The World of South African Music : A Reader [1 ed.] 9781443807791, 9781904303367

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The World of South African Music

The World of South African Music A Reader

Introduced, compiled, and edited by

Christine Lucia

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS

The World of South African Music: A Reader, introduced, compiled and edited by Christine Lucia This book first published 2005 by Cambridge Scholars Press 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2005 by Christine Lucia and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1904303366

To Michael

Contents Preface and Acknowledgements........................................................................... xvii Introduction ........................................................................................................... xxi PART 1: Imperialism to Modernism.................................................................... 1 A Journey to the Booshuanas John Barrow ............................................................................................................. 1 Tribal Life & Customs of the Xhosa Ludwig Alberti ......................................................................................................... 3 Travels in Southern Africa John Barrow ............................................................................................................. 5 Music in the Cape Christian Latrobe...................................................................................................... 7 Songs of the Zoolas Andrew Smith ........................................................................................................ 13 Music for the Settler Jubilee Robert Godlonton................................................................................................... 15 Preface to a Solfa Tune-book Christopher Birkett................................................................................................. 18 Music in the Northern Cape and Bechuanaland Andrew Anderson .................................................................................................. 19 Ntsikana, the Story of an African Hymn John Bokwe............................................................................................................ 21 Wings of Song J.W. Househam ...................................................................................................... 26 African Music Reuben Caluza........................................................................................................ 29 The Gora, a Stringed-wind Instrument Percival Kirby ........................................................................................................ 32

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Contents

African Music in South Africa Frieda Bokwe Matthews......................................................................................... 39 PART 2: Apartheid and Musicology .................................................................. 41 A New Era for Music and Musicians Edward Dunn ......................................................................................................... 41 The State of Folk Music in Bantu Africa Hugh Tracey........................................................................................................... 44 Columbia Dance Hall, Marabastad Ezekiel Mphahlele.................................................................................................. 48 Ocarina Music of the Venda John Blacking......................................................................................................... 50 King Kong Mona de Beer ......................................................................................................... 57 Africa, Music, and Show Business Dollar Brand/Abdullah Ibrahim ............................................................................. 60 Tonal Organisation in Venda Initiation Music John Blacking......................................................................................................... 62 Reminiscences of Healdtown Joseph Scotch Coko ............................................................................................... 66 Princess Constance Magogo David Rycroft......................................................................................................... 72 Evidence of Stylistic Continuity in Zulu ‘Town’ Music David K. Rycroft .................................................................................................... 71 Aspects of Afrikaans Music J.J.A. van der Walt and G.G. Cillié ........................................................................ 90 Wait a Minim and King Kong Ralph Trewhela ...................................................................................................... 93 The Correlation of Folk and Art Music among African Composers Khabi Mngoma....................................................................................................... 97

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The FAK and Afrikaans Music W.S.J. Grobler...................................................................................................... 106 The Music of Ntsikana David Dargie ........................................................................................................ 108 Highbreaks: A Taste of Marabi in the 1920s and ’30s David Coplan ....................................................................................................... 115 Christian Schubart and the Cape Anna Bender-Brink .............................................................................................. 121 Opera Houses in South Africa Jaques Malan........................................................................................................ 125 Chris McGregor Christopher Ballantine.......................................................................................... 129 Arnold van Wyk and Nagmusiek Howard Ferguson ................................................................................................. 132 PART 3: Music and Social Transformation..................................................... 137 My Story Miriam Makeba ................................................................................................... 137 The Songs of A.A. Kumalo: A Study in Nguni and Western Musical Syncretism Bongani Mthethwa ............................................................................................... 139 From Latvia to South Africa Lucy Faktor-Kreitzer............................................................................................ 146 Xhosa Overtone Singing David Dargie ........................................................................................................ 151 The Royal School of Church Music in South Africa Barry Smith .......................................................................................................... 155 Tiger Dance, Terukuttu, Tango, and Tchaikovsky: A PoliticoCultural View of Indian South African Music before 1948 Melveen Jackson .................................................................................................. 158

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Contents

But We Sing Alfred Temba Qabula........................................................................................... 169 Reuben T. Caluza and Early Popular Music Veit Erlmann ........................................................................................................ 171 Music and Emancipation Christopher Ballantine.......................................................................................... 180 Hindu Devotional Music in Durban Sallyann Goodall .................................................................................................. 191 Cape Malay Music Desmond Desai .................................................................................................... 198 The Guitar in Zulu Maskanda Tradition Nollene Davies ..................................................................................................... 206 Basotho Mbube Robin Wells.......................................................................................................... 215 Basotho Performance Aesthetics: Sefela and Shebeen Songs David Coplan ....................................................................................................... 219 PART 4: A New South Africa ........................................................................... 230 Isicathamiya in the 1970s-90s Veit Erlmann ........................................................................................................ 230 Indigenous Instruments Andrew Tracey..................................................................................................... 237 Songs of the Venda Murundu School Kaiser Netshitangani ............................................................................................ 244 The Art of Metamorphosis – Or the Ju|’hoan Conception of Plurivocality Emmanuelle Olivier ............................................................................................. 249 Analysing Kevin Volans’ White Man Sleeps Justin Clarkson-Fletcher et al ............................................................................... 257

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Kwela Lara Allen............................................................................................................. 266 Pedi Women’s Kiba Performance Deborah James ..................................................................................................... 271 Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town Denis-Constant Martin ......................................................................................... 278 Nazarite Hymns Carol Muller ......................................................................................................... 284 Stefans Grové: Sonate op Afrika-motiewe Stephanus Muller.................................................................................................. 288 Abdullah Ibrahim and the Uses of Memory Christine Lucia ..................................................................................................... 297 Vocal Jive and Political Identity during the 1950s Lara Allen............................................................................................................. 302 John Knox Bokwe and Black Choralism Grant Olwage ....................................................................................................... 309 The Globalisation of South African Music Martin Scherzinger............................................................................................... 319 References ............................................................................................................ 324 List of Sources...................................................................................................... 348 Index..................................................................................................................... 361

List of Musical Examples (original source in brackets) Ex 1 Sounds produced on the lesiba, simplest type of tune (Kirby 1934, 190) Ex 2 Sounds produced on the lesiba, more developed type of tune (Kirby 1934, 190) Ex 3 Melodies produced by the most skilful lesiba players (Kirby 1934,191) Ex 4 Another type of melody produced by a lesiba player (Kirby 1934,191) Ex 5 Fingering and approximate tones produced on two ocarinas (Blacking 1959, 17) Ex 6 Transcriptions of four duets played on two ocarinas (Blacking 1959, 20-21) Ex 7 Harmonic framework and root progressions of four duets (Blacking 1959, 23) Ex 8 Harmonic and tonal progressions of tshikona and khulo (Blacking 1970, 87) Ex 9 ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ (transcr. C. Lucia) Ex 10 Ugubhu harmonics (Rycroft 1977, 223) Ex 11 Umakhweyana harmonics and resultant scale (Rycroft 1977, 223) Ex 12 Transcribed opening of song ‘I shall go wandering, mother’ (Rycroft 1977, 229) Ex 13 Transcription of violin song ‘Mus’ ukuzidumaza makoti’ (Rycroft 1977, 250251) Ex 14 Antiphonal form reconstructed from the previous song (Rycroft 1977, 253) Ex 15 Scheme of parts in ‘Mus’ ukuzidumaza makoti’ (Rycroft 1977, 254) Ex 16 Magaliesburgse Aandlied arr. G.G. Cillié (FAK 1979, 614) Ex 17 ‘U Ea Kae’ by J. Mohapeloa (Morija Publishing) Ex 18 Ntsikana-Bokwe ‘Great Hymn’ transcr. D. Dargie (Dargie 1982, 9) Ex 19 Ntsikana-Bokwe ‘Round Hymn’ transcr. D. Dargie (Dargie 1982, 9) Ex 20 S.T. Bokwe’s ‘Great Hymn’ melody transcr. D. Dargie (Dargie 1982, 9) Ex 21 S.T. Bokwe’s ‘Great Hymn’ full harmony transcr. D. Dargie (Dargie 1982, 23) Ex 22 Four variants of wedding song ‘Ulo Thixo omkulu’ transcr. D. Dargie (Dargie 1982, 25) Ex 23 Reconciling the wedding song and J.K. Bokwe’s ‘Great Hymn’ (Dargie 1982, 11) Ex 24 ‘Ntsikana Bell’ transcr. D. Dargie (Dargie 1982, 22) Ex 25 ‘Ntsikana Creator of Life’ transcr. D. Dargie (Dargie 1982, 22) Ex 26 ‘Highbreaks’ by A. Lebona transcr. L. Ament and D. Coplan (Coplan 1985, 259-61) Ex 27 Four germinal motives of Nagmusiek (1st movt) by A. van Wyk (Ferguson 1987, 21) Ex 28 Opening melody of 3rd movt (Ferguson 1987, 22) Ex 29 New theme of 3rd movt (Ferguson 1987, 22) Ex 30 New motive of 6th movt (Ferguson 1987, 22) Ex 31 ‘Baba Wethu Ophezulu’ by A.A. Kumalo transcr. B. Mthethwa (Shuter and Shooter 1971, 5-6)

List of Examples

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Ex 32 ‘Ordinary umngqokolo’ showing fundamentals and overtones (Dargie 1988, 59) Ex 33 ‘Umngqokolo ngomqangi’ showing fundamentals and overtones (Dargie 1988, 58) Ex 34 ‘Silusapho lwase Afrika’ by R. Caluza (Lovedale Press) Ex 35 Opening of ‘Ixeghwana’ by R. Caluza (Erlmann 1991, 124) Ex 36 Bhajan ‘Kr̙s̙na̙ tƗrƯ moralƯ mane bhƗna bhnjlawe’ (Goodall 1991, 413) Ex 37 Adhdhaan (Desai 1993, 318) Ex 38 Qiraat ‘Al Fatigah’ (Desai 1993, 319) Ex 39 Pudjie (Desai 1993, 323) Ex 40 Djieker (Desai 1993, 324) Ex 41 Nederlandslied ‘Skoonste Minnaar’ (Desai 1993, 325) Ex 42 Nederlandslied ‘Rosa’ (Desai 1993, 327) Ex 43 Kaseda ‘Salaam’ (Desai 1993, 327) Ex 44 Samman dhikr (Desai 1993, 329) Ex 45 Transcription of a section of the song ‘Incema’ by S. Ngcobo (Davies 1994, 126-127) Ex 46 Scale encountered in ugubhu and in other Zulu songs (Davies 1994, 126131) Ex 47 Jo! Tlapa la thella Hee! Tlapa la thella (Wells 1994, 221-224) Ex 48 Male sefela sung by Rabonne Mariti (Coplan 1994, 211) Ex 49 Women’s shebeen song, ‘Peka’ (Coplan 1994, 213-215) Ex 50 Pitch-class ‘A’ for White Man Sleeps ‘First Dance’ (Clarkson Fletcher et al [1998], 10) Ex 51 Right hand part of harpsichord 2 in White Man Sleeps ‘First Dance’ (Clarkson Fletcher et al [1998], 11) Ex 52 Units for B:5 right-hand part of harpsichord 2 (Clarkson Fletcher et al [1998], 11) Ex 53 Extract from Ballantine’s transcription of ‘Khunofu’ (Clarkson Fletcher et al [1998], 11) Ex 54 Emulation of fundamentals and overtones in White Man Sleeps ‘Second Dance’ (Clarkson Fletcher et al [1998], 11) Ex 55 Chord Sequence of White Man Sleeps ‘Third Dance’ (Clarkson Fletcher et al [1998], 14) Ex 56 Sonate op Afrika-motiewe, Finale 2, violin, bars 7-10 (Muller 2000, 125) Ex 57 Sonate op Afrika-motiewe, Notturno 1, violin and piano, bars 1-6 (Muller 2000, 128-29) Ex 58 Sonate op Afrika-motiewe, Notturno 2, violin and piano, bars 1-7 (Muller 2000, 128-29) Ex 59 ‘Mamma’ by Abdullah Ibrahim transcr. C. Lucia (Lucia 2002, 132) Ex 60 Vocal part of John Knox Bokwe’s ‘The Heavenly Guide’ (Olwage 2003, 144) Ex 61 Opening of J. McGranahan’s ‘That will be Heaven for Me’ (Olwage 2003, 145)

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List of Examples

Ex 62 Musical Rhetoric in T.C. O’Kane’s ‘Go Work in My Vineyard’ (Olwage 2003, 148) Ex 63 John Knox Bokwe’s ‘Plea for Africa’ (Cory Library, Rhodes University)

List of Illustrations (artist or copyright owner in brackets) Fig 1 View of a Kaffir settlement on the South Coast of Africa. Chevalier Howen and Jacob Smies, engraved by L. Portman c1800-1810 (Parliament of the Republic of South Africa, Acc. No. 1863) Fig 2 The church at Groenekloof/Mamre (C. Lucia) Fig 3 The church at Gnadenthal/Genadendal (C. Lucia) Fig 4 Organ loft of the Dutch Lutheran Church Strand St. Cape Town (Museum Africa) Fig 5 St George’s Church Grahamstown c1830 (Museum Africa) Fig 6 Original title pages of Ntsikana, the Story of an African Hymn (Cory Library, Rhodes University) Fig 7 Methodist Church Albert St. Johannesburg c1926 (Museum Africa) Fig 8 Ends of Hottentot gora with tuning-peg (South African Museum) Fig 9 Korana Hottentot playing upon the gora (P.R. Kirby) Fig 10 Sotho (Bas.) playing upon the lesiba (P.R. Kirby) Fig 11 Edward Dunn addressing a meeting c1950 (Museum Africa) Fig 12 Diagrams of two Venda ocarinas drawn to scale (J. Blacking) Fig 13 Miriam Makeba and Nathan Mdledle in King Kong 1959 (Bailey’s African History Archives) Fig 14 Harmonic and tonal progressions of tshikona and khulo (J. Blacking) Fig 15 Certificate of the London Tonic Sol-fa College 1898 (Museum Africa) Fig 16 Southern Zulu work-song ‘We Majola’ (D. Rycroft) Fig 17 Zulu multi-part song ‘I shall go wandering, mother’ (D. Rycroft) Fig 18 Mr Joseph Sikwaza (D. Rycroft) Fig 19 The original cast recording of Wait A Minim (Bailey’s African History Archives) Fig 20 The Princes Theatre London 1961 (Bailey’s African History Archives) Fig 21 Accordion and concertina played by Mary and Percy Monri 1939 (Museum Africa) Fig 22 Circular diagram of ‘Highbreaks’ after Rycroft (D. Coplan) Fig 23 Manuscript of ‘Erstes Kaplied: Abschiedslied’ (A. Bender-Brink) Fig 24 Manuscript of ‘Zweytes Kaplied: Fur den Trupp’ (A. Bender-Brink) Fig 25 Standard Theatre Johannesburg 1890s (Museum Africa) Fig 26 Van Riebeck Festival celebrations Cape Town 1952 (Museum Africa) Fig 27 Cape Town Promenade Pier c1900 (Museum Africa) Fig 28 Poster of Gems from the Operas (L. Faktor-Kreitzer) Fig 29 Joseph Gabriels and May Abrahamse 1962 (L. Faktor-Kreitzer) Fig 30 Nowayilethi Mbizweni performing umngqokolo ngomqangi (D. Dargie) Fig 31 View of St George’s Cathedral by Thomas Bowler (© Iziko William Fehr Collection, Cape Town) Fig 32 The Lawrence Trio 1928 (Lawrence family private collection) Fig 33 A.G. Pillay c1952 (SABC) Fig 34 The Red Hot Jazz Pirates Band 1935 (Lawrence family private collection)

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List of Illustrations

Fig 35 Fox Movietone making a travelogue at Mt. Edgecombe (S.S. Singh Collection) Fig 36 Maya Devi and the Ranjeni Orchestra 1941 (M. Devi private collection) Fig 37 Kalaivani Orchestra Pietermaritzburg 1948 (A.G. Pillay private collection) Fig 38 The Merry Blackbirds in 1937 or 1938 (P. Rezant private collection) Fig 39 The Merry Blackbirds in the early 1940s (P. Rezant private collection) Fig 40 The Jazz Maniacs, in a photograph taken between 1934 and 1939 (C. Ballantine private collection) Fig 41 Division and tuning of maskanda guitar strings (N. Davies) Fig 42 Nofinishi Dywili playing the uhadi (D. Dargie) Fig 43 Tsonga (Shangaan) tshihwana players (ILAM, Rhodes University) Fig 44 Pedi moropa drummers (ILAM, Rhodes University) Fig 45 Zulu umtshingo player (ILAM, Rhodes University) Fig 46 Pedi dipela player (ILAM, Rhodes University) Fig 47 Transition from the primary basic version in the principle tessitura to the others (E. Olivier) Fig 48 Binary form of White Man Sleeps ‘First Dance’ (J. Clarkson Fletcher et al.) Fig 49 Pitch-class ‘A’ configured for White Man Sleeps ‘First Dance’ (J. Clarkson Fletcher et al.) Fig 50 Relationship of parts to original dances in White Man Sleeps ‘First Dance’ (J. Clarkson Fletcher et al.) Fig 51 Sections of White Man Sleeps ‘Third Dance’ (J. Clarkson Fletcher et al.) Fig 52 Pennywhistlers (J. Schadeberg) Fig 53 The fingering of B flat major on a B flat penny whistle (L. Allen) Fig 54 Rural women singers performing to greet their urban visitors (S. Mofekeng) Fig 55 SK Alex women: drummer and solo singer in performance (S. Mofekeng) Fig 56 The Pennypinchers All Stars marching on the Green Point Stadium track 2 Jan 1999 (M. Matthews) Fig 57 Close-up of Pennypinchers All Stars showing instrumentalists (M. Matthews) Fig 58 32-beat cycle of ‘Ngamemeza ebusuku nemini’ (C. Muller)

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is the product of several years’ work and many individuals and institutions helped in its production, so the first thanks go to librarians in the following libraries: Eleanor Bonnar Music Library, University of KwaZulu Natal; Music Library, Rhodes University; Cory Library for Historical Research, Rhodes University; International Library of African Music; South African National Library, Cape Town; The British Library; The Pendlebury Library of Music, University of Cambridge; Library of the University of South Africa. The following people assisted in a host of small but significant ways, both in developing the concept of the book and in its practical implementation: Lara Allen; Rob Allingham; Christopher Ballantine; Max Peter Baumann; Anna Bender; Kathy Brooks; David Bunn; Joseph Caluza; Anriette Chorn; Bill Cottam; Giselle Dalziel; Dave Dargie; Nollene Davies; Desmond Desai; Zureena Desai; Muzikayise Dlamini; Vera Dubin; Elizabeth Dunstan; Veit Erlmann; Graham Gilfillan; Steven Gill; Stanley, Sue and Adam Glasser; Sallyann Goodall; John Hopkins; Melveen Jackson; Deborah James; Lucy Kreitzer; Valmont Layne; E.T. Lengoasa; Robert Letellier; Dave Leverton; Winfried Lüdemann; Pierre Malan; Jacques Malan; Denis-Constant Martin; James May; Edward Mngadi; Lindumuzi Mngoma; Mavis Mpola; Carol Muller; Stephanus Muller; Josephine Naidoo; Andy Nercessian and the staff at Cambridge Scholars Press; Michael Nixon; Elizabeth Oehrle; Elizabeth Potts; Julie Poyser; Nishlyn Ramanna; Zahida Sirkhotte; Ari Sitas; David Smith; Kathy Standford; Michael Titlestad; Andrew Tracey; Liz Welsh; Stuart White; colleagues in the Wits School of Arts. A particular debt of gratitude is owed to Michael Levy for advice over copyright permissions, Grant Olwage for research assistance, Clare Loveday for help with proofing, and Roger Parker for invaluable comments on the Introduction. I acknowledge financial assistance from the University of KwaZulu Natal, Rhodes University, the University of the Witwatersrand, and the National Research Foundation in Pretoria, and particularly thank The Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge for an Overseas Visiting Scholarship in 2001-2002 that enabled me to complete much of the research. Above all I thank authors and copyright holders of extracts used in this book for allowing me to use their valuable intellectual property. Sometimes cuts were made in their work, indicated by ellipses or square brackets (ellipses in authors’ quotations are however their own). The sign […]indicates a longer cut than those shown by a simple ellipsis. In a few cases the extract has been edited or shortened. Most of the original musical examples or illustrations are reproduced here but it has not always been possible to find them, and so alternative or additional ones have been used. Because they have been numbered consecutively throughout the Reader their original numbering will change, as will references to them in authors’ (original) texts. The same principle of uniformity was used for references and

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sources, the ‘List of Sources’ at the end of the book being a composite one drawn from all extracts (this also has the advantage of avoiding duplication). All original formats have been standardized as far as possible (for ease of reading) but original spellings are retained; and errors or omissions in the originals have where possible been corrected. Original spellings have mostly been kept in the main text too, but many aspects of punctuation and referencing style have been standardized. Original footnotes/endnotes are retained but all are now placed at the end of the book in chronological sequence as endnotes. The Harvard system of referencing in the text has been used even where footnote were used in the original, also to make the flow of reading easier. My modifications or additions to endnotes as Editor are shown in square brackets, and I have also added a few explanatory ones. Where original authors did not give adequate information in their references (such as page numbers) I have generally not made up for this. All musical examples have been re-done in Sibelius, as originals were extremely varied in style and quality. The labour of producing this book during the past two years was shared with my husband Michael Blake, who not only typeset all the musical examples but also undertook a thousand tasks on my behalf in the process of securing republication rights. Most important, he rescued the remnants of my flagging spirit more times than I dare remember. This book is lovingly dedicated to him. While every possible effort has been taken to locate the copyright owners of text, visual, or musical material used in this book, it has not been possible in all cases. The publishers welcome any additional information in this regard. Ludwig Alberti ¤1968 A.A. Balkema; Lara Allen ¤1999 Ashgate Publishing Ltd.; Lara Allen ¤2003 The Society for Ethnomusicology; Christopher Ballantine ¤1991 Taylor & Francis Ltd.; Christopher Ballantine ¤1997 Christopher Ballantine; Anna Bender-Brink ¤1986 Musicological Society of Southern Africa; John Blacking ¤1959 International Library of African Music, Rhodes University, Grahamstown; John Blacking ¤1970 The Society for Ethnomusicology; Reuben Caluza 1931 ¤Courtesy of Hampton University Archives; G.G. Cillié ¤1979 The Human Sciences Research Council; Clarkson Fletcher et al. ¤1998 Musicological Society of Southern Africa; David Coplan ¤1985 David Coplan; David Coplan ¤1994 The University of Chicago Press; David Dargie ¤1982 Musicological Society of Southern Africa; David Dargie ¤1988 David Dargie; Nollene Davies ¤1994 Florian Noetzel Edition;

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Mona de Beer ¤1960 A. Glasser and S. Glasser; Desmond Desai ¤1993 University of Natal; Edward Dunn ¤1949 The Outspan; Veit Erlmann ¤1991 by The University of Chicago Press; Veit Erlmann ¤1996 by The University of Chicago Press; Lucy Faktor-Kreitzer ¤1988 Lucy Faktor-Kreitzer; Howard Ferguson ¤1987 Peter Klatzow; Sallyann Goodall ¤Musicological Society of Southern Africa; W.S.J Grobler ¤1982 The Human Sciences Research Council; Melveen Jackson ¤1989 Florian Noetzel Edition; Deborah James ¤1999 The International Africa Institute, London; Percival Kirby ¤1968 The Estate of the late Percival Kirby; Christine Lucia ¤2002 The British Forum for Ethnomusicology; Miriam Makeba with James Hall ¤1988 Miriam Makeba; Jacques Malan ¤1986 The Human Sciences Research Council; Denis-Constant Martin ¤1999 New Africa Books; Frieda Bowke Matthews ¤1935 V.J. Matthews; Khabi Mngoma ¤1981 International Library of African Music, Rhodes University; Richard Moyer ¤1973 Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University; Es’kia Mphahlele ¤1958 Es’kia Mphahlele; Bongani Mthethwa ¤1988 International Library of African Music, Rhodes University; Carol Muller ¤1999 by The University of Chicago Press; Stephanus Muller ¤2000 Literator; Kaiser Netshitangani ¤1997 International Library of African Music, Rhodes University; Emmanuelle Olivier ¤1997 InfoSource and the University of the Western Cape Institute for Historical Research; Grant Olwage ¤2003 Grant Olwage; Alfred Qabula ¤1989 by National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa; David Rycroft ¤1975/76 International Library of African Music, Rhodes University; David Rycroft ¤1977 Bonnie Wade; Martin Scherzinger ¤2004 Cambridge University Press; Andrew Smith ¤1975 A.A. Balkema; Barry Smith 1988/89 Musicological Society of Southern Africa; Andrew Tracey ¤1996 University of Natal; Hugh Tracey ¤1954 International Library of African Music, Rhodes University; Ralph Trewhela ¤1981 Paul Trewhela and Beverley Naidoo;

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J.J.A. van der Walt ¤1979 The Human Sciences Research Council; Robin Wells ¤1994 Morija Museum and Archives. Additional illustration permissions Bailey’s African History Archives; Christopher Ballantine; Mrs Solomon Cele; Cory Library, Rhodes University; David Dargie; Lucy Faktor-Kreitzer; Gallo (Africa) Ltd; International Library of African Music; Melvin Matthews; Santu Mofekeng; Museum Africa; Jürgen Schadeberg; Parliament of the Republic of South Africa; Times Media Collection; Iziko William Fehr Collection. Additional musical score permissions ‘Silusapho lwase Afrika’ by Reuben Caluza ¤Lovedale Press (Pty) Ltd; ‘Magaliesburgse Aandlied’ arr. G.G. Cillié ¤Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniginge; ‘U Ea Kea?’ by J. Mohapeloa ¤Morija Sesotho Book Depot and Publishers; ‘Kr̙s̙na̙ TƗrƯ MoralƯ Mane BhƗna Bhnjlawe’ transcr. S. Goodall ¤The University of Durban-Westville; ‘Baba Wethu Ophezulu’ by A.A. Kumalo ¤Shuter and Shooter.

INTRODUCTION Reading South African music We face the challenge of creating a unique South African musicology, [and] have the opportunity, that other nations can envy, of building our own monuments in this ‘last Paradise’ (Malan 1983, 34).i For any ethnomusicologist interested in the music of the slums, streets, harbours, and mines of Africa, South Africa constitutes something of an Eldorado (Erlmann 1991, 1). The subject of this book, South African music, tells many stories. It is a work of meta-fiction, a narration of voices constantly interrupting each other with diversions and contradictions, vying to construct itself from the remnants of a remote or recent past in much the same way that we as human subjects have the tendency (as Umberto Eco once noted) to construct our lives around the narrative conceit of the novel (1995, 131). One might argue that the stories narrated here are not fictional but infused with tangible reality through their historical, geographical, generic or cultural location: the story of African traditional music, for example, or the story of Afrikaans song, marabi piano, or Zulu choralism. Perhaps, even, there is only one subject told in many different ways according to the writer’s perspective. The quotations that head this Introduction tell of two such perspectives: in the case of Afrikaner musicologist Jacques Malan writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, South Africa was a paradise, a tabula rasa waiting for the possibilities of a new kind of (white) critical inscription. For German-born ethnomusicologist Veit Erlmann ten years later the country was ‘something of’ an Eldorado, provided one was prepared to explore the byways of the (black) working-class poor. However different, each view is underscored by an alluring notion of paradise, a notion that comes not from the language of musicology or ethnomusicology but from the world of fiction. Taking this view of the world of South African music as a play of narratives, a musical biography of a country, the first question to ask perhaps, is how does the story begin? Whether told through academic discourses in musicology or ethnomusicology, or related discourses of a more creative kind such as autobiography, news feature, travel journal, lecture, poetry - all represented in this Reader - there is a tendency to want to evoke a certain myth of origin. Such myths have been present throughout the written history of music in South Africa, a history that goes back to travel accounts of the fifteenth century, tales of miracle and wonder. Since South Africa’s political changes began in 1994 however there has been a shift towards reclaiming the more immediate past, reimagining it and

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even seeming to romanticise its darkest days. The musical life of the apartheid township of Sophiatown of the 1950s, for example, is retold repeatedly in current films, television series and books as if this was a golden age. A slightly different example of reinvention is the alignment of Western classical music with new bedfellows. South Africa’s ‘First International Classical Music Festival’ (known locally as the ICMF) was held in Johannesburg and Pretoria in 2001 to show such alignment bringing together (according to a media release) “the widely acclaimed English Chamber Orchestra, Xhosa-woman overtone singing, Schubert lieder [sic], African drum-singing [and] the ever-popular Ladysmith Black Mambazo” (quoted in Ansell 2003). In this kind of narration the entire history of orchestras, symphony concerts, recitals, music festivals, competitions, arts councils, censored state radio and television and the unimaginable damage of unequal education and cultural opportunities that drove this Western hegemonic order along under grand apartheid (and before that British colonial rule), are here erased - with the stroke of a pen - as if they had never existed. The origins are remade and classical music reborn with a new link forged between the classical (Schubert and the ECO), the traditional (Xhosa-woman and African ‘drum-singing’), and the popular (Ladysmith Black Mambazo). With such reinvention of the past, music has fallen, to use Lacan’s term, out of the imaginary register into the symbolic. What under Western hegemonic discourse before 1994 was just ‘music’ because it was music of the dominant minority has, reasserting itself under the pressure of post-apartheid South Africa, renamed itself (Classical Music) and redrawn its boundaries (International). Behind this recent transformation of music by the wand of classicism, however, lie many other historical moments similarly driven by the imperative of changing ideologies, whose complex relationships preclude the very notion of a single narrative of South African music. The monolithic Europe-driven cultural institutions of twentieth-century South Africa so clouded the view of this plurality for the past 100 years that, until 1994 Western music seemed indeed to constitute a homogenous block, supporting the Nationalist edifice both metaphorically (through legislation) and literally (the State Theatre in Pretoria for example). Now South African music sees itself differently, as part of a set of interlocked histories, a patchwork of collective initiatives and individual efforts. In this optimistic view South Africa is Eldorado: flowing with gold not only musically but also (as this book itself shows) in terms of critical readings of that music - biographies, autobiographies, dissertations, articles, books - telling their stories through the eyes of composers, critics, performers, institutions of all kinds, even through the musical lens of small towns.ii Such a radical rethink inevitably begins to show more and more clearly that the notion of a South African musical territory and set of practices before the first significant European settlement in the seventeenth century, before colonialism,

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urbanisation, apartheid or globalisation, with their attendant musical impositions Dutch psalms, Wesleyan hymns, German folksong, British music education, American jazz, house music - is fictitious; the precondition for its existence being precisely the absence that cannot be imagined. There is no timeless and unproblematic past where cultural contact never occurred. This myth of origin, persisting in South African discourse even to the present day and clung to by many overseas visitors, hints at a freedom that once existed and might somehow come again: once a South African liberation myth with political teeth, now reinvented as an African Renaissance myth - it remains nonetheless a myth. There is also no continuum in these stories - this Reader is not a ‘music history’ despite the way the readings are arranged chronologically - but there is a sense of both continuity and discontinuity in these pages moving inexorably towards the present moment. A definition of ‘South African’ in the title is linked to political history, of course, and for the purposes of this book it means music that exists or once existed within the current political borders of South Africa. Constraints of time and place are daunting in a region that has several centuries of recorded history, approximately 43 million inhabitants, covers an area of 1, 400 000 square kilometres and is bordered by six countries (Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho and Swaziland) with whom it has a shared cultural history and some shared languages. Further, South Africa has a terrain and climate almost as varied as Argentina or Australia, an ecological multi-environment that has profoundly shaped the development of its indigenous musical instruments and practices (see Tracey 1996). It has eleven official languages and many religious practices, including more than 200 indigenous Christian churches ranging from a few hundred to millions of members (the Zionist Church for example). Its music has been affected by successive waves of acculturation, some brutal, all causing major cultural transformations and retransformations. Selecting the readings The literature in which music emerging out of such cultural polyphony is explained or in other ways ‘read’ is enormous. Well over 1000 items are available, not including at least twice this number in print media articles as well as hundreds of plays, poems, short stories, travel fictions and novels in which South African music is represented. The simplest way to make a selection from this vast aggregation of motifs would have been to take the ‘top ten’ academic articles on South African music from the last 15 to 20 years. I resisted this approach, however: partly because such writing is well known in academic circles, but mainly because such a selection would have biased the book strongly in favour of black South African popular music and jazz, and privileged white writers. The number of pieces I

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included here, ultimately, came in at about 60, whittled down from 200, and even those left standing were ruthlessly pruned. Informing this process were several criteria. First, I favoured extracts that dealt with musical material directly - whether by example, analysis, or description - so that music would have a strong ‘presence’. This means that there are differences in music notation and several indigenous languages used (in song texts) although in most cases these are translated. Second, I tried to introduce as fair a distribution of gender, age and cultural background as I could manage, given the imbalance that exists. South African writers of colour are few in number despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population is not white. Texts are nevertheless there, and they have been included - not for the political purpose of incorporating what Kofi Agawu has called “native discourse” (Agawu 1995, 394) - but because, as Agawu indeed has shown, such discourse often speaks of music not discussed elsewhere with a voice that is not dominant. Third was the criterion of coverage. Some areas of music are far better covered in the literature than others (indigenous music and twentieth-century popular music for example); there is far less on African choral music and almost nothing (in English) on Afrikaans music. Aside from studies of individual composers or histories of towns, there is no writing on the meanings of Western classical music in South Africa as distinct from writing published elsewhere. Taking stock of classical music as a cultural phenomenon within a Southern African rather than European context - and taking it right back to the seventeenth century - is a long overdue project, but few writers have taken the ethnographic or post-colonial view of such music that a reading like this requires. Some gold has been well mined the Zulu male-voice genre isicathamiya for example - while other texts only graze the surface of their subject and may be seen as first attempts to define a field. In making a selection there was no attempt to make up for inadequacies or unevenness in the literature by commissioning further research. What I aimed for, rather, was a reasonable spread of topics given that unevenness. This involved excluding some well-known pieces and authors, which I did with great regret, the compensation being, I hope, a wider range of both musics and voices. Gaps in the research field are there for all to see – and there are many challenges both empirical and theoretical for young researchers to take up. Finally, the scholarship (but not necessarily its authors) emerges from within the present political borders of South Africa. One exception to this general rule is the work of Emmanuelle Olivier on the Ju|’hoansi, who live in the (Botswanan) Kalahari (Olivier 1997). It is included mainly because it demythologises so effectively the imaginary of nomadic ‘bushmen’ that haunts some of the earlier writing in the book; and because the multivocal techniques she analyses relate tellingly to contemporary studies of Xhosa music. Olivier also deals in a way most other writers do not, with vernacular terminology and concepts.

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This representation of musical practices from immigrant, urban, peri-urban, migrant and rural communities covering large geographical areas of the country is paralleled by an equally wide representation of views and ideologies, ranging from those of 200 years ago (the earliest writing is from 1806) to writing of the present. Many different kinds of discourse emerge, and the rest of this Introduction highlights some of the issues of origin, history, ideology, representation, identity, and language that are a feature of the writing. Origin In her (1995) analysis of post-colonial literary criticism, Karin Barber exposes paradigms of binarism that inform both the imaginary tabular rasa of a South African musical paradise and the aspirations of the ever-changing Eldorado: oppositions such as traditional-modern, oral-written, past-contemporary, localinternational (11). Such binarisms recall evolutionist views of music in nineteenthcentury writing, predicated on the fundamental binary, self-other. As John McCall has summarised it, the view promoted in 1893 by Richard Wallascheck for example, is as follows: European Music modern melodic complex aesthetic mental intellectual creative product of culture

African Music primitive rhythmic simple functional physical emotional expressive product of nature (McCall 1998, 96).iii

Although we are alert to Victorian ideologies of ‘ancient and modern’ or ‘savage and civilised’ implicit in this list (see for example Erlmann 1994), the traditionalmodern and African-Western dichotomy persists in current thinking about music in South Africa, as do other frequently encountered pairs such as individualcommunal, urban-rural. The difficulty in moving away from binaries is compounded by the degree to which they are constantly re-inscribed, if only to be manipulated afresh (as the ICMF has shown), the problem with them being precisely that they are so much part of the way South Africans think about themselves musically. In the global context, such dichotomies place us automatically in anOther country, another hemisphere, another culture, from that of the imagined West. They reduce the historical and economic contingencies of a more nuanced reading of South African music - where the West has been part of

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the script for several centuries - to secondary status. A single word in any pair operates mainly in relation to its opposite and becomes a signifier of difference, one that contemporary music education and composition continually seek to undermine but ultimately reinforce, locked as they are into the symbolic order of naming. An example of this problem is choral music, or amakwaya or makwaya (competition) music, which originated from black mission-educated composers in the eastern Cape and Natal. Choral works in this tradition are written in tonic solfa notation and become scores; but such scores are not necessarily read or even owned by those who perform them. They are scarce commodities (it takes a serious researcher to make a substantial and diverse collection);iv few choristers are fully literate in solfa notation,v and choral songs are often taught by rote over many rehearsals comprising constantly shifting groups of attendees. Composers themselves strain against the expressive, tonal and rhythmic limitations of working in solfa notation. Unavailability of scores, even when they have been prescribed for competitions, confirms their low status as ‘texts’.vi Yet fidelity to notes and instructions on the ‘score’ is a criterion that adjudicators use in assessment, and the few scores that exist are treated as classics by committees who organise the major national competitions, forming over time a canon of musical works inscribed in the consciousness of those involved in choralism. Furthermore, choralism is phenomenally popular, involving almost half the country’s population (see Mngoma 1986, 116-117). In the midst of such ambiguity, to bring Barber into service again, it seems that whatever state of literacy choirs uphold, they all “access texts in one way or another” (1995, 12). Just as she cites the potential 30 million Hausa or Swahili ‘readers’ of texts, I would estimate that there are close on 20 million members of choirs in South Africa who ‘read’ choral songs. Where does such music fit into the oral-written paradigm? The three categories of competition songs (traditional, Western, vernacular) have themselves changed since 1994. The ‘vernacular’ was designed in the earlier twentieth century to cater for music written in solfa script by composers using African-language texts, but now includes songs in Afrikaans; thus it challenges the African-Western binary while at the same time exposing the problematic of placing Afrikaans songs alongside African solfa pieces, in the category ‘indigenous’. There are many other examples where South African music defies neat categorisation. Constantly re-narrated and re-read, the very difficulties in conceptualising it (for this Reader) are part of its story. If presenting it as an anthology in the way this Reader presents an ‘overview’ brings out (rather than obscures) the underlying dichotomies, it also affords an opportunity to look at it precisely for those differences and anomalies, as an archaeological site in which layers of practice and meaning are encrusted together and occasionally thrown up into strangely tilted conjunctions. This enables a view of South African music as a

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set of differently constituted practices resonating with each other as they develop(ed) - simultaneously as well as sequentially and with resulting discontinuities as well as continuities. With this Foucaultian notion in mind, we come to a discussion of history. History and ideology The music of South Africa has evolved by a series of migrations - from many parts of the world over several centuries (Europe, the Malay Archipelago, south-east Asia, the Middle East, the US, Canada and South America), and, within the country, over several millennia. Thus its story has a number of possible ways to ‘begin’. In the search for origins South African music has been particularly well served by Xhosa prophet Ntsikana Gaba (died c1821). His story is referred to several times in this Reader, and always he is presented as ‘the first’ - the first Christian convert in the eastern Cape, the first Xhosa composer, creator of the “first Christian hymn composed and sung in Kaffirland to real native music” (Bokwe [n.d. c1904], 28). His surviving hymns provide ample material for an evolutionist consideration of something that lies on the border between history and myth, to prove that “origin is there so that history can begin” (Barber 1995, 7). One can argue that there were concrete beginnings, and inescapable historical facts, such as the establishment of the first permanent mission station among the Xhosa by Rev Brownlee in 1820 (Dargie 1982, 7). The building of this mission mud, stone, hardship, prayer - and the sudden death of Brownlee shortly afterwards took place at a certain time and place, profoundly affecting the detail of some everyday lives. But such bald realities do not explain music, or tell us what moved Ntsikana and what his community of onlookers experienced. What ‘text’, for example, did those early congregations access in Ntsikana’s chants? There are only partial answers. The oldest account we have is by John Knox Bokwe from the late 1870s: the version given in this Reader was published around 1904 and was intended for a readership in Victorian Britain (the publisher was the London Missionary Society), for whom Ntsikana is domesticated as ‘ab-original’ Christian rather than - during frontier wars he was deeply involved in - as politicised being (see Olwage 2003, 139-42). Bokwe’s myth goes thus: looking over his cattle one morning he is excited (Bokwe calls it a ‘trance’) by the sight of a glowing light striking his favourite ox ([n.d. c1904], 19). Returning with his family from an umdudo or ceremonial dance a few hours later, Ntsikana passed a stream where he unexpectedly “washed off the heathen clay from his body”, the signature of conversion (Ibid., 19-20). The next morning Ntsikana sang a strange new chant and told his startled relatives that “the thing that had entered within him directed that all men should pray” (Ibid., 19-20). According to Bokwe, then, Ntsikana’s hymn - his first utterance as a Christian convert - ‘entered’ him at night,

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having been dreamt.vii First the flash of enlightenment, then the discarding of the past, the dream-song, and a prophecy. This historic moment - Ntsikana’s altered state of consciousness resembling for Bokwe St Paul on the road to Damascus - was captured very differently by Methodist leaders in 1923, celebrating a century of success in the South African mission fields. The origin of Ntsikana’s music lay for them not in a mystical moment between sleeping and waking, past and future, but in a typically African spontaneous “outburst”. We can imagine how these first converts, rejoicing in the new and wonderful life that had sprung up within them, would croon, in quiet and low monotones, the message that had appealed to them, until the heart would swell and unconsciously burst into melody and praise God. Ntsikana … has given us such an illustration. It is just a natural outburst of feeling and joy as we should expect from one emerging from the bondage of a cruel heathenism into the freedom and liberty of the children of God (Househam 1923, 53). In his recounting of the myth, Househam downgrades song (the most ardent expression of Xhosa culture) to ‘crooning’, reiterates the litany of primitive music’s qualities as did Wallaschek; and speaks of the great prophet Ntsikana as illustration or mere ‘example’ of an early convert. His distancing strategy (aside from its racial overtones) pushes the event away from the tenor of the fictional account Bokwe wrote for the metropole, leading it towards a crude evangelistic ethnography. Employing quite another register, David Dargie’s (1982) account explores the musical side of this experience, as if it were not so much a religious awakening as a great creative moment in which Ntsikana juggles old and new. Dargie places his account in the context of performance: while Ntsikana was dancing at the umdudo - the night before he supposedly dreamed the first of his hymns - he “became aware that the Holy Spirit had entered him” (1982, 7). Dargie, like Bokwe, imagines what was said and by whom, writing his account almost as fiction. “The next day he continued to act strangely, telling people that something had entered him … He began to sing strange chants, using the words ‘elelele homna’” (Ibid.). Dargie’s account also signals the focus on difference: he is fascinated by the merging of European and African cultural traditions into what has come to be viewed as the first South African composition (Blake 2000, 13). Here, then, Ntsikana is not so much exemplary convert as composer articulating a new musical expression. Concern for what is often seen as a ‘reconciliation’ between the African and Western in compositional discourse (although it often re-inscribes difference) places Dargie’s account at an interesting tangent alongside other writers in this volume who have tackled the same issue, such as Bongani Mthethwa (on Alfred Assegai Kumalo [sic]), Erlmann (on Reuben Caluza), and Stephanus Muller

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(on Stefans Grové). All four writers examine the interface, or in Leon de Kock’s apt phrase, the ‘seam’ (de Kock 2001) that holds together compositional strands in the post-colony. The interweaving of these strands has, over time, been theorised under various names: in the 1970s and 80s it was called syncretism, in the 90s hybridity; in popular music or jazz discourse it might be fusion or cross-over. In terms of Ntsikana’s music, such hybridity was extremely awkward, ‘unlikely’, as Grant Olwage puts it, revealing (through Bokwe’s harmonisation) both Xhosa music ‘reformed’ and Victorian hymnody ‘deformed’ - and thereby, spawning few successors (Olwage 2003, 138). The claim for Ntsikana as compositional origin rests on his symbolic significance, then, rather than on his music. And where the music is claimed it is partly in error: the version of his hymn that Bokwe transcribes as the ‘Great Hymn’ is not what is now seen as the originating Great Hymn (transcribed by Bokwe as the ‘Round Hymn’ (Olwage 2003, 136)). The claim rests, moreover, on two massive conceptual leaps: from what Ntsikana actually chanted in the early nineteenth century to Bokwe’s early twentieth-century arrangements; and again to what we choose to find original a century later. The myth of Ntsikana as origin owes its different inflections to historical undercurrents that inevitably changed during the course of the 200-year span of this volume. The dividing line between different sections of the present book mark some of the most important moments of change in South African history: 18061930s, 1940s-80s, late-1980s-mid-90s, and mid-1990s to the present. They broadly define four projections that have been of over-arching significance in South African political ideology: British imperialism and its aftermath in a tangle of rapidly urbanising modernisms, the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the philosophy of apartheid, the often violent politics of transformation, and the postapartheid democracy. This does not mean, however, that the four sections are movements of a national symphony that move inexorably forward in time without reminiscent themes. The ideology of the colonial nineteenth century contained many elements (romanticism and nationalism being two) that persist to the present day; apartheid laws may have crumbled but their stifling impact on musical development is still felt; transformation was a long and painful stage in the South African psyche that occupied a surprisingly short span of chronological time and still has not yet ended; and although 1994 was a new beginning, even in ‘the new South Africa’ cultural terrain remains highly contested. The texts represented in this book reflect changing historical and ideological imperatives in ways far more complex than can be grasped by surveying the (chronological) list of contents, and some examples must now be given. In the work of some writers (such as Melveen Jackson on South-Asian music from the 1860s to 1948) historical sensibility is very much to the fore. In others it is an insignificant aspect of the writing - some extracts seem almost to exist in a historical (or ideological) vacuum. Most of the writing cannot be fully understood, however, without knowing something of the socio-political events that surrounded

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it; for example Barrow’s Account of a Journey, Made in the Years 1801 and 1802 … (Barrow 1806b), Alberti’s Tribal Life & Customs of the Xhosa in 1807 … (Alberti 1968[1815]), and Barrow’s [Travels] in Southern Africa … (1813). All three were written during the British-Dutch war over the Cape Colony during which, briefly: the British wrenched the Colony from Dutch control in 1795 to prevent it falling into French hands during the Napoleonic wars,viii handed it back to the (Dutch) Batavian Republic in 1803, seized it again after the Battle of Blaauwberg in January 1806 and confirmed their control through the London Convention of August 1814 (Saunders and Southey 1998, 31). Barrow was a significant player in this tug of war. He published at least five accounts of two visits to south-western Africa in 1797-98 and 1801-02, rewriting his narrative to suit the expectations of readers in London and his employer, the British Admiralty. Their appearance was timed conveniently in terms of the unfolding of political events (1801, 1804, 1806 and 1813). His accounts of 1806 and 1813 (detailed and shrewd observations including many references to music) lent narrative solidity to the centre’s possession and re-possession of a distant ‘other’ (Pratt 1992, 58). Music provided Barrow with evidence of ‘civilisation’ among the inhabitants sufficient for their subjugation: “here a plentiful harvest is offered to the first reapers who may present themselves” (1806b, 400). The full titles of his books themselves speak to the imperial agenda (see List of Sources); while his changing signature (John, John Esq, Sir John …) traces a career whose ascendancy between 1801 and 1813 was arguably due in large part to his work on ‘the colonies’. A counterpoint to this narrative is German-born Ludwig Alberti’s popular Tribal Life … published first in Dutch (1810) then French (1811) and German (1815) - an English translation appeared only in 1968. Alberti’s work as a professional soldier took him to the Cape in 1803-1806 (the Dutch period between British rule) on the Batavian Republic rather than British side. His view of music is as ‘other’ as Barrow’s; but it is not so much the tale as his dour telling of it, that marks a major contrast. Not for Alberti are the literary allusions that make Barrow’s text readable as (travel) fiction quite aside from its references to music. Alberti manages to reduce a great Xhosa creation myth to the following bland ‘poem’: In the land in which the sun rises, there is a cavern, from which the first Kaffirs, and in fact All peoples, as also the stock of every kind of animal, came forth. At the same time, the sun and moon came into being, to shed their light, and trees, grass and other plants to provide food for man and cattle (1968[1815], 13).

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Barrow on the other hand rolls out the bleak Karoo desert north-east of Cape Town as a carpet of narrative: From these lonely wastes of Africa, ‘where’, as Dr. Johnson observes of part of Scotland, ‘the traveller has nothing to contemplate but grounds that have no visible boundaries’, nature seems to have witheld her bounteous hand, and doomed then to cheerless, irremediable, and consequently perpetual, sterility (Barrow 1806b, 371). No paradise here, at least on the surface. And the reference to Johnson is telling: early South African writing is often more than mere ‘account’ of history, geography or culture - it is the work of fiction. Anna Bender-Brink’s (1986) Christian Schubart and the Earliest Music about the Cape views the music of early colonialism through the lens of more recent cultural history: she analyses two patriotic songs written by Schubart (contemporary of Beethoven - as indeed was Ntsikana) as propaganda inciting German conscripts drafted into the Cape war on the Batavian side. This has quite different resonances from Barrow or Alberti, as one might expect. The fortunes of the British and Dutch in the Cape were also inextricably linked to those of the Malay prisoners exiled there when the Dutch East India Company began using the Cape in 1652. Cross-fertilisation between Dutch songs and psalms, German missionary hymns and Malay ritual and secular music is the result of this cultural miscegenation yet remains one of the most unexplored areas of South African music history (see Malan 1979, 24-25; Desai 1993; Martin 1999 in this book). Later in the nineteenth century another wave of immigration brought about by socio-economic manoeuvring in London saw the influx of Indian indentured labourers and merchants into Natal from 1860 onwards, to work on the new sugar plantations. Jackson records the effects of this immigration as a diversity of musical inscriptions (‘Tiger Dance, Terukuttu, Tango, and Tchaikovsky’), showing how traditions brought from south Asia developed and changed alongside colonial forms of music-making, to create the diversity she problematises as South African Indian music (Jackson 1989). The 1913 Native Lands Act, which dispossessed the majority of inhabitants, provides the historical backdrop against which a number of texts discuss South African music in the 1920s and ’30s, including Erlmann’s study of Caluza’s early African nationalist songs (Erlmann 1991) and Reuben Caluza’s own short essay, ‘African Music’ (Caluza 1931), written for an in-house journal in the US and thus not known in South Africa.ix Some writing emerging from the 1950s through early ’80s reflects the development of two parallel ideologies that characterise the age - Afrikaner and African nationalism - and white liberal empathy with the latter (Hugh Tracey 1954; Blacking 1959 and 1970; De Beer 2001(1960); Rycroft 1977; Malan 1979, 1982 and 1986; Trewela 1981; Mngoma 1981; Coplan 1985).

