africa, takes a close look at the political and theological complexities of the lat est hymnal for the Afrikaans churches, its perceived successes and failures, and in so doing points out both the legacy of conservatism in its choices, and how it is beginning to broaden its horizons.

The history of the political exiles who fled South Africa in the apartheid era is one that is common knowledge today—Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela

being among the most famous, but in fact just two out of many. Less well known is the fact that South Africa has long attracted men and women to its

shores, some of whom were themselves fleeing from political oppression else where. Our next three articles focus on three such 'immigrants', though they all had different reasons for arriving. Carol Steyn, a Research Fellow at the

University of South Africa, examines a fourteenth-century Armenian hymnal that was brought to Pretoria by a man fleeing from the Turkish pogroms of the late-nineteenth century, and which was then acquired on behalf of the Republic of the Transvaal by none other than President Paul Kruger himself. Barry Ross, a final-year BMus student of Stephanus Muller at the University of

Stellenbosch, then tells the fascinating tale of Michael Scott, an English naval

officer, author and conductor who settled in South Africa in the late 1940s, and found in the rural Western Cape the freedom to lead a lifestyle that would at the time have been frowned upon elsewhere. A friend of W. H. Auden in his stu dent days, a regular correspondent with Leopold Stokowski and others, Scott

spent his final years developing a huge collection that today forms the core

holdings of the music library at the University of Stellenbosch. Although ac

quired some thirty years ago, it is only recently that the Scott Collection has been properly catalogued. Its fate is shared by several other music collections in libraries across the country. The archives of the Russian-born, English con ductor and composer Albert Coates are another such example. Coates's many claims to fame include conducting the world première of the complete Planets Suite by Hoist, and being the composer of the first-ever opera to be televised. He emigrated late in life to South Africa, the home of his second wife; and it was she who donated his papers to Stellenbosch just a few years after his death in 1953. While cataloguing the Coates Archives only recently, Santie de Jongh of the Stellenbosch Documentation Centre for Music discovered three fasci

nating autobiographical fragments dealing with Coates's early years in Russia and Germany; they are published here for the first time.

The troubled history of the 'New Music' in South Africa is here traced by Michael Blake, a leading South African composer, and a Senior Lecturer at the

University of South Africa. The first South African Section of the International

Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) was founded in 1948 by the Scotish

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MUSIC IN SOUTH AFRICA: FOREWORD 253

composer Erik Chisholm, for many years the head of the Music Department at the University of Cape Town, and a committed communist to boot. The Section lasted only a few years before both financial and political pressures caused it to close down. As Blake shows, contemporary music is a topic that has been as

politicised as any in the history of South Africa. In a story that is not without its moments of farce, he relates how more than one attempt was made to re affiliate with the international umbrella organization. But it was not until 1999 that the newly founded 'NewMusicSA' was accredited as the official South African Section of the ISCM; it has since played a fundamental role, both in

propagating contemporary South African music in general, and in endeavour

ing to take new music far beyond what used to be the preserve of a small, white élite.

Each article here, as befits a contribution to a librarians' journal, deals in some way with the preservation and dissemination of musical knowledge in South Africa, though at times in a manner that might well seem utterly foreign to those elsewhere. We are confident, however, that the types of preservation and dissemination described here, although peculiar to the African context, can provide food for thought for the members of our community in the Western metropolis. Besides the usual abstracts in English, French and

German, we here include in each case a translation in Zulu, which is the most

widely spoken mother-tongue language in South Africa today.

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