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Muller’s claim for Grové (Muller 2000) is that his use of Africanness is ‘imaginary’: an Afrikaner imagining himself into an ‘other’ musical space rather than composing across musical syntaxes. Mthethwa (ethnographer trained in Zulu traditional practice and church music as well as Western music theory and piano) shows how Kumalo uses Western hymnody to revitalise the African aesthetic of folk music, within the already hybrid genre of African choral music.x Dargie traces traditional elements in Ntsikana’s Great Hymn in order to speculate on “how it originally sounded” (1982, 17), comparing ‘schooled’ choral versions with ‘unschooled’ bow-song versions. Muller’s reading of Grové side-steps history, looking at the piece as personal state of being rather than political statement of origin, but in the context of other pieces in this book the historicity of Muller’s writing is implicit in the way he constructs the discourse of Grové-Muller’s quest for new Afrikaner compositional identity. There is a curious resonance, too, between Grové’s description of his Damascus road experience of Africa (quoted in Muller 2000, 124) and Ntsikana’s experience on the road back from the umdudo as told by Bokwe. In both cases there is a moment of crisis: an acceptance of some new and powerful impulse, of deep undercurrents of social change over which the individual has no control. Relying on a composer’s statement (in Grové) there is, of course, an inflection on the process of hybridity that would not be present in an ethnographer’s description. So Grové resonating in this Reader with Ntsikana, is thus very different from Grové resonating with the extract used here from David Rycroft. Where Grové in 1997 is creatively inspired by “a pick-ax-wielding black man” (quoted in Muller 2000, 124) it is with a very different ear that David Rycroft in 1964 heard ‘We Majola’ sung by labourers wielding pick-axes in Durban’s West Street: “young men whose roots are in the country, who come to town as temporary manual workers” (Rycroft 1977, 221). Rycroft in turn came to a positive view of Zulu ‘town’ music only after initially lamenting it as a sign of decadence in the same way Hugh Tracey did a generation earlier (Tracey 1954). What such entanglements in ideology and language reveal is a struggle to affirm a new identity, while in some cases still maintaining connectedness with the European mainstream. South Africa is rich in the kind of writing - autobiography for example - that tells the tale not just of music but of music on two continents. Violinist Lucy Faktor-Kreitzer’s Taking a Bow (1988) reveals the struggle of adaptation experienced by Latvian Jews emigrating to South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century to escape the ghettoes of Europe, forging an identity out of remembered traditions in new spaces. Edward Dunn’s ‘New Era for South African Music’ of 1949 hints at a later influx of European immigrants - after World War II - whose subsequent involvement in black music and theatre (the musical King Kong in 1959, for example) was as significant as their role in the revival of white concert and ‘music appreciation’ culture.xi Robert Godlonton’s much earlier memoir of the British Settlers’ anniversary celebrations in 1844 records British

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songs transplanted to the eastern Cape frontier in the nineteenth century: music remembered by the first generation of immigrants; music that envoiced a displaced identity. The longing for connection to roots elsewhere (Europe, or south Asia) is closely related to the myth of ‘continuum’, and to the myth of origin. Even though we know that such a view of music history is a “fictitious continuum, borrowed from the novel” (Dahlhaus 1983, 11), the power of narrative persists. The winds of change in global music historiography (even among people as centrist as Dahlhaus) have hardly touched South Africa, however, where a belief in periodicity (Renaissance-Baroque-Classical-Romantic-Impressionist-Modern) is embraced with almost religious fervour. Such a desire for continuity is often a matter of belief, too, linked to both theological and nationalist discourse. The following extract from the Church of the Province of Southern Africa’s Anglican Prayer Book (1989) reveals the former: This book stands alongside the South African Book of Common Prayer (1954), itself heir to the three Prayer Books of 1549, 1552, and 1559. Behind these products of the sixteenth century lay the liturgical tradition, strongly influenced by the monastic movement with its sevenfold office of prayer, which reached back into the early centuries of the Church’s life and ultimately to our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and through him to the worship of Israel (Church of the Province of Southern Africa 1989, 9). This rushing back into the past is symptomatic not only of desire for historical roots but of a broader cultural identity crisis in which South African histories are seen as inextricably enmeshed with other global histories. This makes any view of South African music history far from neat, since it has to relate a “chronicle of much larger spatial dimensions” than South Africa alone provides (Erlmann 1999, 9).xii Within the country itself, as David Coplan reminds us, our post-apartheid condition provides a set of “historical frames, many ‘nows’ lived alongside one another”, frames still used within the country to re-inscribe “irreducible difference [borne] by imagined cultural communities” (Coplan 1998, 140).xiii What Coplan refers to here are the histories of so-called coloured, Indian and African people previously marginalised by monolithic narratives of the Great Trek. Such musical histories are ‘nows’ that are being heard in many cases for the first time, and the new approach to history teaching underlying them is inevitable. Before music histories are rewritten with revisionist enthusiasm, however, it is helpful to look at the many changing ideologies of historiography, analysis and ethnography in past views of South African music, ideologies often inseparable from the music or contexts they seek to represent. Two opposing ends of the spectrum included in this Reader might be cited here. Malan’s four-volume A South African Music Encyclopaedia (1979, ’82, ’84, ’86) approached the music of

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South African from the apartheid discourse of the 1970s and ’80s, from the paradise of Malan’s ‘own, unique musicology’ referred to at the beginning of this Introduction. Monumental in scope, the Encyclopaedia’s sweeping ideological frame of reference herds black South African musics into reduced representations of the ‘Bantu’, ignoring popular music into the bargain;xiv monumental too - in a more positive sense - in its defining use of the Afrikaans language for musicology.xv At the other end of the political spectrum lie Marxist critiques such as Richard Salmon’s ‘Toward a Committed Musicology’ (Salmon 1977) and Christopher Ballantine’s ‘Taking Sides or Music, Music Departments and the Deepening Crisis in South Africa’ (Ballantine 1984b), where musicology is used against the apartheid regime as motif of resistance. The subjects for musicological enquiry that form a large part of this book, from whatever part of the political rainbow they emerge(d), are far more obviously written, indeed, because of ‘South African histories’ and its contexts, than they might be elsewhere in the world, where contexts for ‘doing’ musicology are not usually questioned. To turn to choral music and choral practice again as example: its histories have emerged through work variously representing socio-political context (and not all presented in this book): Deirdre Hansen’s monograph on Xhosa composer Benjamin Tyamzashe (Hansen 1968); Yvonne Huskisson’s extensive catalogue of ‘Bantu’ composers (1969; see also Hauptfleisch and Huskisson 1992); Khabi Mngoma’s African humanist re-evaluation of ‘folk and art elements’ (1981); Bongani Mthethwa on syncretism (1988); Erlmann’s 1991 study of Reuben Caluza that set new parameters for ethnobiography (1991, 112-155); Caesar Ndlovu (1995 and 1997) and Elliot Pewa (1992 and 1995) on the politics of choral competitions; Grant Olwage on discourses of race, class and gender in choralism (Olwage 2003). The context of doing musicology here, has profoundly affected the narrative mode of these different approaches to writing about choralism, to the extent of creating it as a genre; one, moreover, in which the boundary between subject and writer are so intermeshed as to exemplify what Homi K. Bhabha has called a “narrative splitting” of the subject (1992, 301). The danger of presenting the extracts in this Reader chronologically is that they can give the impression of being a grand narrative of texts, showing some kind of historical development - or worse, a notion of progress - both in musical maturity and in critical thinking. Countering this possibility are two tendencies that keep all the pieces ‘now’: one of them being the immediacy of writers’ individual voices; another, the reception history that all music has regardless of when it was composed. On the question of voice: the English of these extracts is perhaps more than usually varied in a Reader, partly because it reflects changes in language usage over a large time-frame (200 years), partly because the writing is drawn from varied sources (not all of it musicology), and because many authors have used English as a second (or third) language.xvi Important to note here is that my choice of items has been based on a serious linguistic limitation, that is, that all the writing

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is originally in English. This has meant that a substantial number of extremely interesting works (mainly in Dutch and Afrikaans) are excluded, and this undoubtedly further skews the historical-ideological representation. The issue of language however, particularly Afrikaans, calls for consideration here of the role played by institutional contexts out of which much of the writing in this Reader emerged. This is a far narrower view of music than the one implied so far, but it needs to be deconstructed since it is a discourse that has had far-reaching effects on the way music is ‘read’, not only in South Africa but globally. The world of South African musicology Some of the readings collected here originated in research projects undertaken for university degrees, most of them subsequently published but not necessarily with a large circulation. Thus many pieces included here are hardly known, and the musicological context out of which they emerged must be sketched. The establishment of the Musicological Society of Southern Africa in the late 1970s (with an annual congress, and a journal founded in 1981), and the Ethnomusicology Symposia in 1980 (annual Symposium and published conference papers) created new platforms for the presentation of such research, but at the same time created two separate communities of scholarship in South Africa.xvii Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, when South African universities were already affected by the international boycott and were severed from each other internally by eleven apartheid education systems, intellectual divides were further underscored by the separation between these two organisations. While both encouraged the presentation of work in progress, such work often avoided engagement with critical theory. The two organisations, but particularly the Musicological Society, tended to foster a research ethos in which the writer could remain untouched by international disciplinary shifts in the humanities and especially in musicology during this period. This state of affairs is, indeed, precisely what enabled Malan to make the remark in 1983 that heads this Introduction. It was a ‘new musicology’ in the sense of content and context, not to be confused with the new musicology that came out of the culture wars of North American and European scholarship in the 1980s. Underlying Malan’s phrase is the kind of liberation myth alluded to at the beginning of this Introduction - an Afrikaner nationalist myth of ‘own’ and other, that underlay the political philosophy of ‘separate development’ that was legitimated by apartheid. Local views in the 1980s polarised into two musicological camps: crudely put, musicology for conservatives who engaged with the hegemonic discourse of Western classical music regardless of the way it propped up the regime (indeed, as if it had nothing to do with politics); and ethnomusicology for liberals who engaged mainly with African music and with a discourse of resistance (see Byerly

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1998) or for new African scholars who engaged - problematically for them in terms of the apartheid ethos of separate development - with their ‘own’ music. In his (1995) analysis of the Ethnomusicology Symposia, ‘So Who Are We And What Are We Doing?’ Christopher Ballantine tackled this thorny problem head-on (Ballantine 1995), grouping the 155 topics covered in Symposia between 1980 and 1993 into nine categories. One of these, ‘Introductory’, is where “the clear intention of the speaker was not to put forward new research, but rather to introduce the audience to some aspect of ethnomusicology, or to a particular ‘ethnomusic’, rather as a lecturer might teach his or her students” (Ballantine 1995, 133). Ballantine’s intention was surely not to downgrade such scholars - most of them black - who in exposing a new ‘ethnomusic’ sought to be part of a small local scholarly community against great odds (lack of resources and expertise at the historically black universities where most of them worked). In noting that “theory constituted a disturbingly low 4.5 percent of our topics” (134), Ballantine quite rightly exposed the difference between advocacy and critique, without, however, fully explaining the word theory. The theoretical perspective of some of this writing is often an embedded formalism, taken over from writing of the previous generation of South African ethnomusicologists such as Rycroft and John Blacking, coupled with a view of traditional music that is ‘insider’, informantdriven. That such notions constituted a “taken-for-grantedness”, as Ballantine put it (Ibid.), may not be entirely due to complacency, as he suggests (“we can’t any longer comfortably work ‘inside’ a received discipline; much of our work must take place at the ‘cutting edge’” (Ibid., 135)). The space from which most ethnomusicologists during the 1980s and early ’90s wrote about music was far from a comfort zone. It was a space where many people worked without resources or guidance, and longed for recognition, for someone to look after their advancement. Such a person, I suspect, was John Blacking: recognising that the problem lay in lack of access to the ivory towers of academe and also acting out of political defiance, he made huge efforts to get black South African post-graduate music students to Queen’s University, Belfast, during the apartheid years.xviii Indeed, the high percentage of papers (in Ballantine’s critique) that deal with ‘traditional’ music, is an indication that in wrestling with African music, many young African scholars working in the tortured spaces of 1980s black South African universities were in fact extremely concerned with theory, above all a theory of their own scholarly identity - subsequently manifest in later moves towards a dialogue with ‘African musicology’ - rather than with the culture theory embraced in the late 1980s and early ’90s by popular music scholars such as Erlmann, Meintjes (1990), and Ballantine. Thus his analysis, although timely, raises an issue of crucial importance running throughout this book, about the representation of - or by - the Other.

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Representation A brief history of the discourses through which South African music has been represented goes something like this: travel writing is a genre of representation popular from the late eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, paralleling - indeed contributing to - the development of narrative history and the novel. The various manifestations of scientific positivism that transformed its discourse in the late nineteenth century include the modern disciplines of history, anthropology, and musicology. Folklore studies and then ethnomusicology emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, at first to deal with issues of non-Western music; then, under the impact of sociology and cultural studies, with popular music and jazz. Thus one can view any literature produced on South African music in the past 200 years or so as a prism of shifting methodological approaches. Taking a scholar at random: I.D. du Plessis’ work on ‘The Malay’ (1940s - ’70s) was a product of the positivist musicology of his era as much as it contributed to an emerging nationalist agenda. And in the way that flows of musical discourse (Western or non-Western) were seen as ‘chunks’ (periods, cultures, genres, composers), Malay music was just another chunk, and moreover one that hadn’t been well ‘covered’ in the literature. The rhetoric of representation has particularly applied to studies of performance. Espousing an anthropology of performance back in the early 1980s, David Coplan saw a metaphor for change and adaptation, an “impression of the structure of emerging African communities” (Coplan 1982, 114) - a paradigmatic antidote to the ‘timeless past’ discourse, in which he advocated analysing performance in terms of a “dialectical … exchange between musicology and ethnomusicology” to show “social meanings” (127), in much the same way as Christopher Ballantine used this notion in the 1980s (see Ballantine 1984a). For Deborah James in her review of writing on black South African music (James 1990) the pull is more towards historical representation. “Only by combining musicological and historical insights can one gain a comprehensive understanding of the strength and vigour of a musical style”. Understanding musical form, she argues, helps one understand a socioeconomic milieu (318), but only, it must be said, the milieu of a particular historical moment. For Regula Burckhardt-Qureshi in 1995 it was history and anthropology themselves that needed interrogation. The debate instigated by Monson, Agawu, Tomlinson and Feldman, to which Qureshi’s essay is a Preface, points up the need to “challenge the frontiers of historical scholarship in music” (Qureshi 1995, 331) which in turn highlights the influence on musicology of epistemological and methodological changes within history and anthropology, the “two dominant paradigms of social science that have been informing musical scholarship with increasing explicitness” (Ibid.). Taking this debate further in 2000, Qureshi notes (echoing Bhabha) “a conceptual separation between scholar and subject, problematising all knowledge of Others, including ‘insidership’” (Qureshi 2000, 19). Thus (in terms of this Reader) Erlmann’s work

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on isicathamiya “interrogates how a given performance practice makes sense for those involved in its production and reception, and how exactly this sense is socially organized and controlled” (Erlmann 1996, 44-45, cited in Qureshi 2000, 32). But who are ‘those involved’, and who is representing whom? As Coplan noted in 1998, “our subjects were neither what they’d been thought to be, nor whom they claimed or seemed, and our categories were not reflected in situations on the ground” (Coplan 1998, 136). Is epistemological validity, he asks, simply “a matter of who’s talking”? (Coplan 1998, 137). The dislocating experience of fieldwork where one person’s location becomes another’s dislocation - is not substantially different, I suggest, from the ‘journey to the field’ made by travel writers in the South African interior. Nor perhaps is it different from representing that experience through writing; or through music. A great deal of the writing in this book attempts to travel into the ‘interior’ of music and its contexts, and the struggle evident on almost every page is to find a position from which to view the music (which remains stubbornly Other) and a position from which to justify the gaze. The resonances of one gaze against another produce all manner of dissonances that hardly need emphasis: they speak in this Reader, often clamorously, for themselves. Hugh Tracey’s claim that Africans in the early 1950s could not represent themselves when it came to valuing their traditional music is challenged by Caluza’s eloquent plea for African music written 20 years earlier. Mngoma’s exposure of folk elements in choral music as part of an “upsurge of [African] nationalism” (1981, 61) chimes ominously against Grobler’s matter-of-fact account of one year later (and in this book a leap of one page) of the formation of the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigingexix (1982, 52). Blacking’s cultural analysis of the ‘rules’ of tonality and harmony in Venda girls’ initiation music (1970) stands in sharp contrast to Netshitangani’s description of Venda boys’ initiation (1997). Where Netshitangani gives an array of song texts rich in humour and pathos without analysis, Blacking’s take on harmony enhances his distance from the experience he portrays, but makes him more determined to ‘get inside’ the rules that inform it. Netshitangani’s ‘insider’ involvement in the process of ritual circumcision allows him the space to step back and use bland understatement: “Murundu is always held during the winter season, the reason being that it is a good time for the wound to heal” (1997, 2). Neither scholar makes overt use of theory. Indeed, no-one could have had more influence on ethnomusicology at its formative stage in South Africa than John Blacking, yet theory is something he resisted, even despised. By down-playing it, indeed, he ran the risk of being ignored - as he testily pointed out in an interview with Keith Howard shortly before his death. The issues raised [in Venda Children’s Songs] and the problems it solved hardly seem to have been accepted. Time and again I read papers that raise the

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same problems yet make no reference to it. It is as if the book never happened. I carefully worked out the relationship between social structure and musical structure, yet this has been more recently addressed by others in what, frankly, I consider a naive fashion … To a certain extent, the faults are my own. I have always disliked long-winded, theoretical discussions which are basically designed to show off how much one has read. I am not particularly interested in long diatribes on idiotic or untenable theories. I would prefer not to get involved in theoretical matters at all (Blacking quoted in Howard 1991, 6364). Yet what Blacking offered as a theoretical model of its time was analysis, a way of “dealing directly with musical material”, as Reginald Byron puts it (Blacking 1995, 22). How do other writers deal with this? Perhaps, again, it is largely a matter of methodology. The terms of Qureshi’s distinction (above) between the ‘Western way’ of studying classical music (assumed familiarity with texts resulting in insights that are subjectively ‘insider’) and the ‘separation’ between scholar and subject in ethnographic method do not help us here, as assumptions cannot be made about South African musical texts being familiar (either inside the country or outside it), nor can one always speak of a separation between scholar and subject. When the subject is music, its ‘narrative splitting’ through the use of various analytical tools is always all-too-apparent, as this Reader shows. Music is represented here through verbal description, diagrams, illustrations, and, not least, musical examples. Music embedded in cultural processes such as text, movement, ritual, resists easy translation into another metaphorical space, whereas Western musical scores are already-existing, semi-autonomous forms of representation. Studying music that stems from an oral rather than a literate tradition, however, has not deterred writers from making it available in the form of transcriptions. Various styles are used in this Reader and in any case there is no standard format: some are graphic; some use staff notation but in unconventional ways (the pulse notation of Dargie, for example, or the circular notation of Rycroft); some use tonic solfa.xx Many pieces discussed are available on recordings - another form of representation - to which some writers refer. To the cultural anthropologist or ethnomusicologist, song texts are as important as musical transcriptions, sometimes more so, and often quoted at length. This heightens differences in methodology that come from training: where musicians trained in Western classical music regard music as ‘essential’, the essence for the ethnomusicologist is not analysis of musical notes; indeed, it is relatively unusual to find someone writing about South African music (such as Blacking) who has both a strong ethnographic background and a strong grasp of music theory and analysis. Penetrating the musical text is therefore a process whose problems and paradoxes are revealed on the surface of the writing in almost every piece in this book. For this is an area where there is no place to hide.

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Representing the ‘other’ and ‘the music itself’, which I see as epistemologically linked, is further connected to the idea of South Africa as a nation. Strongly allied to the notional paradise or Eldorado with which I began is the equally problematic idea of South Africa as a national ‘body’, a metaphor from imperial discourse much evident in travel writing, that has by no means disappeared. Foreign funders are only the latest in a long line of readers of the South African musical scene for whom the country embodies newness, opportunity. In the 1920s operatic impresario Giuseppe Pagnelli “‘saw South Africa as virgin territory for opera’, and his great ambition was to produce it here with South African singers in the main roles” (Faktor-Kreitzer 1988, 65-66). John Barrow’s “plentiful harvest” of Tswana were noticed because of the dancing women, whose “softer antistrophes” provided the evidence of ripeness for the missionary project (1806b, 400). Paradise and Eldorado are sometimes coupled in these imaginaries: “A recently-arrived foreign musician remarked that he can’t resist the feeling ‘that the South African music scene is virgin ground and that we are sitting on gold’” (Makhene 1996, 152). In the 1920s, European Jews in the ghettoes of Europe saw South Africa as “‘[D]ie Goldene Medina’ (The Golden Country), the land of opportunity where, as was common knowledge, the streets were paved with gold” (Faktor-Kreitzer 1988, 8). Forming fresh cultural identities in a foreign place and new national allegiances in relation to internal politics are integral to the many stories of South African music. National musics are typical examples. During the rise of Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s the FAK-Sangbundel (Gutsche 1938(1937)) was compiled, many of its Afrikaans folksongs being instant translations of German ones (see Grobler 1982). What is perhaps more interesting is how Afrikaans music developed after the 1930s, and how a much older repertoire of Dutch songs often derived from psalms, survives, some of it subsumed into the cultural identity of the Cape Malay. In this book two examples are given: the ‘Magaliesburgse Aandlied’ recorded and transcribed in 1950 by G.G. Cillié and found in later editions of the FAK-Sangbundel (to illustrate Cillié’s extract on Afrikaans liederwysies); and ‘Rosa’, example of a Malay genre of Dutch-derived song known as the nederlandslied, transcribed by Desmond Desai in the 1980s. Another example is the black nationalism embedded in Lovedale Press’s 1934 version of Enoch Sontonga’s ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, regarded by the publishers as ‘The Bantu National Anthem’ (Lovedale Sol-fa Leaflets No. 17; Loots 1985). Writing that speaks about music as national expression, however, is less easy to come by, which is why Stephanus Muller’s deconstruction of Afrikaans art music is timely. The world of South African music Defining the present South African nation musically as well as historically, through a text like this Reader, is an experiment. There are few models or prototypes.

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Unlike most other books on ‘the music of a nation’, this one applies a very broad definition of music. Books devoted to the music of one country often focus on folk traditions because of the link between folk music and nationhood. Keith Pratt’s Korean Music: Its History and Its Performance (1987) deals for example only with traditional Korean music. Nils Grinde’s A History of Norwegian Music (1991) “presents an overview of the history of Norwegian music but with emphasis on art music” (xiii), but the approach still reflects the idea of national identity. Although popular or traditional ‘Black’ music might sometimes seem to represent South African music as whole - and excellent sources such as the articles on South African music in New Grove II (Rycroft et al 2001) and the Rough Guide (Allingham 1994a and 1994b) tend to confirm this perception - the totality of literature on South African music reveals much more. The most useful model I found was that of Gilbert Chase, who as early as 1941 proposed a history of music for a single nation that would comprise “the sum total of musical experience in its full range of social and human values”, including not only classical and “genuine folk music”, but also “such hybrid manifestations as urban street music and popular theatrical music” (Chase 1941, 17).xxi It was, though, the idea of a ‘sum total’ that I was trying to avoid: the contributions in this Reader are far from being - and don’t intend to be - a ‘totality’. It is an eclectic choice, ranging through travel journals, memoirs, poetry, essays, conference papers, articles and book extracts, as well as musically crossing a number of different categories and genres. The four Parts of the book are imbalanced, and in at least three ways: the historical periods they cover, the number of extracts, the number of pages they occupy. I did not attempt to make a neat symmetry out of them. Part 1 (1800s to 1930s) is about thirty pages; Part 2 (1940s to late ’80s) is about forty pages; Part 3 (late 1980s to 1994) is about ninety pages; and Part 4 (1996 to 2003) seventy pages. More than half the extracts were written post-1990, a period of just over a decade in which writing on South African music escalated out of all proportion both inside the country and overseas. Indeed, it is one of the sadder reflections on our institutional musicological life that some of the most talented and interesting writers now live outside the country. Such research uses a wide range of approaches: each writer is seen coming to terms with post-apartheid, post-colonial and post-modern intellectual challenges. Some writing places itself (consciously or not) at the interface of more than one discipline, including biography, musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology, history, linguistics, and cultural studies. Even where theoretical and methodological concerns are not made explicit, their imperatives are embedded in the writing, and can sometimes be seen most clearly at points where one piece of writing is read in tandem with another. This resonance at the surface of the writing is in some ways as important as the topic written about, and perhaps constitutes the space where my selection criteria for inclusion in this book really show.

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I chose to organise the readings chronologically rather than herd them into themes (traditional or popular), geographical areas (the Cape, or KwaZulu Natal) or genres (Zulu music, classical music). Themes emerge, rather, and create, I hope, simultaneities in the reader’s imagination. The book has a beginning in the early nineteenth century only to impose some kind of time-frame on the anthology. Perhaps all that remains is to point out an aspect of the writing not yet addressed in this Introduction, concerning the way a writer’s tone or voice affects our ‘reading’ of South African music. Godlonton’s patriotic prose, peppered with exclamation marks - ‘Home of our hearts! our father’s home! Land of the brave and free!’ (Godlonton 1971(1844), v, 34) - with its quality of mild hysteria, bespeaks the desperation British Settlers felt in finding themselves in terrain described two years before they arrived as a “wild and truly horrid region” (Latrobe 1969(1818), 174). Small wonder that the music Godlonton mentions waves the flag of Empire (‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘The British Grenadiers’), sung, one imagines, as bulwark against the horrid environment in much the same way that Dutch settlers sung William Sluiter’s Gesangen at every sign of trouble (Barrow 1813, 315-16, 400).xxii In a situation where everything looked uncomfortably different, small wonder that even the familiar (Western classical music) appeared “strangely altered and mangled” - as Latrobe observed of the Haydn mass he witnessed in Cape Town (Latrobe 1969(1818), 299). The quiet tone of Christopher Birkett’s ‘Preface’ to the Solfa Tune-book, which he published in London in 1871, is encapsulated by a phrase whose thunderous echo down the next 130 years he could not have foreseen: “The Sol-fa notation, which I had the honour of introducing in South Africa sixteen years ago” (Birkett 1871, [n.p.]). The writing of Frieda Bokwe Matthewsxxiii (daughter of John Knox Bokwe) and Reuben Caluza is part answer to this: in their equally polite way they saw it as an ‘honour’ to be ambassadors for African music abroad in the 1930s. Their pieces voice, however, a political stand in presenting Africa with a modern face and without apology, a tone that Hugh Tracey did not manage to strike (nor did he acknowledge their work). Percival Kirby’s painstaking (1934) study of a defunct instrument (the Khoi gora), drawing on archival writing from travel accounts, description of extant instruments and surviving players, diagrams, photographs, shows the better side of scientific positivism. It also provides a link with writing of the past, in the way that he draws on travel journals at every turn to give evidence of how instruments were previously ‘seen’. The tone of Part 2 markedly changes, covering as it does the forty years following the Nationalist Party victory in the 1948 election through the various forms of resistance to totalitarianism and the crisis of late apartheid politics. The year 1987, with which Part 2 ends, is perhaps no more significant than 1988: indeed the whole late-1980s transition was characterised by so much political double-think, social violence and rapid legal reform (Beinart 2001, 263-70) that even as someone who lived through this time - I could not make any historical

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moment seem more significant than another. But the fact that there was an escalation of ‘the beginning of the end’ probably contributed to the sudden bulge in writing that emerged from 1988 onwards, writing characterised by an intensification in ‘taking sides’ (Ballantine 1984b) and giving rise to the title ‘Apartheid and Musicology’ for this section. Two somewhat different trends in writing about music ripened during the 1980s: one saw Afrikaans- and English-speaking scholars viewing music as irrevocably linking them to Europe while at the same time ingraining their South African identity (van der Walt 1979; Cillié 1979; Grobler 1982; Malan 1986). These extracts connect to others: the references to Sluiter’s Gesangen in Barrow (1806b and 1813) is explained by van der Walt in reference to how Afrikaans church music developed; the establishment of the FAK (Grobler 1982) partly explains Khabi Mngoma’s take on African choralism (Mngoma 1981) and marks starkly contrasting experiences of the political economy of the arts between the 1950s and 1980s. The most significant extracts in Part 2 are those which selfconsciously introduce new ideas, such as Blacking’s conception of ‘root progression’ in Venda ocarina music (Blacking 1959) and Rycroft’s use of Wachsmann’s term ‘loanwords’ to revaluate African urban music and cause him to express his reconsideration in terms that he himself described as a “heresy” (1977, 217). Part 2 also sees an important emerging discourse, black nationalism, aimed at an indigenous readership and assessing the ambivalent role played by traditional music in identity-formation in newly-urbanising South Africa. There is also poetic writing that recalls the struggle discourse of the 1980s (Qabula 1989) and writing that remembers culture, such as Ezekiel Mphahlele’s (1958) memoir of Marabastad and marabi, Miriam Makeba’s account of experiences as stage artist (Makeba 1988), and Dollar Brand’s bitter-sweet poems of nostalgia written in the US (Brand 1970 (1966)). Christopher Ballantine used an Adornian approach in his sociological analysis of early jazz (1984a), influencing an entire generation of South African writing about the relationship of music to society, writing that intensified in the late apartheid era. His presentation of the radical versus liberal views of black music in the 1940s (1991) is in many ways ‘vintage’ Ballantine, and one of many South African texts written during the 1980s and ’90s that probed into the history, structure and agendas of South African popular music, paving the way for a burgeoning of research in this area. Indeed, the pioneering work of inter alia Jackson, Goodall, Davies, Mthethwa, Erlmann, Ballantine at this time constituted a school of ethno/musicology in the 1980s that has hardly been rivalled to this day. Mthethwa’s use of Zulu terms such as indlela (path) for melody and isigubudu (cattle horns) for harmony, gave something of an initiative to ‘native researchers’ exploring issues of insider versus outsider knowledge, issues much discussed in South African musicology of the 1990s. Denis-Constant Martin’s book Coon Carnival (Martin 1999) could hardly be more different in approach, but the way it

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gives voice to participant discourse - through ‘windows’ inserted as a parallel text, a technique borrowed from the world of television and film - is an example of an immediacy, a sense of ‘being there’, characteristic of much recent writing. It is something of a leap of faith to put between the covers of a single book a selection of readings on South African music that explores this vast and shaky terrain, the spread of music, writing and habitations - past, present, concrete, abstract - imagined above. I tried to find the impossible intersection between axes of history, geography, text, context, coverage, writers; but despite my best efforts (or perhaps because of them) this book remains a heterophony of voices, each telling its own story, each sounding a little different once surrounding stories have been told. Their diverse views of ‘music’ remind us of the impossibility of defining South African music as a subject.xxiv What this Reader offers, then, is both an anthology of sources and, more important, a panorama of views. Drawing some of these texts together tells one kind of story about what South Africa has been and therefore to some extent, what it is; or it tells many such stories. If it is a fiction, it might be one through which South Africans can understand themselves and reconstruct their past in the way that Umberto Eco imagined; and if it is non-fiction, we can read it as a collection of narratives tracing connections that individual writers cannot make. For it is, to use Barthes’ phrase, a writerly text, in which the reader is by far the most important player.

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i Editor’s translation. The original Afrikaans reads: “Ons staan voor die uitdaging van ’n spesifiek Suid-Afrikaanse musiekwetenskap … Ons het die moontlikheid, wat ander nasies ons kan beny, om in hierdie ‘laaste Paradys’ ons eie monumente te bou”. ii See for example Bouws 1965, Jackson 1970, Sparrow 1986, van Blerk 1986, Marais 1989. iii Wallaschek’s evolutionsist take produced comparisons that were presumably read as back-handed compliments that nevertheless further distanced the ‘primitive’, such as “among races of the very lowest order of civilisation there are frequently to be found some which have more musical capacity than many of a higher order. This is undoubtedly the case with the Bushmen” (Wallaschek 1970(1893), 1). iv Mavis Mpola, for example, has taken several years of doctoral work through Rhodes University to amass some 200 examples of choral music by Xhosa composers: an invaluable collection that is unique of its kind. v Exceptions include the University of Pretoria Chorale, conducted by Mokale Koapeng. vi The series South Africa Sings published by SAMRO promised to fill this lacuna, but thus far has only produced one volume (Khumalo 1998). vii Dreaming songs has been related by inter alia composers Joseph Shabalala (see Ballantine 1997), and Jabez Foley. The following account was related to Mavis Mpola during her doctoral research on Xhosa music by Foley’s widow, Mrs Ethel Mtyobo: “Utishara ebevuka ezinzulwini zobusuku aqubule incwadi yakhe nosiba abhale. Mna ndakuyibona ngomso loo nto ebeyibhala” (‘Teacher’ [Foley] would wake up in the middle of the night and grab his book and pen and write. I would see the following day what he was writing) (Mavis Mpola, interview with Mrs Mtyobo, 27.05.01; used with permission). viii C. Saunders and N. Southey’s (eds.) A Dictionary of South African History (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip, 1998), gives good potted summaries of the main events, issues and figures in South African history. William Beinart’s Twentieth Century South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) is one of the best detailed accounts of its recent history. ix I am indebted to Veit Erlmann for bringing this piece to my attention. x He applied a similar approach to analysis in his study of the hymns of Isaiah Shembe (see Vilakazi, A., with B. Mthethwa and M. Mpanza, 1986). xi A document in the Johannesburg Public Library - the Catalogue of [Sheet] Music in the Strange Collection of Africana (1944) - speaks to another tangent of this culture, the hugely popular parlour music played in homes, clubs and concert halls. The Supplement to this

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catalogue alone (1945) has two hundred items, all voicing a strand in the multiple histories of South African music - in languages such as Zulu, English, Afrikaans, and German. xii Braudel’s notion of the longue durée (1980(1969)) - the notion of time moving at different rates in one geographical region so that space becomes a prism of layered history is useful in juggling the large conceptual spaces of history and geography that apply here. xiii Coplan refers the reader here to Graham Pechey’s (1994) work on post-apartheid narratives. xiv A fact not unnoticed by its many critics; see for example Erlmann 1991, 112. xv It was published simultaneously in the two official languages of the day, Afrikaans and English. xvi The first languages of such writers include Zulu, German, French, Afrikaans, Venda and Xhosa. xvii See Paxinos (1986) on the Musicological Society, and Ballantine (1995) on the Ethnomusicology Symposia from 1980 to 1995. The split between the two bodies has lessened over the past 5 years and there are moves afoot to merge them. xviii They include for example Bongani Mthethwa, whose work is used in this Reader, and Caesar Ndlovu. They also include scholars from many other African countries. xix The Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Societies (FAK), the cultural wing of Afrikaner nationalism. xx The system used in South Africa is the British system made famous by John Curwen in the nineteenth century, using a moveable doh, rather than the continental system of solfège where doh (ut) is fixed as C. xxi Chase later proposed (1958) a model for writing a history rather than the history of music in North America. Such a history, he says, can neither be a continuous narrative nor a complete cultural survey (1958, 4), “for it must necessarily deal with various types of acculturation that were going on simultaneously. It must strive for ‘penetration in depth’ rather than for chronological continuity’, while “[t]he predominance of primitive, folk and popular idioms, will necessitate what amounts virtually to a reversal of values” (Ibid., 5). To achieve the latter perspective, he argues for a philosophical basis in “Kenneth Burke’s theory of ‘perspective by incongruity’”, which (prophetically, now) involves a search for “the heuristic or perspective value of a planned incongruity” (Burke 1935, 160) in which one deliberately discards available data in the interests of a fresh point of view (5). xxii In the early twentieth century the Afrikaners largely invented their folk tradition by setting melodies from Germany, The Netherlands and Britain to Dutch or Afrikaans texts (see Grobler 1982) while the British did not attempt this kind of musical adaptation. xxiii I am indebted to Grant Olwage for bringing the piece by Bokwe Matthews to my attention. xxiv The way music is so often linked to poetry, drama, dance, religion, or ritual (African, Asian, or European), is only one problematic. Another is that in most of the country’s nine African languages there is no word for ‘music’: words used are the equivalent to ‘song’, or ‘dance’. In current South African English and Afrikaans the words ‘music’ or ‘musiek’ do not necessarily connote the same thing; and assumptions lie behind this word that link it to many different things - now to classical music (as in the International Classical Music Festival), now to pop (as in the phrase ‘the music industry’).

PART 1

Imperialism to Modernism

A Journey to the Booshuanas1 John Barrow John Barrow was an explorer, geographer, and prolific writer (inter alia, The Mutiny of the Bounty). From his base at the British Admiralty in London where he worked from 1804 to 1845, Barrow profoundly influenced foreign policy in an era that included the Napoleonic wars and early British imperialism in Africa. His Account of 1806 is one of several narratives he wrote on the Cape Colony, and the journal on which it is based was one kept by a colonial Commissioner. A few days after their arrival2 the party had an opportunity of being present, by invitation, at a marriage ceremony, and of witnessing the festivities that took place on the occasion. At the time appointed they were conducted to a spacious enclosure of a circular form, surrounded by a palisade of wood. Here the venerable Chief received them with great kindness, in the midst of the elders of the place. On their right stood a group of young women, and on the left about an equal number of men, dressed in a very fantastical manner. A crowd of spectators stood in a ring round the circle, leaving the central space free. The men who had been selected for the performance of the ceremonies on the occasion advanced into the area, and began to display their feats of agility. The effect of their dancing was singular enough. Some of them were dressed in a kind of petticoat which reached from the waist to the knee, composed of black and white ostrich feathers arranged in alternate rows; and others had several belts of leather fixed round the body, from the neck to the calf of the leg, to which were stitched by one end the tails of the jackal, the tyger-cat, and a species of viverra.3 Their bodies were painted with white, red and yellow clay. As the dancers whirled round, their tails and the ostrich feathers flew out at right angles with the body, and their great object seemed to be that of preventing them from collapsing, and of keeping them extended horizontally in every attitude and motion of the body. Their movements were accompanied with a rude and boisterous song, which ceased at intervals, when the women who did not dance responded in a softer kind of antistrophe, which was not by any means void of melody. The same women bestowed also on the dancers frequent marks of applause, by the clapping of hands. The dancing being ended, a refreshment consisting of boiled beef and Kaffer corn (holcus) boiled in milk was served round to the guests; after which the bridegroom, who was one of the dancers, led home his bride, and the company retired to their respective dwellings, apparently well satisfied with the diversions of the day. The regularity and decorum with which they conducted themselves at this ceremony,

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and indeed on all occasions, impressed the commissioners with a very favourable opinion of the character of the Booshuanas,4 which was not diminished by the uninterrupted harmony that seemed to prevail in this happy society. […] The Booshuanas may, in every respect, be considered to have passed the boundary which divides the savage from the civilized state of society, and to have arrived at the stage of moral refinement which is not incompetent to the reception of the sublime yet simple precepts of the Christian religion. It is here the missionary might employ his zeal to some advantage; here a plentiful harvest is offered to the first reapers who may present themselves.

Tribal Life & Customs of the Xhosa5 Ludwig Alberti Ludwig Alberti was a German-born professional soldier who lived in the Cape Colony 1803-1806 while it was under the rule of the (Dutch) Batavian Republic. He worked as a Government administrator mainly in the southern Cape and his account is a closely observed one: part report, part ethnography. It first appeared in Dutch in 1810. French (c1811) and German (1815) versions quickly followed, but the English translation was published only in 1968. All efforts to discover something of the real history of these people amongst themselves, proved quite fruitless … All that one can glean, consists of a general mythical popular legend, which I impart here in the manner in which it is related by the Kaffirs themselves: ‘In the land in which the sun rises, there is a cavern, from which the first Kaffirs, and in fact All peoples, as also the stock of every kind of animal, came forth. At the same time, the sun and moon came into being, to shed their light, and trees, grass and other plants to provide food for man and cattle’. […] The most common form of communal entertainment is an extremely monotonous dance. An arbitrary number of men draw up, usually quite unclad, close together in a straight line, and link their elevated right arm, in which they clutch a knobkirrie, through the left arm of their neighbour. The women form a second line close behind the men, without however linking their arms. The men continuously jump in the air with both feet, without any variation; whilst the women perform a convulsive movement of their whole body, mainly pushing their shoulders forwards and backwards in conjunction with certain movements of the head [see Fig. 1]. After making a half turn, from time to time, they follow each other in very slow steps and resume their positions after a tour in this fashion, round the line of men. In the course of all this, they know how to observe a very modest bearing, especially by casting their eyes down. At the same time the dancers, both men and women, hum a tune, which however only consists of the constant repetition of a few unharmonious notes without any words. This dance is continued until the body is covered in sweat, and complete exhaustion follows. Here and there dancers step out, and their places are taken by others, until the whole party is tired and relinquishes the entertainment.

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Fig 1 View of a Kaffir settlement on the South Coast of Africa. Chevalier Howen and J. Smies c18126 © Parliament of the Republic of South Africa (Accno 1863). Album published to illustrate Alberti’s Kaffirs aan die Zuidkust van Afrika (1810). The Kaffir settlements are found near rivers, brooks or basins, where rainwater collects, though not very close to them. This picture shows such a settlement, with the huts and adjoining kraals, placed irregularly at the owner’s choice. Also, there is a group of Kaffirs dancing in a row, arm-in-arm, with knobkirries held in the right hand. They jump on both legs, without variation, continuously singing ‘Ohuu’. Meanwhile the Kaffir women, in the row behind, make a variety of movements with head and shoulders, appearing rather like convulsions; from time to time they walk slowly in front of the first row, and then return to their original positions. The rest of the group is assembled in their usual positions around a fire from which the weary dancers retire, only to repeat the entertainment again after a rest.

[…] One does not see musical instruments of any inventiveness among these Kaffirs; the only one I came across was a thin stick with a string of catgut drawn over it, which thus resembled the bow of a violin of unskilled manufacture, at the one end of which half a cleft quill was attached to the catgut, by pulling it through two openings that have been made for this purpose. This quill is held in front of the locked teeth, and by breathing in and out fairly vigorously, sounds are produced which are similar to a so-called jew’s harp, though more muffled and less audible than the latter. Actually, I saw this instrument very rarely among those Kaffirs, and apart from this, it was never played by a Kaffir, but always by a Gonaqua. The latter have for a long time ceased to constitute a distinct population, because of the expansion of the Colony, since when they became dispersed chiefly among the Kaffirs, who were their nearest neighbours. I think it likely, therefore, that this instrument became known to them in this way. Singing together, by a party of Kaffirs, takes place solely at a dance, in the manner referred to; otherwise one only hears individual persons singing, principally and frequently in solitude, if indeed this production of sound, completely devoid of melody, and these quite meaningless ejaculations can be so designated.

Travels in Southern Africa7 John Barrow The colonists who live in the vicinity of the Cape are not ignorant of the comforts of life, especially such of them as are descended from French progenitors. At the small distance from the Cape, however, and among the Dutch settlers, called Boors,8 or peasants, the rudest mode of life prevails. The Boor, indeed, seems to have no idea of what is properly called comfort … Music and dancing seem to be totally unknown. […] In some families may be found a person who, by way of courtesy, is named the school-master. This man has generally served the stipulated period in the army, or has been disabled during the service. He teaches the younger branches of the family to read, to write, to sing psalms, and to repeat a few prayers, and this is the utmost extent of their education ... Where a schoolmaster even of this description, cannot be procured, the children are instructed only in the arts of shooting and driving cattle ... Few libraries contain any other books than the Bible, and William Sluiter’s Gesangen, a vulgar metrical version of certain portions of the scriptures. As among the greater part of ignorant people, superstition is very predominate; and they are extremely punctual in the performance of the common ceremonies of their religion. They never partake of a meal till the youngest of the family pronounce, with audible voice, a grace of such length as to resemble a prayer; and, every morning before sunrise, the whole family assemble, to pronounce, in a way which they call singing, part of Sluiter’s Gesangen. […] [A] party, consisting of six colonists and as many Hottentots,9 was sent in order to examine the country, and to endeavour to discover a tribe of Bosjesmans10 ... From the top of a hill they had seen several fires at the bottom of a narrow defile, at the distance of about twenty miles towards the east, and they concluded that a tribe of bosjesmans might be found in that place. It was immediately resolved to march thither during the ensuing night. At the approach of evening, accordingly, they set forwards, but not till the peasants had somewhat elevated their courage, by singing several of William Sluiter’s hymns, and by drinking a sopie, or glass of brandy. […] The Bosjesman lives, no doubt, in a state of almost perpetual hardship; but he is his own master. He depends upon his own exertions to procure every enjoyment, and the continual danger to which he is exposed, not only raises his courage, but produces a degree of mental energy, to which a slave is almost always a stranger. His activity of mind precludes dejection; and dancing, which among the Hottentots in the colony is hardly known, is very common among the Bosjesmans. His dread of being surprised by his enemies, indeed, confines him to his hut during the

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greater part of the day, but during the moonlight nights, he often dances from the setting of the sun till his rising. For this reason, as well as on other accounts, the approach of summer is to him a joyful circumstance, and when the first thunderstorm takes place after winter, an event which he reckons a sure indication of good weather, he tears his coats of skin in pieces, and tossing it in the air, continues dancing, with little intermission, for several succeeding days and nights. In every kraal are many circular spots which are trodden hard, and which are the scenes of their nocturnal sports. Notwithstanding this cheerfulness, no human being can lead a more precarious existence than the Bosjesman. […] Dancing and singing, the most common amusements of savages, seem at present to be little known among the Hottentots. A sullen gloom settles on every countenance, and the face is seldom seen relaxed into hilarity. Barrow knew only two Hottentots who seemed to have any taste for music, one of them a male, was a Chinaqua, the other a female, was from the Snewsberg, and they both were servants of a farmer belonging to the party. They had two instruments, both extremely simple. One called gabowie, had some resemblance to a guitar, with three strings, the other named gowra, consisted of a piece of sinew stretched over a hollow stick with a quill at one end. By expiration and inspiration, different tones were produced, but without any certain modulation. […] The following day was Sunday, and in the morning, Barrow was awakened by the noise of several female voices singing. When he looked out, he saw a company of female Hottentots seated upon the ground. They were dressed in printed calico, and had assembled to sing their morning hymn. The sight of Hottentots in a comfortable state, a sight so uncommon in the colony, was peculiarly pleasing. […] They attended divine service on Sunday, and the ambition of every one to appear clean and decent, is a sufficient refutation of the opinion, that filthiness constitutes an essential part of a Hottentot character … The discourse delivered by one of the missionaries was short, but was replete with good sense. The musical part of the service was performed chiefly by the women, whose voices were not deficient in melody.

Music in the Cape11 Christian Latrobe Christian Ignatius Latrobe was a minister in the Moravian Church, known in England as the United Brethren Church. His father was a friend of Charles and Fanny Burney and Samuel Johnson, and Latrobe himself knew Haydn, Cramer and Novello. He composed instrumental music and hymns, and published some of the first English editions of contemporary sacred music. Latrobe was involved in both the re-establishment of an old mission at Baviaanspoort (‘Gnadenthal’) in 1792 and the establishment of a new mission at Groenekloof in 1810. Today I heard with much pleasure a party of men and women, employed as day-labourers in the missionaries’ garden,12 both before and after their meal, which they enjoyed in the shade of the grove, most melodiously singing a verse, by way of a grace. One of the women sung a correct second, and very sweetly performed that figure in music, called Retardation

from which I judge, that dissonants are not the invention of art, but the production of nature. Nothing would be more easy, than to form a chorus of the most delightful voices, in four parts, from among this smooth-throated nation. […] In the evening, the Liturgy, or hymn, treating of our Saviour’s sufferings, appointed in our Church for Friday evening’s worship, was sung in a spirit of humble thankfulness for our redemption. This is the grand subject,13 which has proved the means of conversion, civilization, and happiness in time and eternity, to believers of every tribe and nation. May it be and remain our constant theme, in spite of either a deriding word, or the vain conceits and specious arguments of such, as pretend to superior insight, and think that they have found something higher and more effectual. […]

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Fig 2 The church at Groenekloof/Mamre (‘Lobessaal’). Photo C. Lucia When it had grown too dark to write, I sat down to play something on the piano-forte. Hearing a rustling behind me, I perceived, that three or four Hottentot girls had quietly entered the room, to listen to the music. I told them, that I would play for them, but they should sing for me, as I wished to ascertain, whether, by the help of an instrument, they would keep true to the tune, without sinking their voices. They then gave out, and sung some verses, in different tunes; I always found them true to the pitch of the instrument, though every now and then I let them sing some lines by themselves, then falling in with the piano-forte, found they had not in the smallest degree lowered their voices. The number of singers gradually increased to thirty. I was pleased with this new proof of the naturally musical qualities of this nation, and was convinced, that the sinking of the voices at church, is only owing to bad precentors, but would be prevented by an organ. After our evening-worship, the spirit of singing seemed to come upon us, and we were above an hour engaged in playing and singing verses to a variety of beautiful German hymn-tunes, some of which were new to me.

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Fig 3 The church at Gnadenthal/Genadendal. Photo C. Lucia […] [On the mission station at Hoogte Kraal] At nine, the people were called together by the sound of a cow’s horn, blown by a maid-servant, in place of a bell. About a hundred men and women attended … After Mr Pacalt had spoken about two minutes, a woman began to make a strange tremulous noise. Supposing her to be suddenly seized with illness, I was surprised to find no one ready to help and lead her out, till her neighbours, catching the infection, the noise spread throughout the whole assembly, the men uttering deep groans. In his prayer, the missionary affectionately remembered us, and we were sorry to be so much disturbed, by the continuance of these jarring sounds. On expressing our astonishment at the disturbances thus occasioned to the service, Mr Pacalt informed us, that it had been considered as a sign of conviction, by the power of the Word. But supposing even, that true conviction of sin might, in some, produce this effect, who does not see, that insincerity may easily adopt such external marks, to gain the good opinion of

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men, whose piety and truth being unsuspected, are willing to believe others uncapable of so great a fraud. Feeling as I do for the honour of the cause we are all equally eager to promote, and highly respecting the efforts made by missionaries of every denomination, though differing from us in forms, and perhaps in opinions, as to minor points, I would humbly submit to the consideration of the directors of all missionary institutions, whether it would not be well to avoid every thing that needlessly gives occasion to the evil-minded to ridicule or oppose our labours. We have reason to take the apostle’s frequent warnings to heart, that we may not ‘let our good be evil spoken of’. […] In the afternoon [Van Kervel, the landdrost for the district of George] invited several friends to meet us, with whom we spent a very pleasant evening. The landdrost being a great lover of music, I did not want much entreaty to play for him many of Haydn’s and Mozart’s compositions, which, though familiar to me, were new to him, and seemed to afford him great delight. […] [Camping near Uitenhage, eastern Cape border] Some Hottentots, who visited us in the tent, were desirous to know our opinion concerning the groaning practised by some of their countrymen, during divine service. We answered, that we believed, that the work of God’s Spirit was not to be sought for in noise and external marks, which might be affectation, but in a humbling sense of our sin and need, and in a broken heart and contrite Spirit. The Lord was not in the wind, nor in the earthquake, but in the small still voice. Mr Von Buchenrode having invited our whole party to dinner, we again met Mr Knobel, when, after a long dearth of music, I was extremely gratified to find in the latter an excellent performer on the piano-forte and flute. We spent two or three hours in playing Haydn’s and Mozart’s duettos, to the great gratification of our hearers. Little did I expect to have such a treat in this distant corner of the earth. […] We attended divine worship at the Lutheran church [Cape Town], where, as the Rev Mr Hesse informed me, some extraordinary music was to be performed, to solemnize the commemoration of the delivery of the Augsburg Confession. I expected some ecclesiastical anthem in the good old Lutheran style, but was sadly disappointed. By way of a prelude, the organist, a very clever performer both on the piano-forte and violin, assisted by about six or eight of the military band, treated us with the middle movement of Haydn’s military symphony. The performance of this marvellous piece was surely a very improper preparation for religious worship. On Mr Hesse’s entering the church, and stepping before the altar, he pronounced the words; ‘Holy is God! Holy is God! The Lord of Sabaoth!’ Between each sentence, a choir, consisting of four or five men, sung the same words to music, pretending to be the Sanctus in Haydn’s first mass, but strangely altered and mangled. The singers had no copies written out for their use, but, turning their backs to the congregation, looked over the organist’s shoulders into

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his book. The majestic simplicity of the Lutheran hymn-tunes was lost, in a display of the most flourishing decorations. Still I hoped, that, during some part of the service, which, as far as the preacher and congregation were concerned, was conducted with great solemnity, some anthem would be performed. I was mistaken; for, as a prelude to one of the four hymns appointed for the occasion, we were treated with another instrumental piece of Haydn, beautiful in its composition, and well executed by the band, but rather suited to accompany a dance, than to excite devotional feelings. Of Mr Hesse’s most impressive discourse, I understood more, than on a former occasion, having seated myself near the pulpit. He closed it with a serious, and indeed mournful, consideration of the great degeneracy, now prevailing throughout the Protestant communion, and with an earnest, but affectionate address to his congregation, and especially to the youth, exhorting them to consider their ways, and return unto the Lord, who had granted them such privileges, and the free use of His Holy Word and Sacraments. But, as if to efface all due impression made upon the audience, by the solemnity of Mr Hesse’s discourse, the organist struck up the last movement of the military symphony, which half the congregation staid to hear.

Fig 4 Organ loft of the Dutch Lutheran Church Strand St. Cape Town © Museum Africa I must confess, that I left the church with pain and disgust. Though blame may attach to the persons engaged in this degradation of the service, and of that noble art, which is so suitably and acceptably employed to promote devotion, when under the influence of a proper spirit, yet the cause of grief and regret in the heart of

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every sincere Christian, on account of such incongruities, lies deeper. That such things exist, is one convincing proof, among many, of the truth of the reverend preacher’s description of the present degeneracy. In those days, when the Protestant Confession was presented at Augsburg, would such performances have been borne in a place of worship?

Songs of the Zoolas14 Andrew Smith Andrew Smith was a Scottish-born army medical doctor assigned to the new British settlement in Grahamstown in 1821. His interest in African culture caused him to be sent on many missions to discover more about ‘native’ life, and in 1825 he was appointed superintendent of the newly-established South African Museum in Cape Town. His Journal of 1834-36, on which expedition he was accompanied by famous water-colourist Charles Davidson Bell, remained unpublished until 1975. Most of their songs being historical and by means of which the warlike feats of the tribe are handed down, it may readily be conceived that when they are sung by persons who took a prominent part in the events they describe no small enthusiasm is occasionally called forth … The descriptions of any battle in which the Zoolas15 had been successful and had killed many of their enemies was always marked by such thrusts and movements of the stick as were meant to show that their spears had been used with great effect and always in the direction where the vanquished people resided; or when the words described the flight of an enemy the thrusts were given so as to express what was the fate of the fugitives if within reach of the Zoola weapons. In some of the songs they sung while in attendance upon Musulacatzi16 they very often simultaneously and with an expression of defiance pointed their sticks towards the south and we supposed these passages to relate to Barend or John Bloom who lived in that direction and who formed prominent characters in their records.17 On enquiry, however, we found this not to be the case. They were supposing the Amachosa18 would be driven from their country by the white men and that it was possible they might attack the Zoolas to take their cattle, but if they did, the show of sticks was meant to indicate that the spears of Musulacatzi’s warriors were ready to oppose them. We naturally expressed our surprise that they should have so quickly composed a song on the Amakosa war but we were informed that was not the only composition they had completed since our arrival. Another had been produced describing the pleasure of the king at seeing so many Europeans, and particularly dwelt upon the circumstance of the white people ‘driving the Amakosie’, and yet many of them were peacably enjoying themselves amongst the Zoolas and watching their dances. Were the mass of the Zoola songs to be taken as a criterion of the state of mind and intelligence of the people a very erroneous idea of both would be the result. They generally indicate the lowest possible state of intellect, consisting principally of a chorus between which certain unconnected sentences are introduced either to record some occurrence that has passed or to express some feeling or inclination that exists at the time. The exact import of these sentences are often but

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imperfectly understood by the persons who compose them. These lower orders of songs are merely the vague ideas of some of the least talented of the tribe and only relate to minor and purely local circumstances. Poor as they may be, however, attempts are made to have them sung in the presence of the king, which sometimes succeed, and thus Musulacatzi becomes acquainted with the sentiments, views and wishes of his subjects, which might not be the case if the local evils and other matters were not brought forward in the unconnected jargon of which they are mostly made up. The Zoolas songs, however, that are sung on advancing to battle, or those which celebrate the ceremonies annually observed in honour of the first fruits of the earth, are much less barren of ideas and far from vulgarly expressed. When, also, an event has happened of so much importance that it should not be forgotten and is made the subject of a national song, it occupies the talents of the more able poets of the nation.

Music for the Settler Jubilee19 Robert Godlonton Largely through his co-editorship of the Graham’s Town Journal, Robert Godlonton (1794-1884) became an influential spokesperson for the 1820 British Settlers and articulated British support for strong policies in the disputed frontier region of the eastern Cape. He made his mark in other ways, laying the foundation stone of Grahamstown’s Settlers' Memorial Tower (now the tower of the Town Hall) in 1870, for example, and producing many sketches of life in the eastern Cape. Home of our hearts! our fathers’ home! / Land of the brave and free! The keel is flashing through the foam / That bears us far from thee! We seek a wild and distant shore / Beyond the Atlantic main! We leave thee to return no more, / Nor view thy cliffs again!20 […] [In Grahamstown] It had been arranged by the Committee, in accordance with the public wish, that the [Jubilee] services should commence with a public Religious Thanksgiving to GOD, for that providential care and abundant mercy, amidst many and great trials, so conspicuous in almost every page of the Settlement’s history. The Episcopal Church of St. George had been granted by the Colonial Chaplain, the Rev J. HEAVYSIDE … The Edifice was filled to overflowing, many being unable to obtain even standing room … In the course of this preliminary service, the following were sung with very creditable ability by the choir:To bless thy chosen race, / In mercy, LORD, incline; And cause the brightness of they face / On all thy saints to shine. … Then God upon our land / Shall constant blessings shower, And all the world in awe shall stand / Of his resistless power. […] [T]he gay banners which were borne by them,21 inscribed with mottos indicative of their descent from the British Settlers of Albany - of loyalty to their Queen, and of undying and ardent attachment to the land of their forefathers; - the exhilarating strains and occasional marshal clang of the military bands which preceded them … gave encouraging assurance that their children would be raised up embued with British feelings, and with that fidelity to the Throne and attachment to those Institutions which, established by British wisdom, have been supported by British valor and patriotism, and bequeathed from father to son as a precious and sacred legacy.

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Fig 5 St. George’s Church Grahamstown c1830 © Museum Africa […] THE NATIONAL ANTHEM [was] adapted as follows to the occasion by the Rev. THORNLEY SMITH, Wesleyan Minister, resident at Graham’s Town: GOD save our noble Queen! / Smile on VICTORIA’s reign; / GOD save the Queen! / May she by grace be led, / And on her royal head / Be richest blessings shed; / GOD save the Queen! … GOD bless our native land! / May heaven’s protecting hand / Still guard her shore. / May peace her power extend, / Foe be transformed to friend, / And Britain’s power depend / On war no more. May just and righteous laws / Uphold the public cause, / And England bless. Home of the brave and free, / The land of liberty, / We still our prayers for thee / To heaven address. And lift on Albany, / Our rising Colony, / Thy smiling face. / GOD of our father-land, / Extend thy gracious hand / To us, an humble band / Of Britain’s race. And not this land alone, / But be thy mercies known / From shore to shore. LORD, make the nations see, / That men should brothers be, / And form one family, / The wide world o’er. […] [In Port Elizabeth the following day] Previous to the prayers the choir sung the 122nd Psalm:22 Oh, ’twas a joyful sound to hear / Our tribes devoutly say, / Up Israel - to the temple haste, / And keep your festal day. Before the Litany an anthem, adapted to the magnificent words of the prose version of the 150th Psalm, Laudate Dominum, was chanted, and previous to the sermon the 96th Psalm was sung … The beautiful air of ‘Rule Britannia’ was played as the congregation left the church. […]

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The Chairman23 then gave - ‘THE HONEST MAGISTRATE CAPT. W. LLOYD’. Captain LLOYD … Glee - ‘The Old English Gentleman’ … Song by Mr WELSFORD - ‘The British Grenadiers’ … ‘Come dwell with me and be my love’ … [And finally, in Bathurst] ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot?’

Preface to a Solfa Tune-book24 Christopher Birkett Christopher Birkett trained as a teacher in London, where he learnt tonic solfa under Henry Nixon, and both men moved to South Africa c1855. Birkett worked in Grahamstown where he taught music (including solfa) to black mission school pupils and white music societies, and later taught in other parts of the eastern Cape. The uniform prevalence of the penult accent25 in the languages of Southern Africa renders it impossible, in the absence of an adequate number of monosyllables, that the versification in those languages can sufficiently conform to the usages of versification in European languages as to make it practicable that any European Psalm Tune Book can supply the necessary number of Tunes required for Divine worship in these parts of the Mission field. The Long Measures, Common Measures, Short Measures, Six Eights, &c., are unavoidably in TROCHAIC foot and each line ends with a syllable unaccented, whilst the European Measures are IAMBICS ending with an accented syllable. So that whilst the quantity in the verses may be analogous, there is a direct contrariety of accent throughout every syllable of every line. In the absence of an appropriate collection of Tunes the Missionaries have, been compelled to submit to the use of tunes altogether unfitted in accent for the words which had to be sung. A Missionary in Madagascar describing his experience in this respect says: ‘I could weep sometimes at the outrageous effect of the misplacing, of the accent - there are 168 hymns in the London Missionary Society’s Hymn Book, and not one is correctly arranged’. So that for the past fifty years continuous violence has been done to the language in almost every celebration of Zion’s Songs. The publication of the present collection of appropriate tunes I trust will be found to supply to a considerable extent the want which has so long been felt. In the prospectus issued in a circular letter last Christmas it was announced that the work would contain 200 tunes. But, indebted to several friends for their kind advice, I have since adopted the suggestion of publishing the work in two parts - to bring out Part I immediately containing 100 tunes, and reserve Part II for a time,26 so as to enable me to add thereto a selection of Anthems, and pieces suitable for Sunday School Anniversaries. The Sol-fa notation, which I had the honor of introducing in South Africa sixteen years ago,27 seeing that the knowledge of it is now so widely spread, and that its usefulness, and its cheapness, and its simplicity are so unparalleled, I think, with the permission of Mr CURWEN, will be the proper form in which to bring forth this collection of tunes so as most widely to extent the benefits of the book.

Music in the Northern Cape and Bechuanaland28 Andrew Anderson Andrew A. Anderson was a colonial magistrate in the Cape before he embarked on 25-year travels through southern Africa as far north as the Congo. Explorer, hunter, naturalist, and anthropologist, his ‘great journeyings’ (as the London Saturday Review put it) added ‘another page to the physical geography of Africa’. He was twice believed to be dead, once for at least three years. I was invited to a dance one evening by Waterboer,29 when the élite of the families were invited. All the fashionable dances were correctly and well performed to the music of the harmonium, which one of his sons played; his daughters were well behaved, and I was much pleased to see such refinement in this out-of-the-way corner of the world among natives. Since that time he has been made a prisoner, deprived of his chieftainship, and is now living in Hope Town, the principle portion of his people being driven from their lands. The Griquas … plough and cultivate their lands, are fond of coffee and visiting; like their Boer brothers in habits and customs, being descended from Dutch and Bushmen they retain the habits of the former. Many of the Boers of the Transvaal are descended from these people. […] This reed band is a great institution with these people. The following night the young men met as usual with the band at their large kraal. The night was not dark, as the stars give great light in this latitude. When they were in full play, and the women and children going round the performers, singing and clapping of hands, each one wearing a long karos, which covered their figure, and a fur cap, their usual covering at night, I left my waggon, dressed like them, with a jackal karos and tiger-skin cap, which concealed my figure and face, walked down and joined in the dance, which was maintained for some time, all the men sitting or standing beyond the circle looking on. A little girl caught a glimpse of my white face, which had become partly uncovered, when she screamed out and pointed to me. It was then no longer necessary to keep up the disguise; I therefore threw off my karos. When they saw who it was, they joined in the fun, laughing and clapping of hands, and I was made to sit down and have a good drink of Kaffir beer. […] Tuesday, a very hot day. Many divisions of the Impi coming in from all quarters and marching up to the great camp; as this is the last day of the old year with this nation, they commemorate it by great national rejoicings. About twelve o’clock I walked up with several of the hunters and traders, and took up our positions close to the entrance of the king’s private grounds, when regiment after regiment came marching up, dressed in their war dress as before described, with shield and assegai, and took up their position so as to form an immense circle of

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ten and twelve deep, within the enclosure close to the king’s kraal, who came out to show himself for a few minutes and retired. In the mean time, his wives, dressed in beads and bright yellow kerchiefs over their shoulders, and long black kilts or skirts down below the knees, young girls dressed in short kilts, and a profusion of ornaments round their loins, arms and heads, stepped into the open space within the circle of troops, and chanted songs, moving forward at the same time, the warriors singing and raising their shields up and down, keeping time with their feet … After a long time Lo-Bengulu30 came forward with a dancing gait, and took the lead out of the station at the head of his own particular regiment or bodyguard, whose dress and shields are all black, each soldier not less than six feet, followed by the other regiments, when they formed into three sides of a square. Then the king came forward, surrounded by his bodyguard, and threw an assegai at an imaginary enemy, when … the rain came down so fast that it put a stop to further proceedings. But previous to the king’s leaving, about 100 oxen were driven out of the circle where they had been kept by the whole of the Impi, and were soon slaughtered for the great feast that was to come off that night. Altogether it was a pretty and novel sight, and if the weather had been fine, the effect would have been most singular and striking. Some 500 women and girls stood in groups to witness the performances. The women who danced held sticks ten feet in length with the bark peeled off; the slave population looked on at a distance. I made the best of my way to Mr Peterson’s store, where I found Mr and Mrs Elm, Mr and Mrs Coillard and the sister, and took cake and coffee with them, and then to my waggon which was outspanned on the opposite hill … The next day the troops returned to the respective military camps, and the last of the military dances ended in a downpour of rain, amidst crashing thunder and flash after flash of the most vivid lightning I have seen for a long time.

Ntsikana, the Story of an African Hymn31 John Knox Bokwe John Knox Bokwe was born and died near the Lovedale Mission Institution (eastern Cape) where he was educated and held various posts, including secretary to the principal, and postmaster. A prominent voice in late nineteenth-century Cape black politics, Bokwe was joint editor of Imvo Zabantsundu, the first blackmanaged paper in South Africa, in 1898-99. He was ordained as a minister in the Free Church of Scotland in 1906, and headed the mission station at Ugie. Bokwe is best remembered for his transcriptions of Ntsikana’s hymns, and for his collection of Xhosa and English hymns and part-songs, Amaculo ase Lovedale (Lovedale Music) (1st publ. 1885).

Fig 6 Original title pages of Ntsikana, the Story of an African Hymn. Cory Library, Rhodes University Ntsikana was of the Gaika tribe. His father's name was Gaba, who was a polygamist - as most Kaffirs are till they profess Christianity. Ntsikana's mother was the second wife, perhaps better loved by her husband, and the first wife

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availed herself of the illness of another member of the family to bring about a charge of witchcraft against her rival. She consulted a Kaffir doctor, and succeeded - as it was easy to do - in getting him to confirm the charge. Ntsikana’s mother was therefore adjudged a witch, and had to flee for her life to her own friends. A few months later, Ntsikana was born, spending his childhood among his mother’s people. At the age of twelve or thirteen, he was sent for by his father, Gaba, who laid claim to the lad on account of so many head of cattle having been paid for the mother before marriage. There were no schools in dark Kaffirland in those days, and as soon as a boy was eight or nine, be was occupied in tending goats and herding sheep. At the age of fifteen, he was promoted to herd cows and oxen. He learned to use his knobkerrie and throw his assegai in hunting game and guarding his father's cattle, and thus prepared himself for fighting his chief's battles. His only article of clothing was a sheep-skin; and if he washed himself once in six months, he did well; indeed, nobody cared if the boy did not wash at all. Ntsikana was at this cattle-herding age, when one day a strange, elderly white man arrived in Gaikaland, who, after being cautiously welcomed by the chief, was allowed to pitch his tent on the banks of the Keiskama River. The natives gave the stranger a name peculiar to the circumstance of his arrival, as they have since done to every European who has come to dwell with them, sometimes descriptive of a blemish in his person, or a certain mannerism in his bearing. The name given to the new arrival was ‘Nyengana’, meaning one who had appeared as if by accident. His European name, however, was Dr van der Kemp, who visited Gaikaland about 1799. The stranger carried a Book in his hand when the tribe gathered to see and hear, what his errand was. There stood the brave soldier of the Cross, telling the Good Tidings for the first time to a congregation of wondering Gaikas! Alone, yet not alone, be had left his home in obedience to the command of his Master and Saviour - ‘Go, ye and teach all nations’. How attentively they listen; how carefully they scan his features! A little distance away sits a small crowd of boys, clad in their karosses, parts of their black bodies rendered grey by the scratches of the thorny thickets through which they have had to creep. One of these boys seems especially to drink in the words of the strange white man. This is Ntsikana receiving the precious seed. It lies there, as it were, rotting, but destined one day to take root, to bud and blossom, and bear abundant fruit, to the glory of its evercareful Husbandman. […] Having inherited his father’s property, and occupying an influential position among his people, he shortly afterwards removed to another part of the district. After Dr van der Kemp’s withdrawal from Kaffirland, there arrived another Missionary, the Rev Joseph Williams, of the London Missionary Society, whom Ntsikana also heard proclaiming the same news. It seemed to the heathen Kaffir that this ‘thing’ - as he called it - was following him wherever he went, haunting his very existence, and troubling his soul.

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Kaffirs are a pastoral people, and are accustomed to early rising. One of the first things a man does when he rises in the morning, is to go to his kraal to count and admire his cattle. Ntsikana had a favourite ox, an ugly-looking animal of large size, dun coloured, but here and there spotted white, with large horns. He had given this ox the name of Hulushe, and when he spoke of it, he added a peculiar expression, not easy for a European to pronounce, because of the click sounds. Ntsikana, in his language, thus praised his favourite ox: ‘Hulushe, uqezcqamtweni, / Lunga lama Pakati’; which means, literally translated - ‘Hulushe, thou store of milk sacks, / Thou dappled one of the Councillors’. Ntsikana one morning went, as usual, to the kraal. The sun’s rays were just peeping from the east, and, as he was standing at the kraal gate, his eyes fixed with satisfied admiration on his favourite ox, he thought he detected something brighter than usual striking the side of his beast. As he looked at the animal, Ntsikana’s face betrayed excited feelings, and he thus enquired of the lad standing near by: ‘Do you observe the thing that I now see?’ The lad, turning his eyes in the direction indicated, replied: ‘No, I see nothing there’. Ntsikana, recovering from the trance, uplifted himself from the ground, on which he had meantime stretched himself, and said to the puzzled boy: ‘You are right; the sight was not one to be seen by your eyes’. Later on in the day, the memory of what he had seen haunted him away from a dance to which he and his family were invited. It seemed to bring to his recollection the words he had heard preached when a boy, and the idea expressed then, that ‘Men ought all to pray’. He could not enjoy the day’s pleasure, and at last summoned his family to accompany him home, without giving any reason. On their way home, on passing a stream, he, before them all, washed off the heathen clay from his body, which has now become the acknowledged sign of adopting Christianity. The next morning, at dawn, Ntsikana was heard to sing a chant, and to make his first statement on the Christian religion. The relatives could not understand this eccentric behaviour, and thought he was bewitched, or was getting mad. But he told them that the thing that had entered within him directed that all men should pray. Though they might not yet understand what that meant. they would do so by and bye. He sang over and over again this strange chant, the words of which are not translatable into English, beyond saying they express the idea of HALLELUJAH, AMEN! The chant was sung only while people were gathering in to Ntsikana’s meetings, and should not be confounded with the Hymn itself, which will be given later on.

ls,f:m,m:m,m lr: Elé lé lé lé lé

lʙ : – l r : – : – l d : sʙ : - l hom Hom, Homna!

ls,f:m,m:m,m lr: Elé

lé lé lé lé

lʙ : – l r : – : – l d : – : – ll hom Hom, Hom!

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Ntsikana began to preach in right earnest, and crowds came to listen to his words. In some hearts the seed was taking root, and eyes were being opened to the importance of the thing he spoke about. This they showed not merely by attending the meetings regularly, but by praying at their houses. […] Though seventy-five years have passed since Ntsikana died, his great influence still secures for his memory, his words, and his actions that reverence which this first Christian convert among South African Kaffirs worthily deserves. All that still remains of the story to be given is his great hymn. The words are in the original Kaffir with a literal - though not metrical - translation into English. The tune or chant to which the Kaffir words are sung was published for the first time in the Sol-Fa [sic] notation at Lovedale, South Africa, in 1876, the music having been handed down only by tradition till then. The words had been committed to print by the early missionaries, and the hymn is in every Christian Kaffir Hymn Book now in South Africa. The words and music were both composed by Ntsikana. It is a weird air, chanted to lines expressive of what the man took God and the Gospel to be. It is the first Christian hymn composed and sung in Kaffirland to real native music, and it is to Kaffirs a precious legacy left by Ntsikana to his native fellow Christians, and is highly valued and loved by them. NTSIKANA’S HYMN: ULO TIXO MKULU - THOU GREAT GOD Key F. Gravely.

Arranged by J.K. Bokwe

ad lib.

ls l lU l l

tempo

:– . f : -: :

l f , f., m : r l : lo l Tixo omku l : l :

-

ll l fe l lu l fe lr

:l : fe ngo : fe :r

ll l fe l se l fe lr

:l : fe -

zu : fe :r

-

l l l l l

= ls lm l lwi lm ld

:

–

:

– -

-

:

–

:

–

l l l l l

s

:

–

m

:

–

ni, m

:

–

d

:

–

ll l fe lU l fe lr

:m

ll l fe

lo

Ti

:m

l fe

:m

:m

l r

:d

:s -

:s :m -

xo

l l l l l

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= lm :s ld :m l om - khu l m :s ld :d

[pause]

-

lr l tʙ/s l lu lr l sʙ

:m :m : ngo :s :d

Ulo Tixo omkulu, ngosezulwini; Ungu Wena-wena Kaka lenyaniso. Ungu Wena-wena Nqaba yenyaniso. Ungu Wena-wena Hlati lenyaniso. Ungu Wena-wen’ uhlel’ enyangwaneni. Ulo dal’ ubomi, wadala pezulu. Lo Mdal’ owadala, wadala izulu. Lo Menzi wenkwenkwezi nozilimela; Yabinza inkwenkwezi, isixelela. Lo Menzi wemfaman’ uzenza ngabomi? Lateta ixilongo, lisibizile. Ulonqin’ izingela imipefumlo. Ulohlanganis’ imihlamb’ eyalanayo. Ulo Mkokeli wasikokela tina. Ulengub’ inkul’ esiyambata tina. Ozandla Zako zinamanxeba wena. Onyawo Zako zinamanxeba wena. Ugazi Lako limrolo yinina? Ugazi Lako lipalalele tina. Lemali enkulu-na siyibizile? Lomzi Wako-na-na siwubizile?

ld ld l se lm l mʙ

: lʙ : lʙ zu :r : r,

-

l sʙ l sʙ l lwi ld l dʙ

: sʙ : sʙ -

ni. :d : dʙ

ll ll ll ll ll

The Great God, He is in heaven. Thou art thou, Shield of truth. Thou art thou, Stronghold of truth. Thou art thou, Thicket of truth. Thou art thou, who dwellest in the highest. Who created life (below) and created (life) above. The Creator who created, created heaven. This Maker of the stars, and the Pleiades. A star flashed forth, telling us. The Maker of the blind, does He not make them on purpose? The trumpet sounded, it has called us, As for His hunting, He hunteth for souls. Who draweth together flocks opposed to each other. The Leader, he led us. Whose great mantle, we put it on. Those hands of Thine, they are wounded. Those feet of Thine, they are wounded. Thy blood, why is it streaming? Thy blood, it was shed for us. This great price, have we called for it? This home of Thine, have we called for it?32

Wings of Song33 J.W. Househam J.W. Househam was an English-born Minister of the Wesleyan Methodist Church and President of the Native Centenary Conference 1923. This conference commemorated among other things the establishment of the first Wesleyan mission station in ‘Kaffraria’ (then eastern Cape Colony) by William Shaw, in Grahamstown in 1823. The history of a tribe was enshrined in song. As there was no written language, this was the only method by which events could be preserved. It was thus [the Imbongi34] threw into the shape of a striking recitative, events as they occurred; and these were taken up by the young men and women, who were taught to sing them on every conceivable occasion. […] It is a curious thing that all their songs were sung in a minor strain; and the chorus was invariably in two parts, usually in fifths, which gave the impression of a dirge-like sense of sadness. Listening for the first time to these songs one would naturally assume that there was little of joy in the lives of the people, and that their utterances were the interpretation of a hopeless outlook in life. Probably there is truth in this assumption. Life, bounded by the autocratic caprice of a despotic chief, and the lynx-eyed cruelty of the witch-doctor, did not afford much scope for joyous expression. It was only by the introduction of the Gospel - the ‘opening of the prison doors to them that are bound’ - that these plaintive songs began to give place to the spirit of praise and joy. And as civilisation and education advanced, the importance of the Imbongi began to wane, and the class itself to disappear. […] In the eighteenth century the Methodist revival brought a decadent England face to face with God, and melody began to flow forth in irresistible sweetness and force. So here in darkest Africa the introduction of the Gospel offered a new experience; it brought new hopes; it touched for the first time a dormant chord, and awoke that ‘wondrous dower of song and glory’ which was soon to make itself heard and felt throughout the land … We can imagine how these first converts, rejoicing in the new and wonderful life that had sprung up within them, would croon, in quiet and low monotones, the message that had appealed to them, until the heart would swell and unconsciously burst into melody and praise to God. Ntsikana, one of the earliest converts to Christianity, has given us such as illustration. It is just a natural outburst of feeling and joy as we should expect from one emerging from the bondage of a cruel heathenism into the freedom and liberty of the children of God:

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Ulo Tixo omkulu, ngosezulwini. / Unguwena, wena, Kaka lenyaniso. Unguwena, wena, Nqaba yenyaniso. / Unguwena, wena, Hlati lenyaniso. * * * * * * * Ulomkokeli, wsikokela tina. / Ulengub’ enkulu, siyambata tina. * * * * * * * Ugazi lako liyamrozo yinina? / Ugazi lako lipalalele tina. Thou art the great God who art in heaven. It is Thou, Thou, who art the Shield of Truth. It is Thou, Thou, who art the Stronghold of Truth. It is Thou, Thou, who art the Hiding Place of Truth … Thou art the Leader; Thou hast led us. Thou art the great Garment; Thou hast clothed us … Thy blood; why has it been shed? Thy blood; it was poured out for us. The phrasing is that of the heathen Imbongi; the theme is that of the ‘sweet singer of Israel’; while the style is an excellent vehicle of thanksgiving and praise. Methodism owes much to song; she has ever found it a glorious handmaid to a glorious Gospel; and in no part of the world is her indebtedness to song greater than in these regions of South-East Africa. The Natives are gifted with a voice for singing, and they are not afraid to use it. To hear a congregation of some six or seven hundred people singing the songs of Zion - and all singing - is an experience to be remembered. There is no need for instrumental music to lead; they have volume and power which make instrumental music feeble indeed … How much the success of the hundred years’ work is due to this love of singing, it is impossible to say; probably more than we think. It has kept the spirit of optimism aglow; it has inspired effort and led on to victory under the most depressing circumstances. […] ‘Thou hast put a new song into my mouth’, says the Psalmist, ‘even praises unto God’ … To get that song into the heathen hearts has been our work. To hear that song welling up from changed hearts has been our joy. To make that song AFRICA’s GREAT LOVE SONG will be our unceasing prayer.35 ‘Amadolo kwelilizwe / Makagobe pambi kwako, / Zide ziti zonk’ ilwimi / Ziluxel ’udumo lwako’ (Tiya Soga) The knees of the nations, / Let them bow before Thee / Until every tongue / Shall utter forth Thy praise.

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Fig 7 Methodist Church Albert St. Johannesburg c1926 © Museum Africa

African Music36 Reuben Caluza Reuben Tolakele Caluza was born in Edendale and educated at Ohlange Institute and Mariannhill Training College. A Zulu choral conductor, composer and teacher, Caluza recorded with his Double Quartet in London on the HMV label in 1930. After completing a BMus at Hampton Institute in Virginia and an MA in composition at Columbia University, Caluza became head of Adams College (Natal). After his retirement, Caluza lectured part-time at the University of Zululand. Much has been said about Africa’s being a ‘dark continent’. This phrase has moved the hearts of some disciples of God to penetrate into the unknown interior to convert and educate the Aboriginal races of this great continent. Schools have been started, learned men and women are devoting their time to the study of the language families of Africa. Various books have been written on these. What has been done so far deserves the praise and admiration of all who are interested in the development of African races. However, few men and women have delved deeply into the study of African music. Few have thought of utilizing this talent as a medium of lifting these races. No books have been written on this subject. Is it because it is lacking in beauty and harmony? After hearing some of its quaint tunes, one who thinks so will change his mind and wish to hear more of these chants. Other African arts are studied with keen interest, but music, which is the language of the soul, music, in which is found the spiritual aspirations of a nation, music, from which we can study the history and customs of race, African music, which might be a great contribution to civilization in the same way in which the Russian male choirs, the choral societies of Welsh miners and other such groups have been - African music is the most neglected of African arts. None of the African folk songs have been collected and preserved. Let us consider one of the many rich stores in African music - Zulu music. As with all primitive people, Zulu songs are developed in company with bodily and rhythmic movement. Some tunes have no words at all. A Zulu singer hums a tune or sings meaningless exclamatory syllables, such as ‘oha!’ ‘oham!’ ‘Oji!’ As he sings, he makes bodily movements which thoroughly agree with the tune. He stamps, and the women join in with the clapping of hands and queer ejaculations of derision. Usually these tunes are very short and the same phrase is sung over and over. The first note at the beginning of Zulu songs is usually an octave high or low, and it is either the super-tonic, or the dominant, or the leading-note. Such notes are found in war songs, songs of triumph and derision. When a Zulu song begins with the tonic or mediant, it either refers to a pathetic incident or expresses yearning.

30

However, there are exceptions to these. Children’s songs generally begin with the sub-mediant. At the close of a musical phrase, one either finds the super-tonic or the leading-note. The Zulus are not careful about authentic and plagal cadence. There are, however, some very beautiful tunes which commence and end well. With regard to the scale, Zulus sing all the notes of the diatonic scale; in some cases chromatic tones are perfectly sung. The singers are not conscious that they are singing chromatics. The difference in the singing of the notes lies in the fact that, instead of singing the notes as they should be sung, they approach them with a slur, thus producing peculiar notes which should be given new characters. Such notes occur between the mediant and the super-tonic, and another one might be placed between the leading note and the octave. Words either deride or praise an act of prowess. Patriotic songs are very common, and many of these are sung on important ceremonies. Briefly they can be described as songs connected with weddings, hunting, ancestral worship, courting, snuffsongs, cradle songs, songs for thrashing corn, work songs, etc. Certainly, it would take some years to exhaust the repertoire of Zulu music. To illustrate what has just been said about songs of derision, I will take for my example a song sung in the historic days of Dingana. When the Zulus were fighting against a strong nation some of their warriors fled, leaving their men in the thick of the battle. At the close of the battle, the victorious regiment went home singing a song entitled ‘Wa balek’ u Nobaleka’. The literal translation of these words is ‘The coward ran away, but we are not such cowards’. Another very interesting song which has been handed down orally from one generation to another is called ‘Litshe lika Ntunjambili Ngi vulele ngi ngene’. This means ‘Ntunjambili’s stone or stone with two entrances, open and let me come in’. This stone is in Zululand and the place called Ntunjambili was named after it. The song describes some superstitions that our ancestors had. In our folklore we are told that in ancient times there were cannibals in Zululand, who went about the country in search of young girls whom they carried away to their caves. This stone (Ntunjambili) was a place of refuge for girls who fled from these cannibals. The young girls would run to this stone and sing this song at the entrance; the stone, which opened and closed automatically, would then let the girls in. When they thought the human-flesh-eater was gone, they would sing the same song and the stone would open for them to go out. There are many Zulu cradle songs. Almost all Zulu girls sing them. Some are as old as the Zulu race; no one knows their origin. When a young Zulu girl is left at home to nurse a child, she sings a song with some such words: ‘Sleep little baby, don’t cry. Mother has gone to find food for you’. She sings this song until the baby sleeps. This is another very old song. When, by accident, a Zulu child hits a chicken in such a way that it becomes unconscious, he takes two sticks and knocks them together above the chicken as he sings a tune to the words which mean ‘Little chicken, little chicken. I was only playing with you, but now you are dying’. He sings this song till the chicken revives.

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Now, if Zulu customs, beliefs, traditions, and aspirations are contained in Zulu music, why not give time and money to the profound study of this fascinating art of the Africans? Already the Zulus are in a transitory stage and the tendency among some of them is to belittle all their customs and folk songs. Western music of all classes has so influenced the civilized class that they will not sit for a moment to listen to their folk songs. Unless something is done to collect and preserve African folk songs while time is still opportune, these weird and quaint tunes of the Bantu race will be lost to the world. Will someone make the effort of going to the very heart of Zululand and other parts of Africa to find out what can be done with African music? Neither unfavourable conditions of climate nor inconveniences of travel should hinder him from penetrating into these regions. I feel confident that, if only the right man will dedicate his mind and soul to the proper cultivation of this native talent of choral-singing from Zululand, he too will lead to fame a body of men whose unspoiled and unselfish love for musical expression will bring an inspiring and uplifting message to the world. In closing I wish to quote what one English artist said after she had seen the Zulu war dance: The true art, will, I am certain, spring from the black races. It is in their hands. The native music with its weird strange harmonies - can one listen to it without being conscious that here is talent, half-smothered, forcing its way to realization. In holding back the black man, we are curbing the best that is in ourselves. The native is rich in talent because he is rich in originality. His gorgeous color sense, his ready wit, his gift of happiness - what a wealth of all that is young and spirited he brings into our lives. We are not so clever that we cannot learn from him. How eager - how pathetically eager he is to learn from us.

The Gora, a Stringed-wind Instrument37 Percival Kirby Percival Kirby was a Scottish-born musicologist, composer, conductor and broadcaster, and the first Professor of Music at the University of the Witwatersrand (1921-52). Remembered for his contribution to early studies of indigenous southern African music, he also promoted Western music, for example founding the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra in 1927. A little-known aspect of his legacy, recorded in his biography Wits End (1967) was his role in selecting ‘Die Stem’ by M.L. de Villiers as the best tune submitted for a national anthem competition, in 1925.38 The unique character of the musical instrument known as the gora has for years attracted the attention of travellers in South Africa.39 It stands alone as an example of a stringed-wind instrument, and it is peculiar to this country. […] Barrow (1806a, 98), saw the gowra, as he called it, at Graaf Reynet. it sounded, he said, ‘like the faint murmurs of distant music that “comes o’er the ear” without any distinction of notes’. But Barrow noted something of great importance; a tuning-peg had been applied to the instrument to enable the player to tighten his string more readily. I had always doubted the authenticity of this feature, although it had been mentioned by several other writers; but recently I have seen specimens of the gora fitted with tuning-pegs. One, a Bushman example, is privately owned; another, a Hottentot instrument, is preserved in the South African Museum, Capetown, but is not on exhibition. A photograph of the ends of this specimen, showing the peg, is reproduced on Fig 8. The tuning-peg seems to me to have been a relatively late addition to the gora, the idea of it having been in all probability derived from European musical instruments. It is significant that it occurs chiefly upon instruments seen near the Cape. Lady Anne Barnard (Barnard 1910, 259-60), in one of her letters, also described the gora without mentioning its name. She, too, noted the presence of a tuning-peg, and stated that on the instrument the Hottentot performer produced ‘a sound as loud as any trumpet’. She purchased the instrument for two shillings, but I have not been able to trace it; doubtless it has disappeared. About the same time Alberti, frontier Governor at Fort Frederick in the Port Elizabeth district between 1800 and 1804, heard the gora played by Hottentots who were living among the Xhosa, though he expressly stated (and he had taken great pains to make sure of his facts) that it was not played by the latter race (Alberti 1810, 165-66). He definitely compared the sounds of the instrument to the ‘tones of the so-called Hunting-

33

Horn’, showing that he fully realised that the music of the gora was based on the harmonic series, which is also characteristic of the ‘natural’ brass instruments.

Fig 8 Ends of Hottentot gora with tuning-peg © South African Museum […] In 1932 (Kirby 1932, 194-95) I was fortunate in obtaining from a living Korana a description of the method of making and playing upon the gora It was made from a fairly straight stick with the bark removed, and seasoned suitably. A string of twisted sinew was fixed to a spatulate piece of quill taken from the feather of a korhaan (a species of Otis). To flatten the quill after it had been split along one side, it would be soaked in hot water. The string was passed through a hole made in the tip of the quill and spliced into itself, never knotted. The other end of the quill was lashed to one end of the stave by a piece of sinew or riem, and the other end of the string secured to the opposite end of the stick. By applying the quill end to the mouth, the lips surrounding but not touching the quill, the player could produce quite powerfully, by inspiring and expiring vigorously, certain harmonics of the string. One old Korana Hottentot, named Mulukab, stated that he could still play the gora; he added, ‘You play it by yourself. It makes you forgetful of things, and you can be your own company’. Fig 9 shows another Korana, named Seleki, from Schweizer Reneke in the south-western Transvaal, playing upon the instrument.

34

Fig 9 Korana Hottentot, playing upon the gora © P.R. Kirby […] After the Korana Hottentots, forced by circumstances, had trekked north to the Orange River, and later to the Vaal, they came into conflict with the vanguard of the Chwana in their southern advance. As a result, the two races remained in contact for many years, and exchanged a number of ideas. We have already seen [earlier in Kirby’s book] how the Chwana adopted the reedflute ensembles of the Korana; in like manner they adopted the gora, calling it lesiba - the Chwana name for the feather, the characteristic feature of the instrument. As it moved farther north an alternative name, kwadi, was given to it. As would be expected, references to the use of the instrument by the Chwana are all relatively recent. Fritsch (1872, 190, 327, 427, 439) saw the lesiba in the hands of the people of that race, though he remarked that, though it had spread throughout the South African tribes, it was characteristic of the Hottentots. Brown’s Secwana Dictionary (1895) contained the following entries: ‘kwadi-losiba’; ‘losiba; the outer skin of a goat’s bowel, and a musical instrument made from it’; ‘lesiba = losiba’. I have not found the word losiba in use in southern Bechuanaland except at Mafeking, though lesiba is recognised; kwadi is the name given to the instrument in the Mochudi district of southern Bechuanaland. Passarge (1907) … also refers to the Chwana use of the gora, and Schultze, too (1907, 645) observed it among them, noting the unusual feature of a tuning-peg. I myself have heard it played on several occasions at Mochudi by Bakgatla performers, some of whom were expert players. The Sotho,

35

who are closely allied to the Chwana, acquired the gora as the latter did, and in all probability about the same time, and they gave it the same name, lesiba, as did the Chwana. Casalis (1861, 156) first noted its presence among the Sotho of Basutoland, and described it in detail. Its tone, however, displeased him, for he compared it to that produced on a clarinet by a novice. Widdicombe (1891, 58) also saw the Sotho playing upon the lesiba in Basutoland, and, like Casalis, disliked its tone. In 1931 I heard and recorded several excellent Pedi performers near Schoonord, in the northern Transvaal, and during the past three years I have been in close touch with expert Sotho lesiba players from Basutoland. A photograph of one appears on Fig 10. […] The tone is, when well produced, very pleasant, partaking of the qualities of both string and wind, reminding one of an Aeolian harp; and it can be varied in power from a faint whisper to a strong, vibrant sound, the air column of the mouth and throat acting as a resonator.

36

Fig 10 Sotho (Bas.) playing upon the lesiba © P.R. Kirby In the following example of the simplest type of tune played on the lesiba which I have observed and collected, the performer alternates inspiration and expiration, the former causing the string of the instrument to give forth one of its partials quite prominently (although some of the lower ones, and even the fundamental itself, can also be faintly heard at times), the latter serving to release the breath, and being accompanied by a laryngeal sound, or grunt, of indefinite pitch (noted by Burchell and Bartle Frere, although not explained by them):

37 q=

(a)

   

(b)

 

72 (approx.)









 etc.













Ex 1 (a) Sounds produced prominently by vibration of the string, brought about by inspiration. Other (and lower) sounds of the same harmonic series are also audible. (b) Laryngeal sounds of indefinite pitch produced by rapid and forcible expiration40 In tunes of more developed type, fewer laryngeal sounds are produced. The performer has accordingly fewer opportunities of emptying the lungs satisfactorily, and consequently the strain of performance is increased. My second example shows a tune of this nature: q=

(a)

(b)

72 (approx)

          

       



Ex 2 (a) Sounds produced prominently by vibration of the string, brought about by inspiration. Other (and lower) sounds of the same harmonic series are also audible. (b) Laryngeal sounds of indefinite pitch produced by rapid and forcible expiration But in the melodies played by the most skilful performers the laryngeal sounds are entirely absent, or at least practically unaudible. In such cases the player sets the string in vibration by alternating inspiration and expiration, and the tone produced is of remarkable purity and carrying power. The next example illustrates a characteristic tune of this type: q=

72 (approx.)

    

(b)

              (a)

(b)

(a)

(b)

(a)

(b)

(a)

(b)

Ex 3 (a) Sounds produced by expiration. (b) Sounds produced by inspiration The lower tones of the harmonic series involved, even down to the fundamental, tend to colour the whole at times. The passage within the double bars is repeated until the player is exhausted, when he stops to breathe, and then begins again. The performer from whom this tune was obtained played it first

38

with E-flat as the fundamental pitch of the string, and afterwards pulled it up to F. Each performance lasted only a few seconds Still another type of tune is found. The example which I quote was played on the lesiba by a Sotho in Johannesburg: h = 70 (approx.) (c) (d)

(c) (d)

 

   

 



(e)



 

(c) (d)

 

(c) (d)

(c) (d)

   

  (e)

(f)

 



  









Ex 4 (a) Sounds produced prominently by vibration of the string, brought about by inspiration. (b) Laryngeal sounds of definite pitch produced by expiration. (c) Sounds (from string) produced by expiration. (d) Sounds (from string) produced by inspiration. (e) Sometimes the upper G is sounded here, instead of C. (f) Sometimes D is sounded here, instead of B-flat I have also heard a Chwana produce higher partials of the harmonic series than those noted in the examples which I have given. An examination of the examples I have quoted yields the following results. The sounds produced by setting the string of the lesiba into vibration by inspiration or expiration, are certain partials of a given harmonic series, the fundamental of which is determined by the length, thickness, and tension of the string, The partials chiefly used are the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th of the series (and occasionally the 10th and 12th), particular prominence being given to the 7th which, in modern European music is regarded as inharmonic, and therefore undesirable, since it is in conflict with the tempered system in general use. The importance of this instrument can scarcely be overrated, not only because of the unique method of sound-production utilized, but also because of the actual employment for melodic purposes, of upper partials of the harmonic series. This practice must have been a powerful and direct factor in fixing what one may term ‘focal points’ in the musical scales of the various peoples who have from time to time employed this instrument.

African Music in South Africa41 Frieda Bokwe Matthews Frieda Deborah Bokwe Matthews, daughter of John Knox Bokwe and wife of educationist and politician Z.K. Matthews, was a music teacher and pianist who trained at Trinity College of Music, London, in the mid-1930s. One of the first women to graduate at the University of Fort Hare, she spent her life teaching music, mostly in exile (Switzerland, the US and Botswana). It was while she was in London in 1935 that Matthews gave the following lecture on African music.42 The object of this paper is to make a plea for greater study of African Music than has hitherto been common among those interested in one way or another in the ‘Dark Continent’. A few records will be used to illustrate what the writer considers are the characteristic features of African Music and African singing. The objection will probably be raised by some of you after you have heard the records that they show considerable Western influence and that they therefore do not represent typical African Music. In this connection it is well to remember that the white himself is responsible for the fact that it is almost impossible to find any native songs in South Africa which do not show some resemblance to Western music. But even so such records are not completely disqualified for use in such a lecture as this, for what I am concerned to do is not to trace Western influences in these songs, but to point out to you what features of African Music they illustrate, for I am fully convinced, from my experience that even when Africans are singing a completely Western song, they often do so in a distinct manner and with a distinct African interpretation so that even white people who are quite familiar with the music cannot recognise it in its distorted form. And I believe that the way in which a people sing has much to do with the nature of their music. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that more harm has been done in South Africa - with the best intentions of course - to African forms of recreation than to perhaps any other sphere of their life. In their earnest zeal to uproot all that was savage and barbaric in the African life, the settler and the missionary alike stamped out or discouraged everything which they considered immoral or inconsistent with their new teaching or which interfered with their opening up of the country for development. Forms of recreation had to give way to new ideas of work or religious belief. Thus in the very laudable desire to improve the African’s status in various directions more pressing than forms of recreation, one of the most fundamental aspects of his life suffered eclipse, the coming together of young and old to participate in singing and dancing and other ceremonial functions. Today one of the commonest criticisms of African boys and girls, for example in our boarding schools, is that they are too dull and will not readily take part in games. One of the most trying jobs in such schools is to be games-master. Unless games and music are definitely included in the Time-Table they are not ready to take part

40

in them, except for just a few. One reason for this is probably the fact that many of our present day pupils are in the third generation of Christian upbringing or white contact. Years before them their grandparents and parents were being taught how to work and stop playing. While they may have learnt the lesson of the dignity of labour in a rather imperfect way, still they have also begun to teach their children that play is silvern but work is golden. And as African song was almost inextricably interwoven with play, dancing story-telling, witchcraft, hunting, fighting, wherever these forms of activity disappeared, music followed the same course. Most of the songs that have disappeared are those that dealt with the most colourful aspects of African life - songs sung at initiation and other ceremonial functions - and what43 […] relegated to the leisure part of education, if it implies that the leisure part of education is the least important, will not do for Africa. And giving music the worst periods in the school time-table, e.g. the last on Friday afternoon, will not permit out pupils to get anything of permanent value out of it. Again more attention needs to be paid to the creative side of music in African schools. There is much spontaneous singing among children during their recess periods, when going away from and coming to school, and their ability in this direction could be capitalised. What has been done by progressive schools in America and elsewhere in stimulating children to create as well as to perform music could be repeated in Africa by teachers of the right kind. The anthropologist may here find also a rich field for his science. The existence of mechanical devices such as the gramophone and the sound film may enable him to give us African music in its original setting and so give colour and life to his descriptions of various aspects of primitive life. He can preserve for us some of the emotional reactions of the people during crises in their social life and so show better than the written page can ever do the sources of the richness and the fullness, the balance and the satisfaction that the African finds in life. In music the African finds not only enjoyment but also consolation in troubles both out of his own internal life and out of juxtaposition with white people, just as the Negro found in his spirituals a way of escape from the drudgery and the persecution and the drabness of his ordinary life in the time of slavery. You can never utterly destroy the hopes of a people who can sing, and that is one reason why the African is able to survive even such things as restrictive legislation, civilised labour policies and all that goes to making his lot a most undesirable one in South Africa.

PART 2

Apartheid and Musicology

A New Era for Music and Musicians44 Edward Dunn Edward Dunn was an English-born conductor, teacher, writer and performer in his youth a clarinettist with the Hallé Orchestra. Active in municipal music organisation and adult education after he immigrated to South Africa in the mid1930s, he held posts in Durban, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pietermaritzburg, promoting orchestral and youth development. His International Arts League of Youth festivals attracted huge audiences during the post-war years. The sprawling culture of South Africa is becoming more and more restive; its somewhat gawky limbs - straggled across a sparsely populated continent - are, under the impetus of growing-pains, prodding around for a foothold to a more selfconscious and mettlesome attitude of spirit, mind and body. There is more than a stirring in the air. Youth, the world over, is identifying itself with cultural manifestation of all forms of culture. War, to a large extent, is responsible for the resurgence in music in particular. The hazards of war animate human emotion, revivify the hunger for some sort of spiritual balm and quicken our consciousness and need towards a higher valuation of the fundamentals of a brotherhood of tolerance, understanding and inspiration. These qualities belong to the ultimate essence of things, through which Man finds a large measure of happiness and peace of mind. To make humanity feel the insistent urge for these things is the lofty aspiration of your sincere artist. This revelation of art functions on the same place as religion, but, I feel, with a more impelling voice than that of either religion or philosophy. The best in music and drama provides Man with a sharpened intuitive awareness of the inevitability of spiritual illumination … Art is not an escape from life; it is an escape to life, and the appreciation of this truism is expressing itself in more tangible terms in South African than ever before. A moment ago I made a passing reference to our sparsely populated continent. Now quickly let me add that the thickening of our flanks through the influx of thousands of lusty and eager immigrants has vigorously accelerated the tempo of our ‘adolescing’ culture.45 Now the municipalities of Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth, East London, Pretoria and Pietermaritzburg are not merely flirting with music as a civic amenity but openly wooing, and, in some cases officially affianced to, a sturdily evolving policy of purposeful design.46 In these towns there is an irrepressible gravitation toward some form of resident orchestra. This is the most exciting news on our unfolding cultural history. Do your realise what this means? Let me make an attempt to explain. I avowedly believe that in the years to come

42

South Africa will become a richly productive cradle for creative arts. It virginal beauty, and - to the artist - its kaleidoscopic enchantment, is rich in the plasmic media out of which great art is born and fashioned. The customs of its peoples are in such sharp contrast that I believe South Africa will project an uniquely vibrant and distinctive idiom in its indigenous music, giving shape and form to a spiritually and materially valuable contribution to the cultures of the world.

Fig 11 Edward Dunn addressing a meeting c1950 © Museum Africa Now I do hope we can agree on one most important argument - an argument generating the motive power behind the recent conference of Civic Directors of Music,47 namely that the present haphazard processes of presenting musical artists from overseas and the absence of any co-operative plan in conducting an adequate survey of the potentialities of our young South African artists and the manner in which their learning and experience might be advanced, is producing very considerable and useless wastage in time, listening-effort and money of willing music patrons, and leakages in the perambulation and progress of musical education. […] Concert promotion is not in itself sufficient to ensure a more healthy national cultural welfare. As result of the recent conference it is clearly recognised that music, functioning as a full-time activity under civic administration, can be the most comprehensively useful medium plying in the dual capacity of educator and entertainer for the greatest communal gain. In the broad conception of the propagation of good music as a cultural service to the peoples of a country the orchestra is the framework of the structure. The orchestra completes the picture in opera, ballet, oratorios, concert-platform performances and, in its smaller divisions, chamber music. Therefore the delegates at the conference felt that it would generally be conceded that the organisations operating the existing orchestras, together with the new civic music departments shortly to be established in Bloemfontein, Port

43

Elizabeth, East London, Pretoria and Pietermaritzburg, are eminently fitted to act as arterial centres, whose music administrative departments have the necessary machinery for the co-ordinating of area musical activities and progressive musical educational projects, also concert promotion groups … The public is already levied by [the] city councils, the SABC and universities, and therefore it is felt that these organisations should provide a national framework to which all interested groups and concert-promotion bodies might be affiliated. A National Council of Music and Allied Arts is the urgent need in the interests of the public as patrons; our indigenous artists of concert-platform and stage; our young artists, and the expanding festival organisations throughout the Union. […] It is believed that this new National Council would have the resources at its disposal to envisage the introduction of an International Festival of the quality of the now world-famous events of this character in Europe. We now have the necessary orchestral forces in the Union, as provided on the occasion of the visit to this country of Sir Thomas Beecham. Each province in turn would provide the stage for this great annual pageant of the arts, bringing to South Africa the cream of the world’s greatest in music and the allied arts. Imagine what this would mean in providing opportunities for our own composers and foremost South African artists. The expression to all these ideals is only possible through the decisions of the recent Bloemfontein conference that a congress shall be staged in December of this year to which representatives will be invited from all the above organisations, for the purpose of designing a blue-print of the proposed National Council of Music and Allied Arts. The conference accepted the invitation of the Durban City Council to hold this vital congress in Durban.

The State of Folk Music in Bantu Africa48 Hugh Tracey Hugh Tracey was born in England and emigrated to then Southern Rhodesia after World War 1, to farm. Once he discovered the richness of indigenous music, and inspired by the work of European and American folklorists, he began in the 1930s to record African music and develop extensive projects for documenting and researching it throughout subSaharan Africa. In 1954 he established the International Library of African Music based on his growing collection of recordings and instruments (now the largest collection of subSaharan recordings in the world), and founded the African Music Society Newsletter (later Journal) in the same year. We Europeans are at a great disadvantage in talking about African music. Unlike most other members of this Conference49 we do not represent or discuss our own music but that of a people radically unlike ourselves among whom we live. It is only because we have found that the African is pathetically incapable of defending his own culture and indeed is largely indifferent to its fate that we, who subscribe wholeheartedly to the ideals of our International Council, are attempting to tide over the period during which irreparable damage can be done and until Africans themselves will be capable of appearing at our conference as wellinformed representatives of their own peoples. Three facets of Bantu music Africa, south of the equator, is a fine country for music. It contains a population of about sixty million Bantu peoples … After a few hundred years of comparative isolation the famous explorers of the last century opened up the continent to commercial, religious, mineral and agricultural enterprises, each of which has affected the lives and consequently the music of the indigenous peoples. But the invasion is by no means complete and to-day we have three facets of Bantu music side by side: the original folk music, which is still the music of the great majority, and is far more active than some would have us believe; music in decay, eclipsed both by foreign prejudice and by indigenous gullibility; and thirdly, music in reconstruction, a state of affairs in which the melting pot is throwing up new forms of music, good, bad and indifferent, all of them strongly coloured by intrinsically African characteristics. All three stages should be borne in mind when contemplating Bantu music. To take them in order - first the folk music.

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Folk music All the many Bantu musics, like the tribes themselves, share a common heritage, but each has developed its own individuality in strict segregation from the rest of the race. This is what makes the study of Bantu music so fascinating. Before white people arrived in the interior of Africa the tribes were in a continual state of mutual hostility and it was unwise if not fatal for a member of any one tribe to wander outside his own territory unarmed. Lines of communication were limited to internal footpaths and a few navigable rivers. The stronger tribes claimed the fertile valleys and plains, the weaker were crowded up into the hills or to the edge of the deserts. Here, of course, environment played its part in determining the kind of musical instruments the tribe would be able to play.50 […] There is one characteristic all African musics share in common: practicality. The music of pre-literate peoples is not always artistic, maybe, but it is invariably practical. Every piece of folk music works for its living. However aesthetically pleasing it may have been in its day, once its keen edge is blunted and it no longer achieves its purpose, whether it be the direction of thought into spiritual channels or feet into dance routines, it is abandoned by the rising generation and lost irrevocably in the wilderness of no memory. […] For the general majority of Bantu people, songs take the place of, shall we say, the correspondence columns of our newspapers and are the chief means of moulding public opinion. You can say in song or verse what you could not say in prose without giving offence. Here, then, we find the artist and musician playing his essential part in the integration of society. He is the jester who reflects the opinions of the ‘right thinking’ man or woman, the arbiter of the decencies and the opponent of excesses in chief or commoner - in other words, the upholder of the spirit of continuity and solidarity in tribal or social life. For his songs to be effective there must also be continuity of artistic style - a continuity or gradual proceeding of symbolism through which the common people may participate without hesitation. In this way they feel they are taking part in the intangible realities which give meaning to the rest of life, compensate for distress and, indeed, create that sense of well-being without which life at any economic level is not worth while. It is, surely, the quality of this artistic symbolism which determines the degree of culture. On the other hand, it is care and preservation of cultural symbols which determines the degree of civilisation. Many of our Bantu are cultured but few would yet qualify for the right to be called civilised by these standards. The preoccupation of our International Folk Music Council one believes to be just that: to assure continuity for all cultures in a changing world and thus directly to contribute to the well-being of society. This brings us to the second aspect of Bantu music in our time, that of music in decay.

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Music in decay Left to itself, there is no reason to suppose that Bantu music would have either progressed or declined. It would merely have proceeded in step with its creators, reflecting their actual mental state and their capacity for this form of art. But once the floodgates of Western and other foreign intrusions had been opened, there was an immediate change for the worse. The Bantu bends to every wind that whistles and, lacking that sense of proportion which creates a civilisation, his whole culture was exposed and vulnerable to attack by determined proselytisers, both progressisists and priests. These two, with the highest and most impeccable motives, paved the way for the merchant, the employer of labour, the creator of towns and mixed communities, the educators or those who cared little for the intrinsic African. He was to be made better spiritually or better economically, better educated and better clothed. His culture did not matter; it was, they considered, beneath contempt. He was in future to be useful, civilised and saved. With what results? Wherever this process has most succeeded there is a sorry state of affairs. Original forms of music and dancing give place to imitations of foreign styles, the arts lose their meaning and their contribution to social integration is wasted. Taste is destroyed and licence extolled. Violence is the quality in a ‘cowboy’ film which is most admired and the songs of the bawdy house eclipse all others. They have sales value. Nor is it the merchant only who undermines the function of folk culture. Social workers, teachers and missionaries unwittingly create new complications in order, they think, to induce moral or spiritual virtue through the ancient device of associating what to them are uplifting strains of music with each new lesson in ethics. Sinner and saint go hand in hand to destroy a continent’s taste in music, and the victim heartily enjoys them both, adding unexpected little quirks of his own; a brand of stark realism to his new love songs and a shuffling of the feet in the hymns not written into the original text. He surprises and alarms his mentors who indeed have started something which neither has the power to curb. Now comes the third stage. Music in reconstruction In those parts of the country most affected, the old songs have gone. They are considered to be socially inferior, out of date, heathen and primitive. ‘New style’, ‘cowboy’, ‘jive’ is the new mental level of the emancipated. Hymns for work songs, Victorian quartets for choirs, everything remade simple with tonic solfa. But that is not the whole picture. Reaction sets in. The minds which gave rise to the old styles of performance, the old and more responsible ways of using music as a social corrective gradually creep in again. They are hardly recognisable at first but little by little they make their presence felt. The three common chords51 have created a dead level of mediocrity in nearly every song, religious or secular, but strange things are happening to the rhythms. Musical monotony is coming into its

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own again as their secret dynamo against drudgery; preference is being given unconsciously to those foreign tunes with some element of Africa in their parentage. Morality songs in spite of their four-part harmonies are sung in the old modes; social solidarity creeps back as the main theme of singing groups and, for those with cash to spare, the guitar takes over the accompaniment with drums and rattles as before and a kind of Bantu calypso is the response to this now universal instrument. The continuity of their musical symbolism remains broken, but the old mentality is beginning to reassert itself and to grope for new clothes which will fit once more. This is the stage of present-day popular music in the towns. Much of the old styles of music has gone but much still remains. Whole tribes have lost what music they had and can only regain a Bantu culture if they can bring themselves to think inter-tribally - a difficult proposition for tribesmen who have received nothing but hostility from their fellow Bantu all down the centuries. The white man has been their only friend, a friend who, from their point of view, has been regrettably friendly with all the other tribes also. Conclusion […] [W]e, in the African Music Society, must needs devise some means of protecting Bantu and other African folk musics until the indigenous people themselves have developed that civilised ability to treasure what is theirs by birthright. We propose to do so by the establishment of an inter-territorial Library of African Music to which all the countries south of the Sahara will be asked to contribute and from which they will be able to obtain copies of Africa’s best recordings from all over the continent.52 In this way we may bridge the gap between the first stage of folk music and the third of social reconstruction. By capturing something of the vitality of present-day folk composers in our recordings we may yet fire the imagination of those African musicians who will help their people to stand up to the vicissitudes of the industrial revolution which is sweeping across the continent. At present, research work in Bantu music is almost exclusively undertaken by foreigners and until Africans have made their choice between the gay creative personality of their own music or the drab proletarian grey in imitation of others, there will be little chance of Africans themselves making any serious contribution to the deliberations and achievements of our International Folk Music Council.

Columbia Dance Hall, Marabastad53 Ezekiel Mphahlele Ezekiel Mphahlele was born and raised in Cape Location, Pretoria. Barred from teaching, he became a reporter for Drum Magazine and was exiled because of his outspoken views on apartheid. He lived in Nigeria, France and the US, and his early life is documented in the autobiography Down Second Avenue. On returning to South Africa in 1977 he was refused the Chair of English at the University of the North and was then appointed by the University of the Witwatersrand, first as Research Fellow and from 1979 as Professor of African literature. Mphahlele has published numerous essays, short stories, novels and other writings. Columbia Hall cuddled in the centre of a row of Indian houses in the Asiatic Bazaar, just wedged between Marabastad and the Cape Coloured Reserve. It was an old building, with sooty walls that were painted and repainted time after time to give the deception of attractiveness. On either side of the low platform that was meant to be a stage, was a door leading to a lounge room that covered the breadth of the hall in length and was partitioned into cubicles, each fitted with a couch. The lights of the Columbia were never bright. We often did odd jobs in the hall for the manager for pocket money, and breathlessly we examined every part of the interior. Breathlessly, because few parents liked the sound of the name ‘Columbia’. We were told in doubtful terms that it was an evil place where immoral practices went on behind the cloak of a dance or concert. Boys who were not tethered to their homes told us gleefully what dancers and concert performers did in the cubicles backstage. The men paid money for the convenience of using the couches with their girls. At the sight of the couches, my head turned round, aflame with all sorts of pictures, and I promised myself the opportunity of finding out what it was grandmother and Aunt Dora didn’t want us to see. That is, if I should get the chance of attending a function. The opportunity came. Talking pictures had just arrived in Pretoria. A new Indian-owned bioscope hall, the Star Picture Palace, opened for the first time in the Asiatic Bazaar with a showing of The Singing Fool, featuring Al Jolson. Excited crowds flocked at the cinema to see the new wonder in the history of the film. We were permitted to go - my little uncle and I, escorted by an older uncle and Aunt Dora. Every night there was something on at the Columbia. What better night could there be for going there? But then I doted on the movies, and it would break my heart to hear the other boys recall among themselves what they had seen at the Picture Palace. I had a little money I had made at the market, and I could afford the admission fee of a shilling at the Columbia. So, once I had been given my ticket, I lost myself in the crowd and dashed to the Columbia just round the block. There would be an introductory programme of shots and a silent film before Al Jolson.

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I was let into the Columbia. I came face to face with the U-NO-MES dance band, whose music had before only floated to our ears as we passed the hall; violently, noisily, but vigorously. Thinking back on it now I remember the sad note of depravity, self-abandon, sweet, sensuous dissipation ‘Marabi’ jazz sounded. The small jazz combos like U-NO-MES and the Merrymakers beat out a new two-tothe-bar jazz, the second note in which was accentuated by a bang on the drum. The name ‘Marabi’ came from Marabastad. From there it went to the Reef. Handbills in pink or green or white could be seen on electric poles and rusted corrugated-iron walls which read: THINGS ARE UPSIDE-DOWN! AND WHY? ’CAUSE THERE’S GALORE SENSATIONAL, FANTASTICAL, SCINTILLATING, REVERBERATING JAZZ EXTRAVAGANZA BRING YOUR GAL, SPIN YOUR GAL FOR THE PALPITATING MARABI RHYTHM OF U-NO-MES AT A DAYYBREAK DANCE AT COLUMBIA EVERY NIGHT I stood against the wall in that misty hall of dim lights. Couples clung to each other very tightly, swayed sideways and backwards and forwards at the hips. Their faces were wet with perspiration. Occasionally a man or girl wiped it off with the back of the hand. They swayed to the monotonous tune, seeming to hear or see nothing, lost in the savagery of the band’s music. They might even be blissfully unaware of the fact that just round the block, Al Jolson was bringing the magic of the age - the sound film. I continued to stand there, drinking in all the dust that rose from the concrete floor, the dim lights, the smell of perspiration and tobacco smoke. That was the Columbia, the name that spelled horror and damnation to those who concerned themselves with human conduct. Then I saw them. The couples, dancing through the doors to the lounge backstage, clinging to each other, carrying and pushing each other along. I felt a solid lump shoot up and then down my throat. The palms of my hands were damp with sweat against the wall. And I dashed out and made for the cinema, my knees shaking from a feeling of guilt. If any of my people should find out … I enjoyed Al Jolson all the same. A few weeks later we saw Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. TALKING, SINGING, DANCING became familiar labels on cinema hoardings. At first, I was a little uneasy at the prospect of going out of business. The boys wouldn’t need my services any more as reader of the titles on the screen. They’d have to listen to the dialogue. But soon I drowned my little fears in the novelty and expediency of it all.

Ocarina Music of the Venda54 John Blacking English born, John Anthony Randall Blacking served in Malaya during the 2nd World War before studying Social Anthropology at Cambridge and music ethnology in Paris. In 1953 he emigrated to South Africa to work under Hugh Tracey at the International Library of African Music, including a two-year period of fieldwork on Venda music (1956-58). After a spell as Professor and Head of Social Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Blacking took up a position at Queen's University of Belfast in 1970, where he remained until his death. Blacking’s ‘cultural analysis’ of music as articulation of societal and human values was widely disseminated through many publications, including Venda Children’s Songs (1967), How Musical is Man? (1973), and ‘A Common-Sense View of all Music’: Reflections on Percy Grainger’s Writings on Ethnomusicology and Music Education (1987). In studying the music of a society, one of the first tasks is to discover the structural principles which underlie the musicians’ creation of sound-patterns. Where there is no system of musical notation, analysis must inevitably be preceded by accurate transcriptions of the music performed. In a recent discussion of the problems of musical transcription, Veenstra stresses that “more thought” should be given “to scientific method”, and maintains that a musical score is music “to be performed”, whilst a transcription of a recording is music “already in existence”; he advocates special notation for transcriptions, the use of “dual-beam oscillographs” and other commendable techniques, but he does not discuss the function of musical transcriptions (Veenstra 1958, 44). Even the most meticulous transcription of one performance of a single item of music is surely not evidence enough to justify an analysis of the structure of the music. Jones has already shown (Jones 1959 Vol. 1, 234 ff) how two good singers may perform the same song differently; and even two performances of the same music by the same performer may differ. Unless we are specifically studying interpretation, we want to know what a musician sets out to do each time he plays a certain piece of music, not exactly what he did on one particular occasion.55 ‘Time-pitch’ graphs and other mechanical devices may be helpful and necessary for the ethno-musicologist in the course of his analysis, but the final transcription should, if possible, be as straightforward and as easy to read as a standard musical score, which in any case is only a guide to musical performance and an approximation of the sounds produced. The four musical transcriptions (see Ex 6) do not represent the exact sounds that are made every time two Venda boys play ocarina duets, but are a synthesis of several performances of the same duets. Detailed transcriptions of every performance that I heard or recorded are not given, since I do not consider that the

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early stages of an analysis need be printed any more than the field-notes of an anthropologist. The transcriptions are intended to represent the musical patterns desired by any two Venda who set out to play the duets. Venda ocarinas The Venda ocarina (tshipotoliyo, pl. zwipotoliyo) has not, to my knowledge, been previously reported. Van Warmelo mentions the word tshipotoliyo in his Venda Dictionary (1937), but describes it as a “reed-flute of herd-boys”, an alternative name for tshitiringo, which is a three-holed transverse flute. During the course of my fieldwork in Venda-land,56 however, I only heard the Venda use the word tshipotoliyo to describe an ocarina and all old people whom I questioned assured me that it had not been recently borrowed from the Tsonga, who live next to and amongst the Venda, and whose shiwaya ocarina has been reported by Kirby (1934, 128 and Plate 44). […]

Fig 12 Diagrams of two Venda ocarinas, drawn to scale. A. Made from a ‘kaffir-orange’. B. Made from a wild custard apple. Type A is rarely seen in Vendaland The tunes which the Venda play on zwipotoliyo are not complex, and the melodies are much influenced by the physical properties of the instrument. The largest of the three holes is always used as an embouchure, across which the breath is directed as in playing the transverse flute, and the two smaller holes are stopped in one of two ways: A. The instrument is held in the left hand and the holes are stopped with the thumb and first finger, or the first and second fingers; B. The instrument is held in both hands, and the holes are stopped with the two index fingers. For the best results, the instrument should be thoroughly soaked in water before playing. Four tones can quite easily be produced (see Ex 5).

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              

1

 1

2

3

4



5

Ex 5 Fingering and approximate tones produced on ocarinas Nos. 1 and 5. 1. With both fingers on the holes. 2. With ‘left’ finger off (i.e. thumb or first finger in position A). 3. With both fingers off. 4. With both fingers on, but tilting the instrument towards the mouth and downwards, so that a larger area of the top hole is covered by the lower lip Since the two smaller holes are supposed to be the same size, there is generally no difference between the notes produced by lifting either the ‘left’ or ‘right’ finger. […] When wild custard apples (thuzwu) are in season, between December and July, boys make zwipotoliyo, especially when they are out herding. I never saw nor heard of girls playing them. The size of thuzwu does not vary greatly, so that the compass of most zwipotoliyo lies within the notes c” and f”’. Several instruments are generally made at the same time, because duets are played more often than solos, and therefore it is necessary to select pairs of instruments which sound well together. […] The melodies of both parts A and B in the ocarina duets [Ex 6] begin on the instruments’ ‘fundamental’ tone, with both finger-holes closed; the entries of part B, especially in Tunes I and II, present few difficulties to the player. The periods of four beats in Tunes I, II, and of eight in Tunes III and IV are the most common in Venda music, and the use of polyrhythm in Tune IV (3 beats in part B against 2 in part A) is a standard technique. The symmetrical musical phrases of both parts are, like the rising fanfare melodies, unique in Venda music, where chorus and solo parts are very rarely of equal length and even then they are not regularly ‘staggered’, as they are in these ocarina duets. […] Another important feature of the duets, which is found in other items of African music, is what I have called the ‘root-progression’; the duets are held together structurally by a canto fermo which moves a whole-tone above and below a tone which may be regarded as a ‘tonal centre’. Combined with the unresolved ‘harmonic’ progression, this gives the music the quality of perpetual motion, and there is no point which might be called a cadence. The Venda either stop playing abruptly at the end of a phrase, regardless of the harmonic implications, or they

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prolong the lowest note of the root-progression; this ending is unexpected and harmonically unprepared, but similar endings are found in other musical traditions. […] The relationship between the melodies of ocarinas A and B (Ex 5), and the reasons why my informants preferred this to all other combinations, may be best explained by analysing the ‘harmonic’ framework which seems to underlie the duets. The patterns of many other Venda melodies may be similarly explained in terms of basic ‘harmonic’ progressions, and I have heard much music from other parts of Africa where the same principles apply. It might be argued that because of my own training in Western music, I am trying to fit Venda melodies, that are conceived as pure melody, into an ‘harmonic’ framework which simply does not exist in the minds of the performers. My contention is that this ‘harmonic’ framework does exist, at any rate in the minds of Venda musicians, and I offer my informants’ choice of ocarinas as evidence of this.57

Ex 6 Transcriptions of four duets played on ocarinas 1 and 5 [Fig 12] (contd. on next page).

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Ex 6 (contd.) Transcriptions of four duets played on ocarinas 1 and 5 [Fig 12]. Ocarina 1 (marked A) plays the part of chanter (musimi), and ocarina 5 (marked B) plays the chorus (bvumeli). Some players vary the melodies by repeating notes quickly (marked X-X in the transcription); the effect is rather like that of flutter-tonguing

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(In the ensuing discussion, I wish to make it clear that when I speak of ‘fifths’, ‘fourths’ and other intervals, I refer to approximate intervals. I have not yet been able to make enough accurate measurements to establish the intervallic norms, if any, of Venda music.) When more than one Venda sings, and especially in antiphonal music for solo and chorus, parallel singing and the use of intervals of the octave, fourth and fifth, may occur. When these intervals are used, the movement of the melody remains the dominant feature of the music. There are, however, three other intervals which are sometimes used, and they create tension and add ‘harmonic’ significance to the melody; these are the third (generally minor), and more especially the tritone and the minor seventh. The melodies of much Venda music appear to be based on an implicit ‘harmonic’ framework; the individual melodies of the ocarina tunes, however, are clearly influenced by the physical resources of the instrument, but when they are combined for duets, ‘harmonic’ interest is added by the production of points of more or less tension. Thus in all four tunes (see Ex 6), the points of least tension are at 1, 3, 5 and 7, where the two parts combine to produce the interval of a fourth. 2, 8, 2a, and 4a are points of greater tension, where intervals of a tritone, a minor third and a minor seventh are used. 4, 6, and 4b are points of implicit tension; for although unisons and fifths are used, the structure of the melodies and their ‘harmonic’ progressions does not allow these to be treated as points of rest. A summary of the ‘harmonic’ structure of the tunes is given below [Ex 7]. In most recordings of the duets, especially those of Tunes III and IV, what I have called the ‘root-progressions’ emerge very clearly as pillars in the patterns of sound. The regular movement of the root-progression a whole-tone above or below a tone which may be called the ‘tonal centre’ of the progression, is a feature of much Venda music. Similar progressions are found in the music of the Chopi of Moçambique, the Luba and Kanyoka of the Belgian Congo and several other African societies, and even in the Tonic-Subdominant-Dominant strumming that one often hears on guitars and old pianos. For the Venda, the shift of tonality implicit in the movement of the root-progressions appears to be the most important structural feature of the music.

          

A



C1

           B

      C2

or

   

C3

Ex 7. A. Actual ‘harmonic’ framework of Tune I. Root-progressions are shown with black notes. B. Basic ‘harmonic’ framework implicit in all four tunes. ClC3. Root-progressions of Tunes II, III and IV

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If we judge the duets by the principles of European classical music, however, we cannot say that any one of the notes of the root-progressions in Ex 7 is equivalent in function to the Tonic; c#”’ is really the Tonic of all four tunes. Since the ‘chords’ on g#” in the transcriptions have the effect of a second inversion of a chord on the Tonic c#”’, they provide only a temporary point of rest, and the music is always thrust on to the next point of tension. The combination of regularly moving root-progressions and unresolved ‘harmonies’ gives the music that quality of perpetual motion, which is a prominent feature of much African music. Very often, the music continues until it is stopped suddenly and without any musical preparation; each player or singer may break off at the end of a phrase, and since (because of the polyrhythmic basis of so much African music) these phrases rarely coincide, there is no point which might be compared to the Western cadence. The Venda sometimes finish a tune by prolonging (-kokodza = lit. to pull) a certain note; for instance, in Tunes I and II, my informants often prolonged the f#” at point 4. Harmonically, of course, this cadence is quite unexpected and out of keeping with the pattern of the music. It is only comprehensible if we consider it in relation to the root-progressions; after weaving above and below the tonal centre of g#”, the root-progression finally descends to f#”, which thus becomes a point of rest. Such unexpected endings occur in many of the items of African music that have been recorded by the International Library of African Music (Sound of Africa series); they are often heard in jazz music, and Kirby reports (Kirby 1930, 412 and 414) similar endings in the songs of American Negroes.

King Kong58 Mona de Beer Mona de Beer was born in the then Transvaal and lived in the Cape and overseas. A journalist, magazine editor and author of several books on South African art and history, her first husband was SA-born, UK-resident composer Stanley Glasser, through whom she became closely involved with the production of King Kong. At the time of her death she was married to politician Zac de Beer. King Kong was a success. How much of a success, though, was not realized until the rave reviews appeared in the newspapers, and until the booking agency ‘Show Service’ found itself inundated … enormous queues forming hourly outside their Eloff Street offices. Queues went right along the arcade, into Eloff Street and around the corner into Jeppe Street. More than five thousand bookings came in by post. Telephone bookings were made from as far as a thousand miles away and from every part of the country. Special buses were hired by groups who travelled from towns within a radius of three hundred miles. Johannesburg cinemas were phoning Show Services to ask when King Kong was to end, as their attendance figures were being affected. The Post Office complained several times about congestion on Show Service telephone lines … The tunes blared forth from gramophone shops and over the transmission services of the green ‘African’ buses. They penetrated every back alley and to the servants’ quarters throughout the town. […] Bloke Modisane, writing in Drum (April 1959) said: “King Kong … is the wonderful fulfilment of a great expectation. Not just because it is a brave experiment or the ‘first’. Nor does its being pure South African necessarily endow it with a ‘home product’ halo. No excuses, partisan or otherwise, are needed to pass it off as good”.

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Fig 13 Miriam Makeba and Nathan Mdledle in King Kong, 1959 © Bailey’s African Archives […] One of Ian’s59 major problems was to fill the break between the March closing and the April reopening …60 The fears of the organizers in letting the cast disperse and then collecting them together were very real. There was also the obligation to keep them on the payroll while they were not working. Many had been given leave or had given up their jobs entirely when full-time rehearsal pay began. The obvious

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step seemed to be to take the show to Pretoria. It was sufficiently near to warrant striking the set and moving everything and everyone for the short free period until the Johannesburg run could be resumed. Ian applied to the Pretoria City Council for permission to use the City Hall, and was refused. Similarly the University of Pretoria did not want to make their auditorium available. In a letter to the Star of 20 February, the ‘Afrikaanse Kultuurraad’ [Afrikaans Culture Board] expressed its appreciation of the firm step taken by Pretoria’s City Council and University. The ‘Board of Culture’ added that they did not want in any way to stand in the path of the Bantu in the development of his culture - if (in the instance concerned) it could be called ‘culture’. […] The Pretoria City Council finally offered to erect a tent in the Agricultural Show Grounds. Ian gave Pretoria up as a bad job and set about making the arrangements for Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth.

Africa, Music, and Show Business61 Dollar Brand [Abdullah Ibrahim] Abdullah Ibrahim [born Dollar Brand] is a jazz composer-pianist, whose music has played as defining a role in South African jazz as Ellington’s in the US. His music and life have spanned two worlds: American jazz and music of his birthplace (Cape Town) and other African traditions. He spent many years in exile, mostly in New York, and now divides his time between there and Cape Town. VI blues for district six early one new year’s morning when the emerald bay waved its clear waters against the noisy dockyard a restless south easter skipped over slumbering lion’s head danced up hanover street tenored a bawdy banjo strung an ancient cello bridged a host of guitars tambourined through a dingy alley into a scented cobwebbed room and crackled the sixth sensed district into a blazing swamp fire of satin sound early one new year’s morning when the moaning bay mourned its murky waters against the deserted dockyard a bloodthirsty south easter roared over hungry lion’s head and ghosted its way up hanover street empty forlorn and cobwebbed with gloom

VII where loneliness’ still waters meet nostalgia and morning breaks the city sun and smoke and towering grey the buildings murmur grim subway rumblings in their roots i scan the vacant faces and sad smiles and long for home

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the night my soul had herringed red through raucous songs of childhood: and friends and comic stories long forgotten were whiskied out of memories dim to function as narcotic and silence cruel reality as it screamed it’s neither here nor there i’m hemisphered but three the southern cross and libran scale and god knows he knows where

Tonal Organisation in Venda Initiation Music62 John Blacking I hold the view that although varieties of natural, social, and cultural environment can stimulate the creation of an infinite variety of forms, the processes by which these forms are produced are limited by the capacities of the human organism. In other words, all possible processes are contained in the physiology of the body and the central nervous system, and human thought and action must always be an extension and adaptation of these processes, an unfolding of inner feelings, actions, and thoughts in an infinite variety of cultural environments which in themselves are products of these processes. […] Although I do not attempt to use the techniques of linguistic analysis, I sometimes use its terminology. For example, what I described as ‘principals’ in Venda Children’s Songs [1967] I now call ‘rules’. This does not imply that the terms have the same meaning as in linguistic analysis. On the other hand, it is not necessary to use a new word for musical transformations: they may not work in exactly the same way as linguistic transformations, but they are transformations. Although I call this kind of analysis Cultural Analysis (Blacking 1967, 191-98), it is no less a formal analysis of music sound. Similarities of tonal and rhythmic patterns within the body of songs discussed are essential data in discovering rules that are applicable to Venda music; but their similarity is always considered in the context of Venda culture and not as sound per se. […] The Venda national dance, tshikona, is for them their most important music (Blacking 1965, 37, 52); it expresses the values of the largest social group to which a tribal Venda belongs, its performance involves the largest number of people, and its music incorporates the largest number of tones. As many as three hundred men may play at once, but even if they use only one set of twenty-four pipes and three drums, the music still covers a wider range of tone and timbre than any other Venda music. I have already shown how tshikona may be taken as a model to explain the characteristic melodic patterns of some children's songs (Blacking 1967). In using it again as a model to elucidate Venda rules of tonality and harmony I must emphasize that I do not assume that other items of music are necessarily derived from tshikona. I suggest that tshikona and these other items of music are modelled on the same set of rules; but since tshikona demonstrates their application most dramatically, it may serve as a powerful analytical tool. In particular, since the reed-pipes are named (Kirby 1933; 1934, 155-62), their musical function in tshikona may provide important clues to the identification of modes and their tonality. Given a fixed scale (mutavha) of twenty-four tones, one can obviously select from it seven heptatonic modes as a basis of creating melodies. If a person

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trained, say, in the Ambrosian or Gregorian systems of plainsong comes to listen to these melodies, he will be inclined to interpret them in terms of a known set of rules and will identify the modes by their dominant and final tones. Such evaluations can indeed be made of Venda melodies, but they would be irrelevant and incorrect in the context of Venda music. […] In the chords of the harmonic progression common to both tshikona and khulo, the process may be summarised as follows: the overall tonic is D, but tonality shifts regularly between D and its leading note E. During every two such tonal shifts there is one harmonic progression from a strong tonic to a strong leading note. Thus tonally and harmonically the strongest parts in the pattern are the first and last chords, in which the tonic and the leading note respectively play their tonal roles. This is illustrated in Ex 8. The music of domba illustrates the working of another rule which applies to several Venda melodies. The master of initiation begins the solo call on the E of the last chord of khulo and descends a fifth to the A of the fourth chord. The khulo pattern continues and is repeated, and the master begins the next solo call on the final chord. The rule is that the tonality of the call is centred around the leading note, while the chorus establishes the tonic or final of the mode. This is perfectly logical when one considers that very often only the chorus responses of the songs are sung, particularly when novices are practising ndayo movements. Thus the chorus must establish the tonality of the mode, for otherwise a performance could have no established tone-centre.

 

 

Harmonic Progression

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ex 8 and Fig 14 The harmonic and tonal progressions of tshikona and khulo, showing the shift of maximum tonal power from tonic (D) to leading note (E), and back to tonic. The rectangles symbolise shifts of tonality, and the changing thickness of the wedge illustrates the decrease and increase of the tonal power of the tonic and leading note, which is achieved by the harmonic progression of the chords

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It may be argued that in using tshikona and domba as models for understanding the songs of girls’ initiation I am imposing on the music a preconceived system which will distort its meaning as much as would the use of European musical theory. To this I can only say that after trying to understand the melodies from many points of view, I found that the use of these models was able to reduce numerous inconsistencies; and secondly, as I have already mentioned, it is not the structures of tshikona and domba as much as the rules that underlie those structures which I expect to find present in the music of the girls’ schools. One example will illustrate the kind of difficulty that arises in trying to analyze Venda melodies on the basis of their surface structure and show why the deeper harmonic progressions are more important to the Venda than the precise composition of the tone-rows used. As a result of changes in speech-tone, following changes in words, or of limitations in the range of a voice, an apparently pentatonic melody may he converted into a hexatonic melody. For example,

       

  

       

  



may become



To describe the melody as basically hexatonic would be misleading, and to describe its tonality as pentatonic would be wrong, because the harmony from which the extra tone is derived is inconceivable within the limits of a pentatonic scale. The B’s should really be regarded as passing notes, and we could say that the basic mode is

      

but the tone-row used is

 









In other words, the apparent simplicity of a melody may conceal the greater complexity of the musical structure on which it must be based. I have illustrated this in connection with Venda children’s songs (Blacking 1967), where I showed

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that the patterns of some four-tone melodies presuppose the existence of the idea of two heptatonic modes moving together at the interval of a fifth (i.e., as in tshikona).

Reminiscences of Healdtown63 Joseph Scotch Coko Joseph Scotch Coko was a student at Healdtown Training Institution in the eastern Cape between 1915 and 1919. After returning to live in his home in Grahamstown he met Amy Ayliff Goss, daughter of his parents’ one-time employer, and subsequently corresponded with her from 1948 until his death in 1963. His letters abound in references to his education at Healdtown and perceptions of music in African society. When the late Mr Farrington64 arrived to conduct music exams he spent two to three weeks at the institution. He examined us on every point of music in mass or individually. Mr Caley65 took us on the modulator. We stood in a big semi-circle beside his house and took turns on the modulator. One boy said in an undertone, ‘Chaps, I see no way of passing this, I know some tunes but the Modulator is full of D T L S F M etc., and I don’t know whether I’ll point a correct note’.66 His turn came and as the fellows were giggling the first note he shanked on was a d, and Mr Caley said, ‘Failed’. He placed the pointer on the table and said, ‘What did I tell you chaps’. We all laughed except Mr Caley who didn’t see the joke and threatened to write opposite each name ‘Failed’.

Fig 15 Certificate of the London Tonic Sol-fa College 1898 © Museum Africa

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Mr Farrington’s last day was to assemble the Training School in the Church [with] Mr Caley as Conductor. That was a big day as the two traders near the Institution all came to hear us sing. Mr Caley was always at his best then. Mr Farrington would close his eyes as if asleep and yet he was wide awake. After finishing the two or three songs he would stand up and point out mistakes, then he would take us on hand sign singing. Boys right hand and girls left hand and he sang tenor. What a voice! He stopped just when we still needed more and so had the listeners. I may be wrong, but I think I have the majority on my side when I say I regard the Methodists, especially my people, as very good singers. I don’t know much about Europeans, but I have heard the late Mr Oswald Bennett’s tenor and Mrs Harry Sole. Both were good. […] When I was at Lovedale,67 I was very disappointed with Church singing, even the students’ choir was just fair. I asked the conductor why he couldn’t get them singing nicely … He said, ‘Please don’t make any comparison with Healdtown, these people can’t sing and yet I have chosen the best voices’. […] Another man who sang bass beautifully was Professor Jabavu68 - a first class musician - could play piano and violin. He was a bit showy … No wonder the ruling politicians say ‘Black Englishman’ … Once a [term] we had musical night at Boys School. The girls came down. The staff and their European friends never missed it. There were choirs but the Transkei fellows liked choirs and town fellows preferred solos. One or two of the African staff, male, would sing a solo. […] ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ was written, if memory serves, during Dr Hertzog’s Bill and also the song ‘iVoti’ [The Vote].69 Later a Zulu musician put the words into music and I believe [it] was first sung by the Zulu people. Its origin is the Xhosa written by S.E.K. Rune Mqhayi and the latter song and words by B.K.T. Tyamzashe. I took it for granted when it was sung at the close of each function instead of ‘God Save the King’. My recollection of the words are very hazy and am asking one of the teachers at the Secondary School to loan me Imibengo where I think it appears (Imibengo - An Anthology of Xhosa Prose and Verse). […] I had a bit of trouble getting ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’. The young moderns didn’t know a thing about it. A Mr Mdledle who was in the same class as I at Healdtown, now a retired teacher, told me to seek a copy of the Drum magazine which may supply me with the information I needed. […] It was 1957, the time of the Bus Boycott. Fares had been pushed too high, so the people were walking to work and back from their homes in Alexandra, nine miles from Johannesburg. And, at the close of each day, their walking done, they’d gather and listen to speeches, then sing. ‘Nkosi, Sikelel’ iAfrika … / Lord Bless

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Africa’ … The words and music rang in the evening air, as they had rung all over South Africa in times of happiness, sorrow, peace and crisis. […] After its adoption as a close-of-meeting anthem at gatherings of Africans throughout the country, the song caught the imagination of people in the North. Today it is the national Anthem of the new Tanganyika and, as Drum reported last month, it is sung at the close of gatherings in the Rhodesias. On another level, it has been adopted as the anthem of the Transkei when the South African Government goes ahead with its plan for so-called ‘independent Transkei state’ within South Africa.70 […] Evening Post, July 18, 1963 African anthem in three versions Cape Town - The version given by Mr De Wet Nel of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ appears like a subtle attempt at brainwashing now that two other versions of the anthem have come to light. Altogether there are three different versions in existence and if no clarity is reached soon Transkei independence might be born in a clash of words and accents. No one appears to know which is the right version of the anthem. Two different versions have come from Government sources. The original one is from Mr De Wet Nel and the other from the Department of Information in its publication, Bantu. Bantu is now official magazine of the Bantu Affairs Department, but it is Government inspired. The anthem was composed in 1897 by Mr Enoch Sontonga, a Thembu who was a teacher in Johannesburg. Mr Sontonga’s words were: Lord bless Africa / Let its horn be lifted, / Hear our prayers, / Lord bless Africa / Lord bless Africa. / Come O Spirit, / Bless O Lord, bless, / Come O Spirit, / Bless O Lord, bless, / Come O Spirit, / Thou Holy Spirit, / Lord bless us, we your dependants. Other version Mr De Wet Nel’s version is: Lord bless Africa, / Bless our tribal chiefs, / And let them remember and fear the Creator, / Bless the men of the tribe and the young boys. / Bless the mothers of the tribe and the young girls. / Bless the ministers and the mission societies. / Bless the land and our stock and drive away the hunger. / Bless Africa.71

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70

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Ex 9 ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ as sung during the mid-1980s at mass meetings in Durban (transcr. C. Lucia)

Princess Constance Magogo72 David Rycroft David Rycroft was born in Durban of English parentage and moved to London in 1952 where he was appointed Lecturer in Bantu Languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He remained at SOAS until his retirement in 1987 and then became Editor of the Galpin Society Journal. He was a composer as well as prolific writer in the fields of African linguistics and ethnomusicology, and was one of the first Southern African scholars to research urban twentieth-century African music. Born at the Usuthu royal homestead at Nongoma in 1900,73 Princess Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu kaCetshwayo kaMpande kaSenzangakhona is a direct descendent of the Zulu royal lineage. Her father was the late Paramount Chief Dinuzulu (1868-1913, son of King Cetshwayo, son of Mpande, Son of Senzangakhona and brother of Shaka and Dingane). Princess Magogo was the first child born to Silomo (daughter of Ntuzwa, son of Ntlaka, of the Mdlalose clan) principal wife of Dinuzulu, after Dinuzulu’s return from banishment on the island of St. Helena after the Anglo-Boer war. Her earliest musical education, so she claims, was at the hands of her grandmothers, the widowed queens of King Cetshwayo, in whose huts she frequently slept as a child, as well as her mother and her mother’s co-wives. On one occasion the Princess narrowly escaped death through the jealousy of another of the wives of Dinuzulu. During the Bhambatha rebellion the Princess was sent to live in safety with the Buthelezi clan, where she was cared for by Sonkeshana. When peace returned she went back to her parents. Her mother, Silomo, died soon afterwards and the responsibility fell upon Princess Magogo, at an early age, to look after her two brothers, Solomon Maphumuzana Nkayishana, and Mshiyeni, until such time as they obtained wives of their own. (Solomon later reigned as Paramount Chief from 1916 to 1933, and Mshiyeni served as regent from 1933 to 1945 during the minority of Solomon’s heir, Cyprian.) Princess Magogo attended Nkonjeni school, at Mahlabathini, where she learned to read and write Zulu, but did not study English. After her father’s death, and the accession of her brother Solomon as Paramount Chief, the royal capital was moved further north and Princess Magogo went to live there also. In 1923, her brother, Paramount Chief Solomon, sent an emissary to the ruling chief of the Buthelezi clan, Chief Mathole, to suggest that a marriage be arranged between him and Princess Magogo. Chief Mathole responded according to strict Zulu etiquette, by giving the messenger a present of snuff, thereby indicating his assent to the proposition. She became his tenth, but principal wife. Marriage cattle, amounting to 118, and a cash dowry of £44, were subscribed by the Buthelezi clan as a whole, and the marriage festivities continued for two weeks. Chief Mathole built for the

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Princess a new homestead, named KwaPhindangene, on the hills above Mahlabatini. This has remained her home ever since and is now also the home of her first-born son, Chief Ashpenaz Nathan Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, who is now Chief Executive Councillor of the kwaZulu Government and is widely acclaimed as the most eminent African leader in Southern Africa today. The princess also has two daughters, Morgina Phikabesho (now married to Dr Dotwana) and Admara Phokunani (now Mrs Vilakazi). She is blessed with many grandchildren, to whom she makes a point of passing on treasures from the Zulu and Buthelezi musical heritage. Brought up as a Christian, and remaining to this day a staunch member of the Anglican Church, Princess Magogo has nevertheless always upheld Zulu tradition and custom and has inspired the Buthelezi clan to do likewise. The Buthelezi were the first of many related clans to be conquered by Shaka, in the early nineteenth century, and incorporated into the powerful Zulu nation. Throughout their subsequent history the Buthelezi have always maintained a specially close relationship to the Zulu royal lineage. Ngqengelele (b. c1790) served as a personal steward to Shaka. After Shaka’s death, Klwana rose to become one of Dingane’s war-captains. Thereafter, Mnyamana held the same position under Mpande, and in Cetshwayo’s time became virtual prime minister of the Zulu nation. Succession in the Buthelezi chieftainship passed on through his descendents, Tshanibezwe (d1906), and Mathole (late husband of Princess Magogo). Princess Magogo is no newcomer to the microphone. Dr Hugh Tracey first recorded her singing in 1939, shortly before the death of her husband. In the early 1950s a number of further recordings were made of her songs, together with a selection of traditional choral songs of the Buthelezi clan, and these were published on two 12” LP discs.74 Since then, the South African Broadcasting Corporation has also recorded and broadcast a good quantity of her material; the titles of about thirty items are listed under her name in their publication, The Bantu Composers of Southern Africa, compiled by Yvonne Huskisson (Johannesburg, 1969) followed by details of her personal biography. In the well-known cinema film, ‘ZULU’ (concerning the historical battle of Rorke’s Drift, 1879)75 the striking authenticity of the traditional music is due to the Princess’s expertise as musical consultant. (Her son, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi plays the role of his great-grandfather, King Cetshwayo, in that film.) The Princess has frequently been consulted by academic researchers, both from South Africa and further afield, on the subject of Zulu history, and other cultural matters. Among others, Dr Henry Weman, organist of Uppsala Cathedral, Sweden, describes visits paid to her in 1956 in his book African Music and the Church in Africa.76 In 1964, while engaged in linguistic and ethnomusicological research, I had the opportunity of spending several weeks at Mahlabathini, where Princess Magogo, together with Chief Gatsha Buthelezi and Mrs Buthelezi and their household, were unsparingly generous with their hospitality, patience and cooperation. In the course of many long interviews the Princess sang over 120 songs77 and provided a great amount of information about Zulu music, its social context, and its history.

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[…] Her favourite instrument is the large ughubu musical bow, used for selfaccompanied singing, and she appears to be the last remaining player of this important historic instrument. She also plays the umakhweyana bow (with divided string) and, for music of a lighter style, the European autoharp. Her singing has a richness and power of expression which is quite unique. Though her most characteristic range is contralto, she can effortlessly change to the high, thin soprano style of a young Zulu girl musing about love, or even sometimes descend to the bottom of the bass clef quite comfortably. A new LP stereo recording of fourteen self-accompanied songs by this outstanding royal artist has recently been published.78 […] In the Zulu texts of the songs given below, letters shown within brackets were elided in the sung version. Where a chorus part has been indicated at the bottom of a song, the text, usually consisting of just a single line, has been printed once only but should be understood as being constantly repeated, in overlapping antiphonal relation to the leading part, throughout the song. A.1 Uyephi na? (Where has he gone?) This is a traditional lullaby (but the mother may have had more worries on her mind than just a sleepless baby, perhaps). In the recorded performance, lines 1, 6, 8, 9 and 16 were each sung twice. Okabani na lowomntwana? Ngowalendod(a) eMacebecebana79 Ib(e) iyabon(e) ithi Kuyaphothulwa;80 Phuma mntanam(i) (u) bonise phandl(e)!81 5 Okabani na lowomntwana? Umkadad(e) uyephi na? Engasaqonywa-nj(e) uyephi na?82 Engenantombi-nj(e) uyephi na? Umkadad(e) uyephi na? 10 Engasaqonywa-nj(e) uyephi83 na? Engakaganwa-nj(e) uyephi na? Uyotheza yini na? Uyogawul(a)? uyephi na? Engasaqonywa-nj(e) uyephi na?

Whose is that baby? It is [the baby] of that man who talks such a lot. Whenever he sees [household activities] he thinks food is coming; Go out, my child, and show the outside! 5 Whose is that baby? Our sister’s husband, where has he gone? Since he’s courting no longer, where has he gone? Having no girl, where has he gone? Our sister’s husband, where has he gone? 10 Since he’s courting no longer, where has he gone? Being not yet married, where has he gone? Has he gone to gather firewood? Has he gone to fell trees? Where has he gone? Since he’s courting no longer, where has he

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gone? 15 Engenantombi-nj(e) uyephi na? 15 Having no girlfriend, where has he gone? Wen’usemsamo, You at the back of the hut, you by the doorway! wen’usemnyango!84 INHLAZA85 Wo, ho, kasaz(i)!

CHORUS Oh, we do not know!

Princess Magogo learnt this song in her youth but she does not know who composed it. She considers it to be quite old, and to have originated from the Zulu clan. It is classified as an umlolozelo or ‘children’s song’. This general category includes, besides lullabies like the present example which are sung to children by adults, also nursery jingles sung by children themselves. Although some Zulu lullabies have soothing words, addressed to the baby, there are many, like this one, in which the mother (or aunt) seems to be expressing her private thoughts rather than consoling the child. The text of this song closely resembles one which has been documented by A.T. Bryant (1929, 555) and which he claims was sung by a bride and her bridesmaids as an ‘isimekezo hymn’, on the second day of the marriage ceremony. Princess Magogo considers that its use in such circumstances would be very unlikely, however. She says it is specifically a song for lulling a baby to sleep on an occasion when the father is away. Isimekezo songs are generally of a sorrowful character, lamenting the bride’s estrangement from her family home and making mention of her father and other close relatives from whom she has been parted. Bryant’s text does not conform in this respect. […] A.6 Ngibambeni, ngibambeni (Hold me, hold me) This is a nostalgic love song, adapted by Princess Magogo in memory of her late husband, Chief Mathole Buthelezi.86 She first learned the traditional form of the song from relatives, in her youth, while staying at Ngenetsheni, the residence of Prince Hamu kaMpande. In the present rendering of the song, line 1 was sung twice, line 4 was sung three times, and line 15 twice. Helele, helele! awu, helele!87 Way(e)muhle lomfana, yeyeni! Ye mama, ye mama, ye mama! Ngibambeni, ngibambeni, bomama! 5 Usebeyath’ uyangibheka ngamthanda! Usebeyath’ uyahleka ngamthanda! Wayeth’ uyakhuluma

Oh, oh … He was handsome, that boy, alas! Oh mother …! Hold me, hold me, my mothers! 5 When he used to look at me, I loved him! When he used to laugh, I loved him! When he was talking, I loved him!

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ngamthanda! Yeyeni, yeyeni, ye mama! 10 Wagibel’ amahash’ amfanela! Wagibel’ elinsundu lamfanela! Wagibel’ elibomvu lamfanela! Wagibel’ elimhlophe lamfanela! Wagibel’ is(i)temelo88 samfanela! Yeyeni, yeyeni, awu yeyeni! 15 Sengimuka nomoya ye mama! Ngibambeni, ngibambeni, ngibambeni!

Alas … mother! 10 When he rode on horseback, it suited him! When he rode a brown one, it suited him! When he rode a reddish one, it suited him! When he rode a white one, it suited him! When he rode in a train, it suited him! Alas, oh alas! 15 I am being swept away with the wind, O mother! Hold me, hold me, hold me!

In another version of this song, recorded in 1964,89 the lines of text occur in different order, sometimes with slightly altered wording, and there are a few additional lines. This bears out what has been previously observed from a detailed study of several performances of song A.2 above and also of another of Princess Magogo’s songs,90 where it was noted that there seems to be no single, fixed or authentic standard version. […] B.2 Laduma ekuseni (It thundered in the morning)91 Princess Magogo composed this song herself in 192392 at the time when her brother, the late Paramount Chief Solomon kaDinuzulu, sent an induna to Chief Mathole Buthelezi (her late husband) to suggest that he should marry the Princess. (The Chief gave a present of snuff, and this indicated his assent to the proposal.) The song-text gives the impression of lamentation over some misfortune, but Princess Magogo states that this apparent ‘misfortune’ was in fact the occasion of her marriage, since, for a Zulu bride, there is the sorrowful aspect of perpetual separation from one’s parental home. Sentiments of this kind are commonly expressed in a category of song known as isimekezo, sung towards the end of the marriage ceremony by the bride and her bridesmaids.93 The metaphorical reference to thunder, which recurs several times in this song, is frequently found in Zulu and Swazi isimekezo songs, symbolising the blow of separation, and particularly its effect on the bride’s parents. The phrase ‘Ladum’ ekuseni’ (‘it thundered in the morning’) is also in this instance perhaps more directly reminiscent of Princess Magogo’s father, King Dinuzulu, since one of the praise epithets in his izibongo eulogies consist of the line: ‘UZulu ladum’ ekuseni kwaNongoma’ (‘Heavens that thundered in the morning at Nongoma’). In lines 12 to 19, the reference to trees of various chiefs implies the tree planted over the grave, in each case … The significance of the green snake is that ancestral spirits are reputed to return in that form.

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Ye baba, ye mama! Lashonela nxany’ eMadaka,94 yeheni!

O father, o mother! [The sun] set in the wrong direction at Madaka, alas! Lashonela nxany’ eMadaka, yehe babo! It set in the wrong direction at Madaka, alas! EMadaka, yehe babo! eMadaka, yehe At Madaka, alas! At babo! Madaka, alas! 5 Ladum’ ekuseni kwakhal’ amadoda, 5 It thundered in the morning and men yehe! cried out, alas! Ladum’ ekuseni kwakhal’ omama, yehe! It thundered in the morning and our mothers wept, alas! Ladum’ ekuseni kwakhal’ obaba nomama! It thundered in the morning and our fathers and mothers wept! Obaba nomama, kwakhal’ obaba nomama! Our fathers and mothers, they wept did our fathers and mothers! Lashonela nxany’ eMadaka, yeheni! [The sun] set in the wrong direction at Madaka, alas! 10 Babhincela nxanye kwelaseMadaka, 10 They girded themselves on the yehe babo! wrong side for it at Madaka, alas! Sala kahle kumfowen(u)!95 Farewell to your brother! (I)sihlahla sikaPhungashe Phungashe’s tree has a green snake, sinenyandezulu, yehe babo! alas! (I)sihlahla sikaMevana Mevana’s tree has a green snake, sinenyandezulu, yehe babo! alas! (I)sihlahla sikaMvulana Mvulana’s tree has a green snake, sinenyandezulu, yehe babo! alas! 15 (I)sihlahla sikaMatiwane 15 Matiwane’s tree has a green snake, sinenyandezulu, yehe babo! alas! (I)sihlahla sikaPhungashe Phungashe’s tree has a green snake, sinenyandezulu, yehe babo! alas! (I)sihlahla sikaZwide Zwide’s tree has a green snake, sinenyandezulu, yehe! alas! (I)sihlahla sikaSobhuza Sobhuza’s tree has a green snake, sinenyandezulu, yehe! alas! (I)sihlahla sikaDingiswayo Dingiswayo’s tree has a green snake, sinenyandezulu, yehe babo! alas! 20 EMadaka yeheni! 20 At Madaka, O woe! Yek’ eMadaka, yeheni! O for Madaka, O woe! Yek’ eMadaka, yehe babo! O for Madaka, alas! Yek’ eMadaka, yeheni! O for Madaka, O woe! Emadaka yehe babo! At Madaka, alas! 25 Lashonela nxanye phansi kukaMyeye 25 [The sun] set in the wrong ‘heni! direction below Myeye, alas!

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Ladum’ ekuseni kwaMyeye he babo! Kwakhal’ obaba nomama! Kwakhal’ abafazi yeheni! Kwaphum’ izidwaba yehe babo! 30 Kwaw(a) izidwaba yeheni! Kwaw(a) amabheshu yeheni! Kwaw(a) amabheshu yehe babo!

It thundered in the morning at Myeye, alas! Our fathers and mothers wept! The married women wept, alas! The leather skirts came off, alas! 30 The leather skirts fell down, alas! The [men’s] loinskins fell down, alas! The loinskins fell down, alas!

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Evidence of Stylistic Continuity in Zulu ‘Town’ Music96 David K. Rycroft The case for studying material that reflects cultural adaptation and assimilation has lately been attracting growing support, largely in the interest of gaining greater understanding of present and future human behaviour. Despite its relatively short time-span, the growth of new styles of popular music in Africa has already reached a stage where we find that the history of the present situation often cannot be clearly accounted for, owing to absence of accurate observation during earlier intermediate phases. Merriam (1964, 318-19) has remarked on the paucity of information on traditional musicians in towns, and more recently John Storm Roberts has listed several factors that have contributed to the present confused situation: First, what was taking place was usually disapproved of by people who might have been in a position to analyse it. Second, it was only partially documented in some of its phases by commercial phonograph records. Third, most anthropologists and musicologists regarded it until recently as a disaster rather than an interesting phenomenon of social change (Roberts 1973, 241).

In suggesting that the ethics of personal ‘purist’ motivation in research might be in need of review, we must on no account lose sight of the fact that the successful evaluation and analysis of later popular or ‘town’ material depends essentially on the deepest possible understanding of earlier forms, or of their remaining relics. Rather than belittling the value of ‘traditional’ studies pursued heretofore, concentration of contemporary problems highlights their importance, and it remains indisputably right that old material should have headed the list of priorities and should continue to do so wherever the terrain remains relatively unexplored. But from a long-term viewpoint, a continued emphasis on studying only ‘gems from the past’, to the exclusion of what is going on here and now, represents an imbalance that we should take steps to rectify. […] The ‘heresy’ I wish to propound here is that, among the Zulu, what is played on some cheap Western commercial instruments is often not an attempted imitation of Western music at all, but rather an expression of indigenous musical principles which in some cases can be more effectively realised through these new media than could be done on the traditional instruments they have replaced. The music to be discussed in this paper comprises a few examples from among a number of amateur performances by Zulus, on non-indigenous instruments, recorded mainly in the streets of Durban, South Africa, in 1964.97 It exemplifies a type of self -accompanied solo music, made by relatively unsophisticated young Zulu men from a country background, merely for personal pleasure and selfexpression, and often performed while walking. In earlier days, in the country, the

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instrument most commonly used was the umakhweyana, a form of traditional musical bow with a gourd resonator. These can still very occasionally be found in some of the remoter rural areas, but never in town (where they would serve as a strongly negative status symbol). […] [Zulu] communal music is essentially vocal, and antiphonal in form. In any choral song there are at least two voice-parts, singing non-identical texts, and the temporal relationship between these parts observes the principle of nonsimultaneous entry. Sometimes this is realised through simple alternation of leader and chorus lines. But overlapping phrases are far more common, and this gives rise to polyphony. There is usually no common cadence point where the parts achieve a combined resolution. Instead, each voice, in its turn, returns to its starting point and the process is continually repeated.98 […] Besides communal choral music unaccompanied by instruments, individual music-making was formerly very common. Flutes and musical bows of several different types were employed-either for solo playing or, in the case of gourdresonated musical bows, for self-accompanied solo singing.

Fig 16 Southern Zulu work-song [‘We Majola’]: a simple example of a twopart song © David Rycroft

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‘Limb music’99 In traditional Zulu musical expression, both stamping and hand-clapping were used, together with dancing movements and gestures, to accompany certain types of vocal music. As extra-corporeal projections of limb activity one might cite the use of ankle-rattles, the beating of weapons against shields and the use of the ingungu friction drum (limited to girls’ coming-of-age ceremonies). More elaborate drums and percussion instruments were absent, but musical bows were extensively used for individual music-making. ‘Mouth music’100 Whistling, by men, and ululation by women had limited applications, but singing was by far the most important vehicle of musical expression. As direct projections, there were several types of flutes used melodically in solo performance, and we might cite the sounding of animal horns through lip vibration (analogous to the use of the vocal cords) though this served for signalling rather than for musical expression. Considering that melody, with variations in pitch and duration, is in a sense fundamentally a human vocal activity, perhaps we should include as indirect ‘extensions’ of the human voice (or as media for expressing qualities that are, in a sense, basically vocal) not only aerophones, but also any other instruments which happen to be used melodically by the Zulu, whatever their organological category. To return to musical bows, which were named first as direct projections of limb activity, one finds that these were used, not just percussively, but in such a way as to produce melody also, thus emulating or serving as an indirect projection of the voice. In the case of mouth-bows, of which there were several varieties, the mouth cavity of the player in fact served as a variable resonator for the selective amplification of one or another of the harmonic partials, while stopping of the string with a finger yielded alternative fundamental roots. In gourd-bows, this function of the mouth is fulfilled instead by a hollow calabash attached to the stave, and the selection of harmonies for melodic use is achieved by varying the size of the opening in the calabash through moving it closer or farther from the player’s chest.101 The classic form of Zulu gourd-bow [is] known as ugubhu.102 Exs. 10 and 11 show the fundamentals and partials commonly produced on the ugubhu, and also on the umakhweyana, which has string divided into two segments. Viewed from our present angle, the gourd-bow represents a level of projection that is more independent than that of any other Zulu instrument, since only limb movements are involved, and yet melody can be produced entirely without using the human mouth. But was the gourd-bow used merely to replace solo singing? All available evidence shows that this was never the case. The instrument was essentially regarded as a means of self-accompaniment while singing. But the

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accompaniment provided by the gourd-bow was never a direct imitation of the singer’s vocal melody or of its rhythm. A close study of other types of Zulu music reveals important formal and structural parallels between this gourd-bow music and Zulu choral dance-songs, which were regarded as their highest form of musical activity. The role of the gourd-bow can in fact be seen to be like that of the vocal chorus, and while playing this form of self-accompaniment on the bow, the singer assumes the position of ‘leader’, singing in antiphonal relation to his simulated ‘chorus’. The projection into the instrument, therefore, is not that of the singer himself, but of an imaginary group external to himself, which he brings to expression through his musical bow, and against which he can set his vocal creativity. (Exs 10 and 11 show typical tuning, and range of selectively resonated harmonics, on Zulu gourd bows.)

 

Harmonics

Fundamentals Open / Stopped





  

   

Ex 10 ugubhu (with undivided string): the [upper] harmonics become progressively fainter as the mouth of the gourd is covered through approaching the player’s chest

Ex 11 umakhweyana (with divided string): three fundamentals: harmonics and resultant scale Reputedly, many choral songs now in general use were originally composed by some individual singer while using a gourd bow for self-accompaniment in this way, In gourd-bow songs, the bow provides an ostinato phrase, usually from 4 to 8 measures in length. The singer never enters at the beginning of the instrumental phrase, but always at some later point during that phrase, and there is the same kind of overlapping relationship between solo and chorus phrases in choral songs. A further confirmation that the bow serves to simulate the chorus part lies in the fact that an additional singer, if he wishes to join in during the performance of a self -accompanied gourd-bow song, usually sings the chorus phrase, and this can be seen to closely resemble the bow phrase. When several singers join in, they

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usually enter separately, providing offset phrases. [Fig 17/Ex 12] represents such an example, showing first a scheme of the part relationships and, below, a musical transcription. This item was a self-accompanied song performed by Princess Constance Magogo ka Dinuzulu, using the ugubhu unbraced gourd-bow, with additional parts supplied by her son, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, and by several of her grandchildren.

Fig 17 Zulu multi-part song [‘I shall go wandering, mother’] © David Rycroft.

84 e = 192-200 3+2+3 8

                          

Voice 1



Voice 2 (Chorus)

_

Ugubhu musical bow

                                                                  

:

Voice 3 (Descant)

:

:

:

:

:

:

:

Ex 12 Transcribed opening of Zulu multi-part song ‘I shall go wandering, mother’ The text is as follows: (Voice 1) ‘1 shall go wandering, mother, but where will my quest take me?’ (Voice 2) ‘The girl I would love is one who cuts preliminaries short! Take her, boy, she is escaping’. (Voice 3, chorus) ‘We choose beautiful lovers; we choose the handsome ones’.103 The unbraced ugubhu gourd-bow is very rarely found today, Princess Magogo being perhaps the only remaining performer, but players of the umakhweyana, which is a braced form of gourd-bow, are still to some extent encountered in country areas.104 It is used for self-accompanied solo singing in the same way as the ugubhu, and the relationship between voice and instrument is basically the same. […] Violin-songs The idea of ‘violin-songs’ may seem a little odd in the Western world. But with some young Zulu men the European violin is used for self-accompanied singing, instead of the guitar. Serving as a functional replacement for the traditional gourdbow, it is quite natural that such instruments should likewise accompany the voice. The most able performer I encountered was Mr Joseph Sikwaza, from Umzinto, on the Natal South Coast, who is shown in Fig 18. He had bought his violin at a secondhand store several years previously.

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Fig 18 J. Sikwaza with his violin © David Rycroft The instrument had steel strings. The bridge, and also one of the tuning pegs, were home-made and rather roughly constructed. While playing, he held the violin against his left collar-bone, not under his chin. The bow was grasped firmly in the right fist, with knuckles upward. He employed standard violin tuning (but approximately a semitone flat, throughout). He claimed to be entirely self-taught, and responded negatively regarding listening or watching the instrument being played by anyone else, but it was not possible to check the authenticity of this claim. Among other possibilities, a rough idea of ‘folk style’ fiddle playing might have been acquired through watching Wild West films. […]

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Ex 13 Transcription of violin song ‘Mus’ ukuzidumaza makoti’ (Joseph Sikwaza, 1964)

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He sang in a very high falsetto, in unison with the melody in certain phrases of the upper violin part, or at times with the lower ostinato part. Using doublestopping, two simultaneous parts were always maintained on the violin, and the bow was never lifted from the strings, throughout the performance. The musical effect is unlike anything else I have ever heard, and the absence of obvious Western features seems surprising. The transcription in Ex 13 refers to the most interesting of his pieces, entitled ‘Mus’ ukuzidumaza makoti’ ‘Don’t disgrace yourself, young bride!’ (Mr Sikwaza in fact has two wives, and I am reasonably sure that this song is his own composition.) We shall first consider only the vocal line in this song. This shows fully traditional features. The overall shape of the melodic line is descending. The rise and fall of the pitch does not violate speech tone requirements. The mode is basically hexatonic. Rather than final cadence, there is obligatory recommencement. The balance between the first phrase and the incomplete ‘he, he’ phrase immediately suggests antiphonal ‘leader-chorus’ form as its basis. The supposition that the ‘he, he’ line is here incomplete, being relinquished in order to take up the re-entry of the second ‘leading phrase’ is confirmed by its later full statement, as a typical ‘chorus’ phrase, occupying four measures. The typical Zulu off-set temporal relationship between ‘leader’ and ‘chorus’ phrases is evident from the re-entry of the ‘leader’ part (at bar 10) after only three measures of the incomplete ‘chorus’ (which lasts four measures when completed).105 Before considering the violin parts, it is possible to reconstruct, merely from this vocal line, a two-part antiphonal basis which it undoubtedly represents. Reconstruction of this kind (see Ex 14) is not just a speculative exercise. One merely applies, in reverse, the normal rules that Zulus follow when giving a solo rendering of an antiphonal choral song. (As stated earlier, this involves jumping from one part to another whenever a new entry occurs.)

Ex 14 Hypothetical antiphonal form, reconstructed from the solo vocal line only, in the previous item (Ex 13)

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Turning now to the violin part (or parts) in this item, one is perhaps first struck by the continuous use of two strings simultaneously. It seems doubtful that European technique is being emulated here. There is no direct precedent for this in traditional instrumental playing but it is perhaps relevant to note that, in all musical bow playing, two simultaneous notes were always present: the fundamental, and one or other of its selectively resonated harmonics. In the violin performance we are discussing, intervals of the fourth, fifth and octave seem to predominate, and Kirby’s remark about the avoidance of thirds is well demonstrated. In this particular piece no use at all was made of the E-string, but it was used in other items. While the double-stopping may at first give the impression merely of adding harmonic fullness, closer study of the transcription in Ex 13 reveals a clear polyphonic structure. Both the ‘leader’ and the ‘chorus’ phrases of the vocal line can be clearly identified in the violin music. Despite the fact that these phrases have ‘staggered’ entry points, they are both effectively covered. At the first vocal entry, it will be seen that the violin’s upper melodic line moves in unison with the voice. At the ‘he, he’ ‘chorus’ entry, the lower part, on the violin, brings this out too, and in fact completes the phrase while the voice changes to the ‘leader’ part. But the violin takes the ‘leader’ part also, in unison with the voice again, while continuing to repeat the ‘chorus’ phrase, underneath. On looking back to the instrumental introduction, it can be seen that the violin had in fact been executing ‘leader’ and ‘chorus’ phrases, simultaneously, all along, even before the first vocal entry. In addition to moving in unison with the voice, in ‘leader’ phrases however, it will be noted that the upper violin part also supplies a second leader-type phrase, which enters each time at the finishing-point of the vocal ‘leader’ phrase. It therefore appears that a total of three antiphonal parts are in operation, as illustrated in the schematic transcription [see Ex 15]. In addition, there is also some further embellishment of the ‘chorus’ part. This again reflects traditional practice. In choral songs the chorus often has a ‘divisi’ rendering.106 […] In support of my earlier suggestion that the ethics of personal ‘purist’ motivation in research were in need of review, the following comments by C. LéviStrauss about preserving the diversity of cultures in a world threatened by monotony and uniformity would seem pertinent: It is not enough to nurture local traditions and to save the past for a short period longer. It is diversity itself that must be saved; not the outward and visible form in which each period has clothed that diversity, and which can ever be preserved beyond the period that gave it birth. We must therefore hearken for the stirrings of new life …; we must also be prepared to view without surprise, repugnance or revolt whatever may strike us as strange in the many new forms of social expression. Tolerance is not a contemplative attitude … it is a dynamic attitude, consisting in the anticipation, understanding and promotion of what is struggling into being (LéviStrauss 1956, 162).

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Ex 15 Scheme of parts in ‘Mus’ ukuzidumaza makoti’ (as from first vocal entry) As is probably also the case in a great many other countries, there is a great social distance between unlettered amateur musicians who make music for their own pleasure, and those white-collared people who are concerned with formal education, including the propagation of music in Zulu schools. It will be a cultural misfortune for the future, if no notice is taken, now, not only of the ugubhu and the makhweyana, but also of the kind of creativity exemplified in amateurs like Joseph Sikwaza, and many more, whose artistry could exert an invaluable leavening influence in future musical expression and its development among the Zulu.

Aspects of Afrikaans Music J.J.A. van der Walt and G.G. Cillié Johannes van der Walt and Gabriel Cillié both spent much of their lives promoting and researching Afrikaans sacred and secular music. Van der Walt was a musicologist and Professor of Music at the University of Potchefstroom where he established the Institute for South African Music, while Cillié was involved in church music and choral training at the University of Stellenbosch, and was prominent in the Afrikaans folk song project of the FAK107 in the 1950s. Psalms108 When Van Riebeeck arrived in South Africa in 1652, he had in his possession the Dutch State Bible (authorised version), the Articles of Faith of the Reformed Church and the Dathenus Psalter, the official psalm-book of the Church. The tunes in this were exactly the same as those in the first complete Genevan Psalter of 1562, which followed in the wake of Calvinism as it spread through European and colonial lands. Thus, when the French Huguenots arrived in South Africa in 1688, they heard their own familiar tunes sung by their future compatriots - a significant factor in the welding of the two national groups at the Cape … The psalms were also continually prominent in the education of slave children and in missionary work. The Dutch rhymed metrical versions of the psalms of 1773 also found their way to South Africa. Until 1814 only these psalms and certain hymns (Eenige Gezangen) were sung in South African churches, to the old tunes of 1562. But in 1814 the collection known as Evangelische Gezangen, first used in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1805, was accepted for use in Afrikaans churches. In the farm homesteads other sacred songs, notably those of Groenewegen and Sluyters, were also sung, but these were never elevated to the status of liturgical music. […] Sluyter and Groenewegen109 From the earliest days in South Africa a feature of the family prayers was the singing of sacred songs, in addition to the psalms and hymns from the authorized song-books of the church. This practice may be assumed from the possession in many homes today of collections by Willem Sluyter (1627) and the brothers Johannes and Jacob Groenewegen. In the Sluyter books no music is provided with the words; but at the beginning of each lyric there is a reference to a suitable tune from the psalter, and/or to an alternative that might be used. For example, one of the songs has the title: ‘Gebed tot Christus, om naar zijn voorbeeld geduldig te

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lijden’ (‘Prayer to Christ that we may with patience follow His example in our suffering’) and suggestions for a tune run thus: Tune: Psalm 146 or: Rosemond die lag gedoken. Similarly, in the Groenewegen collection only the words are printed; but here only a single choice is given - either a psalm or another tune. No doubt the purpose of these early collections was that the lyrics should be sung: in fact, as we may read in Groenewegen’s Preface, even before publication they were sung with great effect from manuscript copies at prayer and testimony meetings on Sunday evenings. It has not been easy to ascertain the extent to which the songs of Sluyter and Groenewegen were sung in South Africa. In his research into the origins of socalled ‘liederwysies’ (tunes adapted for church use) Willem van Warmelo came across isolated examples of lyrics from both of these collections, where the musical notation had been added to the text; other tunes were [also] sung to him. […] The influence of ‘Slaven Gezangen’ (‘slave tunes’) on the heritage of sacred songs In her youthful reminiscences written in 1909, Maria Neethling, wife of the Rev Neethling of Stellenbosch, and one of the daughters of the Rev Andrew Murray of Graaff Reinet, relates how the family would travel once in five years by horse-cart from Graaff Reinet to Cape Town to attend Synod. On their 10-day journey it was a customary and pleasant diversion for all of them to sing during the first hour of the morning and the last hour in the evening, as they rode along. ‘Those were the days’, she writes, long before Sankey or Church Praise or even Bateman existed; but what a rich store we had, both in Dutch and English! The Dutch psalms and hymns so sacred, so familiar, so tender to us Cape people! We had the Scotch Paraphrases too, and the Cottage Hymns and Olney Hymns; and, best of all, a little stock in our memories of what we called ‘Slaven Gezangen’, compiled for the use of native congregations; so simple and so sweet, they were loved most of all. The favourites were: ‘Liefste Heiland Uw genade’, ‘Mijn Heiland! ek verloren kind’, ‘Hij die den Heiland nog niet heeft’, and ‘Ik ben een worm, gansch arm en klein’.

The ‘Slaven Gezangen’, to which Maria Neethling refers with so much affection, were collected for use in the churches of the ‘natives’ - as she puts it. Judging by examples she gives, they were borrowed from the hymn-books of the Rhenish and Berlin Missionary Societies in South Africa. Collections of these songs were published during the 1850s. It is certain that the non-white servants of the Murray family learned these songs in the mission church, and that they sang them to the children of that family; and this, possibly, is how whites in many families learnt the songs of the mission churches; and this is probably how songs of German origin became known to the Afrikaner people. The hymn-books used in South Africa by non-white Christians included the following - the Rhenish Hymn Book (2nd Edition 1856), the Paarl Hymn Book (1869), and the Berlin Hymn Book.

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These books contained mainly translations of German sacred songs into Dutch. In 1949 there appeared an Afrikaans volume, Sionsgesange, for use in the Dutch Reformed Mission Church in South Africa, largely the work of the Rev E. Hartwig. The sacred songs of the non-whites also had their influence on the sacred songs of the whites in South Africa. There is, for instance, a melody for the old Dutch Hymn 17: ‘Wie maar den goeden God laat zorgen’, which is well-known throughout this country. It is, in fact, the tune of the German song ‘Mir ist Erbarmung widerfahren’, which does not appear in any of the abovementioned song collections used by whites, but certainly in every book used by coloured persons. This is clearly an instance of whites having taken over a tune to be found in collections normally used by non-whites. ‘Liederwysies’ and their origin In October 1950, a small group, including some of the older residents of Maanhaarrand, Magaliesburg, sang a number of old traditional songs, which I noted down. (i) ‘The Magaliesburg Evensong’ (FAK, No. 308); (ii) a tune for Psalm 65; (iii) ‘Prepare your lamps’ (a song on the parable of the ten virgins); (iv) two tunes for Psalm 100, one of them identical with the tune of the song ‘Die rivier is vol en die trane rol’; (v) the well-known tune for Psalm 38 (FAK, No. 299); (vi) Psalm 126, verse 3, sung to a tune generally used with the words of Hymn 17, and originally the German tune for the chorale ‘Mir ist Erbarmung widerfahren’ (FAK, No. 300).

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Ex 16 Magaliesburgse Aandlied: melody by Frans Fouché (1950), arrangement by G.G. Cillié (1979, 614)110 © Federasie vir Afrikaanse Kultuurveriniginge Translation: 1. Keep me as I go to sleep, mighty God, who always watches. Protect me with your omnipotence when evil threatens me. 2. Forgive me all my sins then I shall rest my head. I shall not fear death or hell because Thou art my rock, Lord. 3. Keep my parents and my friends safe this night. Tomorrow we shall thank Thee for Thy goodness and the gift of the new day.

Wait a Minim and King Kong111 Ralph Trewhela Ralph Trewhela was a songwriter, film composer, arranger and lyricist who worked in radio (SABC), film composition and production (for example The Magic Garden with African Film Productions) and also the recording industry (Gallo Africa). He was noted for war-time hits that remained popular well into the 1970s, and wrote many children’s plays for radio with his wife, Evelyn Levison. .

The first South African revue to achieve a really long run was ‘Wait A Minim’. It opened at the Intimate Theatre, Johannesburg, on January 19th, 1962, and closed on December 19th, 1968, having played during that period to audiences in South Africa, Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The whole show had originated literally by accident. Leon Gluckman was rehearsing a new musical by James Ambrose Brown for the Intimate Theatre when the leading lady fell and injured her leg. There was no understudy and no time to coach someone new from scratch. Let Andrew Tracey continue: Leon had eight weeks to fill. Well, he was desperately looking for something and he got in touch with Taubie Kushlick. Now Taubie knew us [Paul and Andrew Tracey], because she and Dad [Hugh Tracey] were good friends, and Taubie often came out to the farm and heard us sing. So she suggested us to Leon. First of all he got Kendrew Lascelles and his dancing partner, Zelide Jeppe, then he got Paul and me. I knew Jeremy Taylor - we had been at Oxford together - so I suggested he come into the show. Then we auditioned for the other three parts. Leon offered Taubie the chance to join him, but she turned it down.

Andrew hadn’t heard the anecdote, but the story that buzzed round theatrical circles during the lengthy run was that Taubie’s reply to Leon was, ‘Go ahead, darling. Get it out of your system’. He did. Seven years later. ‘Wait a Minim’ played twelve weeks in Johannesburg, then toured other South African cities for about a year. Who’s Who in the Theatre credits the company with 656 performances at London’s Fortune Theatre, and 457 at New York’s John Golden Theatre. ‘Wait A Minim’ and ‘Ipi-Tombi’ stand unrivalled among South Africa's theatrical exports to date. With his customary modesty, Andrew Tracey attributes the success of ‘Wait A Minim’ to one song. He is half-right. Although this one number occupied less than four minutes in a smoothly directed, subtle production, it was responsible for 99% of the publicity. Once again, over to Andrew: The revue itself didn’t show signs of lasting very long until the Rand Easter Show started. Then Gallo’s began broadcasting ‘Ag, Pleez Daddy’ continuously at the Show. That gave us a boost. It became known to some people as ‘The Jeremy Taylor Show’ or ‘The Ag, Pleez Daddy Show’.

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Fig 19 The original cast recording of ‘Wait A Minim’ (Intimate Theatre, Johannesburg, 1962). Paul Tracey is in the top hat, Andrew Tracey is at his feet, and Jeremy Taylor is extreme right © Gallo Africa I had previously met Jeremy Taylor at a Speech Day at St. Martin’s School in Johannesburg. The star turn in the ‘concert’ given by pupils before the prize-giving ceremony was Peter Klatzow, now one of our most prominent serious composers. Jeremy was then married to his first wife, Barbara, also teaching at St. Martin’s and a fine musician. There is no doubt that ‘Ag, Pleez Daddy’ put ‘Wait A Minim’ on the map. It took an Oxford-graduate from Britain to satirise the vocal peculiarities of the English-speaking South African. Later, Robin Malan did much the same thing in print [Malong 1972]. ‘Ag, Pleez Daddy’ has now become a ‘standard’, and continues to earn royalties and performing fees both for Jeremy and for Gallo Music. […] Black musicals came of age with the staging of ‘King Kong’. The opening at Wits University in 1959 was one of the most exciting theatrical first nights Johannesburg has ever known. Based on the true story of a Zulu fighting-ring favourite who murders, is sent to jail and commits suicide there, it hit the audience right between the eyes. It was the first time Miriam Makeba had been seen in a musical, and she was electric. Nathan Mdledle, leader of the big-selling Gallo Record singing group The Manhattan Brothers, had both the voice and the build for the bullyboy anti-hero. Harry Bloom wrote the ‘book’ and Pat Williams the lyrics. Music was by Todd Matshikiza. Todd was a South African Black musician who could put down his compositions in staff notation. A couple of years previously he had written a choral

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work for 200 voices and orchestra for the Johannesburg Festival. Leon Gluckman, better known then for his production of straight plays, directed; Stanley Glasser, recently returned from Cambridge University, handled the orchestrations and guided the music through rehearsals. Arnold Dover devised the choreography; Arthur Goldreich (later involved in a sensational jailbreak) designed costumes and decor; Ian Bernhardt stepped in to handle the promotion and much of the administration. London now became interested. Producer Jack Hylton (once the big-time bandleader) sent his son-in-law, Hugh Charles, to Johannesburg. A songwriter himself, best remembered for his inspiring wartime ballad ‘There’ll Always Be An England’, Hugh liked what he saw and heard, and contracts were signed. He wanted additional lyrics for the London production and, as Pat Williams was not available, I spent some weeks with Leon and Spike Glasser writing extra words to Matshikiza's melodies. ‘King Kong’ opened in London in February of 1961. It was well received but, despite the reviews, never enjoyed the long West End run that had been hoped for. Some say the British pit musicians failed to capture the special ‘township sound’ of the orchestrations. Others feel the London production lacked the sparkling charisma of Miriam Makeba, who had been unable to travel to the UK because of commitments in the US.

Fig 20 The Princes Theatre, London, 1961 © Bailey’s African Archives

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[…] ‘King Kong’ created a legend, a legend that lasted twenty-one years. Then, sadly, it crumbled. In April 1979 a revival was staged at His Majesty’s Theatre, Johannesburg. At least, those of us who fondly remembered the old show thought it would be a revival. But the new ‘King Kong’ had little to do with the smash hit of two decades earlier. An American writing and production team jettisoned the original ‘book’, used only a few of the original songs. Most of these were given a disco treatment that caused Mrs Esme Shipanga, widow of Todd Matshikiza, to give the producers an ultimatum to ‘stop this travesty of my husband’s work’ or face legal action. Rave notices had greeted the initial 1959 staging, The Star headline proclaiming ‘“King Kong” Is Greatest Thrill In 20 Years of SA Theatre Going’. Now the headlines read: ‘A Defeat for Comeback Kong’, ‘Cheap and Nasty’, ‘Kong is a King-Sized Disaster’. Almost immediately after the first reviews appeared, the visiting production team walked out of the show and returned home. The première had been packed. Two performances later, roughly one tenth of the seats at His Majesty’s were occupied. Corney Mabaso, the local assistant director, tried to salvage the show by restoring as much as possible of the original, but the damage was done. Critics attended again, and commented on the improvement to no avail. On a Monday night nine people arrived to see the show. They were given their money back, and the production closed with an estimated loss of R200 000.

The Correlation of Folk and Art Music among African Composers112 Khabi Mngoma Khabi Mngoma was a teacher, singer, instrumentalist, African music scholar, conductor, and adjudicator. He founded the Ionian Choir and Orchestra in Soweto, taught at the Union of Federated Artists (Dorkay House, Johannesburg), and was Professor and founder of the Music Department at the University of Zululand. Mngoma championed the use of African compositional techniques in choral composition as well as the performance of Western classical music in African communities. In African society the formal composing of music is not considered to be a specialist activity to be left to the experts. Anybody with the inclination to compose is encouraged to do so and accepted as a composer. This is the continuation of an old tradition in African society that several social scientists have alluded to from time to time.113 We thus have many well established African composers who have not had formal music training, and others who have had some training. In such a situation it is easy and often necessary for the Western style composer114 to draw heavily on the stylistic characteristics of African folk music. Earlier on - this century, up to about 1950 - the African composer tried to be as unAfrican as possible. African indigenous music from which he could get his inspiration and ideas was anathema - it had been equated with heathenism and all that was to be rejected and banished from his life.115 With the upsurge of nationalism among Africans especially from 1950 onwards, there was a conscious effort among those who wrote music to include features in their music that were identifiably African. The inclination has been reinforced by the political philosophy of Black Consciousness of the 1970s. In spite of the [earlier] conscious effort to be unAfrican, however, the vernacular texts used imposed an African character on the music with regard to melody and rhythm. […] The authentic varieties of folk music occur in rural areas: areas that are still predominantly bound to a traditional life-style. Like folk music all over the world, it is music that mirrors the people’s lives, their concerns, their aspirations, the things they relish, even the things they hate, giving vent to their frustrations … In the Folk music of the contemporary African cultural scene, the older and authentic varieties tend to be anachronistic - because of the cultural changes that have taken place. The newer varieties show a healthy ‘bastardisation’ which is part of evolution and even conscious development. Original hunting songs are still performed even though all game is confined to reserves and enjoys protection of

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the law - and hunting is prohibited. Ceremonial songs commemorating wars, historic, sacred and other social events, arc still sung even though the rituals that went with them have been abandoned. Songs that used to accompany most types of work are still sung even though there is very little work of the sort that went with them. These are now sung for entertainment as well as to reinforce a Black cultural identity. Even in this context of anachronism, diversity is a problem. The South Africa … we know today is by no means a single homogeneous unit, and its musics are correspondingly diverse. African folk music, therefore, cannot properly be represented by the compositions of a single territory, but rather by the musics of a great number of loosely related tribes, each having influenced the performances of its neighbours to a greater or lesser extent (Tracey, 1958).

Because of this factor, I have had to limit my discussion to Sotho, Xhosa and Zulu composers, by selecting ten representative works. The themes chosen by these composers pertain to legend, nature, history, social skits and communal life. These are themes that are akin to those that are found in the folk musics of those peoples. These composers are continuing this tradition. The folk music performed by most tribes in Southern Africa is vocal music. The African composer in this part of the world composes vocal music, choral music. He has completely ignored the solo voice, even though there is an abundance of solos for voice and voice with instrumental accompaniment in many indigenous styles. The African composer has not concerned himself with this medium. Both in the old and the new traditions of African folk music, instrumental music for stringed bow, guitar, concertina and mouth organ persists among the non-Christian communities. The stringed bow is popular116 [and] judging from some of the responses to singing by Africans, their propensity to sing in harmony [rather] than in unison and their preference for a strong bass line in group singing, make one to speculate that the sonorities in the stringed bow instrument and its prevalence must have influenced this preference among Africans. The players of stringed-bow instruments have a highly developed sense of aural perception …117 Because the fundamental or root-note in the harmonic series is the loudest or strongest sound of the series, the chord heard by the player has the bass as its strongest note. This must have, through the ages, become part of the musical culture of the people. In addition to this, I want to suggest that vocal resonance inherent in African singing also has a bearing on the preference for hearing each fundamental with its ‘harmonic series’ because each singer generates these overtones in his own voice. The hearing of the fundamental note only, heard in unison singing, is without fulfilment for the African musicians and populace, but sonorities that contain superimposed intervals on the fundamental as heard in the harmonic series are thus preferred.118 […]

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In teaching songs by rote it has been my experience every time, that singers anticipate the harmonies so much that it has left me with the impression that the harmony is conceived by them to be inherent in each melody. It is therefore understandable that most of the folk singing and the folk songs have an abundance of harmony which has become a preference for the African composer of music as well. In the compositions of African composers there is a preference for the doubling of parts, intervals of the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th. The sonorities are in the main derived from folk music; even when the chord progressions often tend to be ‘learned’ and Western folk elements are always present. Another strong feature of the eclectic African composer - and most of them are just that, they are eclectic - is the virile rhythm of their music. This rhythm is unfortunately bound by the bar-line. It often lacks the freedom and the polyrhythmic features of African folk music. The texts help to determine the rhythmic motifs of the music. This is true also of folk music. Another limiting factor to the African composer is the tonic solfa notation system with its limitations. Polyrhythm as a stylistic feature has however been used by J.P. Mohapeloa and K. Magubane. The majority have steered clear of it. In spite of the many influences evident in the works of the African composer, their Africanness still comes through strongly. Many folkloristic characteristics are evident; evidence that suggests that consciously or unconsciously, they are a continuation of an African folk tradition. In the models chosen [here] these characteristics are commented on in an effort to show where and how the correlation of folk and art music among African composers takes place.119 The African composer seems to have come to grips with the majority of folk music styles, by incorporation or imitating them in his compositions. The styles that have eluded him are the ceremonial songs,120 their staggered beat or ‘rubato’. He has however, managed to imitate their harmonies and their sonorities. He has also managed to master the organisation of voice-parts, whose pertinent description by D.K. Rycroft (1966) sums it up as follows: Multipart organisation of voices is common in the traditional music of all Nguni peoples. I have found this to be the case among the Sotho also. In a choral song there are at least two voice parts, singing non-identical texts. The temporal relationship between these parts observes the principles of non-simultaneous entry. In some songs this is realised through ‘simple antiphony’; a solo ‘calling’ phrase is followed by a ‘responsive’ phrase by the chorus, and this alternation recurs throughout the song. The simplest songs comprise just two pairs of ‘call’ and ‘response’ phrases constantly repeated … overlapping phrases are common … The Nguni peoples seem to have made a speciality of this practice, and it gives rise to some complex forms of polyphony.

These characteristics occur frequently among African composers. They seem to be their hall-mark. The items I have chosen to demonstrate this are choral compositions by J.P. Mohapeloa (‘Obe’, ‘Leeba’, ‘U Ea Kae’, and ‘Linoto’), R.T.

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Caluza (‘Umaconsana’ and ‘Awuthi Nyikithi’), F.M. Raseleso (‘Mohoang’), B.P.J. Tyamzashe (‘Zweliyaduduma’), C.B. Qwesha (‘Untsikana’), and ‘Tanana’ by C.Q. Mbele (composed for piano).121 ‘Obe’ [is] based on a Sotho legend relating to a one-eyed beast, used for frightening and to correct wayward children. The bass line in the composition is pitted against the rest of the upper voice parts, with each of the two entities maintaining a rhythmic and melodic character that gives the music an antiphonal as well as a polyphonic character or feel. The rhythm of the words influences and generates the musical rhythmic motifs in the work. The Bass part simulates the mythological ugly one-eyed beast, with a text that is altogether different from that of the upper three parts. The upper three parts (SAT), simulate the frightened cries of the child and her appeals to her parents for help. Both texts are sung simultaneously - a characteristic of African folk singing among the Sotho, Xhosa and Zulu … The composition is in one key, it has no modulation - a typical characteristic of African folk songs. This is the case with all Mohapeloa’s compositions. With his talent and ‘schooling’ in formal Western composition, my view is that he could easily have effected key changes for musical effect, but he keeps to one key in each one of his compositions, without effecting modulations. I surmise that it was a conscious way on his part of keeping and perpetuating the African folk song tradition of keeping one key centre.122 The folkloristic characteristic of using exclamations like He! Jo! As well as the rhythms that simulate the words, make this song one of the most popular with African choirs all over South Africa. […] [‘U Ea Kae’] is, according to Huskisson [1969, 164], a “[c]horal arrangement of a traditional [corn] threshing song … Threshers bound for Taung upbraid a fellow-worker for having no stick with which to work”. The exclamation hom! is used frequently in Sotho and Xhosa folk songs. In Zulu I have not met it in a musical context. It is used as a term of exclamation in exhortation and eulogy. This is another of Mohapeloa’s songs that has proved very popular because of its folkloristic exclamations of he!, eu!, e! and hom! and its antiphony [see Ex 17]. […] ‘Umaconsana’ by R.T. Caluza is in four parts (SATB). It pokes fun at shebeens which are a common feature of African social setting. In this particular work the composer explores and exploits the sonorities of male ensemble singing against female sonorities. The alternation of these two groupings gives the work an antiphonal character similar to antiphony found in folk songs. The difference is in the fact that instead or a solo voice doing the ‘call’ the whole female section (SSA) does it, with the ‘responses’ coming from the male section or the choir (TTBB). The three triadic parts of the soprano are pitted against the four male parts. The first section of the work (bars 1 to 16) is SATB and homophonic. The second section (bars 17 to 56) has the alternation and antiphonal singing of the female against the male sections of the chorus. Here also is found the ‘non simultaneous

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103

Ex 17 ‘U Ea Kae’ by J. Mohapeloa © Morija Publishing

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entry of parts’. The third section of the work (bars 56(4) to 64) has the melody in the bass line, with the upper three parts (SAT) providing the ‘response’ and accompaniment. Both ensembles sing the same text, but non-simultaneously. In the fourth section of the work (bars 65 to 67), the male voices provide a ‘humming’ accompaniment to the female ensemble, (bars 71(4) to 72) until the word ‘qed’ ibhabhalazi’. Unlike Mohapeloa’s songs, this one has modulation (bars 33(2) to 39(2)). Like Mohapeloa, and as is the case in folk song, the text strongly influences the melodic contours and the rhythmic motifs of the music. […] ‘Awuthi Nyikithi’, by R.T. Caluza again, is a work song, the type of folk song that was popular before the advent of automation. It is written for T.T.B.B. The slow start conjures a heavy load which the workers heave up and carry away as is imputed in the acceleration of the pace. The harmonic texture is mainly homophonic with some antiphony. The Bass part, and at other times the Tenor, does the ‘calling’ with the rest of the ensemble ‘responding’. The second Bass is given a prominent part. Exclamations like nyikithi and dubula zasha were taken directly from words used in the work situation where these songs were sung during the twenties up to the early fifties. […] ‘Zweliyaduduma’ by B.P.J. Tyamzashe was composed “for the visit of the British Royal Family to Umtata, 1947” (Huskisson, 1969). Antiphony occurs in bars 1, 20, 25, 31, 32 etc. The composer exploits the non-simultaneous entry of parts and the juxtapositioning of different texts (bars 64(2) to 85) a trait that we have seen to be common in African folk songs to create moods of excitement and agitation. The text is in Xhosa and it is composed for SATB In bars 16 to 28 the composer directs that the performance should be done with hand-clapping and dancing - a typical trait of African folk singing in most of the folk songs. This directive is to be done to the words: ‘A! Homna! Hulelele homna! Ahom! Hom!’ The exclamation ‘Hom!’ was alluded to earlier as expressive of exhortation and sometimes triumph in African folk singing. In addition to the devices of dynamic and temporal variety, the composer has used modulation to express the changes of mood. The song is in light vein. It was intended for entertainment. Its eight sections comprise light hearted music which includes in its text prosaic expressions like ‘hip! hip! hurray’! The text’s tonal inflections and rhythmic motifs are inherent in the music - a folkloristic trait … The work is divided into thirteen sections (medley of songs): Zweliyaduduma Sikhahlela kukumkani Nokumkanikazi

The country is thundering [x4] We hail the King And the Queen

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Nakuwo amatshawekaz’ amahle A homn A homna Wawel’ amanzi ukumkan’ wase Britani Dabulamanzi olwandle Ngangalala yokumkani Hai to kumkani AmaTshaWekazi’ amahle Angena eAfrika Afrika uThixo makasikelele Makhe sithabathe Makhe siphothome Thina ma Afrika Sikhahlela kuKumkani wethu Botisani bo khanibhotiseni’ bo Ulithemba lenyaniso Ukumkani kukumkani Siyabulisa ngengoma Thixo sikelel’ ukumkani wethu Sikelel’ iAfrika Ithamsanqa lemvula Kweli lizwe kwilizwe lakwetho Lifikile nekumkani enkulu Iyavuya iyavuya iyavuya Ngenen’ iAfrika yonke Ithi Hip Hurray ! Hip Hurray ! Ala Homi A homi A hom Thixo sikelela / ukumkani wethu

And the beautiful regent queens [Exclamation] [x2] The King crossed the waters Of Britain He cut across the sea water His majesty the King Hail the King [x2] Beautiful regent queens Entered Africa Africa May God Bless Let us grab Let us ponder over this We Africans We salute our King Salute, O please salute You are our true hope The King to the King We salute in song God Bless our King God Bless Africa The gift of rain In this country in this our country It has come with the great King It is happy, it is happy, it is happy Really the whole of Africa Is saying Hip Hoorah! Hip Hoorah! [Exclamation] God Bless / Our King123

[…] Many of the older composers tried to be as un-African as possible. In spite of this - the conscious effort to be as Western as possible - their use of vernacular texts imposed an autochthonic element in the works. The younger composers are now consciously trying to mirror an Africanness in their works. They are imbued by a sense of nationalism such as was the case in nineteenth-century Occidental Romanticism. While folk music is in most cases inspired by nationalism, “nationalism is not necessarily folk song” (Farwell 1946[1975]). Features of folk song abound in national music and identify it with its ethnic sources. The ethnic sources give it an ethnic and a geographical identity; but the humanness of the composers comes through in their works, and it transcends ethnic and geographical barriers, and identifies them as part of the wider family of Man. I therefore find it appropriate to end this monograph by quoting Farwell (1946[1975]) in discussion of ‘National Music’:

106 [M]usic is far from being a universal language … wherever it amounts to anything it can be proved that it strikes root deeply on its proper national soil … The central interest in this matter of nationalism in music … in the end identifies itself with the final interest in music. It is a question of the fusion of the purely human values involved, with the artistic values. These two factors are indispensable, complimentary, mutually assimilable. The moment we, say ‘music’, we equally imply humanity. Music is compound of instinct, emotion, thought, intuition. And this is what man is. We cannot escape this identity on any pretence of interest in purely artistic theories. The human is scaled in the artist. The moment we recognise this, we must realise that we are dealing not with constants, but with two variables. Humanity varies as to race variety and development, in thousands of ways. Musical art varies correspondingly in thousands of ways; on its general foundation of folk song lies the higher development of the art.

It is in works with a ‘sound general foundation of Folk song’ where the African composer in South Africa is most successful. He composes with self assurance and confidence and thereby reveals himself as one with Universal Man.

The FAK and Afrikaans Music124 W.S.J. Grobler W.S.J. Grobler was a scholar of Afrikaans music, who served on the editorial committee of the New FAK-Songbook. This was published in 1961 by the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniginge (Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Societies) in the year of the formation of the Republic of South Africa. When the Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Societies (FAK) was formed at a congress in Bloemfontein in 1929, it was clear that the promotion of Afrikaans music was to be one of the tasks of the organisation.125 With others, Willem Gerke made a special appeal to the congress about this matter. The first indication that the executive committee of the FAK had been giving Afrikaans music its

Fig 21 Accordion and concertina played by Mary and Percy Monri 1939 © Museum Africa serious attention, was the establishment of a committee (March 7, 1931) to investigate the possibility of publishing a volume dedicated to Afrikaans musical folklore. […] The committee compiled a list of about 200 songs … The work was completed in 1937 with the publication of the first FAK-Volksangbundel. This was thoroughly revised twenty years later: out-moded songs were removed and indigenous Afrikaans songs were more widely represented. The revised edition was published

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in 1961. Other matters pertaining to music to receive the attention of the executive committee during the 1930s were: (a) organisation of attempts to reach unanimity among Afrikaners on the question of a national anthem (this led to the official recognition of Die Stem van Suid-Afrika (M.L. de Villiers); 126 (b) appeals to manufacturers of gramophone records to distribute Afrikaans records of higher quality and to finance a number of recordings of outstanding Afrikaans songs … (c) the appointment of South African musicians to collaborate with examiners of the London Associated Board in music examinations conducted in South Africa. A result of the work done during the ’30s was the realisation that a permanent music commission was desirable and on June 19, 1941 the FAK Music Commission met for the first time … The Music Commission is appointed biennially by the Executive Committee with the following terms of reference: (a) to make Afrikaans music known and to encourage the performance and use of Afrikaans art songs; (b) to assist young Afrikaans composers by appraising their work and to ensure that selected works are published; (c) to promote Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in music teaching and lecturing; (d) generally to protect and promote the interests of Afrikaans composers. The Commission has recommended the publication by the FAK of church choir books, piano teaching manuals, school operettas and songs in Afrikaans and took the initiative with regard to the special congress devoted to folk music and singing which was held in Stellenbosch between 30 September and 3 October 1957. An important result of this congress was that negotiations were conducted with various authorities to establish an institute for folk music at an Afrikaans university. This was created at the University of Stellenbosch in 1960, with Jan Bouws of the Netherlands (later Dr Jan Bouws) in charge. Other tasks of the Commission include the compilation of programmes for Afrikaans festivals, language festivals and Republican thanksgiving festivals, and the distribution of circulars and lists of select titles providing information and advice on folk songs, recordings of Afrikaans music and published compositions by Afrikaans composers.

The Music of Ntsikana127 David Dargie Dave Dargie’s interest in Xhosa music developed during his days at Lumko Missiology Institute in the then Transkei (eastern Cape), from where he pioneered the study of music in the indigenous churches, African methods of music education, and traditional music. Author of many recordings and academic publications, his best-known work is Xhosa Music: Its Instruments and Techniques. Professor Dargie taught at Unisa, Rhodes and the University of Fort Hare, and now divides his time between Germany and South Africa. Transmission of Ntsikana’s music128 [Janet] Hodgson has carefully described how Ntsikana’s hymns were handed down in the Church (Hodgson 1980, 11-21). However, although the first transcriptions of the text were made as early as 1822 - a year or two after Ntsikana’s death - it was over fifty years before the music was notated by any method. The first person to do so was the remarkable Xhosa divine, the Reverend John Knox Bokwe, who was both scholar and composer. Until then the music has been handed down orally. In this way he himself had learnt the hymns from his grandparents who had been disciples of Ntsikana (Hodgson 1980, 68ff). Bokwe’s first transcription of the melody of the ‘Great Hymn’, in tonic solfa notation, was published in Isigidimi sama-Xosa (The Xhosa Messenger) in November 1876. Other published versions followed in which he distinguished four hymns of Ntsikana, called ‘Intsimbi’ (Bell), ‘Dalibom’ (Life-Creator), ‘Ingom’enqukuva’ (Round Hymn - see Ex 19129) and ‘Ulo Tixo mkulu’ (‘Thou Great God’, the ‘Great Hymn’ - See Ex 18130). […] It was remarkable how Ntsikana’s music survived in the churches by oral tradition. However, since J.K. Bokwe’s time a considerable revival of interest in Ntsikana has taken place among Xhosa Christians. In 1909 he was chosen as a national patron of the Xhosa, with the founding of the Ntsikana Memorial Association, having been preferred to other national figures such as Hinstsa and Nxele. The composition by the well-known Xhosa composer Benjamin K. Tyamzashe, ‘uNtsikana’ (1949), is taught in all the schools. Three of the hymns have spread far and wide and are readily sung by many Xhosa people today [Exs 18, 19, 24]. However, the best-known form of the ‘Great Hymn’ is that of J.K. Bokwe’s son, S.T. Bokwe [Ex 21]. It is even more remarkable that the ‘Great Hymn’ has also survived independently of the influence of church and school. It is sometimes sung today by people who have never heard of Ntsikana. These indigenous performances are invaluable because they provide a clue as to how the hymns were originally sung and how they have come to be altered within the

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confines of the church … Another version of each hymn … has been supplied by transcribing it from a recording made in 1957 by the late Hugh Tracey.131 It was S.T. Bokwe who was conducting the choir for this recording, at Zwelitsha near King William’s Town.

Ex 18 Ntsikana-Bokwe ‘Great Hymn’ (notated by J. Bokwe in solfa, transcr. D. Dargie in staff notation)

     

II(#4)





E - le - le - le

I





ho - mna,



hom,



hom - na.

Ex 19 Ntsikana-Bokwe ‘Round Hymn’ (notated by J. Bokwe in solfa, transcr. D. Dargie in staff notation)

I I(passing V7)

    



II(#4) I

II(#4)



U - lo - thix - o

 -



mkhu - lu,





II(#4) I







ngo - se - zu - lwi - ni.

Ex 20 S.T. Bokwe’s ‘Great Hymn’ melody only (sung by S. Bokwe’s choir, transcr. D. Dargie)

111 Tenor



       



U lo - thix - o

  

S A



 



  -





 

 



 

mkhu-lu,





  

 

 

ngo - se - zu - lwi - ni. T B



  



 



   

  

  

 

          

        

         



     



   

   

         

 

  

 

      

   

     

      

Ex 21 S.T. Bokwe’s ‘Great Hymn’ full harmony (sung by S. Bokwe’s choir, transcr. D. Dargie) Ntsikana’s ‘Great Hymn’ and the Bokwes The elder Bokwe himself wrote that there were two ways of performing the ‘Great Hymn’ (Ex 18), but that he knew only one of them, a claim corroborated by J.W.W. Owen in 1916 (in Hodgson 1980, 71-72). As far as it is known by the present writer, J.K. Bokwe’s melody for the ‘Great Hymn’ (Ex 18) has been published only in Transkei, where the music is less familiar than in Ciskei, Ntsikana’s home territory.132 The more usual practice has been that of S.T. Bokwe, of singing the ‘Great Hymn’ to the same melody and harmony as Ex 19, the ‘Round Hymn’. This melody was certainly known to his father, who had written it down [as] hymn no. 3; and the fate of the now obsolete music for J.K. Bokwe’s hymn no. 4 is therefore something of an enigma. Ex 21 shows how the younger Bokwe sang the ‘Great Hymn’: it is almost the same as the father’s ‘Round Hymn’ melody, with only one rhythmic alteration at the beginning and a change of melodic direction in the last two notes. The musical examples just quoted repay further study, because they all contain elements that are Xhosa and some that are not. The following Xhosa elements can be distinguished. The melodies have a typical saw pattern, gradually falling away to the end. Two harmonic progressions are typically Xhosa: I- II(#4) and I-II with each chord lacking the third. Nonetheless, non-Xhosa elements are numerous.

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There is the perfect fourth of the scale (B-flat in F major). Certain problems arise with the speech tones. For example, in [Ex 18] there is an upward leap across the barline on the word ‘omkhulu’ which should really fall. Similarly in Ex 20 there is the upward leap on the last two notes, as sung by S.T. Bokwe. Chord V in Ex 18 (bar 5, beat 3), and the passing V7 in Ex 20 are atypical. As regards rhythm, both the total lack of rhythmic feeling and the dependence on the barline in Ex 18 are non-Xhosa, as is the stolid 3/4 metre of Ex 20. The writing (Exs 18 and 19) and singing (Ex 20) of various lines of text to the same melody without individual variations are also non-Xhosa. Ex 18 is especially awkward in several ways: besides the disjunct movement already mentioned (from bar 1, beat 4, to bar 2, beat 1), many of the accents fall incorrectly, with the additional rhythmic distortion that arises when semiquavers are followed by heavy regular crotchets. It must be borne in mind that J.K. Bokwe was trying to write down what he remembered from his grandparents. But it should be asked: what was he remembering, and what had actually been sung in those distant days? Ex 18 shows a hazy glimpse of something undoubtedly Xhosa. […] The wedding song version

Ex 22 Four variants of the wedding song ‘Ulo Tixo omkulu’ (transcr. D. Dargie) H = hlabela (lead) L = pandela (answer) Reference has already been made to a recording of the hymns by the late Hugh Tracey. On the reverse of the same disc is another recording of the ‘Great

113

Hymn’.133 Here it is listed as a wedding song for women and simply entitled ‘Ulo Tixo omkulu’, without reference to Ntsikana. A [shortened] transcription of four variants of this song is provided in Ex 22 … Those performing were not only women; male voices can also be heard, singing, providing vocal percussion and uttering cries. The style of performance leaves one in no doubt that these were not churched or schooled people [‘amaKolwa’], but ‘amaQaba’ - people living a completely traditional way of life. This is strongly indicated by the cries, especially the instruction ‘Vala, mlungu’ (‘Close, white man’), referring presumably to the recorder. ‘Mlungu’ is not considered a complimentary term, and would not casually be used by a school or church person … [T]he performance closely approximates true indigenous Xhosa musical style. But two elements point to European influence, namely: the triple metre, though this is not conclusive; more conclusive is the holding of the final major triad at the end, suggesting the final chord of a Western hymn. These reasons lead one to believe that this performance has roots deep in the past, at least going back to the early ways of singing the ‘Great Hymn’ at the mission. J.K. Bokwe’s ‘Great Hymn’ Consideration must now be given to J.K. Bokwe’s notated melody of the ‘Great Hymn’. The first point that must be considered, referring again to Ex 18, is the obvious disjunct movement between bars 1 and 2. The melody skips from an H [lead] line to an L [answer] line, the latter beginning with bar 2, beat 1. If lines H1 and L4 of Ex 22 are written out together, making a very normal adjustment to the first note of L4 to make it move harmonically with H1, the following is arrived at (see Ex 23).

Ex 23 Reconciling the wedding song and J.K. Bokwe’s ‘Great Hymn’

114

J.K. Bokwe’s melody of the ‘Great Hymn’ is written out below the combined H1 and L4 from the wedding song version, with a line in between showing the tones in common which might have formed the links in Bokwe’s memory. The similarity is obvious. Add to it a disregard for speech tones, word accents and the use of Xhosa rhythm, and it becomes even more convincing. The indigenous performance has a convincing authenticity, but, as intimated, also some traces of mission influence. ‘Ntsikana’s Bell’ and ‘Life-Creator’

     SOLO: i: Se

 

- le, ii:'Zani'kuv'izwi

S A





   ALL: A - hom,

T B





  





le

Se Nko

-

 



le, si,

A - hom, A - hom,









a - hom, a - hom,

  

a - hom,

a - hom,

  

  

  



  

  

a - hom,





a - hom. a - hom.

    





a - hom.

 

Ex 24 Ntsikana-Bokwe ‘Intsimbi kaNtsikana’ (‘Ntsikana’s Bell’) (notated by J. Bokwe in solfa, transcr. D. Dargie in staff notation)     

(Quickly)

   

(molto rit . . . .)

  

(i) He! Na - nke K'u - DAL' U - Bom',

 Wa -

      

SIKw' Li - Zwe - ni.

Ex 25 Ntsikana-Bokwe ‘Dalubom kaNtsikana’ (‘Ntsikana’s Creator of Life’) (notated by J. Bokwe in solfa, transcr. D. Dargie in staff notation) Up to the present time no indigenous performance of [Ntsikana’s Bell] has come to light. The performance of S.T. Bokwe’s choir (on recording) closely follows the transcription of his father [Ex 24]. Hodgson tells of the bell stone on the hill above Ntsikana’s grave (Hodgson 1980, 7). He is reputed to have rung this in order to summon his followers to prayer. The stone shows evidence of much ringing. It gives a clear tone which can be heard for a long distance over the surrounding countryside, producing three notes of a major triad in first inversion when struck in different places. The most prominent notes are the fifth and the third. The high, ringing opening notes of this hymn are certainly a call to prayer. The whole text, too, is oriented towards the calling of the faithful: (Yi)zani kuv’ Izwi leNkosi / Sabelani / Niyabizwa ezulwini / (Yi)zani nonke (Come to hear the word of the Lord, Answer the call, You are called to heaven, Come, everyone.) Again, the name of the hymn evokes several associations. Ntsikana is reputed to have used it as his ‘bell’, to call people to worship. The words ‘sele’ and ‘ahom’,

115

sung on a high note, and particularly the latter word with shortened vowels and stressed hum, may imitate the sound of a bell. Further, as it has been observed, the opening notes are those of the bell stone itself, with emphasis on the fifth (C) in Ex 24. The hymn [‘Ntsikana’s Bell’] is sung, of course, in unison and octaves except in the Western-type perfect cadence on the last two notes. The melodic pattern is certainly Xhosa. At the end, the sopranos rise as shown, but more prominent in the music, and more Xhosa, is the fall of the basses to the low F. But the implied chord system is unauthentic. The fall from G to C (bars 6-7), with its implied imperfect cadence, is not Xhosa. The B-flat is wrong, while the final perfect cadence could never occur in Xhosa music. Nonetheless this is a most impressive song and one longs to discover how it originally sounded. [Bokwe’s Hymn no. 2 - Creator of Life] would seem to be the slightest, musically (Ex 25). [The text means] ‘Behold the Creator of life, he has ascended’. The saw pattern and falling melody is typically Xhosa, although the intervals G to C might be suspect. [S.T.] Bokwe sings it solo, rounding it off with a repetition of the chorus of the Bell Hymn, ‘ahom!’ This hymn also has failed to appear in indigenous performance as yet.

Highbreaks: A Taste of Marabi in the 1920s and ’30s134 David Coplan David Coplan is an American-born social anthropologist who has lived for many years in southern Africa, teaching at the Universities of Lesotho, Cape Town and Witwatersrand. His prolific writing on South African urban music and BaSotho migrant workers’ song includes the books In Township Tonight (1985) and In the Time of Cannibals (1994). Coplan is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. For African proletarians, middle-class entertainment was something of a model of city culture, and it certainly influenced the development of marabi. The 1920s and ’30s were the era of ‘concert and dance’ among the urban African petty bourgeoisie. A choir or ragtime vaudeville company performed for the first four hours of the evening, followed by four hours of dancing to the band … Some were ndunduma concerts, attended mostly by recent arrivals from the country who wanted to be ‘town boys’, and came to acquire some urban culture. The term ndunduma means ‘mine dumps’ in Zulu and symbolised the totality of Johannesburg’s culture to people from Natal. The ndunduma concerts and dances were the favourite of the udliwe i’ntaba, people ‘eaten by the hills’, those who, like the Sotho sebono morao, left home on contract work and never returned … Mission-educated critics such as H.I.E. Dhlomo referred to ndunduma functions as “night clubs of the lowest order … attended by degenerate young elements, the newly arrived country bumpkins, and the morbidly curious” (Ilanga Lase Natal, 20 June 1953). Despite this attitude, Dhlomo wrote one of the few accounts of how keyboard players were able to combine Zulu musical materials with ragtime to produce marabi: And yet what naturally talented players the ragtime and the Ndunduma concerts had! Vampers … who improvised many ‘hot’ original dance and singing numbers at the spur of the moment, and who play or accompany any piece after hearing the melody once, and do so on any key … Like the tribal bards of old [they] created beauty they knew not and flung it back unrecorded to the elements which gave it birth.

[…] A full-scale musical transcription and analysis is necessary in order to demonstrate exactly how this flexible style could incorporate musical resources from so many cultures. […] ‘Highbreaks’, played by Aaron Lebona, is a typical marabi. Describing such a musical hybrid in Western terms risks falsifying the African performer’s own conception, and implying certain value judgements. Keeping this in mind, we can still see some of the ways in which tonality and part structure reflect traditional principles.

117

Blacking, writing of ocarina music among South African Venda, introduced the term ‘root progression’ (Blacking 1959, 21-23 [see Blacking 1959 earlier in this book:]). He was referring to the short sequence of bass roots and the melody or melodies moving in relation to the tone centre in multipart structures in African music. Rycroft (1967, 96) used the concept of root progression as a substitute for ‘chord sequence’ because African polyphony does not have real chords or a fixed harmonic scheme. Kubik’s observation that the “concept of root progression is projected into tone and chord material of Western provenance” in African popular music applied to marabi (Kubik 1974, 24). Blacking notes that the distribution of the root progression in African music extends “even in the Tonic-SubdominantDominant strumming that one hears on guitars and old pianos”. In addition, the combination of regularly moving roots and unresolved harmonic progressions gives the music “that quality of perpetual motion, which is a prominent feature of much African music” (Blacking 1959, 23).

118

Highbreaks

Transcription: Leslie Ament and David Coplan

     



    

       

  



  6 I Shakers  I6 V 4          

                 iii6 I6           

ii6

  

       

    



      

  

      6 6 iii6 ii6 I4 V ii I4                                    

  

     







Aaron Lebona



       

         

 

6 I4

      



                         

 

  

 V7 

V7

I

simile

                             

                            6  ii iii ii6 I4

       I6 III6 iii IV

              Prolonged Dominant





 I

   6

I7

                                    

 IV

    4





IV6

6 I4

  

 

6 I4

  



                                                                       



  



                             

                                       

                 

119



 

    



   

  

  

  

        

  



     





  

              

 



          

 





   

  



  

         



   



 



   









  



 



 







     





  









 



















  











  





    

   

 

  





 











  

  











  





   



 

   

 

  













 

      



  



    































  

  

  







  



 



  



  

 





   



  



  

  





       





































  

 



 



  

      



   

  







 

 

'Highbreaks...' ad infinitum. 







  



    

        

  













  



 

      





  

  







  



   

  

  



  

  

   











  

  





   





 







 

                 













 



   











 





  

 

  





          

   

        





   

        















  









 















   

 

 

  



  







 







   









  











  



 

      

  

2.

 

 



   



  





1.

         

  





 

 



Ex 26 ‘Highbreaks’ (Aaron Lebona, transcr. Leslie Ament and David Coplan)

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The transcription of ‘Highbreaks’ reveals a four-bar root progression sequence, essentially I-IV-I6/4-V7, with melodic phrases staggered in relation to it. This nonsimultaneous entry of parts follows the structure of traditional vocal polyphony. It also appears in Nguni guitar and bow songs. Usually, the main melodic phrase appears to run from the second 8th note of measure 1 to the end of measure 2. It anticipates the harmony of subsidiary phrases following in measures 3 and 4 of the four-bar sequence, which are suggestive of additional parts with separate entry points. The phrase scheme for the first twenty measures is roughly AA” (repeat) BA” (repeat) CC’C’C”. In Fig 22 we see the structure of ‘Highbreaks’ represented in a cyclical diagram (Rycroft 1979, pers. comm.), in which the circle represents two repetitions of the four-bar bass sequence. In the right hand, short solo melodic figures occur at the top of a series of chords that move mainly in parallel motion. These chords are frequently ‘irregular’. A typical Western listener might find them disconcerting, since they break the rules of standard harmonic practice, but not in any consistent way that might immediately indicate an alternative musical conception. While parallel motion does occur to some extent in Southern African traditional music, in ‘Highbreaks’ it may well be that the right-hand chord sequences derive largely from retaining a roughly consistent alignment of the fingers while moving the hand as a whole. The fixed recurrent root sequence, as in traditional bow music, limits the choice of melodic notes at any point apart from the prolonged dominant descant, which overrides other features. This variation provides a point of rest in relation to the root progression and staggering of phrases and it is used in both traditional Southern African music and Afro-American forms like jazz (Blacking, op. cit.). The rhythm has several complex and interesting features. The variety, syncopation, delayed beats, and other elements of early jazz are set to a traditional off-beat pattern and played on two tin shakers filled with pebbles. Cadence to tonic, found in many melodic phrases in ‘Highbreaks’, is not unusual in traditional bow or guitar songs; it is inevitable if they happen to end regularly at the same point in the bass sequence. Interestingly, cadential endings here (V7-I) do not occur at the end of the bass sequence, which is on the dominant, but usually at the start of measure 3. In the sixth and seventh four-bar sequences, where the melodic phrase is drawn out to cover four measures, cadence occurs in measure 1 of the next sequence. Both placements are anticipated, with syncopation, and provide tonic harmony.

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Fig 22 Circular diagram of Highbreaks (after Rycroft) Some variation results from phrase-shifting, and some melodic digressions may include short phrases from other songs assimilated from the player’s musical environment. A difficulty in analysing the influences in ‘Highbreaks’ stems from the possible identity of Afro-American and black South African musical practices. A four-bar chord sequence, ending on the dominant, may reflect a segmentation of progressions commonly found in blues. The exact sequence I-IV-I6/4-V7 does not occur in traditional South African music, though the two- four- or six-bar recurrent root sequence is fundamental to it.

Christian Schubart and the Cape135 Anna Bender-Brink Anna Bender-Brink was the foremost accompanist and orchestral pianist of Radio Johannesburg between 1950 and 1970, who in addition to her career as a performer extensively researched South African cultural history of the late eighteenth to early twentieth century. She graduated from the University of Pretoria in 1983 and after her retirement continued to play an active role in Johannesburg musical life. When a new country is being developed, it stands to reason that the musical side of cultural life would, for at least a century, be meagre, and certainly undocumented. This explains why, when one searches for music about the Cape of Good Hope, nothing can be traced until the year 1840 is reached. It was then that the first page of primitively printed music appeared at the Gazette Office 10 St. George Street, Cape Town, in the form of a leaflet. This contained a hymn called ‘Jezus neemt de Zondaars aan’ (Jesus accepts the sinners) inserted in a religious tract called Jezus de ware Zondaarsvriend (Jesus the true friend of sinners). The composer was Frederick Logier. But the very earliest mention of the Cape of Good Hope in the musical history of South Africa is found during the first period of the Dutch East Indian Company (1652-1795). It was in the 1780s that the German poet and musician, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart composed two songs which he called Zwey Kaplieder136 [see Figs 23 and 24]. After various foreign military regiments had served in Cape Town,137 the Dutch East Indian Company - which was better known as the V.O.C. (Vereenigd OostIndisch Compagnie) - signed a contract (‘Capitulatie’)138 with the Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg in Stuttgart, Germany on 10 October 1796. The plan was to station two thousand German soldiers in Cape Town to assist with defence in case the political unrest prevailing in Europe and England should spread and threaten peace at the Cape. In Germany, during those hard times, the marketing of mercenaries was practised by a number of rulers. Unemployment was rife, and young soldiers were eager for adventure. Parents of troublesome ‘enfants terribles’ saw a solution to their problems in the recruitment of their ‘Vagabunden und lüderliches Gesindel’ (vagabonds and dissolute rabble) (see Prinz 1932).

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Fig 23 ‘Erstes Kaplied: Abschiedslied’ In the midst of hurried preparations the Swabian poet and composer mentioned above wrote two poems which he set to music a few weeks before the departure for Cape Town of the first battalion in February 1787. His Zwey Kaplieder [Two Cape songs] were printed and distributed immediately. They became instant ‘hits’, for they prepared the soldiers emotionally and geographically for their future adventures. Schubart, in a letter to his Berlin bookseller Himburg, described the picture aptly: “The departure of the Württemberg Regiment will resemble an immense cortège because parents, wives, lovers, sisters and friends will be losing their sons, husbands, sweethearts, brothers - perhaps for ever” (Prinz 1932, 31). The first Kaplied (‘Erstes Kaplied’) was the farewell song (‘Abschiedslied’), and consisted of twelve verses. The ‘Zweytes Kaplied’ inspired the soldiers, in nine verses, to think of the famous Cape wines, the venison and the beautiful girls, black, brown and white. The latter's title was ‘Fur den Trupp’. In the cultural history of the Cape these two compositions are of considerable importance. They are the first printed copies of music referring to the Cape and, as such, to be published in Europe. The first song became the regimental song of

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Fig 24 ‘Zweytes Kaplied: Fur den Trupp’ the Württemberg soldiers. It reappeared only in the first edition of the popular F.A.K.-Volksangbundel of 1937. Here the song was provided with an Afrikaans text, written by Dr Hugo Gutsche, a compiler of song albums who lived and worked for many years in Heidelberg, Transvaal. He was always in search of good Afrikaans translations of German folk songs; yet the first ‘Kaplied’ appears in this anthology with different words, the title of which is now: ‘Waarheen, jy ruisende stroom?’ It is a bit of a mystery why Dr Gutsche, by deriving his new text from a poem by the German Julius Sturm, chose to ignore the background story of the Württemberg Regiment. Perhaps he considered the 200-year story not sufficiently important for Afrikaans-speaking children to commemorate in song. Instead, the geographical environment of the Cape (or for that matter, anywhere in South Africa) is now described: ‘Flowing streams through veld and vlei, destructive winds through harvests and barns and birds on the wing and you, my soul ... whither, after strife and struggle … ’ (which were all part of the development of a new continent). Apart from the importance of these Zwey Kaplieder in the cultural history of South Africa, the impressions made on the Württemberg Regiment of life at the Cape twelve years before the turn of the century throw a very informative light on circumstances in those times.139 The soldiers departed from Holland in several ships. Out of the two battalions, no less than 143 soldiers died at sea. As regards the ship ‘de Drie Gebroeders’, which spent five months at sea before reaching Cape Town, a quarter of the passengers had died. Eighteen women and eleven children

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had accompanied the soldiers to South Africa. By the end of July 1788 both battalions were stationed, but not at full strength. At first the soldiers were satisfied with their quarters, and they received a warm welcome from the inhabitants of Cape Town; the white-gabled houses made a pleasing impression. The indisposed were nursed back to health. However, the pay proved to be a tremendous disappointment. The soldiers could not save, let alone support any relatives at home (Prinz 1932, 81). They had to see to such things as their own sanitation. The slavery at the Cape was a great shock to them, and they found the indolence of the colonists despicable. Occasionally soldiers and slaves came to blows; a few of the soldiers were even confined to Robben Island until the expiry of their period of service. Their main duty was to keep blacks and coloureds under control and, as coastguards, protect the Cape from attack by the English. They had to participate in regular military exercises and thus they gradually became acquainted with Dutch military customs (Ibid., 93). At first the Commander of the Germans, Von Hügel and Colonel Gordon (the Commander of the Cape Garrison) were on good terms, until Von Hügel complained about the deterioration of uniforms and boots; then relations became strained (Ibid., 97). Von Hügel protested vehemently. Six months later new uniforms arrived, but they were so exorbitant in price that no soldier could afford one. The general impression gained by the Württemberg Regiment was as follows: “There are no theatres, no operas, no exciting festivities, a little primitive music, small pleasures in family circles like games of cards, few restaurants”. About the male colonists they remarked: “They smoke tobacco, drink wine, play cards, ride horses, are first-rate marksmen, but taste for the fine arts and science is completely non-existent” (Ibid., 141). A few comments about the composer of these songs:140 Schubart was born in 1739 in Sontheim, Germany and died in Stuttgart in 1791. He was organist in Geislingen and later music teacher in Ludwigsburg. From there he was banned after a notorious love-affair. After years of drifting he became Editor of the Deutsche Chronik in Augsburg, but was gaoled for ten years in 1777 for propagating ‘free-thinking’. On release he was appointed Editor of a Stuttgart newspaper Vaterlandschronik. Perhaps more interesting from the musical point of view is the fact that Schubart provided some of the texts for Franz Schubert’s Lieder, amongst them notably Die Forelle.

Opera Houses in South Africa141 Jaques Malan Jacques Philip Malan was born in 1917 in Bloemfontein, and trained as a musicologist in Vienna in the early 1950s. Malan founded music departments at the Universities of Potchefstroom and Pretoria, worked as programme compiler at the SABC during its formative post-war years, establishing the Committee for Heads of University Music Departments in 1967 and through that the Musicological Society in the late 70s; and he helped to launch the Society’s annual journal in 1981. In the 1960s Malan began work on a project with the Human Sciences Research Council that resulted in the four-volume South African Music Encyclopaedia (1979 to 1986), and he is author of many other publications. Cape Town An interesting result of the prosperity following on the discovery of gold, was the erection of theatres in the larger centres for the presentation of light theatre entertainment. Thus the meagre theatre facilities in Cape Town were extended in 1893 when the Grand Parade Building Company had a new theatre built at a cost of £90,000. It was still called ‘New Theatre’ when the Lyric Opera Company of Johannesburg inaugurated it with Cellier’s Dorothy on August 31, 1893, but a month later the name ‘Opera House’ became general. The first managers, B. & F. Wheeler (father and son), in partnership with George Edwardes of London, emphasized Gaiety Companies, but after 1898, many groups were engaged to stage operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan and French composers (Audran, Planquette, etc.). Shortly before the War it became fashionable to have the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan sung by children. The Lilliputian Opera Company consisting of thirty-two juveniles is an example. They were extremely successful and returned after the War as Hall’s Australian Juveniles. As far as is known, only one opera was ever staged in the Opera House: Tannhäuser by Wagner. It was produced by the Arthur Rousby Company. The theatre was a blessing for the Cape amateurs. In 1900, for instance, the Cape Amateur Dramatic Society staged farcical pieces such as Jim the penman, Facing the music and Tom, Dick and Harry. But it was also used for concerts by visiting celebrities like Mark Hambourg, Anna Pavlova, Jan Kubelik, Eileen Joyce, Dame Sybil Thorndike and others. In the first decade of this century, Leonard Rayne often hired it for dramatic productions. Under the management of African Theatres it was increasingly used for cinema shows (1920-1937). In the latter year Mr I.W. Schlesinger sold it to the Government for the erection of a new central post office. […]

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Johannesburg [The Standard Theatre] was opened five years after Johannesburg’s establishment as a heterogeneous diggers’ camp (October 1886) with a strong demand for lively, colourful entertainment. Since the opening of the Theatre Royal in 1887, there had been a second Theatre Royal and a Globe Theatre. These had been wood and iron shacks. But at the beginning of 1891 it was felt that a more permanent theatre could be built to accepted standards. The initiators of this project were Emanuel Mendelssohn (husband of Madame Mendelssohn, a soprano) and the financier Robert Stuart Scott, the managers of the Standard Building Company and the proprietors of the Standard and Diggers News. After delays due to lack of adequate finance, the building was opened on October 12 1891 by Captain von Brandis, Mining Commissioner of the ZAR. The first theatre manager, Arturo Bonamici, had exerted himself to make this a gala occasion. He had imported from England a complete opera company with Agnes Delaporte and Grant Fallowes as leading singers, together with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Dan Godfrey, for a performance of Audran’s La cigale et la fourmi. After the performance there was a dinner on the stage. Within the first nine years of its existence about 80 plays were presented in the theatre, but operettas and musicals were also popular.

Fig 25 The Standard Theatre, Johannesburg 1890s © Museum Africa In December 1896 a series of eleven Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were put on by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. Other companies who presented English and French operettas and musical comedies were the New Opera Company (1893), The London Comedy and Dramatic Company (1893), the Lyric Opera Company (1894), the London Gaiety Theatre Company (1894), the Gaiety Musical Comedy Company (1897), the London Opera Company (1897), Miss Mira McDonnell’s Opera Company (1897), Mr Lockwood’s Company (1897) and Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company (1898). A small number of classical operas were presented at the Theatre. Agnes Delaporte (who had sung at the opening) staged

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Faust, Cavalleria rusticana, and Offenbach’s Perichole. The Lyric Opera Company presented Pagliacci, Faust, Cavalleria rusticana, Il trovatore, La traviata; and Quinlan’s Opera Company produced Wagner’s Die Walküre. Quinlan enjoyed such an unparalleled success with this venture that he returned in 1913 for a Wagner season. Unfortunately there was much unrest due to a general strike of mine workers and the public support for the complete Ring der Nibelungen and Madame Butterfly was so poor that the season had to be curtailed. On Sunday evenings the theatre was used for Grand Sacred Concerts in which a musical celebrity, perhaps an artist touring with a visiting company, was honoured. At most of these functions singer were the main attraction; they included Virginia Cheron, Avon Saxon, Mlle Stephanie, William Verdi, Emilie Melville and Margaret McIntyre. But there were also programmes of instrumental music with performers such as Monsieur and Mlle Jonquier (pianist and violinist), Mr Landau (violinist), Signor Renzo Rotondo (cellist), the Cherniavsky Trio and the Johannesburg Orchestral Society playing classical to lighter classical music. The ballerina Anna Pavlova and the Steel-Payne Bellringers also appeared at the Standard. During its history of some 56 years there were additions, such as the gallery (built in 1911) and times when it stood unused, as during the First World War. Then came the gradual encroachment of films from the twenties onwards. After a fire in 1947 it became clear that it had become a hazard and would have to be closed down permanently. There was a strong movement to have it declared a national monument, but the interior structure had become too dangerously unsafe. After standing empty for twelve years it was demolished in 1959. The Oppenheimer Fountain marks the site where it stood. […] Pretoria Less than a year after the conclusion of the Anglo-Boer War an Opera House was built in Pretorius Street [Pretoria], putting into effect an ideal cherished by the Hollanders in Kruger’s Republic. The need for entertainment occasioned by the presence of the British military was the catalyst: it brought together the entrepreneurs Ben and Frank Wheeler, famous in the theatre world of the time, and Mr J.P. Hoffman. The building was completed within a year and inaugurated on February 27, 1904, with the Australian contralto, Ada Crossley, as the main attraction. She was supported by Percy Grainger (pianist/composer), Jacques Jacobs (violinist) and W.A. Peterkin (bass). The three-storeyed facade which faces on Pretorius Street was typical of the quiet simplicity of classical prototypes, but the interior was designed in Baroque style, with a small foyer of approximately 3,35 sq. m. Steps led to the stalls, a marble staircase to the first balcony and five adjoining boxes, and a staircase outside the theatre led to the gallery at the top of the auditorium. On each side of the stalls there were two sets of boxes. In all, 1 016

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people could be accommodated, the majority (412) on the gallery, which soon acquired the nickname of ‘Engelenbak’ (Angel’s Crib). Despite its name, only 23 operas were actually staged there from 1904-1920, as against 111 music comedies, 171 plays, 137 comedies and 99 varied concerts. During the first two years the Moody-Manners Opera Company, which had Dr Rinaldo Sapio and Signor Galeffi as conductors and a cast of Italian singers, presented operas in the new theatre: Il trovatore, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, Lucia di Lammermoor, Daughter of the regiment, Faust, Carmen, Cavalleria rusticana, Maritana and Bohemian girl. This was followed by many Gilbert and Sullivan operettas presented by visiting companies, like the D’Oyly Carte Principal Repertoire Company (1906) or the local Amateur Dramatic Society (later called the Amateur Dramatic and Operatic Society) in which Walter Cranch was the leading light. He testified that they rehearsed very thoroughly, spent large sums of money on attractive productions and that they never had a financial failure. These were elegant and formal occasions, even more so during the so-called ‘Command Performances’ graced by the administrative élite of the capital. On these occasions they had special programmes with original drawings printed on silk. The orchestras consisted mainly of amateurs, reinforced by military bandsmen and a few professional players from Johannesburg. In addition to operas, operettas, music comedies and plays, concerts were also held there. Besides celebrities from abroad, many South African musicians appeared on the stage of the Opera House. Among them were Pierre and Angelique de Beer, Charles Israel, Bosman di Ravelli and the Cherniavsky Trio. In 1905 it was the scene of Sunday evening concerts given by Galeffi’s Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra and in 1911 Henriette Bal van Lier used it for Sunday evening performances by her conservatoire choir. Like many other theatres in South Africa the Opera House had to suffer the encroachment of films. This trend started with brief news flashes in the early years, progressed to complete films from 1911 onwards, and eventually became so frequent that all theatrical pretensions had to be abandoned (1945). During the sixties the threat of demolition loomed over the theatre. There were efforts to have it declared an historical monument and efforts were made to purchase it from the 20th Century Fox Organization, but these led to nothing. On 29 August the doors closed after a last film show. The building was demolished and business properties rose in its stead. The original facade has, however, been preserved.

Chris McGregor142 Christopher Ballantine Christopher Ballantine is L.G. Joel Professor of Music at the University of KwaZulu Natal and author of numerous publications on music sociology, twentieth-century music and South African popular music, including the books Music and its Social Meanings (1984) and Marabi Nights (1993). Primarily interested in the social meanings of music, he has also researched Tswana panpipe music and is currently engaged in a study of kwaito. Ballantine retains a strong interest in contemporary Western art music composition, which he regularly reviews. The basic contours of Chris McGregor’s life are well known: his birth (in 1936) and youth in South Africa; his departure (in 1964) for Europe with his band, the Blue Notes (a black jazz band of which he was the only white member); the twenty-odd years spent away from the land of his birth; and the successful musical career as composer, pianist, and leader (initially) of the Blue Notes and then of his big band, the Brotherhood of Breath. Less well understood are the wellsprings of McGregor’s creative energies, and the central concerns that shape them and direct their expression. At the heart of these lies his profound and continuing involvement with the African music and culture of his native South Africa. Growing up in the eastern Cape district of South Africa (where his father was a teacher at a mission school), the earliest, and certainly the most formative, musical experiences of Chris McGregor’s life were those of the African music that surrounded him. ‘I was a white kid who had open ears from the start’, he says. These musical experiences would have included traditional Xhosa songs of work and ceremony: as a small boy he would go and listen, dance, clap and sing. Xhosa women’s responsorial songs with overlapping entries, he says, ‘were certainly my first counterpoint lessons’. There were also, he recalls, such experiences as hearing a crowd at a bus station suddenly breaking into a song; or the sound of 200 voices in the mission church producing, almost spontaneously, their own unconventional harmonisations of hymn tunes. Later, at boarding school, he clearly remembers using weekend leave to rush down to the ‘blacker’ end of town in order to listen to the music coming out of the black record shops - urban black music (mbaqanga), but also Ellington, the Mills Brothers, the Inkspots, the King Cole Trio. On free Saturday mornings, he says, ‘I used also to walk around with my guitar and sit down with a black accordion player on the street - playing the street music of the Africans living in the towns’. But hearing Ellington, on record and on the radio, falls into the category of what he calls ‘wake-up experiences’. ‘Looking back now’, he reflects, ‘I wonder if it was not because I heard a certain solution of the problem of black tradition in a white world’. He also befriended a black pianist who introduced him to Fats

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Waller. Soon he had his own small jazz band at school. Simultaneously, and often in tension with this, were his serious piano studies in Western classical music: working hard on Bach, Beethoven and Chopin, even giving the concert performances expected of the most outstanding students. But the tension was not just a matter of public expectations. Referring to the classical repertory, he says: ‘I can remember quite clearly feeling a certain malaise with that, and feeling that it excluded too much of my real day-to-day experience of Africa’. The ‘malaise’ reappeared more strongly during what promised to be a brilliant musical career as a music student at the University of Cape Town. The course was Western, classical, and conventional: and it was steadily superseded by McGregor’s deepening personal involvement with the black jazz scene in and around Cape Town. He met some of the outstanding figures of South African jazz when the musical King Kong passed through the city: Kippie Moeketsi, Jonas Gwangwa, Sol Klaaste, and others. Around the same time - this was the late 1950s - came two other powerful, confirming experiences: the discovery, together with his black jazz associates in Cape Town, of Parker and Monk (‘our jam sessions became more intensely bebop’), and an immersion in township jazz, mainly through sitting in (again as the only white) with a 15-piece black band for Saturday night dances in Langa township hall. The township events provided, he says, my first experience of building things from riffs. You’d get the mbaqanga chords going, the lead trumpeter or sax player would improvise a melody, and then, in the next eight-bar sequence, out it would come, voiced and all. That was magic to me! Out of this would emerge the most amazing complexity of texture, instrumental colour, melodic interactions, the rhythmic interactions of three or four riffs going together, and a soloist in front, improvising. I didn’t see a contradiction between these two (bebop and ‘township’), so much as a complementary relationship of linear and circular procedures. It seemed to me that the same skills were being demanded.

In 1964, as the repression of the apartheid state became increasingly severe, Chris McGregor and his group - by now the Blue Notes - left for Europe. Thoughts of returning to South Africa for a tour came to a head in 1969, as a result of the efforts of a small group of black businessmen in Johannesburg. Plans seemed finalized; excitement was high: the group (now expanded into the 13-piece Brotherhood of Breath) would play at large venues throughout the country. But at the last moment everything collapsed. McGregor explains: A lawyer saw photos - mug-shots - of the entire band, and said that if the government decided to stop the tour, there would be no way the contract could hold. Understandably, the financial backers withdrew. From that moment, it was clear I was an exile. I had initially left South Africa partly to broaden my world - but I suddenly realized that the one place in the world I couldn’t play was my home.

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So the exile continues to this day - with the profound hope that the situation will change. Chris McGregor says his feelings about South Africa and his music are becoming more and more intense. ‘There’s one thing you do realize in exile and that is that you’ve become more and more of a homeboy. When you thought you’d cut the ties, you realize you’ve tied them stronger. At times I’ve even tried to run away, to play down the South African connection, only to find that I’ve suddenly become very African’.

Arnold van Wyk and Nagmusiek143 Howard Ferguson Irish-born Howard Ferguson studied composition at the Royal College of Music (his teachers included Vaughan Williams), and pursued a career as a composer and pianist. In the late 1950s he turned to more scholarly work and is especially remembered for his editions of keyboard music. He also edited many of the incomplete scores of Arnold van Wyk, with whom he was closely associated, and taught composition at the Royal Academy of Music. Arnold van Wyk was born on a farm near Calvinia in the north-western Cape on 26 April 1916. He was the sixth of eight children and was christened Arnoldus Christian Vlok after his father. His mother, Helena van Dyk, came from a more prosperous family that claimed descent from the seventeenth-century court painter Sir Anthony van Dyck. The young couple had married at a time when farming offered reasonable hopes of security, but the father was never an efficient manager. Investing in ostriches shortly before the demand for their feathers ceased brought ruin finally. […] [I]important for his musical development was his meeting with a remarkable Jewish couple from Lithuania, Harry and Freda Baron, who at that time kept a general store at De Rust, near Oudtshoorn in the Little Karoo. During the Christmas holidays in 1929 Arnold was staying nearby with his sister Vera. She had no piano of her own and asked the Barons whether Arnold might sometimes practise on theirs. They agreed, with some apprehension which quickly proved groundless. As soon as Freda heard the boy play she realized that in spite of his youth and sketchy technique he knew instinctively what music was about. Thereafter, with the help of their gramophone and countless records from their shop, the Barons introduced Arnold to a whole new world of music. […] In 1936 a small bursary and an interest-free loan from Morris Friedland, a friend of Mrs Baron, enabled him to abandon insurance and embark on a Music Baccalaureate at the University of Stellenbosch. Here he worked with Alan Graham and Maria Fismer, and received a rare honour for a twenty year old who had never had a single composition lesson: he was commissioned by the Federation of Afrikaans Culture Societies [FAK] to write an Eeufeeskantate (Centenary Festival Cantata) for the inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument at Meintjeskop near Pretoria. […] In 1949 he was appointed senior lecturer in Music at the University of Cape Town …144 An orchestral Rhapsody, written in 1951 and now withdrawn, was

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followed by the Second Symphony (Sinfonia Ricercata) commissioned for the Van Riebeck Festival of 1952. […]

Fig 26 Van Riebeck Festival celebrations Cape Town 1952 © Museum Africa […] Van Wyk made three overseas trips during the years 1952-56. The longest was to London from December 1954 until February 1956, during which time he was mainly occupied in preparing for the Durham Mus. Bac. examination, but also found time to work on a large-scale piano work. This was entitled Night Music, in memory of his friend Noel Mewton-Wood, the brilliant young Australian pianist who tragically ended his own life in 1953. Themes for this work were written down as early as 1945 but only in 1956 did the composer give the first performance (for the SABC); and characteristically he then felt the work needed revision, with the result that the definitive version was not heard until September 1959. It is the most important of van Wyk’s piano works, not only because of its size but also because of its richness of content. […] Night Music (Nagmusiek), for piano solo [Dedicated to the memory of Noel Mewton-Wood] 1. Molto lento 2. Presto non troppo 3. Larghetto, poco rubato 4. Allegretto fantastico 5. Lento non troppo, teneramente 6. Allegro agitato e tempestoso 7. Epilogue. This twenty-four minute work was conceived in 1945. It was written mainly during 1955 and 1956 and first broadcast in the latter year. In 1958 it was revised,

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and the first public performance of the definitive version given in 1959. The seven strongly contrasted movements are played without a break. 1. Molto lento: four germinal motives, a, b, c and d in Ex 27, are heard during the first twenty bars of the misterioso opening movement: a Molto lento q = c. 60 

 

 











ppp 

 





1.  



 

 

 

 

mp cant.

 

 



 





1st time: accompaniment continues 2nd time: harmonies change

 

 

b 2. 



 

 







 

mp

    

mp

   

c 3

           

pp pp

  

                

      

            

 



      

3

  









     



d  

ppp      



    

p 

f

   

Ex 27 Four germinal motives: a, b, c, d All four are interrelated through the rocking tone or semitone-figure that first appears in the quaver accompaniment to a. Furthermore, though the work as a whole is not in any normal sense a set of variations, each of the subsequent movements is based on some variant of two or more of these motives. 2. Presto non troppo: a haunted scherzo in which fragments of c, b and a emerge momentarily above a pianissimo swirl of triplets derived from d. 3. Larghetto, poco rubato: the serenely expansive opening melody, a variant of c, unfolds against a shimmering chain of trills: q = c. 52                           

mp molto dolce

Ex 28 Opening melody: variant of motive c

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It is followed by a contrasted theme, e derived from a and accompanied by a gently swaying triplet-figure:

Ex 29 New theme e, derived from motive a This is in turn succeeded by an apparently new motive f: bar 140, which is in fact an inverted derivation of a. In alternation with c it is worked up to a climax g: bar 151, built from a combination of c, e and f. This, is short-lived, however, and the movement dies away to a dreamy close. 4. Allegretto fantastico: a miniature scherzo, hushed and slightly sinister, in which a free two-part canon (a variant of a) is alternated with a cantabile version of c, the latter accompanied by a quietly persistent rhythmic ostinato. The brittlesounding highest register of the piano underlines the prevailing sense of unease. 5. Lento non troppo, teneramente: the movement opens with a warm melody based on variants of d, a, b and f, its uneven 11/8 [metre] giving the effect of constant rubato. The initial calm is gradually overtaken by a more restless mood, which eventually prevails and leads directly into the sixth movement. 6. Allegro agitato e tempestoso: this main section of the work is in fullydeveloped sonata form, with a wild and stormy exposition. Variants of variants are encountered here for the first time: the first subject (from bar 269) is based on f and the second (from bar 278) on both g and e. Towards the end of the exposition a new and exceptionally harsh motive, h, breaks in: h            

        

   

    

fff

Ex 30 Motive h In contrast to this violence, the spectral development section (from bar 315) remains pianissimo throughout. Once again the upper reaches of the keyboard are used extensively, but here the effect is less grotesque than in the two scherzo movements. The storm returns with the recapitulation, its subjects now presented in reverse order. At the climax (bar 370) two notes from the final penetrating chord

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are left hanging in mid-air. One of them evaporates; the other slowly melts into the Epilogue. 7. The Epilogue: ghostly snatches of earlier movements return one by one: first the harsh motive h, now marked ‘p irrealmente’; then the opening bars of movements 5, 2, 3 and 4; and finally the close of movement 1. A broad chordal melody enters quietly above a shadowy, undulating bass, to be followed by a solemn passage marked ‘quasi tromboni dolci’. When this ends a fragment of motive a returns, the rocking semitone of its accompaniment descends lower and lower to round off the work very softly in the extreme bass.

PART 3

Music and Social Transformation My Story145 Miriam Makeba

Singer, songwriter, author, actress, former UN ambassador and outspoken anti-apartheid activist, Miriam Makeba was the first African recording artist to be awarded a Grammy. She began her career in the 1950s with groups such as The Manhattan Brothers, then formed her own female vocal group, the Skylarks. Banned from returning to SA after she toured overseas with King Kong, she was in exile for 30 years, in the US then Guinea. She returned to SA in 1990. On stage I wear the robe that belonged to my mother, the isangoma. The colours swirl and come together on this robe; they are the dark brown of the earth, and the deep blue of the sky. I do not wear this heirloom from my mother all the time, only every so often. And every so often, a strange thing happens when I sing. I do a song, but I am not conscious of it. After we leave the stage, I ask my musicians, ‘Did I sing such-and-such song?’ ‘Oh, yes’, they tell me. But I have no memory of it, When I see films of the show or listen to tapes, there I am, dancing with all the life that is in me, and there is my voice and no other’s. I cannot explain why I should ‘black out’. And no one can explain it to me. I used the expression, ‘dancing with all the life that is in me’. During a trip to Swaziland in 1980, it is first suggested that the life that is in me may be more than just my own. I meet my niece Yvorne, who lives here in Swaziland. Yvorne, whose African name is Nonsikelelo, is very dear to me. I thank my ancestors and the Superior Being and anyone else who has favored me with her, because Yvorne is the only one of my family I can see and touch in my exile. When I left South Africa, it was she who did what I once did and assisted my mother when the amadlozi came and my mother went into one of her trances. Yvorne knows all about isangomas. She takes me to consult with one. This is a task that all my people must do if they are ill, or if they want word of their ancestors, or if strange things are bothering them. The isangoma, a young woman, talks to me in her hut. She doesn’t know me at all, but she asks, ‘Don’t you sometimes feel that you didn’t sing this or that song when you perform?’ I am amazed. She then tells me what others have suggested over the years: that I, like my mother, am possessed by amadlozi. I have always wondered about this. My mother’s spirits almost destroyed her before she went through ukuthwasa. If a person who is a channel for spirits suppresses them, they can make that person ill, or even kill them. If I am a channel for some spirits, like

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my mother was, why don’t they make themselves known to me by causing illnesses or misfortune? But they have made themselves known, the isangoma says. My spirits are stealing the show! Amadlozi are show-offs. This is why they made my mother dress in their clothes and carry on when she was in their spell. I sing before the public, and the spirits get a chance to steal my mind and present themselves. That is why to this day I have been excused, and I may still be excused from going through the hard ordeal of ukuthwasa and becoming an isangoma. […] For many years they have called me ‘The Empress of African Song’. But when Swiss television comes to do a documentary about my life, they choose the title Mama Africa. In Europe there is a film competition among the French-speaking nations teaming with French-speaking African nations. Switzerland chooses Guinea instead of the Ivory Coast, Gabon, Senegal, or the other former French colonies because I live here and they want to use me as their subject. To the film-makers I represent the continent and its music to the Western world. African music, though very old, is always being rediscovered in the West. Then it becomes new, and very hip. Just recently I was in Nuremberg, Germany. My new manager, Willie Leiser, booked me into a rock festival. I did not know why. The main group was The Who, and the other groups were also rock’n’roll. When I came on, the young people in the audience did not know what to make of me. They suddenly became the most hostile audience I ever had. And for the first time in my life things were thrown at me: beer cans, paper airplanes. I almost walked off stage. But something told me I should continue. But I was angry! My anger must have gone into the force of my singing, because the audience was silent before I could finish the song. When I was done they were just standing there. And by the end of my set, they were screaming. When I my musicians and I left the stage, the screaming went on and on for so long, I had to be called back.

The Songs of A.A. Kumalo: A Study in Nguni and Western Musical Syncretism146 Bongani Mthethwa Bongani Mthethwa was a conductor, choir adjudicator, story-teller, and authority on Zulu beadwork, language, and music. His MA degree on music and ritual in African-initiated churches was completed under John Blacking at Belfast University in the early 1980s. Mthethwa’s Ph.D. on the hymns of Isaiah Shembe was left incomplete at the time of his death (1992), when he was Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the University of Natal. The inside view provides three terms which see Zulu society divided into amabhinca (traditionalists), amagxagxa (modernised but not highly educated), and the izifundiswa (the educated). These divisions are not harsh. The insiders tend to view one another as practising different styles instead of the ‘superior-inferior’ assumption. Ancestral veneration safeguards this horizontal relationship since no man call claim superiority above ancestors. Hence the attitudinal nature of these group differences. The music therefore tends to honour these social categories, however, with a lot of interaction between the styles. Alfred Kumalo (1879-1966) was born in a mission station in Edendale on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg … According to my present social categories, Khumalo147 belonged to the African elite. In the mission station, in line with common practice at the time, it was un-Christian to perform any traditional music. Indigenous music emanated from some ceremonies when young people especially were encouraged to improvise songs with the most appalling vulgar words. Such ceremonies and rituals were most alienating for the White missionaries, and from the Christian point of view they had to be stopped amongst Christian societies! Children especially, in mission stations, were punished for mixing with peers from the non-Christian sections. Kumalo himself was once punished by his parents for practising traditional dance with children of the “barbarians” (Huskisson 1969, 62). The cliché that African music is tantamount to enactment of life, that is, without music there cannot be life, is indeed not all exaggeration when one considers that African music ranges from bedroom songs for lovers to war songs in the battlefield. The repression of musical activity in mission stations, leaving the people with the hymn as the only choice for all their musical activities, consequently led to the modification of the hymn. The hymn therefore had to become a work song, a love song, wedding song and [serve] other ceremonial situations, including sheer performance of music for pleasure as one would find in bow songs. I am particularly interested in bow music as it survives on grounds of artistic potency as opposed to ritual music which is perpetuated by the ritual. The songs of Kumalo are not composed in bow style, but socially they are meant like bow music - for listening. They are therefore regarded by the people as ‘food for

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the ear’. Harmony is expected to dominate this kind of music which people regard as food for the ear (ukudla kwendlebe). Some possibilities for synthesis of African and Western music It seems to me that African and European music belong to the same musical ‘species’, because in both ‘musics’ we find the common elements of harmony, melody and rhythm148 […] It is worth pointing out, I think, how these music elements are conceptualised in African music in this discussion. Rhythm being the most fundamental element in African music is somehow standardised or calibrated into microbeats. Further, rhythm has a social significance; there are secular and sacred rhythms. However, the concept of rhythm with Africans is that rhythm begins at polyrhythm level. In other words a hymn in three-four [metre] has no rhythm until the so-called crossrhythm has been introduced. Putting it in another way: syncopation is a myth. There have been some vague notions about harmony being a Western invention, and accusations of Africans trying to imitate Western harmony, but little said about the meaning of harmony to Africans. Harmony in Zulu is called isigubudu, and this word means a beast with converging horns so that the horns touch the skin of the animal. In actual performance of harmonious music, people prefer to form a semi-circle. On the other hand the conceptualisation of harmony by insiders is that of pain or sorrow. In other words, harmony is a musical property that evokes or involves the heart of the music maker and that of the listener alike. Harmonious music is therefore most desirable in an emotional song. Love songs accompanied on bows, or modern Christian hymns using cadential harmony, are examples of ‘painful’ music. However some choral compositions may incorporate Western type of harmony for effects like mockery of Western innocence versus their brutal political systems, as noted by Blacking (1969, 48). Harmony as a concept extends beyond pitch relationship to include timbre. Matching of an instrument with a singing voice for example, takes into account the timbral quality of that voice. Melody in Zulu is called indlela, which means a path. Taking this concept of path a little further, different people walking the same path leave different footprints. Further, melody in song must he pliable enough to accommodate speech-melody of some words which, if not honoured in this respect, might suggest unintended meanings. Since the intervals in melody are subject to modification, melody can therefore be regarded as directional rather than intervallic and hence the allusion of pain. I am not implying the notion that songs in tonal languages are derived from speech melody, but what I want to note is the fact that a precomposed melody must be altered sometimes to follow the speech-melody. Suppose we were dealing with the translation of a Western hymn whose pre-

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existent melody must he given Zulu words: ‘this journey (to Heaven) is still long’ (isende lendlela). The dangerous word here is isende where tone must rise to -se and fall on -nde to achieve correct meaning. If the tone falls from i- (for about an octave) and the last consonants sounded on the same ‘note’, the meaning would be: ‘the testicle of the journey’! Hence modification of melody becomes crucial. According to Bruno Nettl (1978, 134), intrusion into a musical tradition by Western culture can bring a three-dimensional change. The invaded culture may be westernized, modernized, or syncretism might emerge. In the actual practice of the study of a music it is hard to draw rigid lines between these three possibilities. In South Africa the three types of musical change exist as different styles, or they may be juxtaposed in the same musical genre. In the choral music of Kumalo, westernization and syncretism dominate. If some of his songs are played on a [Western] instrument, their African roots are untraceable. Syncretism in Kumalo’s music In the preface of Izingoma zika-Kumalo ([Kumalo] 1971, 2), the editor points out that “kulencwadi Kukhethwe amaculo athize nje ka Kumalo. Amaculo akhe maningi kakhulu kunalokhu”, which could be translated as follows: ‘in this book only certain songs by Kumalo have been selected. He has composed many more songs than this!’ Some of the songs are dated, others not. However, the first song, not published, was written in 1899, and the latest date appearing on some songs is 1963. The composer died in 1966. Considering the date of publication of his book, 1971, which was five years after the death of Kumalo, and five years before the collapse of Bantu Education in 1976, the published songs were probably those that would be acceptable to the Bantu education bureaucracy. The composer was a Christian with a highly Westernised [sic] background, and consequently the music is very hymnal and prayerful. There are twenty-four songs in the book … [Numbers] 2 ‘Baba wethu ophezulu’ (Our Father who is in Heaven), 7 ‘Intokozo’ (Joy (the birth of Christ)), 11 ‘Menzi wento zonke’ (Creator of all things), 14 ‘Nkosi busisa i-Afrika’ (God bless Africa) … carry very prayerful texts, matched with suitable hymnal sounds [see Ex 31]. […]

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Ex 31 ‘Baba Wethu Ophezulu’ by A.A. Kumalo (1935) notated by Kumalo in solfa, transcr. B. Mthethwa in staff notation Elements of form Since Kumalo’s songs are mainly hymnal, the overall form shows Western influence. African music, in the folk idiom, is usually cyclic in structure. Among the selected songs, numbers 2 and 4, ‘Baba wethu ophezulu’ and ‘Nkosi busisa iAfrika’, are plain hymns with two stanzas each. Except for number 11, ‘Menzi wento zonke’, all the other songs under discussion here have two sections each in the combinations of repeated A, repeated B or both repeated. Where there is change of key, he uses common modulations from tonic to the dominant or subdominant. The song ‘Menzi wento zonke’ (1950) has an ABC structure in sequence of F major - A major - F major. To anyone acquainted with Kumalo’s songs, such choice of modulation to the mediant becomes a surprise. Harmony in this music is very rigidly Western, using the primary chords in major tonality, embellished with the secondary and chromatic harmonies. Major tonality appears throughout, and the Western minor scale is not used. Nguni people in general regard the minor mode as unmusical, and perhaps this could have been Kumalo’s belief too. The melody in the music is instrumentally oriented and hence preconceived, rather than being derived from speech tones. However, nowhere in these songs did I come across words carrying incorrect meanings because of distortion of their speech-melody. Some words do suffer some wrong accentuation. In ‘Menzi wento zonke’ for example, the first syllable is accentuated in speech, but the song has stressed the second one. This distortion is quite common even in Zulu folk music, and is tolerable. The rhythm in these songs is restricted to three and four metric

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beats - in other words, ‘conductable’ rhythms. Zulu traditional music uses eight, twelve, sixteen and thirty-two microbeats per cycle. Other combinations are found, but these are the most common. Two songs which I have chosen to discuss separately are numbers 22 and 24 in the publication with respective titles ‘Wayaphi uThandiwe’ (1929) and ‘Woza ngikutshel’indaba’ (1950). Both these numbers are, among others, very popular with choirs and this observation raises a question. The popularity I think, comes from the text which is socially relevant and not attached to the Church. The following is the text of ‘Wayaphi uThandiwe’ as dialogue between the sopranos, basses and tutti. Soprano Wayaphi uThandiwe bantu? Uphi uThandiwe? Washona ngaphi uThandiwe? Kazi uph’ uThandiwe! Bass Nimbuza kimi! Angimazi. Kade ningibuza! Angimazi. Bath’ usenyangeni entashingeni Bathi len’eskomplazi. Soprano Maye Babo! Bass Bathi unofufunyana le! Enyangeni eMkhomazi. Tutti Sesimtholile uThandiwe Ese Mkhomazi nje, usenyangeni Ngcingci! NgoThandiwe. (In paraphrase: the sopranos ask the whereabouts of the girl Thandiwe, and basses deny any knowledge. In the end the basses reveal the mystery that she is at [a] slum near Mkomaas (Mkhomazi), and she is possessed by evil spirits, fufunyana. The whole choir comes tutti to rejoice when Thandiwe is eventually found.) Rhythm is in three-four metric measures.149 This very typical hymnal rhythm to me helps to portray the intended mockery. The sopranos ask a question the answer to which is known through gossip circles. Their question is supposedly innocent, and hence in a typically church rhythm and in Western type of melody, harmonised by alto and tenor. The basses answer in pentatonic melody. This juxtaposing of Christianity and witchcraft is achieved by the use of conventions in Western and African Music. When the truth about the girl comes out, it is revealed in the bass melody using the lower range of voice which is also typical of Zulu cryptic songs. The lyrics of the bass line are as follows: Bath’usenyangeni entashingeni le! ekudeni, ho! (They say she is at the witchdoctor, at what’s-its-name! Aho! Far away ho! Aho!). The rhythmic sounds ho, aho, carry mischievous connotations so that the singer and listener can draw their own conclusions. The treatment of the ‘dangerous’ word enyangeni retains its speech-melody: ƟnyăngƝnƯ (at the witchdoctor); ƟnyƗngƟnƯ (at the moon).150 If the melody rose on the -nge the meaning would be that she is menstruating. It is also worth noting that Kumalo resisted modulation in spite of the inviting form, so that the song retained its folk flavour. The song ‘Woza ngikutshel’indaba’ is popularly known as a male-voice piece, but this is not the composer’s prescription. The song might have been popularized by Kumalo’s male-voice choir in the fifties. When performed by a male-voice

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group, the harmonies are close and the timbral quality of the voices is identical, so that the concept of Nguni harmonization is satisfied. The sustained chords of ‘Woza ngikutshel’indaba’ could be guitar chords, hence the uniformity of voices becomes important in order to represent an instrument. The pentatonic melody in the bass voice, harmonised by the I-IV-V Western progression, is in fact an inversion of Western homophony where the soprano voice is harmonised by the lower voices. Being personally convinced that this song was a folk song, I asked Mrs Kumalo in 1969 how the composer produced such an un-Christian song: the answer was that Kumalo had some ‘barbarian’ friends who were musicians. The song according to her was a ‘cleaned up version’ of what ‘barbarians’ sing. The lyrics of the song portray a dialogue between a man and his sister-in-law, that is, the wife’s sister. In Zulu cultural practice, flirtations between the husband and the wife’s sister are expected and therefore tolerable. The man invites the woman to come quickly closer to him so that he can show her a dassie on the rocks. The woman knows that he is telling a lie, and that he wants to fondle her. Eventually the woman comes. Her pseudo-innocence comes as choral response in highly Western hymnal chords. […] I have pointed out some of the basic concepts of the people with regard to music elements. Harmony in the West is expressed in major and minor modes, the common belief being that the major is a happy or bright mode and the minor is sad. However, local Africans regard the minor mode as unmusical, and their musical sadness is expressed in intense harmonics in major tonality. Whilst Western harmony is distinct because of its chromatic foundations, I would like to dispel the notion that harmony is a Western invention. Parallel with this presumption is another fantasy that rhythm comes from Africa, when collectors of folk music such as Bartók proved that rhythms elsewhere may be equally complicated. Further down on the list of speculations is the denial of a people’s musicality by oversimplification of the relationship between speech-melody and song in tonal languages. Kumalo’s songs are known as ‘school songs’ among those who perform them. There are quite a few editorial errors in the book [Kumalo 1971] which was published after the composer’s death. For a book that was meant for Bantu Education, it is no surprise that the editor is anonymous.151 I feel that it is not for me to assess the composer’s attitude towards the colonial and apartheid systems, but in passing I may mention that like all Christians of his time, he once fought against his fellow-men to suppress the Zulu rebellion of 1906 (Huskisson 1969, 62).

From Latvia to South Africa152 Lucy Faktor-Kreitzer Lucy Faktor-Kreitzer emigrated to South Africa with her family from Latvia in 1926, later studying violin in Paarl and Cape Town. In 1943 she married violinist Charles Kreitzer and was a member of his chamber ensemble as well as a regular player with the SABC Studio Orchestra and Cape Town Municipal Orchestra. Sister of Durban impresario Vera Dubin, Lucy Faktor now lives in the US. During the 1920s the political and economic situation progressively worsened in Latvia and the Jews found themselves forced out of the economy. It was a struggle for survival. Joseph [Faktor] realised that there was no future for him in Dvinsk and he started to make plans to leave. Immigration to the USA was now difficult. Some of the Jews seeking a new life went to Brazil or Argentina. Others left for British Palestine. (The ‘Chalutz’ movement had maintained a farm in Dvinsk for the idealistic young men and women wanting to learn agriculture, to enable them to go as pioneers to Palestine, where they would till the soil and build up a Jewish homeland with their own hands.) However, Joseph was aware that the wife of his Uncle Mottel Faktor of Dvinsk had a distant connection with a Lithuanian immigrant who had settled in London and now owned a blanket factory in South Africa. Joseph was very impressed with this success story. His choice was therefore South Africa, ‘Die Goldene Medina’ (The Golden Country), the land of opportunity where, as was common knowledge, the streets were paved with gold. He decided to write to Max Richman, an old family friend who had emigrated to Cape Town some years previously - and eventually a ‘landsman’ (compatriot) sponsored Joseph to come to South Africa. In due course the necessary papers arrived in Dvinsk. Joseph took them to the British Consul in Riga, where he was issued a visa for South Africa. In addition to paying for his passage from England to Cape Town, he was required by the South African government to send a sum of £35 to London as a deposit with the Union Castle shipping line for his return fare and possible expenses, should he for any reason be refused entry to South Africa. And so in 1925 Joseph Faktor, aged twenty-six, with no vocational skills and speaking only Yiddish and some Russian, left Dvinsk for England on the first lap of his adventurous undertaking. His wife Sonia, the threeyear-old Lucy and the baby, Vera, remained behind until such time as he could afford to send for them. […] When I, as a schoolgirl, began my studies at the College of Music, the legendary ‘Daddy’ Bell had retired after a twenty-four-year term of office, and was living in his quaint home in Gordon’s Bay. William Henry Bell (previously on the staff of the Royal Academy of Music, London) had come to Cape Town in 1912 to be the first director of the College of Music, and by all accounts he had proved

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himself to be a man with the necessary pioneering spirit for such a venture. An extraordinarily prolific composer and a distinguished writer on all aspects of music, he had a wide knowledge of poetry, literature and art, and made an invaluable contribution to the cultural and musical life of his new country. Much is owed to him, too, for his encouragement and help in solving many of the problems confronting the Cape Town Orchestra in the early years after it was founded in 1914.

Fig 27 The Cape Town Promenade Pier c1900 © Museum Africa153 [Bell] returned to act as Principal in 1939 for a short period, and I then had the privilege of playing in the students’ orchestra under this remarkable and dynamic personality. In those days I often came across Signor Paganelli, who taught singing at the Little Theatre where I had my violin lessons with Ellie Marx. I recall his charm and courtliness of manner. In 1929, Guiseppe Paganelli, on his way from Australia during a world tour as soloist with the Sistine Choir, had sung at a concert in Cape Town. He fell in love with the country and decided to settle here. Professor Bell promptly engaged him for the College of Music. Paganelli, to quote his own words, ‘saw South Africa as virgin territory for opera’, and his great ambition was to produce it here with South African singers in the main roles … Staunchly supported by Bell, ‘Paggy’, with unswerving dedication, overcame a host of obstacles and in 1929 laid the foundation of indigenous opera in South Africa with his production of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville at the Opera House. The florid and exacting music for the part of Rosina had originally been written for contralto. Eva Gain, a pupil of Paganelli, shared this role on alternate nights with the coloratura soprano Albina Bini, an established concert pianist, whom Paganelli had ‘discovered’ and trained as a singer. […]

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The Eoan Group, a cultural organisation for the ‘coloured’ community, was founded in 1933 by Mrs Helen Southern-Holt, a social worker, and derived its name from the Greek word ‘eos’ meaning ‘dawn’. Classes were given in dancing, speech-training, play-reading and public speaking, in buildings in what was then a vibrant District Six buzzing with activity - before the bulldozers laid it to waste. In 1943 Joseph Manca took over the choral section. South African-born of Sicilian parents, he was employed in the Treasury Department of the City Council, but his all-absorbing passion was opera. 1956 saw the start of an exciting period lasting about twenty-one years, during which Joseph Manca, with the loyal support of other enthusiastic stalwarts in the Group, presented season after season of traditional Italian operas, attracting audiences in their droves to the City Hall. Their inaugural performance of La Traviata was the first time in the history of music in South Africa that a complete Italian opera had been performed in its original language by an exclusively ‘coloured’ cast. With single-minded drive and perseverance, Manca went on to present La Bohème, Madama Butterfly, Il Trovatore, Rigoletto, I Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana. I played in the Cape Town Orchestra for those operas, and remember a wealth of talent in the Group, among whom were May Abrahamse, Ruth Goodwin, Lionel Fourie (an outstanding baritone), Jimmy Momberg (‘Cape Town’s Tito Schipa’), Vera Gow, Gerald Samaai and Ronald Theys (who started out as a baritone and is now a tenor with the Nico Malan Opera). […] ‘To live a life free of all bias of race, creed and colour’ was embodied in the Group’s constitution. Though all productions always attracted bumper houses and received rave notices, problems of finance made the Group accept a grant from the Government. For a time things went on as before, but eventually they were instructed to abide by the stipulation that the performances be to segregated audiences only. From then on the ‘European’ audiences sat in one section and the ‘coloured’ patrons in another - but there was never apartheid behind the scenes between the orchestra and members of the group. […]

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Fig 28 ‘Gems from the Operas’, an Eoan Group concert given in 1977, received a standing ovation. This was Dr Manca’s last concert before his retirement [Tenor] Joseph Gabriels came to realise that he could not reach his full potential in the country of his birth and, with the help of a benefactress, settled in Europe with his wife and children. The Cape Town Orchestra sent him a cable to

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congratulate him when he sang in Pagliacci at short notice at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. In Italy he is now known as Guiseppe Gabrieli.

Fig 29 Joseph Gabriels and May Abrahamse (Alfred and Rosalinda) in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus - a 1962 production during the Eoan Arts Festival in the Cape Town City Hall. Gregorio Fiasconaro deftly produced the operetta

Xhosa Overtone Singing154 David Dargie No documentation of any traditional overtone singing in Africa had come to light when, on 9th December 1980, while recording a group of young girl singers at Sikhwakqeni [eastern Cape], I realised one of them was producing chords apparently in imitation of the umrhubhe bow, with which the same song ‘Um kaMzwandile’ had been performed moments before. The technique being used by that young girl was to produce unnaturally deep tones by singing in a forced manner in the back of the throat. These deep, gruff tones are rich in overtones, and it was these patterns of overtones of which I became aware. Later it became clear that singers using this technique are in fact following a pattern of melody, by using overtones. Since this discovery, evidence has come to light that not only is overtone singing used by other Thembu people, but it may be known widely among the people of Xhosa culture. Undoubtedly it is encountered rarely these days, although it is frequently used in the Lumko district. The types of overtone singing in the Lumko district are called ukungqokola (v., infinitive) or umngqokolo (n.), as are certain other kinds of gruff singing. […] Two forms of umngqokolo as overtone singing are found in the Lumko district. Both forms are used only by females: the ‘ordinary’ umngqokolo is used by women and girls, and the other kind, called by the performer ‘umngqokolo ngomqangi’ is used only by one woman, the apprentice diviner Nowayilethi Mbizweni, of Dashe, Ngqoko. In both forms of umngqokolo the performer produces gruff tones well below the normal female register by using a forced voice well back in the throat, as it is also used in umbhayizelo and ukutshotsha. These deep tones are then used as fundamental tones; they are rich in overtones, and the singer uses shaping of the mouth to select and amplify overtones for the performance of melody, as in playing the umrhubhe bow. In ‘ordinary’ umngqokolo the performer’s tongue is lifted towards the front of the mouth, and lips being kept open. The overtone melody is faint, compared to the fundamental tones. Usually in this form of umngqokolo the performer uses three or four fundamentals: transposed to the F-G tonality position, these overtones are written as F, G, D and F’. These fundamentals may be seen transcribed in Ex 32. [This] shows part of the performance of the song Nondel’ ekhaya, by Nowayilethi Mbizweni and Nofirst Lungisa, from a recording of their performance in umngqokolo duet. [The] main purpose of the singers is to produce melody; so the melody overtones are derived from whichever fundamental is most convenient. Thus the overtone A” may be derived from fundamentals F or D; C” may be derived from F or F’; D” may be derived from G or D. The melody is Xhosa hexatonic throughout, but the pattern of fundamentals is quite different form that which would have to be used in bow performance. The sound patterns move so

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rapidly that in order to solve exactly what is going on, slow speed play-back had to be used.

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Clap (slow pattern) Overtone Melody Leader Fundamentals Overtone Melody Follower Fundamentals

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Ex 32 Part of the song ‘Nondel’ ekhaya’ showing fundamentals and overtones He! Nondel’ ekhaya155 wath’ utywala buphelile Yewu … ndinesizi ngamankazana … bandibambel’ … bandilingen’ Hey! Nothobile, ma Amandla akalingan’ He! Vedinga Andigodoli, ma Asivani ngomthetho Hayi, ma Ho! lilongwe, Khe, mntakama Ho! lilongwe kulendawo O hamba, ndiyanqen’ uKuthetha

Hey Nondel’ ekhaya (lit. ‘married-at-home’) she says the beer is finished Yes … I feel pity for the (unmarried mothers) they have taken my place, they were stronger than me Hey! Nothobile (a name), mother you are not as strong as I am Oh Vedinga (a thick brown blanket) I do not get cold, oh mother We do not agree about traditional law No, mother Ho! this is the inside-wall-of-the-house yes child-of-mother Ho! the inside-wall-of-the-house is this place Oh, go away, I am tired of talking

Umngqokolo ngomqangi is much easier to hear. Only two fundamentals are used, as in umrhubhe playing, and the melody overtones are of the same order of loudness as are the fundamentals. A solo performance of lines from the same song, using umngqokolo ngomqangi, is shown in Ex 33. The commas indicate breathing there is no break in the rhythm.

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     

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Ex 33 Umngqokolo ngomqangi showing two fundamentals and overtones produced from them

Nowayilethi Mbizweni maintains that she is the only person to perform umngqokolo ngomqangi. In this style of overtone singing, the tongue is not raised. In the ‘ordinary’ variety the overtones appear to be resonated between the tongue and the hard palate. In the ‘ngomqangi’ type, the overtones are resonated (apparently) at the back of the mouth [see Fig 30]. ‘Umngqokolo ngomqangi’ means to ‘ngqokola’ with or like umqangi. Umqunge was the name used for the umrhubhe bow, found by Kirby in Mpondoland. Professor H. Pahl, the editor of the Fort Hare Xhosa Dictionary project, told me that he had a recollection of the term umqangi also being used for the umrhubhe bow.

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Fig 30 Nowayilethi Mbizweni performing umngqokolo ngomqangi © David Dargie If the term umqangi does originate with a musical bow, it has come down to the form of overtone singing via an unusual intermediary. The word in the Lumko district (and also among the Thembu of Queenstown district) is used for a certain beetle which buzzes loudly. Naughty boys impale this beetle on a thorn and then hold it in front of the mouth as it buzzes frantically, trying to fly away; and they then play melodies by shaping the mouth, using the beetle’s buzzing as fundamental tone(s). Nowayilethi says that she got the idea of umngqokolo ngomqangi from this method of ‘playing’ the umqangi beetle. Her ngomqangi overtone singing bears a remarkable resemblance to playing the umrhubhe bow, which may well have given its earlier name to the unfortunate beetle.

The Royal School of Church Music in South Africa156 Barry Smith Barry Smith is Organist and Master of the Choristers at St. George’s Cathedral Cape Town, and a harpsichordist, pianist, musicologist, conductor, and composer. Since his retirement from the University of Cape Town in 1999 he has continued to work as a concert artist and musicologist. His publications include a biography of Peter Warlock (1994). He is an Honorary Fellow of the RSCM and member of the Order of Simon of Cyrene, the highest honour for a layman that can be awarded by the Anglican Church in Southern Africa. If one were to consider the influence of foreign musical organisations on the development of the South African music scene over the past years, then that of the Royal School of Church Music (RSCM) might well be able to claim pride of place, rivalled only, perhaps, by the contributions of institutions such as the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music and the Trinity College of Music, London. But these two last named are exclusively examining bodies and in this respect bear no similarity to the RSCM and its particular interest and specialisation in the field of Anglican Church Music, and its desire to help and assist church musicians in all aspects of the practice of their own particular art. But, perhaps it would be useful at this stage to give some background to the RSCM; to consider the reasons for its establishment and then to trace how, during the past sixty years or so, its influence has become so important and widespread throughout the Anglican Communion, with particular reference to South Africa. In 1922, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York appointed a Committee on Music in Worship which was asked to report upon the place of music in the worship of the church, and in particular on the training of church musicians. The resultant report urged the organist “to inspire the music of those who are only too ready to fall into a deadly musical sleep” (Webb 1977, 6). As a result of this report, at an inaugural meeting at Westminster Abbey on St. Nicolas’ Day (6 December) 1927, the School of English Church Music was founded. Sydney Nicholson, the Abbey Organist, was one of the leading figures in the initial proceedings and was assisted by a provisional council and an advisory committee from the Church Music Society. The first object was to establish the so-called College of St. Nicolas for the study of church music and the training of church musicians, and the second was to encourage church choirs who wished to improve their standards to affiliate themselves. Those choirs who affiliated accepted the Principles and Recommendations set out by the School, paid an annual membership fee, received badges of membership, and literature, as well as help and advice from the group of specially appointed Commissioners when requested157 … At first this scheme took time to be accepted, but by the end of 1928, one hundred and five choirs had

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become affiliated and the influence of the School began to become a potent force, mainly as a result of the enthusiasm of Sydney Nicholson himself, who had been appointed Director.

Fig 31 Bowler’s View of St. George’s Cathedral from Wale Street Cape Town © Iziko: William Fehr Collection, Castle of Good Hope Nicholson was a man of zeal and vision who saw the role of the School of English Church Music stretching beyond the shores of England, and so by 1939 the number of affiliated choirs stood at 1500, including churches of the Anglican Communion in the most distant parts of the world. St. George’s Cathedral, Cape Town, for example, had affiliated as early as 1933. The School was by that time already producing many publications including music, service books, pamphlets on various aspects of church music and a quarterly magazine, English Church Music (now Church Music Quarterly). In 1945, by command of King George VI, the School was renamed the Royal School of Church Music, by which time it had expanded its activities even more widely. These included regular visits by the Director and the appointed commissioners to advise choirs in England and abroad (Nicholson had visited Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA during 1935 and 1936), the organising of resident courses for choristers, and choir festivals arranged on a regional basis. Although RSCM activities had been organised sporadically in South Africa during those early years (usually in the form of massed choir festivals), it was not until the visit of Gerald Knight, Nicholson’s successor as the RSCM’s Director in

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1959, that there was real development and expansion of the work of the RSCM in South Africa. Having travelled widely throughout the country, Gerald Knight suggested the establishment of an annual residential Summer School as a starting point towards improving the standards of church music. He returned in January 1960, to direct the first of what has been an almost unbroken tradition of annual Summer Schools still held in January, hosted successively by each of the four branches. Some of the most distinguished British and American church musicians have served as directors: men such as Allan Wick (Canterbury), Christopher Robinson (St. George's Chapel, Windsor), Lionel Dakers (the third Director of the RSCM), Gerre Hancock (St. Thomas’ Church, New York), Donald Hunt (Worcester) and others too numerous to mention. […] The setting up of four separate South African branches in 1967, each with its own Chairman and committee, was the next important step in the development of the role of the RSCM in South Africa. Each of these committees arranges its annual programme of events to assist church musicians and choirs to extend their knowledge and to give them opportunities to improve their standards. Space precludes a complete catalogue of the types of events organised by the branches, but included are courses on choir training, service accompaniment, choice of music, psalm chanting, sight reading and every other conceivable aspect of the church musician’s art. A large selection of RSCM-published music is available (at discounted prices to affiliated choirs) and it is important to note that the Cape Town branch has published a volume of South African Church Music (RSCM 1988) and that the Northern branch is to do the same in the near future. Looking back, as I now can, over forty years’ association with church music in South Africa, as a choirboy, chorister, assistant organist, student at the Royal School of Church Music (1960-61), and now as organist and Master of the Choristers at St. George’s Cathedral, Cape Town (since 1964), I can see how dramatic and effective the influence of the RSCM has been in this country. Standards have risen and continue to rise, especially where there is enthusiastic and vital leadership as in, for example, the Northern branch where Richard Cock is Chairman. There are in South Africa at present (1988) 239 affiliated choirs representing several English-speaking denominations: Catholic, Anglican and Nonconformist. This achievement can only bode well for the future of church music in South Africa. However, it still has to address itself to the biggest of all its challenges: how to reconcile and integrate the enormously different music traditions co-existing in this country. This is the task facing the church musicians of today and of the future.

Tiger Dance, Terukuttu, Tango, and Tchaikovsky: A PoliticoCultural View of Indian South African Music before 1948158 Melveen Jackson Melveen Jackson, born in Durban and now based in Hillcrest, Natal, is a graduate of the University of Natal. She is a conductor and musicologist and was Senior Lecturer at the University of Durban-Westville until the closure of the Music Department in 1999. She has made an extensive study of the music of Indian South Africans through both her Masters and Doctoral work, and is author of several publications.159 In 1856, the Charter of Natal created a separate Colony with a local representative government (Brookes & Webb 1965, 75). Economic development was still in its infancy, survival depending on the importation of cheap labour, which occurred in 1860 with the arrival of the first indentured Indian labourers from Madras, Calcutta, and their surrounding districts. The indentured Indians were mostly Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, and Telegu-speaking Hindus.160 Amongst these workers there was a small number of Christians and even fewer Parsees (Brookes & Webb 1965, 85). A second group of Indian settlers, known as ‘passenger’ or ‘free’ Indians because they paid their own fare with the idea of establishing trading stations or other autonomous occupational ventures, came as merchants, craftsmen, priests, and teachers to satisfy the growing material, educational, and spiritual needs of the indentured labourers. They were mostly Gujarati and Urdu-speaking Muslims, many of whom came from the district of Surat in the Bombay Presidency which had become stranded when commercial interest moved to Bombay and Karachi (Report 1921, 2). On arrival, the majority of Indian migrants were located in Natal, with only a small percentage of higher caste and better educated workers going to the Transvaal as ‘special’ servants and to work on the gold mines in minor clerical positions (Pillay 1984-1987, interviews). Class and socio-economic struggle, rather than caste, became the dominant factors influencing cultural expression during the first fifty years of settlement. This could be seen in the attitudes of the colonists, who, despite being enthusiastic about the contributory role of industrious but cheap labour at first (Natal Mercury 1866), soon came to perceive established Indian communities as an economic threat. […] Robert Topham, the notorious bigot of the late nineteenth century, called for a ban on all processions and performances in public (Meer, Y.S. 1980, 443-44), and in 1893, the Moharrem festival and its concomitant tiger dance, was physically dispersed by British policemen in Pietermaritzburg (Meldrun 1895, 232-34). Most Indian settlers, however, did not even get the chance to participate in group worship and performing arts due to the heterogeneous nature of ‘barracks’

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inhabitants on the outlying estates, the harsh life-style and long hours of toil, the distances at which estates were placed, and the unwillingness of employers to allow workers freedom of circulation (Swan 1985, 26). Estate owners and officials were often unsympathetic to requests to build temples, to leave work for three-day festivals, to cremate the dead, to eschew meat-eating in hospitals and jails, and to grow beards in accordance with Islamic doctrine (Meer, Y.S. 1980, 139, 389). It seems that extraneous, deliberate constraints on artistic expression, added to inherent difficulties in securing a livelihood, affected most settlers who had been engaged in the performing arts in India. There is evidence of a complete troupe of Tamil sangita natakam players coming to Natal in 1900. Eleven of the twelve members returned to India in 1907 having failed to find patronage for their art (Centenary Newsletter 1960, 9-10). Similarly, many immigrants who had been musicians in India denied their musical background from fear of being misunderstood by neighbours with differing cultural backgrounds. For instance, one Malayalam woman, who had been a proficient singer and dancer, was accused of being a devadasi when she performed at the Mount Edgecombe sugar estate, with the sad result that she never sang or danced again (James 1988, interview). The more settled, financially independent groups were able to establish environments more conducive to art expression. Inevitably, perhaps, the oldest music tradition to be practised by Indian South Africans was that related to the Moharrem festival, the ta’zia procession, the singing of marsiya lamentations, the tiger dance, the raatie dance, and qawwali of sufi Muslim Chistia and Qadari traditions. Badsha Pir and Sufi Sahib (Meer, F. 1969, 201-2), the local saints of these respective traditions, came to South Africa amongst the earliest settlers, and have inspired many well-loved qawwali which are still sung at sama assemblies today. Conflict between contesting South African Muslims is manifested in the sunni Muslim attitude to sufi performance practices, as indicated by a vociferous denigration in 1911 of the “degrading and disgusting tiger-dance” (Indian Opinion June 1961). This marked a growing perception of class distinction between orthodox and eclectic Muslims, since the tiger dance had always been practised by new converts to Islam who were often attracted from the lower castes. Sufi activities attracted Hindus who had neglected their religious practices, resulting in a renewed cross-fertilisation such as that already apparent in Indic Sufism. […] A smaller South Indian Hindu group which also organised itself in 1905, and which fed both members and ideas into the H.Y.M.A., was to be found in the nonagricultural component of indentured Hindu workers. This group of ‘special’ servants was recruited from Madras to work as waiters at hotels which served dignitaries of the British Raj (Swan 1985, 26). Of this group, about twenty were Tamil Hindus belonging to the Saivite sect, educated in Tamil, and followers of Guru Gangathara Navalar in Madras. Under the leadership of C.V. Balakrishnan Pillay, the Shri Sithee Vinayaga Saiva Sithantha Bhajanay Madham was established in Pietermaritzburg.

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The group attracted many ex-indentured South Indian settlers, teaching them the tevarams in worship of Lord Ganessa which had been composed by their guru in Madras, with whom they were able to maintain an unprecedented contact. These they sang at Sathurthi festivals whilst following the raat procession, as well as at their regular Friday evening gatherings. These activities, along with the revivalist missions from India, prompted a tradition of Tamil bhakti worship which spread to Durban and, from 1911, gave rise to “many talented musicians” in the South Indian tradition (Naidoo 1958, 7, 12). It was perhaps not entirely coincidence that the didactic task of exploring and propagating South Indian Saivite devotional music fell to the waitering social group, considering their long hours of leisure time between shifts, their comparatively homogeneous character, their relative wealth ‘special’ servants earned two to ten times that of agricultural workers (Swan 1985, 26) - their status as respected semi-skilled workers, and their unthreatening, indeed subservient relationship with white traders, farmers, and government officials. Traditional structures of patronage, already breaking down in village and newly-urbanising India, were never a viable option for settlers in the colonies. Conversely, the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches were able to muster support and funding from missionary sources abroad, thus providing the motivation, tuition, venues and infrastructures so lacking in other areas. Initially, Indian Christian expression tended to draw on Indic traditions, pivoting around drumming, violin playing, and vernacular singing, which served to accompany street processions of an ornately decorated Pieta or Christus, and all-night devotions (Brain 1983, 296-7). This was not, however, to be encouraged by church leaders. Devotions at the traditional churches soon displayed a eurocentric character, particularly at the St. Aidan’s Mission Anglican church, and the ‘old’ St. Anthony’s Catholic church. Religious organisations played a vital role in education in a situation where the State was largely disinterested. In the case of Christian mission schools, which served the children of indentured and ex-indentured labourers, whether they were Christian or not, a eurocentric concept of ‘civilisation’ was inevitably the objective. St. Aidan’s Training College instituted what is thought to be the oldest Indian South African school song. The song text (Henning 1983a, 6) reflects an ambiguity of loyalty: to the school, to ‘Hind’, to Africa, to the ‘Homeland’, all reconcilable, at least in the song, by the unifying loyalty to the British Empire which ‘blinds [binds?] us all in loyalty’. Despite the nostalgia for India, the poetic style, symbolism, and ethos is patently Victorian. St. Aidan’s church employed Joseph Royeppen as its first organist in 1899. In 1910 William Joseph established the first Indian Anglican all-male choir (Henning 1983b, 8), respectable women not being welcome in public performance. The Royeppen, Joseph and Christopher families formed one of the main nucleuses of Western music. St. Anthony’s church was host to the Gabriel/Lawrence dynasty, the other nucleus of Western music.

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Fig 32 The Lawrence Trio 1928 © Lawrence family private collection In 1896, Josephine Lawrence, née Gabriel, passed the Trinity College Grade One piano examination, a remarkable occurrence in an environment which was characterised by hard manual labour and rough living in general. Her children and grandchildren were to follow her example, resulting in a family tradition which was to produce no less than seven professional practising musicians in the Western tradition, including the London-based ethnomusicologist, Rosemary Joseph. The need to escape the ‘coolie’ image seems to have been the strongest motivation for early settlers in choosing Christianity, and its concomitants, Western education and Western culture in general.161 The christocentric path for raising one’s social class was not the only option even if it were the most obvious and the least hazardous in the colonies. Edward J. Govindaswami was a man ahead of his time. Son of a Marathi Brahmin priest father, who died before Edward and his indentured labourer mother came to Natal, he was patronised by Cardinal A. Edward Newman of the St. Aidan’s Mission. His early years were dedicated to Christian devotion and Western education, including music tuition in the piano, violin, and music theory. From 1913, when Govindaswami was twenty-three, however, he developed an interest in his Brahmin roots, as a result of which he wrote to various Christian bodies in India and England, requesting Tamil literary works and Carnatic music tutors. The rest

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of his life was committed to gathering written materials in these fields, much of it in English by acculturated Indians or British Indologists, such as Professor Sambamoorthy and Rev H.A. Popley (Pillay 1984-1987, interviews). In these premature stirrings lay the germination of a classical Indian music movement which strengthened sporadically during the late forties and early fifties, and again in the seventies and eighties, but which has always been

Fig 33 Pupil of Edward J. Govindaswami, Kalaimani A.G. Pillay was the first Carnatic violinist to qualify in India, 1949 © SABC studio photograph, Durban 1952 constrained by the physical, social, and political distance from its original source, India. […] Assimilation, resistance to assimilation, and syncretism, became the main choices after 1920, with a wide variety in degree, vacillation, specificity, and meaning. The South African Indian Council (SAIC), formed in 1923 and drawn mainly from the trader and professional classes, saw the expedience and disadvantages of ‘anglicisation’ which was already a key issue in Westerneducated political circles (Golden Number of Indian Opinion 1914). The 1927 Cape Town Agreement (Malan-Sastri) and its conditional ‘Upliftment’ Clause (Bhana & Pachai 1984, 155-62) trading conformation to Western standards of civilisation for civic upliftment, marked a climax in assimilation and conciliation politics, and confirmed a growing tendency towards British cultural practices amongst the educated elite.

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Not unexpectedly, the Lawrence family was at the centre of eurocentric cultural activity, initiating the inclusion of Western music education in state schools, developing the choral church and oratorio tradition, organising and participating in the Indian Eisteddfod from 1936, and establishing the Lawrence Trio. Formed in the late twenties, the trio performed at functions held by the Natal Indian Congress - an affiliate of the SAIC - honouring the Agent-Generals from the Government of India, at banquets in honour of white Natal dignitaries, and at camp-fires entertaining the troops during the war. Their repertoire was drawn almost exclusively from the nineteenth-century Western Romantic composers, especially Tchaikovsky. George Lawrence turned to Western popular music. He was the lead violinist and saxophonist of ‘The Red Hot Jazz Pirates Band’ which was established in 1935. It is claimed that this was the first band of its kind, playing European dance music on violins, saxophones, trumpet, trombone, and drums (Jackson 1988a, 20-21).

Fig 34 The Red Hot Jazz Pirates Band, 1935 © Lawrence family private collection After 1920, resistance to assimilation became manifest in the mushrooming of vernacular associations, schools, sabhas, and sanghs which had been incubating since about 1910. Contact with India was now more possible: teachers were

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brought from India by the more affluent associations and the flow of visitors between the two countries increased generally. Sixty years had passed since the first arrival of Indian settlers, years during which much cross-fertilisation in religious and cultural expression was inevitable. But the renewed physical contact with Indic Indians, added, with perhaps even more effect, to the importation from India of 78 r.p.m. records from the early twenties, many who had lost all contact with their cultural roots, which applied most particularly to Hindu South Africans, were able to build on what had hitherto been “marginal survivals” (Nettl 1978, 9) of folk culture. Apart from wedding pandal and songs, natchannias, nautch dance, maypole dance, kummi dance, kholatum dance, and garba dance, all of which made their appearance in South Africa on a regular basis after 1930, terukuttu, a South Indian ‘street dance’, was amongst the most popular before 1935. Terukuttu, or the ‘sixfoot dance’, is part of the Mariammen or ‘Porridge’ festival to Mariamma, ‘Goddess of the pox’ and is an example of improvisatory oral music theatre tradition. As was characteristic of the time, it seems, the festival was followed by Tamil, Telegu, and Hindi alike, despite its being Tamil in origin (Nowbath 1960, 20). Although this festival was vigorously supported between the twenties and the fifties, like all activities perceived as ‘primitive’, terukuttu,

Fig 35 Fox Movietone making a travelogue at Mount Edgecombe. Tiger dancers and Six-foot dancers © S.S. Singh Collection

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which was related to blood ritual, gave way to ‘purer forms of worship’ with the growth of an urban middle class (Nowbath 1960, 20; Jackson 1988a, 22). […] Written dramas, especially those from the South Indian written tradition, were widely represented from the late thirties. N.C. Naidoo, of the Tamil Vedic society, toured the Transvaal and Natal with the play, ‘Nalla Thunga’ (Nowbath, Chotai & Lalla 1960, 176). Other popular plays were ‘Harichandra’, ‘Saranga Daran’, ‘Chittaravelli’, ‘Selvum Janikee’, ‘Thamanthee’ (Saraspathee 1950, 1-2), and the recitation of the classical ‘Kural’ (Naidoo, Memorial Brochure 1980, 4). The dividing lines between classical and folk theatre, historically authentic and locally creative productions, northern and southern music traditions, and Hindu and Christian involvement in Indian South African drama, seem, in retrospect, to be very thin, and seem to vary according to the degree of rural/urbanisation of the communities participating. Sections of South African Muslim society, with much overlapping, were responsible for both resisting East/West and Muslim/Hindu assimilation, and facilitating syncretism. Of the total gamut of Indian South African music, only qawwali has had an unbroken tradition from the earliest settlement. There have been, and still are many styles of South African qawwali, but there has been no time in which this genre has been absent from the music spectrum. In 1935 the musha’ara was introduced to South Africa by Sir Sayed Reza Ali, the then AgentGeneral, and Munshi Ali Mia ‘Chishti’, originally from the Ratanagiri district near Bombay. Although Urdu is spoken by 15% of Indian South Africans, it became recognised as the “language of artistic and classical expression” (Mehtar 1977, 2). […] In 1946, the first Indian South African record company (Jackson 1989) was formed in response to the trade boycott (Mehtar 1987, interview) brought about by the refusal of the Smuts Government to participate in a Round Table conference called by the United Nations. The conference would have constituted a platform for debate about the ‘indophobia’ of white South Africans articulated in the Asiatic Land Tenure and Representation Act, otherwise known as the ‘Ghetto’ Act (Bhana & Pachai 1984, 186, 189-93). The trade embargo resulted in a restriction on the importation of films and records, other than those re-routed via England. Recordings made on the Cavalcade, Shalimar, and The Moghul labels represent the earliest extant sound examples of Indian South African music yet to be unearthed. Most of the works are ‘composed’ by ‘Farooqi’ Mehtar, meaning that he was the lyricist, or shaer. Although he is a Muslim, ‘Farooqi’ does not belong to any sect, He wrote for the Shalimar Hindu themes addressing Rama and Krishna, as well as for the Islamic nats, ghazals, salamis, and ham’ds. Without extensive interviews, it is often impossible to deduce the cultural affiliation of the musicians due to the rich syncretism of these works. A semiologist’s paradise, the Shalimar records reflect conscious borrowings, at times of complete stock phrases, from South African boeremusiek, European ballroom dance music such as the Viennese waltz, quick-

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step, and fox-trot, as well as from Latin American rhumba, samba, bolero, and tango. American popular music, such as dixieland/jive, ragtime, and country-andWestern, are also represented here. These songs - there are no purely instrumental works on these records - are all sung in Hindustani, but the intention was to produce music that was ‘cosmopolitan’, thereby improving race relations (Mehtar 1987, interview). Maya Devi was the vocalist on the first record to be made, which was released on the Cavalcade label. Urdu songs and ‘dedications’ on The Moghul labels, paradoxically, seem to have served to secure Islamic culture in an urban, upper class environment. However, in spite of being intended as an expression of indocentric Islamic nationalism, these records are singularly Western in style. The use of Western instruments and concepts such as the piano and banjo, primary chord harmony, the cadential picardy third, and melodic movement in parallel thirds at times, creates an indisputably Western result. There are also examples of Islamic works using sitar, violin, and tabla, drawing on raga-like melodic structures, and the alternation of more authentically declamatory and sung vocal styles that lend to a more Indic quality. The Shalimar records embody some styles emerging from the new orchestral genre which was, from 1945, to dominate the popular Indian South African music spectrum. Influenced partly by imported records of ‘modernised’ Indic music, the sources of ‘Indian jazz’ were unspecific. It drew on Indic folk and classical traditions; European folk and ‘light classical’ traditions; and American ‘pop’ traditions. The resultant syncretic music was in a sense ‘Indian’. Vocals were sung in vernacular, simple ragas could sometimes be recognised against a harmonic background that often included both a drone and primary chords in root position. Instruments were tuned to the tempered scale, using middle C as a

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Fig 36 Maya Devi and the Ranjeni Orchestra 1941 © Maya Devi private collection reference point, and rhythm was based on two, three, or four pulses. The instruments themselves were an admixture of Indic and Western instruments, favourites being saxophone, clarinet, violin, harmonium, banjo, mandolin, Hawaiian guitar, trumpet, and both Indic drums and Western jazz drums. […] Multiplicity in cultural expression could be accountable perhaps to the rapidly changing political and social conditions of the time. The Indian South African communities which had mushroomed around the growing cities were fertile ground for upward social movement, enthusiastic patronage of the arts in all its

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Fig 37 Kalaivani Orchestra 1948 Pietermaritzburg © A.G. Pillay private collection variety, and for the emergence of indigenous diligent, astute, and courageous political leaders. The forties, in particular, was a time of debate, study groups, drama productions, ‘orchestral’ concerts, folk music and dance, religious and domestic festivals and celebration, passive resistance, circulation of records, films, and books. It was a time, generally, of growth for Indian South Africans, tragically to be brought to an abrupt end with the 1948 Nationalist Party coup which was to entrench the racist attitudes and repressive policies of white South Africans which had been steadily growing since 1880. The year 1950 saw the implementation of the Group Areas Act and its concomitant forced removals which has characterised the socio-economic and socio-political contest ever since.

But We Sing162 Alfred Temba Qabula Alfred Temba Qabula was born at Flagstaff, Transkei. After experiencing the hardships of migrant labour he began to work within the trade union movement, mobilising opposition to capital and the apartheid state through cultural work. Qabula composed and performed poems influenced by traditional praise poetry (izibongo) dealing with issues of union organisation and cultural resistance. He worked closely with sociologist Ari Sitas and poet Nise Malange in the Culture and Working life project at the University of Natal.

[from the Poem: In the Tracks of Our Train] We assembled its pieces together and it grumbled and roared. Its grumbling and churning has caused unrest in the stomachs of the capitalists. They shout from the top in Pretoria: ‘But, what IS happening?’ There was no answer from Pretoria’s hills but the Drakensberg mountains and the plains of Ulundi shook. And they said there: ‘Yes, this engine is powerful and it raises great flames and much uproar It was ignited on purpose to choke us and punish us with fumes and heat. […] What we have made moves forward When its wheels wear out, our unity jolts it forward When they block it on its way to Capetown it does not lose its power, it roars ahead. When they block it on the road to Johannesburg it does not lose its power, it roars ahead it grumbles on, with flames and fumes and anger But they gossip and plot out its undoing

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and they accuse its anger of a communist plot and its roar of subversion And we follow in its tracks, also singing The powerful ask: Who allowed these stalks of cane, these blades of grass to sing? Songs are the property of trees, you have to be tall you have to have stature, substance and trunk to sing But we sing Many with eyes get confused by the stature of trees But at least our song reaches the blind They listen to it closely and understand That the deals their capitalist suitors have struck up at the Sopaki grounds might feel like bangles of gold but they rattle like chains Across the river a grumble is heard There is motion and uproar The people will it to cross the waters now: To jive and to dance on new grounds To hum more pleasant sounds. We agree.

Reuben T. Caluza and Early Popular Music163 Veit Erlmann Veit Erlmann’s fieldwork has taken him to Ecuador, several African countries, and West Sumatra, Indonesia. His publications include three monographs based on his work in South Africa: African Stars (1991), Nightsong (1996), and Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination (1999), which won the Alan P. Merriam Prize for the best monograph in ethnomusicology. He has worked at the Universities of Natal, Chicago, Witwatersrand, and the Free University of Berlin. An influential voice in the theorizing of ethnomusicology, Erlmann is currently Professor of Ethnomusicology and Anthropology Chair of Music History at University of Texas at Austin. ‘Sweet and patriotic songs’: ragtime and African nationalism Caluza had not quite completed his studies at Ohlange when the black Peasantry was shaken to the roots by one of the harshest pieces of legislation in South African history. The Native Lands Act of 1913 robbed masses of African landowners and squatters of their rural base of subsistence, but it also sparked off black opposition to the act which soon culminated in the foundation of the South African Native National Congress in 1912 [sic]. During the first decades of its existence the SANNC, later to be named the African National Congress (ANC) remained a conservative, middle-class association of people of rank whose cultural activities reflected the ideological straitjackets of Durban’s minute black elite. […] Caluza was not a politically minded man. He never joined the ANC and did not perceive the articulation of popular protest as a form of organized political response. But as a “very moralistic” man and person of conservative instinct, he was sensitive to any injustice.164 It was this blend of moderate nationalism with a moral, Christian viewpoint that became the main spiritual source of his songs. Caluza composed his first published song, ‘Silusapho Lwase Afrika’ (We Are the Children of Africa) (HMV GU 11), at the age of seventeen:165 Silusapho lwase Afrika. Sikhalela izwe lakhithi. Zulu nomXhosa noMsuthu hlanganani sikala ngeLand Act. (We are the children of Africa. We are crying for our land. Zulus, Xhosas, Sothos unite over the Lands Act issue.)

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Ex 34 ‘Silusapho lwase Afrika’ by R. Caluza © Lovedale Press

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Silusapho lwase Afrika’ was adopted as the official anthem of the SANNC in 1913 and was followed in quick succession by a set of further songs promoting the Congress and calling for national unity: ‘Vulindhlela Mtaka Dube’ (Pave the Way, Dube) (HMV GU 5), ‘Bashuka Ndabazini’ (What Is Congress Saying?) (HMV GU 42), and ‘Yekan’Umona Nenzondo’ (Don’t Be Jealous) (HMV GU 3). In terms of musical genre and political imagery, these songs are best understood as anthems, or in Benedict Anderson’s apt phrase, as the “echoed physical realization of the imagined community” (Anderson 1983, 132). In terms of technique, they are indebted to the older generation of choir composers such as John K. Bokwe and Enoch Sontonga. The latter is remembered as the composer of the national anthem ‘Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika’, a hymn-like tune composed in 1903. According to Sontonga’s biographer Mweli Skota, the song so moved John Dube that he asked for permission to use it for his Ohlange choirs. Over the years the song became popular and eventually replaced Caluza’s ‘Silusapho’ as official anthem of the ANC in 1919 (Skota n.d., 78; Walshe 1971, 204). Caluza’s early nationalist songs are a good example of the futility of bringing plain structural approaches to bear upon analyses of popular black music in South Africa. An etic analysis of the surface structure in these compositions would indeed bring to light only a limited number of technical resources. Additional insight, however, from an historical and anthropological investigation into black South African cultural dynamics shows that in a country where the appropriation of elements of the hegemonic culture by a subordinate class of blacks was received with panic by the dominant white society, black achievement to a large extent had to be couched in defensive, assimilationist language. Barred from being different and at the same time being suspected of wanting to be ‘black Englishmen’, black South African cultural innovators were indeed negotiating a difficult path that rarely met with approval from their white mentors. Thus Percival Kirby and other South African musicologists claims [sic] that Bokwe’s, Sontonga’s, and Caluza’s compositions were “without a trace of the devices used by European composers to mitigate the ‘squareness’ of the design or to inject vitality into the melody or character into the harmony” (Kirby 1979, 94). Such harsh criticism was of course motivated by racial prejudice and misinterpreted the composers’ intentions. Such compositions, as John Blacking noted, are not examples of “‘black Englishmen’ applauding the music of the dominant culture” (Blacking 1969, 48). Nor are they simply the products of untalented, minor composers with a poor grounding in formal Western music education. As Blacking observed, the appropriation of the triads and cadences of European hymn tunes “expressed the new relationships and values of urban groups, who expected fuller participation in the social and political life of the community into which they had been drawn economically” (Blacking 1980, 198). But the use of such fundamental techniques of Western composition was by no means unambiguous. For the musical idiom that signalled black nationalist aspirations also served to express loyalty toward the British. Thus ‘Bayete’ (Hail, Your Majesty) (HMV GU 12), composed in honor of the Prince of Wales’s visit to

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South Africa in 1925, combines a triadic melodic structure with lyrics that a reviewer called ‘loyal to the core’:166 Bayete nkosi. Mtwana sakubona. Z’yaku bingelel’ ingane zako! Bayete nkosi. (We salute your majesty. Your children are saluting you. Rule us, your children! Salute, your majesty!) In 1915 Caluza completed his studies and joined the staff at Ohlange at an annual salary of £40. Within a short time he took over the leadership of the Ohlange Choir from Lingard D. Bopela, a future ICU activist, and within two years transformed the choir into one of the country’s ablest performing groups. The history of the Ohlange Choir began in 1908 when John Dube tried to alleviate the strained financial situation of his college by taking a brass band on fund-raising concert tours. The idea proved successful, and from at least 1912 the choir undertook similar tours of the major Natal towns as well as Johannesburg. By 1917 these tours had become annual events and included Reef compounds and mining centres.167 Countrywide tours by a black performance group were an unusual, high-profile, and almost political enterprise that ran numerous risks. Curfew regulations restricting concerts and passes that were required of all blacks travelling outside Natal were but some of the obstacles. In view of official suspicions of any travelling, organized group of blacks, Dube’s applications for passes were accompanied by promises to ‘avoid centres where there is rebellion’. Such assurances, however, rarely appeased the white farmers in the interior, nor could they prevent outbursts of rowdyism. For example, at Loskop, Boer farmers were stirred up by fears that the choir’s visit ‘was aiming at causing friction between blacks and whites’, and they promptly called in the police. On another occasion, the virulent racism of Boer farmers and opposition to the choir almost cost Caluza’s life. On the Reef, concerts took place under the auspices of Witwatersrand Native Labour Association indunas, but rarely went undisrupted by drunk migrant labourers.168 Choir member Selina Khuzwayo recalls: We started from Durban, did all the locations in Durban, there were not many then, … and from there we came to Pietermaritzburg. In Pietermaritzburg we used to do Indian halls, coloured halls, last the city hall. From the city hall we travelled in our own train that was arranged by the Principal John Dube, then travelled the whole of Natal. We started from Mooi River, from Mooi River went to Estcourt, from Estcourt we went to Ladysmith, from Ladysmith went to Dannhauser, from Dannhauser went to Vryheid, now Zululand way. From Vryheid, I still remember, then we started now to Johannesburg. In Johannesburg we started in Germiston, Jeppe, from Jeppe then went to all these compounds … When we finished the compounds, then of course we were invited by the churches now ... Finished that, we got into our train, back home. That’s how John Dube and Caluza raised funds for that Ohlange Training College.169

But the tours not only helped to keep the Ohlange institute financially afloat, they also provided cultural models able to satisfy the needs of the entire spectrum of black society by expressing an overarching black identity. Unlike mission-type

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concerts of imusic, Caluza’s shows attracted audiences made up of “all classes, from everywhere”.170 Over the years the concerts developed into one of the earliest-known forms of variety show for blacks that combined brass band performances, imusic, sketches, dress competitions, and more unusual attractions such as ballroom dancing, film shows, traditional drum-and-reed-flute ensembles, isicathulo, and back-to-back dances.171 The highlight of all Ohlange concerts, however, was ‘ragtime’ songs. As one Ilanga critic remarked: “The Ohlange Choir is a choir that satisfies everybody, because it can sing ragtime music [iRagtime], classical music as well as other types of music admired by black audiences”.172 IRagtime was the third category besides isiZulu and imusic recognized by Zuluspeaking urban performers and audiences. The emphasis on ragtime in the repertoire of the Ohlange Choir illustrates the continuity of urban musical traditions based on the Afro-American, minstrel, and vaudeville models favored by John Dube and the older generation of urbanized mission graduates. Minstrel performances had been popularized by Dube’s Inanda Native Singers as early as 1904, and bone playing and cork-burnt faces were standard musical fare at Ohlange … As a pupil, Caluza had even formed his own fully fledged blackface minstrel troupe called ‘Coons’ that had regular appearances at Durban’s New Location hall. Octogenarian Eva Mbambo, a member of the Ohlange Choir from 1921 to 1924, recalled that bone playing even featured in Caluza’s shows as late as the 1920s.173 But what Durban audiences during the First World War and in later years perceived as ragtime was not based on the developed artistic piano compositions of Scott Joplin. Caluza only came to know Joplin’s compositions during his studies in the United States,174 and until the late 1920s, therefore, the only sources for South African ‘ragtime’ were the minstrel tunes, sheet music, and gramophone records of music hall songs of British provenance. These were readily available in Durban’s music shops and were eagerly absorbed by black performers. Thus the Ohlange Choir was perfectly in tune with the most recent trends when it performed Tin Pan Alley composer Paul Wenrich’s ‘Moonlight Bay’ in Durban’s New Location Hall in 1916. J. Gumede’s Georgedale Choir even took things somewhat further and presented ‘Ragtime Crazy’ in the sanctified environment of the Methodist Church in Grey Street.175 If ‘political’ songs such as ‘Silusapho’ solemnly underscored black demands for freedom and justice, ‘ragtime’ songs such as ‘Moonlight Bay’ with their syncopated melodies were potentially more congruous with Zulu speech patterns. The distortion of normal speech rhythm and prosody in Xhosa and Zulu had been tolerated in most nineteenth-century choir music (makwaya) of the missioneducated elite. For these converts had accepted the supposed superiority of the symbols of Western civilization such as four-part choral hymnody over autochthonous forms of cultural expression such as Zulu prosody. In vernacular compositions by elite composers until at least the publication of John Dube’s collection Amagama Abantu in 1911, the integrity of Zulu speech modes was secondary to Western sound structure. Although black audiences had long

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discovered the natural relationship between ‘ragtime’ songs and some of their own dance songs, the problem with American and British syncopated music lay in the disparity between a seemingly African, lively rhythmic texture and English lyrics that could hardly capture the black experience in modern South Africa. And thus as late as 1915 one Ilanga correspondent could still complain about the lack of “people who are really gifted in composing Zulu songs”.176 But 1915 was also the year when Caluza completed his studies at Ohlange, and when the Ohlange concert tours and ‘ragtime’ performances began to develop into a regular feature in Durban’s musical calendar. As a result of the growing interest in syncopated music, from around 1915 Caluza composed a number of songs exploiting the harmonic and rhythmic precepts of British musical hall songs. The most famous of these was ‘Ixeghwana or Ricksha Song’ (Old Man or Ricksha Song) (HMV GU 5) composed in 1917 (see Ex 35).     

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Nga bon' i - xe - gwa - na

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wo!

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li - mbe - t'i

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nga bon' i

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ngutsha na

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xe - gwa

li - mbe - t'i

ngutsha

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li - mhlo - pe

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li - te qwa i ka - nda ka - nye ne -

zi - nyo

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ka - nye ne

 zi - nyo

Ex 35 Opening of ‘Ixeghwana’ by R.T. Caluza Ngabon’ ixegwana limbet’ ingubo limhlophe lithe qwa ikhanda kanye nezinyawo. Irishalam lifak’ izimpondo ligcobe nezitho lifana no ricksha bakithi … O ricksha nkosi, baas, miss, mina tata wena round the town. I saw an old gray-bearded man, who had covered himself with a blanket, and his feet were white, too. My ricksha with big horns and white legs, jumping around and looking for passengers … Oh ricksha Sir, boss, miss. I you take [in fanakalo] round the town. Ricksha pullers had long been one of the strongest and most militant sectors of Durban’s black working class, with their own distinctive dress and street cries. Thus it was small wonder that songs from the milieu of the ricksha pullers had

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always been a component of Durban’s black popular culture. Performances of ‘Ixeghwana’ brought out the ricksha pullers in full force, and during one of the strikes of Durban’s ricksha men Caluza’s composition even surfaced as a protest song. In a sense, as P. Kirby pointed out, the words of ‘Ixeghwana’ with their inkling of fanakalo mine pidgin words could indeed be seen as “a criticism of the European attitude to the African” (Kirby 1979, 90). But such criticism of white racism was by far less relevant to Caluza’s audiences than may appear at first sight. Two things made Caluza’s ‘Ixeghwana’ so popular among all strata of Durban’s black population. First, the song formulated a critique of those members of the black community who had sacrificed their cultural roots for the benefit of only a fleeting acceptance in white society, and who by speaking fanakalo, that supreme form of canonized racial stereotypes, had accepted the ultimate form of white racism, the contempt for the most sacred of all Zulu traditions - the language. Second, ‘Ixeghwana’ was the first composition by a black South African composer that merged topical lyrics in the vernacular with ‘ragtime’, the most polished form of musical entertainment of the time. It was these qualities that were to earn Caluza the “admiration of all Blacks”177 and a modern English izibongo (praise poem) entitled an ‘An African Star’: Midst Afric’s host of sons and daughters, / A nation full of power and honour. / Whose darkness, light has sworn to conquer, / There lives a son whose colour and talent / Set Afric’s great and true distinction. / Afric’s traditions, and modes of old, / Her cries, and passion, her appeal for light, / In strains of sweet, patriotic songs, / Shall now and ever live. / Of whom do Afric’s old and young pride? / The name CALUZA ‘The African Star’. / His love for man, his BANTU airs, / LOVE, FAME, and PRIDE for him have found. / For those of Afric’s host whose eyes have seen / His mode of tread on AFRICAN STAGE, / Have had his name translated. / HONOUR! LONG LIFE! PEACE! to the African Star.178

The reception of Caluza’s music, as mirrored in poems such as ‘An African Star’, demonstrates how ‘ragtime’ songs blended with the cultural symbols fostered within the emerging black nationalist movements in South Africa. Rather than thought of as derogatory and racially biased, syncopated music was seen by many South African blacks as an expression of racial pride. Through the Ohlange Choir and its ‘ragtime’ performances, wrote R.R.R. Dhlomo, “many have felt proud of being black: many have shed tears because of patriotic resurgence”.179 In his later recordings of the more solemn ‘Vulindhlela Mtaka Dube’, for example, Caluza even introduces the song with a lively ‘ragtime’ piano solo, thereby demonstrating the compatibility of the hymnodic, nationalist idiom with iRagtime. White South African audiences were wary of the nationalist connotations underlying black interpretations of these songs, despite the facts that syncopated music was rooted in nineteenth-century minstrelsy and that the popularity of ‘ragtime’ songs transcended racial barriers. Not surprisingly, then, plans by Littin A.J. Mthethwa’s Zulu Union Choir, a thoroughly Western-trained choir with an exclusively Western classical repertoire, to stage a concert of ‘ragtime’ songs in

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the Durban Town Hall in 1917 met with no small degree of opposition. Mthethwa was a gardener and ANC veteran in Durban and with his family had formed the Zulu Union Choir in 1914 to raise money for the war fund (Samuelson 1929, 20812). But for the choir’s manager, former Secretary of Native Affairs R.C. Samuelson, the choir was first and foremost an attempt “to counteract the innumerable tendencies to bring collisions between the White peoples of this Country and the Natives” and “to make the Natives see that we are truly their Friend”.180 The conservative Dube realised the black nationalist underpinnings of ‘ragtime’, and advised Mthethwa’s choristers that they should “forget about rhythmic dance and ragtime songs and sing pure music [imusic] only”.181

Music and Emancipation182 Christopher Ballantine As the music culture of black city-dwellers in South Africa grew in breadth and sophistication in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, a great and important question took shape within it. The question was: What could this music accomplish socially? Or, as it was more elaborately framed at the first conference of the South African Bantu Board of Music, held on 1 and 2 July 1929: How could “this heavenly gift … best be used for the glory of God and the amelioration of our social and cultural conditions?”183 The answers differed - and perhaps nowhere more widely than within the vibrant and virile subculture of jazz and vaudeville fostered by the most profoundly urbanised sectors of the black working class. But the differences here are not mysterious. This nascent, jazzing subculture itself contained somewhat contradictory preoccupations with, on the one hand, styles of jazz and vaudeville derived from the United States and, on the other, musical and performance styles that had developed long ago in the South African countryside, or more recently in the towns.184 Nor did these contradictory preoccupations stand alone: they were rooted in, and grew out of, notions of society and of social change that were themselves contradictory. And it is often in the very language of these deeper beliefs about society that the question about music’s social role was answered. As this suggests, the answers often lie outside the music itself, in the discourses that surround it, and in the contexts of its performance. The moment at which the music’s own content begins substantively to provide the answers, marks (as we shall see) the moment at which the music’s own social role begins to be fundamentally redefined. What then were these beliefs? And what were the corresponding views about a social role for music? The liberal view (1): the moral appeal On the one side were a set of beliefs that were essentially liberal and individualistic in character. As such they reflected in microcosm, and were surely in part a consequence of, the basically petit-bourgeois outlook and practice of (in particular) the African National Congress for much of the period between the 1920s and the early 1940s. For workers and slum-dwellers, this was a time of relative passivity, the result, it is usually held, of the failure of the ANC to create in the black communities a viable organisational presence which would link up with the lives and struggles of the urban working class. This meant that the oppositional activities of this class were guided by what Gramsci would have called a ‘corporate’ proletarian consciousness - one, that is, which attempts to “define and

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seek to improve a position within a given order” (in contrast to a “hegemonic” consciousness, which “seeks to perform a transformative work over the whole range of society”).185 In particular, two broad assumptions about music’s social role stand out here, both concerned with ways in which music might be an aid to improvement within the given order. The first assumption is that the music performed by blacks could demonstrate to whites that blacks were worthy of better social, political and economic treatment: in short, it should seek to effect a moral persuasion. On the analogy that ‘God helps those that help themselves’, the columnist ‘Musica’ opined in an article on ‘The Native and Music’ in Umteteli wa Bantu in 1930, “so will assistance come from either the State or elsewhere if we shew ourselves worthy”.186 More euphorically, conservative poet and critic B.W. Vilakazi asked the leaders of Ilanga Lase Natal in 1933 to believe that “[m]usic will induce men of wider aspect to open for us gateways to economic and political liberty”.187 The argument rested, as so often in the developing South African subculture of jazz and vaudeville, on a presumption about what had happened in the United States. […] At home, the musical scene abounded with groups, bands, and individual performers who were embarked upon a similar demonstration, and whose huge and enthusiastic audiences hoped for a similar deliverance. Appropriately - given their assumption about the political efficacy of moral persuasion - their repertoire was overwhelmingly American, learnt from imported gramophone records, or sheet music, or American films.188 The best of these local musicians made regular tours of the country, sometimes even venturing into neighbouring states. Among vaudeville groups, none was more famous in the early 1930s than the Darktown Strutters. Reporting on a countrywide tour that, by May 1932, was already nine months old, Bantu World noted that the Strutters could “boast of being the only Bantu group who filled the Durban and Maritzburg town halls with an appreciative audience of Europeans, with turns that are supposed to be associated only with European talents”. Better still, they were then “deluged with invitations for private appearances among the elite of Durban European society, not as ‘curios’ but as ‘eye openers’”.189 Musical performance as an ‘eye opener’: the image is significant - indeed central - to this mythology of moral persuasion, and recurs in countless variations, permutations, and associated analogies. Playing to full houses during a visit to Bechuanaland in 1936, the Darktown Strutters were again “both an education and an eye-opener”; this was because they had showed that, “given the opportunity”, Africans were “capable of rising above the ordinary standard of things”.190 In like fashion the following year, the Johannesburg-based Merry Blackbirds - already famous as one of the finest dance bands in the land - were an ‘eye-opener’ in Port Elizabeth and a ‘revelation’ in Bloemfontein (see Fig 38).191 On such occasions, what eyes were opened to was not only the performance of the music itself, but a host of associated skills. One of these was the ability of a great many of the bands to read staff-notation, and therefore to play from imported

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orchestrations. Louis Radebe Petersen, a meticulous observer of the local jazz and vaudeville scene since the 1920s, and once pianist for various groups, makes this point vividly: “They wanted to prove to the world, I say the world, even: if anybody came from America or London or anywhere, if they put the music sheet in front of them they could read it and do it … It’s how they turned the world upside down”.192

Fig 38 The Merry Blackbirds as they were (probably) in 1937 or 1938. From left to right: Enoch Matunjwa, Ike Shuping, Emily Motsieola, Peter Rezant (leader), Mac Modikoe, Tommy Koza and Philip Mbanjwa © Peter Rezant private collection

[…] If eyes were to be opened, it was obviously not a matter of indifference whose eyes they were. The bands and vaudeville companies played, of course, predominantly to black audiences, but (as is already implicit in the examples cited above) the demonstration of worthiness had ultimately to take place before the eyes of whites. Opportunities for such demonstration were avidly taken up. In 1941, for instance, the Merry Blackbirds, the Jazz Maniacs, the Synco Down Beats Orchestra, and De Pitch Black Follies were linked to performances in Johannesburg for the Blue Lagoon Club, the Log Cabin Club, and the New Paradise Club - events that

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prompted critic Walter Nhlapo to note approvingly that “these European night clubs are serving as a factor to a better South Africa. They are breaking slowly but surely the segregation barrier set up by dirty politics ...”.193

Fig 39 The Merry Blackbirds in the early 1940s, performing at the Zoo Lake in Johannesburg to raise funds for the Governor-General’s National War Fund the kind of appearance that surely lent weight to the moral claim they believed their music would advance. From left to right: Wilfred Ditsie, Mac Modike, Peter Rezant (leader), Tommy Koza (partially obscured), Marjorie Pretorius, Stephen Monkoe, Emily Motsieloa, and ‘Fats’ Dunjwa © Peter Rezant private collection In July of the same year, De Pitch Black Follies made their way to Durban and the south coast of Natal, the holiday playground of white South Africans, for a tour of hotels during the height of the mid-year holiday season. Through this “invasion”, as Umteteli styled it, black art and talent would be “carried right to the doors of European South Africa”, and the Follies would have “the opportunity to ‘educate’ a not inconsiderable section of Europeans”.194 And in November, the Follies and the Merry Blackbirds performed at a home in Parktown, one of Johannesburg’s most select white suburbs.195These occasions also served as tokens of acceptance, and as signs that headway was being made. Some tokens carried special weight, as on those rare occasions when the white press noticed, and made favourable comment about, a performance by a black group. […]

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Yet the real reflection on such tokens was made a month later, in Ilanga Lase Natal. Alluding to the success of the Follies in winning “the hearts of their white audiences”, influential critic Herbert Dhlomo reported what one white observer had said to a member of the cast (“You have done more for your people during these two weeks than many politicians have done for years”), and concluded: “I maintain that Art can, is and will continue to play a great part in solving our problems”.196 The liberal view (2): fame and fortune The first broad assumption about music’s social role, then, rested on the belief that whites were racist oppressors because they were ignorant; through music, blacks could help educate their masters and so present a moral claim that the white ruling class would find irresistible. The second assumption was as liberal as the first but more unashamedly individualistic. Its appeal was not to morality but to economics; its logic not that whites would change the system, but that blacks could play the system. It promised not a better deal for all, but a road out of the ghetto for some. Music, it said, could make you rich and famous. […] The assumption that music could make one rich and famous - could change the quality of one’s life - had unusual resonance for one stratum of performers within the jazz and vaudeville subculture. That stratum was women; and they provide an interesting variant of this assumption. It is remarkable that black women were able to define even the most tentative outlines of a gender-based position here. These women, particularly those now living and working in the cities, were the subject of a relentless discussion about their ‘proper’ roles, as wives, as daughters, as parents, but above all as present or future ‘mothers of the nation’. The patriarchal attitudes and conservative morality of this discussion - conducted inter alia through the black press, the schools, and the churches - stressed such things as the importance of Christian ethics, dignified behaviour at home and an exemplary social demeanour abroad, unblemishable fidelity, devotion to duty, and the virtues of a temperate life. Within the rigid and constricting confines of this discourse, there was little place for the ‘sinful’ and inherently ‘corrupting’ world of jazz, dance and the vaudeville stage.197 Yet despite this - indeed, in outright contradiction of it stood the contrasting, and secular, discourse of a developing show-business, which made direct appeals for the incorporation of women, in particular ways and as a special category of performer. In this jazzing subculture, women could at one and the same time make money and be exploited for their novelty value and their sex appeal (though, to be sure, the domination of the bands and vaudeville troupes by men meant that women’s earnings were largely dependent on the ‘generosity’ of the male leaders or managers). But there is a dialectic here. The entry of women as wage-earners on to the performing stage slowly opened up a space which women themselves could begin to define, in such a way that it started to accord new respectability to women

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performers - who now even became worthy of emulation. And women themselves could begin tentatively to undermine, or at least extend, the rigid conventions of socially acceptable roles and behaviour. For women, then, music could play a role that was at least potentially progressive. It could slowly challenge the stereotypes of oppressed womanhood, deliver a blow to male hegemony, and provide a limited basis for economic autonomy. Vaudeville troupes provided the primary location for women performers within this subculture. Such troupes proliferated around the country; mixed-gender and men-only groups were predominant, but by the mid-1930s troupes consisting only of women, and even managed by women, were not uncommon. Nothing in their names gave even a hint of the subtle dialectic at work within them, as a few random examples will suggest. The Madcaps were a Mafeking group; comprising four women and two men, they were founded in 1928 by a Mrs S.M. Molema, described as “an indefatigable sports enthusiast and social worker”.198 The Movietone Cabaret Girls flourished in Bloemfontein around the mid-1930s under the leadership of a certain Miss Florence K. Nthatisi, about the same time that Mrs L. Kgokong was managing her Raven Girls in Pretoria, and not long after Miss V.N. Plaatje had founded her Rhythm Girls in Kimberley.199 De Pitch Black Follies of 1937 consisted of some men and “thirty charming girls in a sparkling revue”; these women divided into smaller groups and took the stage with names such as The Broadway Babies, The Ginger Girls, The Harlem Crazy Steppers, and The Dangerous Blue Girls.200 By 1941, the Follies were fielding The Smart Girls, “a troupe of four juvenile girls, whose singing and blending is remarkable”, and The Hot Sparks with Peggy Bhengu, “the best girl tapper on the stage of dusky Johannesburg”.201 In the jazz field, the space for women was restricted - as was the case in the United States - essentially to two roles: vocalists and pianists. Earliest of the pianists was certainly the extraordinary Emily Motsieloa, who was the first pianist of the Merry Blackbirds (in 1930 when it was known as the Motsieloa Band), and held that chair for nearly two decades.202 (She was, as it happens, also wife of Griffiths.) Hope Khumalo was pianist for the Jazz Maniacs (see Fig 40) for a short period around 1939 or 1940,203 after which she seemed not to play jazz again.

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Fig 40 The Jazz Maniacs, in a photograph taken between 1934 and 1939. Jacob Moeketsi is at the piano; the leader, Solomon ‘Zuluboy’ Cele, sits in the front line, flanked by Wilson Silgee (left) and Zakes Nkosi. Behind (from the left) are Zakes Seabi, Vai Nkosi, and Edward Sililo © C. Ballantine private collection […] But surely no woman made greater impact, or demonstrated greater selfconsciousness about the implications of her career, than the brilliant Johanna ‘Giddy’ Phahlane, leader and manager of the celebrated Bloemfontein troupe, the Merry Makers. A pseudonymous letter-writer in Bantu World, in January 1936, made the point crisply. Indignant that other centres in the country had not yet produced a female vaudeville performer of Phahlane’s calibre, the writer urged that “[o]ur womenfolk have a national gift which if keenly developed would make them stars on the stage”.204 It was a point that Joanna Phahlane herself took up energetically, almost in the manner of a one-woman campaign. Between 1936 and 1938, she wrote an occasional column for Bantu World. Using the pen-name, ‘Lady Porcupine’, this became one of her most important forums. Here she joined with the struggle of black women in general; and here she propagated her belief that music could play a significant role in this struggle. Writing in February 1936, for example, she again drew attention to the contradiction between, on the one hand, the abundance of musical talent among black women, and on the other, the virtual absence of women from leadership positions on the musical stage. “Surely”,

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she urged, “I am not the only young woman in this direction. There are others yet unsung: Forward girls!!”205 […] The radical view (1): organisational links On what I have called the liberal view, then, the social role of jazz and vaudeville was a question of its being an aid to improvement within the given order. Alongside this, there existed at the same time another view, and another set of practices, on the basis of which this musical subculture might play a role that was at least potentially more challenging - for here it might lend assistance to efforts that tended in the direction of more fundamental social change. I shall call this the radical view. As was the case with the liberal view, it is possible here to distinguish between two broad impulses. The first, and chronologically the earlier, is the assumption that music’s socio-political role was largely a question of its formal linkage to oppositional organisations; and as a corollary, that issues such as the specific style, content or provenance of the music were of secondary, or even minimal, importance. One such organisation was the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU). Founded in 1919 as a trade union, it grew rapidly; by the mid-1920s it was essentially a black protest movement with support in many parts of Southern Africa. The ICU seems to have had a close and on-going relationship with music. In 1927, for instance, the year it was at its zenith with a claimed membership of 100 000, the organisation was hiring jazz bands to play at fancy-dress balls and other events in the ICU-owned Workers’ Hall in Johannesburg; the best known of these bands was a ‘Coloured’ group, the Merry Mascots.206 The ICU frequently organised large meetings and rallies, at which ‘The Red Flag’ or the ICU Anthem would commonly be sung;207 and perhaps no association between the union and the jazzing subculture is more suggestive than that in which, at one such rally in 1929, 4 000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Johannesburg behind the General Secretary, Clements Kadalie, a jazz band belting out - and presumably ‘jamming’ to the tune of - ‘The Red Flag’.208 […] The radical view (2): politics in music - towards an African style On the first radical assumption, then, about a more challenging social role for music, it is the links to organisations that were of primary, and virtually exclusive, importance: the politics, in a manner of speaking, was external to the music itself. The second assumption, by contrast, draws this connection much more closely: the politics, though it continues to live outside the music and still seeks to link music to its organisational function, now stands also in much more intimate relationship

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to the music itself. Politics, that is to say, now invades music, and music in turn now welcomes politics explicitly into its own constitution. This is a shift whose outlines are at first only dimly and intermittently perceived, but whose ultimate impact on the future direction of black South African jazz culture was profound and revolutionary. The content of the shift was to assert the belief that there was intrinsically a value in the adoption or incorporation of musical materials that were African. The precise nature of this value was never adequately spelt out by those who, in this period, were its advocates or its practitioners; but there cannot be any doubt that this belief (and the shift to which it gave rise) was part of a broad groundswell that reached its first culmination in the early 1940s, where it inaugurated a period of militant protest and articulated itself through the social and political philosophy of the New Africanism.209 […] As with politics, so with music: the first tokens of a shift in thinking about music become apparent around the mid-1930s. A headline in Bantu World in February 1935 proclaimed the shift in summary form: “Africans Must Not Ape Europeans”. The headline stood prominently above a major article written by Paul Robeson, and reprinted from the Daily Herald: “I am going back to my people”, he had written, “in the sense that for the rest of my life I am going to think and feel as an African - not as a white man … It is not as imitation Europeans, but as Africans, that we have a value … ”.210 Robeson was selected as an important symbol, and example, of this early shift: his intended visit to South Africa in 1935 provided occasion for a flurry of articles, editorials and letters in the black press. In February, for instance, a front-page article in Bantu World referred to Robeson’s “study of African music and life”, and argued that his example should reveal to our budding artists that there is sufficient material for their calling in the life of their own race, that there is drama, tragedy and comedy in the life of a people who are just emerging from the thraldom of Africa’s darkness, and who are being rendered landless and homeless and exploited by an alien race in the land of their 211 birth. This life can be dramatised.

In July, critic Walter Nhlapo took up some of these themes in the form of an impassioned plea: One often wonders when Africans will learn to help, to be patriotic … We will rather sing the English National Anthem well and blunder with ours. What is wrong with us? … Was it not Paul Robeson who condemned the Negroes for trying to sing Brahms, Haydn, Wagner and disregarding their spirituals while Europeans singing them were amassing great fortunes? Again with African folk lore songs; we, like the Negroes, despise them and laugh and scorn at their singers.212

[…] By the late 1930s and early 1940s, the clearest embodiment of this new tendency was to be found in the work of a troupe calling itself the Bantu Revue

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Follies. Their programmes included “sketches, drama, comedy and satire, also sentimental songs, jazz, madrigals and ditties - all of them in the Native vernacular”. The experience was of “a real native concert” - the goal, clearly, of the troupe’s leader, the extraordinary Toko Khampepe, who “in loincloth and skins only, was a rare spectacle on the piano”. They were “premier native music specialists and primitive artists”; it was they, more than perhaps any other group, who “succeeded in reducing the commonplace in Bantu life to a fine art”.213 Some troupes sought to give expression to an ‘African’ repertoire in less sensational ways. For the Synco Fans - like their stable-companions, the Synco Down Beats Orchestra - this meant a resolve “to play songs composed and orchestrated by Africans”.214 So too for the newly-formed African Minstrels, who preceded their launch in early 1941 with an announcement of the repertoire they would specialise in. They gave a list of eight categories - including “exclusive novelty numbers”, “musical comedies”, “old classical jazz songs”, “all-round minstrel choruses”, “operatic minstrel choruses”, “vaudeville revues”, and “specialities” - but at the top of the list stood “African numbers composed by Africans”.215 No-one doubted that these changes were significant. Yet for some, and the testy Walter Nhlapo was among them, they still did not go far enough. Spurred on, perhaps, by the sharply rising political temperature of the early 1940s, he made bold in 1941 to point precisely to the social and political experiences of ‘Africans’ that ought to be making an impact on the content and form of vaudeville productions. It was, quite simply, a call for ‘committed’ art: The theatre of life is so full of incidents which when joined together would form a masterpiece sketch, but because most of these conductors are less imaginative and compositive but merely plagiarists, they fail. We have, for instance, the drama of pick-ups, the life in the zoo-like locations, the hooliganism and the like, subjects which are full of passion, of sorrow, of strife. We have scores upon scores of daily acts that deserve dramatisation but are passed over.216

If for the vaudeville troupes, then, the Africanist impulse might be realised by “not aping the Europeans”, by “presenting the commonplace in Bantu life”, by staging “songs composed and orchestrated by Africans”, or by selecting “subjects which are full of passion, of sorrow, of strife”, what - under the sway of the same impulse - were the jazz bands to do? Certainly, they too could play numbers composed by ‘Africans’; and band- and vaudeville-leader Wilfred Sentso was one of those to pursue this option with particular energy. As Todd Matshikiza was to recall many years later, “Sentso began composing. Swing fever had touched him but he wouldn’t touch imported music. He wrote his own numbers”.217 Furthermore, in the composition of such numbers jazzmen could find new ways to avoid “aping the Europeans”. More positively, they could ignore conservative prejudice and instead celebrate and encourage local proletarian music-and-dance

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styles. Sentso and other composers did precisely this in the early 1940s for the popular tsaba-tsaba, a dance that was a successor to the notorious marabi dance.218 […] But the most fundamental identification of jazz with the Africanist impulse was yet to come. Between the early and mid-1940s, a number of bands began experimenting with the interaction of a set of musical components now being brought together for the first time. The most readily identifiable of these were the cyclical harmonic structure of marabi, a slow, heavy beat probably derived from the traditional (and basically Zulu) secular dance-style known as indlamu, and forms and instrumentation adapted from American swing. With these was combined a languorous and syncretic melodic style owing less to the contours of American jazz melody than to those of neo-traditional South African music. The result was nothing less than a new kind of jazz: its practitioners and supporters were eventually to call it African jazz, or mbaqanga.219 […] After such changes, things could not be the same again. The explicit and conscious acceptance of aspects of a social and political philosophy - in this case the New Africanism - into the very constitution of music, was a turning-point in the history of black South African jazz. Musically as much as socially, the early years of the 1940s were a time of transition. As if to mark and symbolise this transition, two events - each of extraordinary significance in its own right coincide in February 1944. On February 13, the legendary Solomon ‘Zuluboy’ Cele - former marabi pianist, and founder and leader of the Jazz Maniacs - is murdered in mysterious circumstances, and his body is placed across the railway tracks at Nancefield Station in Soweto. Nine days later, on February 24, and at a venue not far away, twelve people sign an attendance sheet as they gather for a small but important meeting. The sheet is headed “A.N.C. Youth League”, and the occasion is its inaugural meeting; among the signatories are Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Anton Lembede, and Jordan Ngubane.220 ‘Zuluboy’ Cele was one of the greatest of the first generation of black South African jazz musicians and band-leaders. The ANC Youth League was the political manifestation of the New Africanism, a philosophy that, in turn, had already begun to have a powerful impact on jazz and vaudeville subculture and on how it understood its social role. The coincidence of these events signals both the end of one era and the beginning of the next.

Hindu Devotional Music in Durban221 Sallyann Goodall Sallyann Goodall holds degrees in musicology, ethnomusicology, comparative religion and psychology, and now works as an expressive arts therapist and psychologist. Her doctoral research on Hindu music in Durban was completed while she was at the University of Durban-Westville, of which she later became Head of Music. She has published in widely divergent areas, including Hindu South African music, music and world religion, music and interventive therapies, and music education. This enquiry is based on the basic empirical research on local Hinduism which was done at the beginning of the 1980s by Johannes H. Hofmeyer and Gerhardus C. Oosthuizen in the field of comparative religions (Hofmeyer 1979; Hofmeyer and Oosthuizen 1981; Oosthuizen and Hofmeyer 1979; Oosthuizen, Coetzee, de Gruchy, Hofmeyer and Lategan 1985), and on my own fieldwork for doctoral research. Hofmeyer and Oosthuizen use the term ‘homogenisation’ to describe certain major processes which occurred in the South African Hindu community. In this discussion I deals with the role of music within these processes, asking how devotional music is affected by, and affects, homogenisation. The process of homogenisation In Hofmeyer and Oosthuizen’s major survey conducted in the Reservoir HillsAsherville-Clare Estate area [of greater Durban], respondents were asked to identify themselves according to sub-groups often identified by the community (Hofmeyer and Oosthuizen 1981). Some of the names used for these groups refer to language, some indicate religious affiliation, a couple indicate caste or surnameaffiliation, and three are labelled ‘Don’t know’, ‘None’ and ‘Confused’. Of the total number of respondents, 32.5% fell into these last three sub-groups, and the highest number of all respondents fell into the ‘Don’t know’ sub-group. This led Hofmeyer and Oosthuizen to conclude that either it was not important for these respondents to have a sub-group, or that they actively rejected sub-group divisions. Either way, since as many as 32.5% do not identify with sub-groups, they concluded that this result “is suggestive of the homogenising process to which Hindus are subject in South Africa” (Hofmeyer and Oosthuizen 1981, 8). Discussing “the gods worshipped and the books read” (Hofmeyer and Oosthuizen 1981, Chapter 3) they found that “a tendency towards greater homogeneity on the one hand, and towards the neglect of ritual on the other, have been isolated as two of the most significant religious trends to which Hindus in South Africa are subject” (Hofmeyer and Oosthuizen 1981, 39). They came to this

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conclusion because a relatively small number of deities are worshipped and because the reading of literature seems to be taking the place of temple ritual. In their assessment of changes in religious attitudes they noticed that a high rate of urbanisation (in the case of Indians this is 90.6% as per the 1982 census) had brought the community in close contact with a process of secularisation which also had a homogenising effect (Ibid., 133). “It was suggested therefore that the most important process to which Hindus are subject in South Africa is not conversion to Christianity, but homogenisation as the elements of secular Western culture replace those of India” (Ibid., 9). Hofmeyer finds an important cause for homogenisation in the local breakdown of Hinduism’s main institutions, the caste system and the joint family system (Hofmeyer 1979, 132). The breakdown of the caste system occurred fairly rapidly since to reject it was to the moral, politico-social and economic advantage of Hindus. Evidence suggests that in the field of music the caste system has no relevance to contemporary analysis. The breakdown of the joint-family system was caused by three factors: 1. the idea that individual independence is valuable (an idea that came to Hindus through the Western education system in the state schools, and which is espoused especially by the youth); 2. the natural material desires which brought participation in commerce and industry (a development which made mobility an important priority); and 3. the fact that housing facilities since the Group Areas Act of 1950 have usually not permitted the establishment of joint families. The erosion of the caste system did not have as serious a religious consequence for the Hindu community as did the erosion of the joint family system. The rejection of caste led, theoretically, to a greater accessibility of religion than before. However, since the joint family was itself the institution for communal worship, its erosion led to a decline in the practice of ritual Hinduism. Furthermore, the youth were taught [in the Western mode of] ‘rational’ verbal explanation at school, and they demanded that religion be meaningful to them in these terms. This the older generation could not provide, since the nature of passing on ritual was not by explanation, and so religious observance declined. The decline is shown clearly by H.J.W. Rocher’s 1965 study, which examines the practice of Hinduism by 75 Tamil mother-and-daughter pairs, where the daughters were students at tertiary level (Rocher 1965, 116). Rocher concludes: The most marked increase in rejection of Hindu traditions on the part of students is found on the question of menstruation causing ritual impurity or not, the consulting of the Tamil almanac, taking of vows during illness and disapproval of rituals performed in the family. There seems to be a less marked rejection on the part of the students where Hindu worship, faith in the healing power of the deities and faith in the basic Hindu concepts are concerned (Ibid.)

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This shows evidence for the specific rejection of rituals rather than rejection of worship and beliefs per se. As a response to the decline in ritual Hinduism we see the rise of neoHinduism, which gives priority to basic concepts of Hindu thought and beliefs, together with the dissemination and reading of religious literature.222In neoHinduism, the practice of ritual is less central, and visits to the temple at an individual’s demands are replaced by regular congregation at a ‘meeting house’ venue, where one can receive religious instruction and develop group solidarity. That the meeting-house approach is increasingly popular has been shown by Hofmeyer and Oosthuizen’s studies, and also by T. Naidoo.223 Another homogenising factor in the Hindu community is that geographical origins, which preserved regional languages naturally in India, are confused in South Africa. This has led to the need for a lingua franca among Indians. As Hofmeyer suggests, English was the obvious choice, given its status as an international language and its advantages for material advancement in South Africa (Hofmeyer 1979, 30). Today the original Indian languages are spoken by less than one in eight of all Indians, with almost seven in eight having English as their home language.224The decline in Indian vernaculars has made religion less meaningful to many Hindus, since traditional prayers and religious scriptures are in Sanskrit or the vernaculars. The linguistic frame of reference has now changed to a Western one. In South Africa, all new-Hindu religious literature and discourse is in the medium of English. Thus the process of homogenisation in local Hinduism has been accompanied by both the decline of traditional ritualism with a concurrent rise of the ‘meeting house’ style of worship and the decline of the use of vernacular languages with a concurrent rise in the use of English. The role of music in the homogenisation process For the purpose of this discussion the three most commonly performed religious musical forms will be discussed: mantra, bhajan, and kƯrtan. The word mantra comes from the Sanskrit verb mantr, meaning ‘to consult’, ‘to ponder over’, ‘to counsel’, ‘to give advice’ or ‘to consecrate with sacred texts’. As a noun it commonly means ‘sacred text’ (Apte 1970, 424). Such texts are in Sanskrit and are chanted mostly on one pitch, with two subsidiary pitches, one on either side, as in the R̙gvedic style. This form is not categorized as ‘music’ by any Durban/South African informant, but as a separate category, ‘chanting’. For the purpose of this paper, though, chant will be considered music since this is common ethnomusicological practice. The word bhajan comes from the Sanskrit root bhaj, which in its widest sense means ‘share’. Depending on how it is used, it can mean ‘sharing towards others’, as in ‘serve’, ‘attend’, ‘worship’, or ‘sharing towards myself ‘as in ‘receive’ or ‘enjoy’ (Ibid., 398). The same root is used in the word bhakti, meaning ‘loving devotion towards God’. As a vocal genre in South African

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Hinduism a bhajan is a worshipping or adoring song. It has a refrain, and in a worship context it is usually sung antiphonally between a leader and the rest of the congregation, proceeding couplet-wise. The text, which is in one of the Indian vernacular languages, tells of incidents in the life of a deity which have a moral message, or else the song itself is a moral exhortation.

Ex 36 Bhajan: Kr̙s̙na̙ tƗrƯ moralƯ mane bhƗna bhnjlawe (Krҕsҕnaҕ , your flute makes me lose my senses)225 Refrain: Kr̙s̙na̙ tƗrƯ moralƯ mane bhƗna bhnjlawe, BhƗna bhnjlawe mane ghelo bhnjlawe, Ghelo bhƗnawe mane bhƗna bhnjlawe. Verses: Eka taraf tƗrƯ yƗda satƗwe, BƯji taraf tƗrƯ mƗyƗ jagƗwe,

Krҕsҕnaҕ , your flute makes me lose my senses. I become unconscious, lose my mind. I lose my mind, become unconscious.

On one hand your memory disturbs me, On the other, you created the world,226and I am attached to this too. MƗyƗ jagƗwe mƗrƯ bhakti mukƗwe, When attachment awakens in me, I lose devotion, Bhakti mukƗwe mƗrƯ mƗyƗ jagƗwe When I lose devotion (to you), attachment overcomes me. DarĞan to nathƯ detƗ ĝƗmal̙ƯyƗ, Kema karƯ jƗĞe sƗrƯ njmarƯyƗ,

You do not appear before me ĝƗmalҕҕƯyƗ227 How will I spend my whole life in this

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conflict?228 Bal̙pan̙Ɨ mƗdun nathi samajtun re, My childish uncertainties are never lost, PƗr njtaro re bhnjlelƯ nƗvad̙Ưne. I cannot lose my immature doubts. Bhakti ƗpƯne tame nƗsƯ gayƗ cho, NƗvad̙Ư mƗrƯ bhnjlƯ gayƗ cho, BhnjlelƯ nƗvad̙Ưne pƗr utƗro re, PƗr utƗro re bhnjlelƯ nƗvad̙Ưne.

You came and taught us bhakti,229 then you left us longing for you, You placed me in a boat230 and then forgot me. That forgotten boat, come and help it across, Take across that boat that you forgot.

The word kƯrtan comes from the Sanskrit kƯrti, meaning ‘fame’ or ‘glory’ (Apte 1970, 150). This type of song sings the fame of a particular deity or saint by repeating the many names and epithets associated with him or her. For instance: Krҕsҕnaҕ is known as Govinda, GopƗla, Murali, Nandalalla, ĝyƗma and many others. Often used are also namah̙, meaning ‘salutations’, jaya meaning ‘victory’ and AUM, the sound mostly closely identified with God. As a musical form in South African Hinduism the kƯrtan is very similar to the bhajan: both are sung couplet-wise and are often performed antiphonally between a leader and the rest of the congregation. Since the text consists of repeated names, and since the deities’ names are common knowledge, it is a simple matter for the congregation to follow on from the leader, and no-one uses a written text for a kƯrtan. Another feature of the kƯrtan is that it is usually sung faster after it is first sung. It might move immediately to double time or the speed might be increased gradually to that point. The major difference between the bhajan and kƯrtan for South African Hindus is not in their purpose, their melodies, or their tempo-changes, but in their texts. This difference shows up in empirical research with local informants. Indeed documentary discussion based on fieldwork in India shows that these terms are not always clearly defined if taken in a pan-Indian context. For example, it appears that in India the terms have opposite meanings in the South to those they have in the North (Slawek 1986, 86ff.). However, this does not seem to be the case [in South Africa]. The term bhajan is sometimes used as an umbrella-term, but the same people who use the term in this way can and do distinguish between bhajan and kƯrtan as song-forms. We thus have three central types of religious music: the mantra, a chanted, Sanskrit, text-centred piece; the bhajan, a refrain-type vernacular song; and the kƯrtan, a repetition of names and epithets. In traditional Hindu ritual worship, centred on the joint family at home and at the temple, the Sanskrit mantra plays a central role. The main purpose of a visit to the temple is to experience the priest’s chanting of specific mantras. When the lamp is lit at home at dusk, mantras could be said or chanted if known. Less often a bhajan or kƯrtan might be sung. The emphasis in traditional ritual Hinduism is on

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the more formal mantra, which is perceived to be in the realm of the educated, while a couple of bhajans or kƯrtans might be sung in an informal setting. In neo-Hinduism in South Africa the weekly congregational satsang (lit.: ‘meeting for good, righteousness, truth’) usually opens with mantras chanted by all. Mantras might be chanted together in other parts of the service but this never takes more than about a quarter of the total time.231 Since Sanskrit is understood by only a handful of devotees out of about one million, about two-fifths of the time is spent singing bhajans and kƯrtans. These are more enjoyable because of their melodic variety as well as their textual accessibility. Those who understand vernaculars understand bhajans, and everyone ‘understands’ kƯrtans. The bhajan/kƯrtan song-leaders in the ‘meeting houses’ are the best trained devotional musicians in the community; occasionally they are of outstanding quality. Song-books of vernacular texts are often available in Romanized versions. The better musicians gradually widen the repertoire, often learning new songs from imported recordings. They also improve the musical ability of the congregation. In their congregations, harmonium, singing and drum classes are often held.232 Children in particular take advantage of these. Children also sometimes take part in religious holiday camps where bhajans/kƯrtans play an important role. Although mantras are taught and are regarded with great respect, Sanskrit is very seldom understood and has been totally ‘mystified’ as a language. It is clear that bhajans/kƯrtans are enjoyed more than mantras and that they fulfil an emotional need which is not met by mantras. Thus it is clear that where Hinduism has changed from traditional ritual worship to a ‘meeting house’ approach, the emphasis in music has clearly shifted away from involvement with the mantra and towards the bhajan/kƯrtan. Although the mantra is not considered to have lost any of its sacred value, the change in the style of worship has markedly affected and increased the time spent on the popular bhajan/kƯrtan. It is clear that the effect homogenisation has had on worship-style has affected the types of music preferred - certainly in respect of the quantity of performance for each type. Homogenisation has promoted the popular bhajan/kƯrtan genres rather than the mantra. Finally, we must address the question of whether (and how) the music itself has affected the process of homogenisation in local Hinduism. In a situation where the desire for real understanding and less formalism increases the use of the bhajan/kƯrtan type of song, one finds that it is especially the kƯrtan, as opposed to the bhajan which affects homogenisation. This again is related to the issue of language. With almost seven in eight Hindus having English as their home language, and fewer than the remaining one in eight understanding a vernacular language, there are not very many people who understand bhajan texts, although many people do enjoy their melodies. However, since kƯrtan texts are comprised of names and epithets alone, the kƯrtan does not need linguistic ‘understanding’. Since neo-Hindu services are usually conducted in English, there is a high enough proportion of comprehensible instruction and communication to satisfy spiritual needs, so that the instructional function the bhajan had in the past is no

198

longer important. Nowadays the bhajan is probably sung more as a popular song than for its instructional value. At the same time, in a society that increasingly favours understanding its religion and that can satisfy this need through the medium of English, the use of the kƯrtan is more viable than the performance of a linguistically less-understood bhajan. The kƯrtan is homogenising in its effect because its use lessens the devotee’s identification and distinction of him/herself as coming from a certain linguistic group on the basis of the song texts used in worship. It promotes the blurring of linguistic background distinctions distinctions which have been the main means Indian South Africans use to distinguish themselves within the Indian group. And, as is explained below, from a general Hindu point of view, the kƯrtan promotes the uniquely Hindu approach to worship just as well as the bhajan does. All in all, for many devotees, this means that the bhajan is not absolutely necessary for their worship. A uniquely Hindu approach to worship derives from the Hindu idea of what sound is. Inaudible (or ‘unstruck’) sound is the primal stuff of the universe, and as such, part of the Creator.233 Repeating God’s name in worship as audible (or ‘struck’) sound aligns the devotee with or connects him/her to the inaudible sound and thus also with the Creator. The name (or sound) is considered to be the ‘thing’ itself, and not ‘just’ a symbol. Repetition of the name assures uplifting of the spirit since one ‘unites with God’. Whether one is singing what would be called a bhajan or a kƯrtan is immaterial to this process of unification. The sound/name is what is important. Thus in a situation in which understanding the bhajan presupposes unusual linguistic learning, the kƯrtan provides for and even promotes the possibility of homogenisation: it avoids the linguistic barriers which can ‘mystify’ Hinduism for the local devotee; it retains its ‘Indianness’ by providing a non-English means of worship; and its simplicity encourages group participation, as in the ‘meetinghouse’ style of worship favoured by neo-Hinduism. Thus the increased use of the kƯrtan can be seen not only as the result of the homogenisation of local Hinduism, but it should be seen also as one of its causes, or, at the very least, as one of its facilitators.

Cape Malay Music234 Desmond Desai Desmond Desai has been an independent researcher on South African Islamic music since 1981. His doctoral work on ratiep, a self-mutilating spiritual art-form as practised by South African Muslims, was completed in 1993 at the University of Natal. He has presented his research on Cape Muslim music at many conferences, both locally and overseas. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries South African slaves and the indigenous Qena (Hottentots or Khoi-Khoin) were often used as musicians in the household of their owners235… Over a period of more than three hundred years, a vast repertory of religious and secular musical forms and styles was established within the heterogeneity of the South African social and cultural scene. These styles may be grouped thus: Sacred adhdhaan (call to prayer, a prayer in cantillated form) badja-ing (or qiraat, recitals from the Qur’an) djieker (or dhikr, a form and style found in the ratiep, moulood, and h̙addad; three substyles exist) pudjie (a line of Qur’anic verse recited by a leader, which is repeated several times thereafter by the jamaah) kaseda (a popular genre of vocal religious music with instrumental accompaniment) Secular236 oulied (a polyphonic vocal composition with instrumental accompaniment) ghommalied (a humorous piece with characteristic rhythmic dhol accompaniment. The verses may be non-related text-wise. It includes the substyles of afklopliedjies and ditties) moppie (a humorous piece with a topical, coherent text) nederlandslied (which include the bruidslied and seevaartlied) Dutch song (patriotic or another song with Afrikaans or Dutch text) Of these sacred styles, adhdhaan (Ex 37) and badja-ing (Ex 38) are stylistically closely related.

200

      

q=

 

80

Al - lah

     

hu

Ak - bar,

    

Al - lah

hu





ash

- ha

-



Al

-

du

an - la

il

lah

-

la

an - la

-

-

Ak - bar,

   





hu

 

ha

il

             il - la

ha

-

-



lal

Ak - bar,



 -

lah,

     il - lal - lah

             an - na

Mu - ham - mad - ur

Mu -

ham

-



Ra - sul - lu - lah,

             

ash - ha - du

 

hu

    

ash - ha - du

 

Ak - bar,

    



lah

 

ash - ha - du

 

Al -



mad - ur Ra - su

-

     lu

-

lah,

                   

gha - ya as

- sa - lah

gha - ya as - sa - lah.

Ex 37 Adhdhaan Translation: God is Great, God is Great / There is no God except Allah, / and Muhammad is His Messenger, / Come to prayer, come to prayer.237

                                   Bis - mil - lah - hi Rag - ma - nir

ragim

min

Rag - ma - nir

 

Al - gam - dul - li - lah Ra - bil



al - la

201

Ra - gim

ma

  

Ex 38 Qiraat (Badja-ing): ‘Al Fatigah’ Translation: All praise to Allah / The Lord of the worlds / The Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Both exhibit a strong Near-Eastern element: they are monodic recitative musical styles; have a non-developmental characteristic with periodic launches; are sung with a nasal vocal quality; generally, are based on Arabic texts and include melismatic and highly ornamental mictrotonal melodic passages. They predate all the other Cape Muslim sacred and secular musical forms and styles, and were established in Islamic culture long before the first permanent settlement of Europeans in South Africa in 1652. Common to both Cape Muslim and Indian Muslim religious musical practices, they relate to the ratiep musical performance in that the vocal performance style of the khalifa [leader] has all of the mentioned musical characteristics. His performance also links ratiep music to its wider musical context through an enhancement of the melody, emphasis on the text, and contribution to the emotional context by technical devices such as slurs and mictrotonal meslismatic passages. Pudjies are characterised by call and response between the voorsinger (leader, who may be an imam or priest) and jamaah (group). The voorsinger leads with a Qur’anic verse. Thereafter the main melody and text are repeated a varying number of times (thrice, and so on) by the jamaah. Antiphonal pudjies are similar to adhdhaan and badja-ing because of the monodic recitative style and the ornamental and microtonal nasal vocal part of the voorsinger. The response is provided by a group whose essentially homo-rhythmic singing may be in one or more voice-parts. This homophonic response in pudjies is regarded as equivalent to the homophonic and polyphonic singing of one of the three djieker substyles (Exs 39 and 40).

202

     Khalifa    Al - la       Jamaah    Al - la Khalifa

Khalifa

     

             

hum - ma sa - lim

hum - ma sa - lim

-

         

wa sal - lam a - lay.

-

        

sa

  

- lim

Ajee

Ab - dul

 - ma





wa sal - lam a - lay.



A - bu - ru - ja -



Ra - sul



 -

   lah

mi - na



wa ku sul-la-kumA -dul-ra - gi

 -



ma.

Ex 39 Pudjie Translation: May Allah bestow peace and blessings. The dhikr performance style of the ratiep jamaah is similar to that of other pudjies or djiekers. The monorhythmic, legato part-singing may be linked to the secular Dutch songs and nederlandslied (Ex 41).

203

  Imam  

q=



    

48

Ya

I

I Jamaah II III

Imam

I

I Jamaah II III

I Jamaah II III

-

           la



ya

     

hu

 

 

Mu





-

-

a

-

lay

Al - lah

-

ya

  

ya

              la

  

-

  

wa

ga

        

Sal

sa

 

-

lu

       la

-

la

 

  



 



-

laam



        



sal - la -

-

ham - mad

hi



    

o

-

  





bee

su

              



Jamaah II III

Ra

   

ya

-

-

          Mu -

ham

bee

-

mad

 

            

hu

a - lay

hi

wa

sa

 -

laam



  

Ex 40 Djieker (Voorsinger: Rajab Devajee) Translation: O Messenger, O Muhammad / Salutations and peace be upon you / O dearly Beloved, O Muhammad, / Salutations and peace be upon you.

204

  

q=



60

      

Skoon

-

-

       

 



ste min

-

-

-

naar,

               

wy



-

              

-



hoor -

my

-

-



-

 -



droe -

 

 

Ex 41 Nederlandslied [extract]: ‘Skoonste Minnaar’ (Marines Singkoor: 30 January 1982) Translation: Dearly beloved / You hear my sad … In all sacred styles, particularly in badja-ing, [microtonal] melismas and ornaments, typical of eastern and Islamic music, links them again to the style of karienkel - singing characteristic of the secular nederlandslied. The nederlandslied, like pudjies, is a responsorial style between voorsinger (leader) and choir who render a narration based on a distorted Dutch text (see Ex 42). q=

60

                 Laas







naam





  

toen ek een mei - sie het

       was Ro -



sa

be -







Fern;

Ro

- sa



 

   

 



min.

Haar





 

 



 Fern.

 

Ex 42 Nederlandslied [extract]: ‘Rosa’ (Recording: SACHM) Translation: When I once loved a girl / Her name was Rosa Fern … A wide range of membranophones of various shapes and sizes (drums and frame drums) as well as plucked lutes of varying kind are used in sacred and secular music of Cape Muslims. In secular pieces, percussion instruments include the barrel-shaped single-headed ghomma, the tamarien frame drum, and less commonly nowadays, sticks and bones. All Cape Muslim religious performances are purely vocal, except for the ratiep, and the kaseda [where] guitar, mandoline, dhol and maraccas are used. In ratiep music, the rebanna frame drum and the barrel-shaped dhol or dholak are found [while secular performances use] stringed musical instruments such as guitar, mandoline and double bass.238

205

Kasedas have instrumental accompaniments [on] mandolines, guitars and banjos also found in secular ghommas, moppies and nederlandsliedere. Solo or duet singing based on Arabic text occurs (see Ex 43). q=

72

     Mandolin             Bass guitar

Dhol

Mand.

Mand.

Mand.



        





 



     

     

     

 

 



  

 







                    

     



    



     

     

     

 

 

 

                      

     



     

    

Bass

Dhol

 



Bass

Dhol



 

 

Bass

Dhol







     

       

       



     

       

       



     

       

Ex 43 Kaseda with instrumental accompaniment: ‘Salaam’ (Duet by E. Adams and Y. Abrahams) Translation: Peace, O peace, / Blessings and peace, / O Messenger.

206

[…] There is a common thread of dhikr performances running through almost all forms of Cape Muslim religious performances.239 While Cape Muslim musical forms are complex and their nature confusing due to lack of evidence, documentation and adequate research supporting evidence for [this] postulate can be found by comparing ratiep, samman, moulood, haddad and kaseda dhikr. ‘Salaam’ is found in all of these, except for [the male] moulood and haddad. There are, however, basic differences in the various performances. In the ratiep a rhythmic accompaniment is provided by the rebannas and dhol. In samman again vocal aspirated sounds are added (Ex 44).

Ex 44 Samman dhikr [extract] (Bridgetown Mosque: July 1986) Translation: Peace, O peace, / There is no God but Allah.

The Guitar in Zulu Maskanda Tradition240 Nollene Davies Nollene Davies was for many years based in Durban, where she completed an MMus thesis at the University of Natal in 1992 on Zulu guitar styles in maskanda music. She was a Lecturer in Music at the University of Durban-Westville until its closure, and now lives overseas. Maskanda is a type of contemporary music in South Africa that draws on the rich musical traditions of the Zulu. Maskanda music is traditionally performed by solo musicians in informal settings such as for beer-drinking, for courting, and for entertainment, as well as by groups of instrumentalists accompanied by dancers. It is played predominantly by Zulu-speaking males who are also expected to demonstrate verbal skills to compose praise songs, poetry, and to convey social messages. Various solo acoustic instruments are used such as the guitar (isigingci, concertina (inkositini), violin (ivayolini), piano accordion (upiyane akhodiyoni), and more recently, the tradition has expanded to include ensembles with electric guitar and drums. The guitar is the most popular instrument among maskanda musicians by far. […] Early development of the maskanda tradition The tradition is deeply rooted in older forms of Zulu music which were more widely practiced in previous years and still exist to some extent in rural areas. This music is mainly vocal with choral dance songs (izingoma) featuring prominently. Melodic instruments were used mostly for solo playing or to accompany solo singing, while communal singing and dancing were accompanied by drums. Solo instruments, played by both men and women, consisted of various types of flutes and musical bows. Mouth bows, friction bows and struck bows were common but today they are rarely found except in remote areas where they are most often played by women and children. In the southern African region in general, the growing disappearance of traditional instruments for self-enjoyment has been reported (Kubik 1990) and this has left a widespread vacuum in this realm of creativity. Amongst the Zuluspeaking people, the maskanda musical tradition has developed partly in order to fill this vacuum. It was reported in 1908 that instruments of Western import were “rapidly penetrating into every part of the country and taking the place of the original primitive instruments” (Mayr cited in Rycroft 1977, 217). Mouth organs (imfiliji), guitars, concertinas and jew’s harps (isitolotolo) became rather easily obtainable and were relatively inexpensive.

208

The players - particularly young performers - adopted these instruments that were used then, too, for self-entertainment. Men appropriated the guitar, concertina, violin and piano accordion for their exclusive use, while young women played the mouth organ and jew’s harp. The music played on the instruments was not an attempted imitation of Western music. The musicians merely adapted the existing instrumental techniques and musical styles to these instruments which, in fact, afforded the musician different possibilities than those presented by musical bows and flutes. Changing from a one-string bowed, plucked or struck chordophone to a four-string violin or a six-string guitar must have presented an exciting new option to any musician. The continuation of some of the techniques and principles relating to musical bow performance is clearly reflected in various guitar songs recorded in the 1950s and 1960s and is still evident in many of the modern maskanda styles. The instruments used to perform maskanda thus function in ways similar to the ones they replaced in terms of both social function and musical relationships. Maskanda from the 1950s to the 1970s Maskanda music has, over the years, been adapting in response to the changing social environment in which it was located. Problems relating to tracing the early history of the genre have been mentioned. From the 1950s onwards it becomes possible to establish some of the developments in the tradition. Until that time it appears that the technique commonly used on the guitar was a vamping style, ukuvamba. Subsequently, a two-finger picking style referred to as ukupika or ukuncinza became popular. This technique made possible a completely new approach to guitar playing and to the music itself. The guitarist is able to present a multi-part structure consisting of at least two melodic lines on the instrument in addition to the vocal line, these being presented in a responsorial style. This enables the musician to express clearly the basic principles underlying most Zulu musical genres. The ukupika or ukuncinza uses at least five and mostly six strings whereas the ukuvamba technique tended to use fewer strings. As indicated below, the six guitar strings are clearly divided into three bass strings played by the thumb of the right hand and referred to as amadoda (‘men’s voices’), and three treble strings played by the forefinger, amantombazane (‘girls’ voices’). This concept of personifying the strings, as in many other parts of Africa, clearly illustrates the association with male voices and female voices, respectively, in Zulu choral music:

209

Fig 41 Division and tuning of strings (The above varies from standard guitar tuning in that the high string is tuned to d’ instead of e’) According to Clegg (1981, 3) it was also around this time that the tuning of the guitar was changed to that shown in Fig 41. This tuning system which is a modified version of the Western system, is the one most frequently used by guitarists up to the present time. Other tunings do exist, some pertaining to specific styles and others ‘invented’ by musicians to suit their individual characteristic styles. The introduction of the ukupika picking style in the maskanda tradition should not be seen in isolation. This occurred soon after the two-finger guitar styles gained widespread popularity in other parts of Southern, Central and East Africa probably around the 1950s. Considering the two-way migration of people between South Africa and other parts of the southern continent, it is quite possible that certain maskanda guitarists were exposed to this music. Allingham notes that “initially, instrumental accompaniments on Zulu traditional discs usually consisted of a few chords strummed on the guitar … A few picked styles were also in evidence on record but all originated from areas outside South Africa” (Allingham 1989). A further development occurred when the recording studios took an interest in the genre. Studio producers, many of whom were involved in producing mbhaqanga music, which is a more commercialized genre of Zulu popular music, coerced maskanda musicians into making certain changes to enhance the commercial appeal of the music. Electric guitars including a bass guitar were added, as were drums and sometimes backing vocals and other instruments. While electric instruments and amplification were already widely accepted in many parts of Africa in the 1950s, their introduction to maskanda music was relatively late. Phuzushukela (John Bhengu) is credited with being the first person to perform maskanda with a backing group, sometime between 1969 and 1971 (Ibid.). Today, solo performance on acoustic instruments is still the preferred medium for musicians. Sipho Mchunu, a maskanda musician who has achieved international recognition with the group ‘Juluka’, feels that the influence of mbhaqanga was important in another respect: The way we are singing [and playing], we are fighting the beat from mbaqanga. A long time ago, the slow beat was for old men …241 Now, on the recordings, we have to follow the beat that is going to be good on the market. It is what the people are

210 demanding, and there is the influence of the producers and the recording companies.242

The tempo of maskanda music has become gradually faster. Older maskanda songs are characterized by a tempo considerably slower than that of contemporary songs. A further important factor is that when the instrumental backing was added, the bass guitar and drums in particular emphasized certain aspects of the music which were not obvious before, namely, the importance of the bass melody and the dance rhythm or dance beat. The addition of a backing group seemed to be a catalyst for the incorporation of popular ingoma dance influence. Ingoma dances have been an important part of Zulu migrant culture for many decades, as has maskanda music, making the link between the two genres inevitable. Most maskanda styles are named after ingoma dance forms, for example, umzansi, isikhuze and isishameni. These dance rhythms form an important and integral part of the music and must be present for a successful performance. In ensembles this beat is played on the drums and emphasized in the part played on the bass guitar, and it often dominates the music to such an extent that the other instruments and vocals are barely audible. The dancers, if present, would respond to this rhythm and perform the relevant dance steps. In a solo performance the dance rhythm or beat is implied and not always obvious to someone unfamiliar with maskanda and/or Zulu music. (See Ex 45 where the underlying dance beat is indicated with an ‘X’.) It is not uncommon for a member of the audience to respond to a good performance by ‘realising’ this beat, that is, dancing to the music. Perhaps the disappearance or waning popularity of some of the older maskanda styles is due to the fact that these were not associated with popular dance forms. […]

211

212

Ex 45 Transcription of a section of the song ‘Incema’ by S. Ngcobo.243 The structure of guitar songs is fairly standard and proceeds as follows: 1. intela/izihlabo: unmetred instrumental introduction; 2. fixed ‘chorus’ section: a melodic-rhythmic pattern established on the guitar, in two or three parts; 3. the solo vocal section: enters after two (or more) repetitions of above pattern; 4. izibongo (praises): optional, usually occurs approximately two-thirds of the way through the song. The performance begins with the introduction, which is referred to as intela, izihlabo or isawundi synonymously. The introduction consists of a series of short, fast, flashy melodic passages. It also serves to inform the listener of the scale and style of the song, and to display the technical brilliance of the performer as manifested in a series of rapid passages and scale-like runs. The guitarist may also use the opportunity to check on the tuning of his guitar. The intela is often set off from the main body of the songs by a clear pause at the end (see Ex 45), end of first line). In the next section, or the main body of the song, the guitarist establishes the melodic-rhythmic pattern (or fixed chorus part) which serves as the musical foundation of the song. This pattern creates a multi-part texture as it may contain two, or even three, interwoven parts, all played on a single guitar (and later with a

213

vocal part added). For example, in the song ‘Incema’ (as shown in Ex 45), the guitar pattern has three parts: bass melody, ostinato, and upper melody. The middle ostinato line consists of rapidly repeated pitches a and g, all played by the thumb of the right hand (Ex 45). This continuous ostinato establishes and maintains the basic pulse of the piece. (The ability to maintain this type of rapid unceasing thumb line must be considered a technical achievement for any guitarist.) The drone-like pattern of evenly-spaced, fast notes played by the thumb of the right hand functions in a similar way to that played on the ugubhu and umakhweyana musical bows. This ostinato serves mainly to lay a temporal and tonal foundation as in bow music (see Rycroft 1975/76, 84-85). In maskanda music (Ex 45) the basic pulse is further emphasized by the dance beat marking every six pulses, as indicated. The pitches c, d, and e, which form the tonal basis of the song occur simultaneously in the bass and upper instrumental parts and fall on the pulse before the main dance beat. This off-beat accent is typical of umzansi, the style of this song. […] The vocal part is then introduced into the guitar song. Each line or segment of text is superimposed over continuing repetitions of the fixed melodic-rhythmic pattern of the guitar. As in bow songs, the solo vocal part is rhythmically and melodically derived from the instrumental parts. Another close parallel between the two genres, bow music and guitar music, is that it is considered essential to intersperse instrumental interludes between the vocal entries “to enable the listener to hear what the instrument is saying”.244 This may create a responsorial type relationship. Rhythmically, the vocal part and the instrumental parts do not have a close relationship in either bow music or maskanda. As in much Zulu and Nguni music the vocalist uses an open voice quality. Portamento is also frequently employed in the vocal line, usually descending. The distortion of syllable length and word stresses occurring on the off-beat as typical in Zulu music is heard in maskanda. The natural speech rhythm of the text appears to be retained to some extent (Rycroft 1971, 236). The guitarist may include in the song an optional section called the izibongo, that usually occurs approximately two-thirds of the way through the song … The izibongo serve primarily for the purpose of self-identification and self-praise. The musician will say who he is, the name of his chief, the area he hails from, the river he ‘drinks from’ and perhaps the name of a mountain near his home.245 The praises contain humour and satire and reflect many of the features found in other Zulu izibongo: highly developed poetic language, frequent use of metaphors, imagery and repetitions. […] After the praises, the song would continue for a few more repetitions of the melodic-rhythmic pattern on the instrument before ending, often abruptly in the middle of a pattern. This again typifies the principles of Zulu music in that the beginnings of phrases are of the utmost importance whereas phrase-endings may be abrupt or fade out.

214

Scales, styles, and tonality Maskanda music employs a variety of scales, but the musicians, themselves, do not use specific terminology to differentiate between them. However, certain scales seem to be associated with certain styles or substyles in maskanda music. While it is apparent that there are a large number of different guitar styles played, musicians are also not in the habit of differentiating song style by particular names, preferring instead to use the generic term ingoma (literal translation, ‘song’ or ‘dance-song’) in reference to all songs. Many of the styles are named after the dance styles with which they are associated. Thus, the main feature in identifying a style would be the dance beat, but scales would also be a consideration. Guitar styles may be divided into two broad categories:246 (A) styles in which the incorporation of Zulu musical principles is apparent (for example, isizulu, umzansi); (B) styles in which this continuity is not dearly apparent (for example, isishameni). Maskanda styles falling within category A (as in ‘Incema’, Ex 45) demonstrate a close relationship with older Zulu musical genres in regard to scales and tonal materials. This can be seen in the use of five- and mostly six-tone scales which could be hemitonal or anhemitonal. Hemitonal scales are found in music played on the ugubhu musical bow (a single-string unbraced, struck bow). Further, from research done by Rycroft and from my own analysis of sound recordings it seems clear that these scales usually employ five or six pitches per octave. Four of these pitches are directly related to the two fundamentals on the bow and to the third and fourth partials. Tonal procedures in styles of Category A emphasize the similarity between maskanda guitar music and Zulu bow music. The bass part played on the guitar represents the fundamental pitches; the upper melody plays the partials (see Ex 45, ‘Incema’). The bass melody in this example outlines two easily recognized fundamental tones (d and c). D as a fundamental is found in measures 1-8 and 1213, C as a fundamental is found in measures 8-12. The upper melody is dominated by pitches which can be heard in a partial-to-fundamental relationship with respect to either d or c. A five-tone scale of the ugubhu bow that is typically encountered in maskanda songs of Category A is shown in Ex 46. This type of scale is based on two fundamentals of b and c a semitone apart. For the fundamental b the related partials are f# and d# above the fundamental. The fundamental c is similarly represented by its third and fifth partials, g and e respectively.

215



     

       

Ex 46 Scale typically encountered in ugubhu and in other Zulu songs. (These pitches are given since they would approximate those found in a guitar song.) In ‘Incema’ (Ex 45), it is demonstrated that the tonality involves shifts between two fundamentals (d and c). This system of shifting fundamentals between two fundamentals can be seen as an example of a direct link between the tonal practices of maskanda music in Category A and of older Zulu bow music. This shifting of tonality can be seen in the excerpt from an ugubhu piece [Rycroft 1975/76, 84-85]. In the first measure, the b fundamental is emphasized; in the second, the c fundamental is emphasized. The guitar song ‘Incema’ [Ex 45] involves an alternation between two fundamentals, but in ‘Incema’ the fundamentals are a whole tone apart rather than a semitone, which is common to ugubhu music. […] Speculation on the present and future development of the thriving and dynamic maskanda tradition must take into account the influence of the radio and recording industries … In the early 1970s producers at the SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) informed me that their policy regarding maskanda had changed and that they no longer recorded solo artists.247 Instead, they were encouraging group performance which at that time was rather uncommon. The reason given was that ‘it is of greater interest to the listener’. This trend has in fact continued. The same policy is implemented by the recording companies, of which there are a few smaller ones in the Durban area of KwaZulu Natal. It is difficult for a solo artist to be recorded and thus for the public to obtain such a recording. Recordings of maskanda groups, on the other hand, are made on a regular basis and are selling on the market in the form of cassette tapes. The solo guitarist thus finds himself in a peculiar position. He derives much satisfaction from playing his solo instrument but in order to achieve the fame and recognition so many musicians are striving for, he is forced to form a group. This has been the only means of achieving this goal, irrespective of how talented he may be. Thus many creative and talented musicians have never been recognized or recorded and lack access to the mass media because of the attitude of the radio and recording industries.

Basotho Mbube248 Robin Wells Robin Wells studied at Durham University and moved to southern Africa where he taught in Lesotho, spending 18 months doing fieldwork there while an associate of the Department of Social Anthropology at Wits. He worked briefly at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford University before going to live in the United Arab Emirates. One of the most successful groups singing Mbube in Lesotho today is Maseru Top 6. Founded in 1983 by the lead voice, Abia Mophete, Maseru Top 6 have produced six albums of finely-crafted unaccompanied vocal music, having secured a record contract in Johannesburg in 1988. Comprising three bass voices, one tenor, a counter-tenor/alto, and with Mophete singing the lead sephololi part, the group integrate elements of Sesotho lipina and dance styles such as mohobelo with European cadences and tonality. As with many Sesotho lipina, old and new, their songs are rooted firmly within the poetic tradition. In composing, Mophete is primarily concerned with the message he wants to convey. The text is composed first then, out of the tonal pattern of the words, melodies begin to emerge that Mophethe shapes into a full length song. Among a number of diverse influences, Mohpethe acknowledges the songs of J.P. Mohapeloa and the internationally acclaimed Zulu singing group Ladysmith Black Mambazo.249 One of their most popular songs, ‘Tlapa la Thella’ (The Slippery Rock), is a critical portrayal of corruption among political leaders set within the allegorical tale of Raboshabane, a lieutenant to Lepheana whose people became notorious cannibals during the time of Moshoeshoe the Great. Raboshabane, having captured a large stock of food and weapons, entreats his subjects to help him climb a steep rocky crag with the promise that they will all share in the bounty. But having climbed on the shoulders of his followers to reach the summit, he then kicks them down again. Raboshabane reaches the top and sits on the rock at the summit. Later, however, another famous cannibal, Motlejoa, discovers a way up the slippery and dangerous crag - and Raboshabane meets a frightening end. The following [three] extracts [Exs 47a, 47b, and 47c] are taken from ‘Tlapa la Thella’250

217

C-T T A B

actual pitch: 5th below written pitch rise:-------

                    q=



100 Solo Jo!

-

tla - pa

la

the - l - l - la.

Jo! - ,

tla

pa - la

                      

3

the - l - la

q = 70

    

-

,

he

-

iee!

tla - pa

                             ,

a,

tla - pa

jo! - ,

la the - la

tla - pa

,

la

the

-

lla

-

l - a 

-

,

l - la

-

,

i - ee -

-

tla - pa

la the - l - l -

3

l - l - ie

iee!

-

Jo! Tlapa la thella / Hee! Tlapa la thella Hey! The slippery rock! / The slippery rock!

Ex 47a Mbube ‘Tlapa la Thella’

-

            

 



the

Jo!

q = 70

-

ie - e 

-

Solo

3



the - lla

q = 100

                           

la

           

la the l - l-





tla - pa

3



-

-

                      

       

iee!

e



-

e

-

,

tla - pa

       

 

iee!

tla - pa

la

the -

           

tla - pa  

la 

the 

lla 



la



218

C-T T

                               

q=

90

Ha - tang

B

-

li - be - tsa

li

le

ho -

ee

-

na -

                                 

Ha - tang



   

 

- na

 

-

le

ho

-

ee -

                         Solo

-

li - be - tsa li

3

3

bo - na -

3

ba se na li - be - tsa - le li - jo -

                                  3



Jo!

-

3

jo!

-

ba shoa - ke tla - la

-

Ex 47b Hatang libetsa Hatang libetsa li le ho eena / Bona ba se na libetsa le lijo Jo! Ba shoa ke tlala / Jo! Tlapa la thella. Tread on. The weapons are with him / They had no weapons and no food. Jo! They are dying of hunger. / Jo! The rock is slippery!

219

Leader (A) Solo

q=

90

                                   



jo - na na na a - o

C-T T

                                          a - o jo - na

-

-

he ba - a - o -

jo - na tla - pa la the - lla, jo - na tla - pa la the - lla, jo na tla - pa la the - lla, jo - na tla-

B



                                                  

e - o - the - lla

la la la la la la lla la

                           

Jona! Tlapa la thella! Hey! The rock is slippery!

etc.

la la la a - o ba - le - tla - pa la the - lla, la

pa la the - lla, jo - na tla - pa la the - lla, jo - na tla - pa

Ex 47c Jona! Tlapa la thella!

  

etc.

la the - lla, jo - na tla - pa la the - lla,



etc.

Basotho Performance Aesthetics: Sefela and Shebeen Songs251 David Coplan The single outstanding student of Basotho performance aesthetics to date is Charles Adams, and much of the following account derives from his pioneering work (Adams 1974, 1979a, 1979b).252 Adams’s researches of Sesotho genres did not include sefela or shebeen songs, but they provide a conceptual framework within which these song types can logically be placed, a schema of ethnoaesthetic categories in the performative domain. As with any cultural philosophy, these categories must first be presented as ideal-typical, with the understanding that they are differentially shared, understood, and defined by individuals in practice. Sefela, along with sporting contests, various kinds of public spectacles, displays of beauty and skill, and performances of all kinds, belong to the overall domain of lipapali, ‘games’, derived from the verb ho bapala, ‘to play, playing’. So the concept of disciplined, performative recreation that underlies the connection between such American phrases as ‘Play ball!’ and ‘Play the blues!’ is explicit in Sesotho. Both sport and performing arts are associated further with the notion of ho bapa, ‘to be parallel or commensurate’, from which ho bapala is derived. The enactment of this concept is glossed by the intensified form of ho bapa, ho bapisa, ‘to make parallel’, or freely, ‘to make metaphor’, from which the noun papiso, ‘metaphor’ is derived. Not surprisingly, some sefela performers use sporting metaphors metapoetically, as a vehicle of self-praise in competitive performance. Here Mphafu Mofolo depicts his victory over his local rivals, including one Kotsiea, on a visit to the capital: Monongoaha Kotsiea o raha bolo. / Baheso ra tena limolo. / Re leba Maseru teropong; / Ha r efih1a ka hare ho teropo - / Banna, likhomo, ngoanabo Makhoathi! This year Kotsiea plays football. / Men of my home have put on soccer trunks. / We go to Maseru town; / When we came right into town - Gentlemen, cattle, brother of Makhoathi! […] Mekorotlo anthems are often sung on horseback, as riding songs and, reinforcing their association with heroic travel, in praise of trains by their migrant passengers. In one sefela the train itself sings the anthem, cheered on by the veld over which it rumbles: Oa tseba utloang, makareche / a o lumela mokorotlo; / Matsiri a na a bina, ‘ielele-ielele’. You know listen, the carriages / sound the mokorotlo; / The grass then sings [responds], ‘ielele-ielele’ (Mabote Nkoebele, in Mokitimi 1982, 317, 442).

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The creation of insightful, ‘affecting’ metaphors, whether verbal, aural, kinesic, or visual, is a distinctive characteristic of Basotho games. Directly associated with this attribute is the contention that games help construct society, giving connective, harmonious, and mutually supportive relationships a degree of self-consciousness (boikutlo, from ho utloa) and emotional reinforcement. In this sense they are semantically contrasted, not with work (sebetsa), but with war (ntoa), a domain that subsumes all kinds of social anxiety and conflict, including the social disruptions of the migratory labor system itself The competitive dimension of sefela performance expresses the social tension inherent in the notion of games as a friendly fight, a conflict that unites people in a common excitation over the display of individual prowess in social accomplishment. Indeed, competition is regarded by many performers as the central dynamic, the point of performance. Some singers, encountered by chance, declined to perform without a partner and rival, someone to resound for and against, while others consented to imagine an interlocutor253 for the occasion, as long as some prize money was provided as a stimulation. Still others I met at home in rural Lesotho explained that, while they enjoyed performing for a local audience, they seldom did so since their village lacked suitable competitors. Sefela is for travels. The widespread practice of praising oneself as a performer in performance is often a direct challenge to others to compete, and such challenges are especially common during travel to and from the mines (Mokitimi 1982, 72). Citing the standard closing formula, ‘Amen, I have finished’, Rabonne Mariti uses such a challenge to conclude his sefela: Nkabe ke re, ‘Amen, ke phethile’; / Nke ke siele ’mate a buoe: / Terene e ratang bo baka, e bake. Sebuoe se ratang bo buoa, se buoe. / Banna! Joale se buoe ka lentsoe le monate: / Nkang pina ea lona! I should be saying, ‘Amen, I have finished’; / I should give my friend a chance to perform: / The train that wants to hook, it can hook on [couple]. / The speaker that wants to speak, let him speak. / Men! Now let him recite in a voice that’s sweet: / Take your song! […] The constant input of energy and feeling involved in the act of sounding is the source of the social continuity and shared comprehension that results from it. The temporal dimension of performance, found in its most admired form in dance, which artfully combines feeling, energy (movement), showing, and sounding in time, is fundamental to its socially constitutive capacities. As Wainwright (1979, 130) found among Xhosa miner praise poets, lifela singers frequently create poetic turns through simultaneous semantic and auditory plays on words. The most important quality of a good song is agreement between rhythm and words, and as Basotho say, Nako ke litumellano lipakeng tsa batho, “Time is the agreements between people” (Adams 1979a, 317). As word music created through performance in time sefela involves the agreeable transformation of both self and social relations. This notion of agreement, achieved through the performative, rhythmic, and therefore temporal representation of feeling in sounded metaphors,

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applies equally to the agreements one must reach with oneself. In the following passage, Makeka Likhojane (Ngoana Mokhalo) recalls such an agreement over his departure for the mines. For added dramatic effect, he uses the device, popular among Sesotho poets, of switching from the past to the present tense, placing both himself and his listeners within the immediate time frame of the event and its emotional context. Ke lesole la habo ’Mamokhesuoe. / Ha ke ne ke tloha ke eea makhooeng, / Ka bua le pelo ra ba ra qeta, / Le moea ra ba, ra utloana. / Mahlo a ka a lla ke sa fahluoa; / Pelo e nyeka ke sa ja letho. I am the soldier of ’Mamokhesuoe’s village. / When I was leaving to go to the place of the whites [mines], / I spoke to my heart and we finished, / And my soul, we understood each other. / My eyes cry though nothing has got into them; / I felt like vomiting [though/because] I’ve eaten nothing.254 In asserting their right to sing and be heard, sefela poets often make metaphoric reference early in their texts either to the sounding/hearing complex or to the aural qualities of their voice: Tholang krata e be tsiee, lala; / Fatang litsehe, Basotho, le utloe. (Stop your noise and cease buzzing, locusts; Prick up your ears, Basotho, so you hear.) (Sporti Mothibeli) […] In games, the domain of sounding (ho luma) matches and overlaps the domain of acting or doing (ho etsa), which includes dance. Within the domain of sounding, games are divided into categories, based on their modes or qualities of sound production. These categories are generally ranked (not always consistently) in terms of their prestige and putative capacity to reconstitute social relations. The highest category consists of dance-songs, based upon the agreement (tumellano, from ho luma) of sounding and doing, of text, tune, physical movement, and rhythm. This category includes men’s mohobelo and women’s mokhibo (kneeling) dances, and the mokorotlo dance songs. Next is ho bua, ‘speaking’, which has special application to contexts of social change and power relations, followed by ho bina, ‘singing’, implicated in education and changes in social identity and status (Adams 1974, 257), an association that strengthens the conceptual linkage between initiates’ praise songs and sefela. In abstraction, men’s sefela is always referred to as ho bina, ‘singing’, and thus ranked below praise poetry, which is ho bua, ‘speaking’, yet in mode of performance sefela clearly falls ambiguously between song and aesthetic speech. […] In sefela, the overall style of delivery is based upon the principle of rising attack followed by falling release that is so often found in solo song parts and sung poetry throughout subSaharan Africa. Spoken Sesotho, like most other black African languages, uses a system of inherent syllabic tones to make semantic distinctions. Sesotho has two tonemes, high and low, but these values are relative

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to the tonal environment of each syllable, rather than absolute. A toneme is high or low only in relation to the pitch of its neighbour(s) (Guma 1971, 26). Over the course of a sentence, there is a tendency for lower tones to pull down high tones that follow them, producing an overall downward drift of intonation. This pattern is exaggerated in sefela. The major unit of vocalization is the ‘breath group’, which may extend from a single line of poetic phrasing to four or more. The Sesotho idea of breath includes not only physical respiration but something of the European notion of ‘breath of life’. The word moea can thus be translated as ‘wind’, ‘breath’, or ‘soul’. The vitalizing role of breath and rhythm in sefela performance is illustrated in the following passage, in which the poet Majara Majara praises is own style of intonation: Ke reng ho lona, likempolara tseso? / Ho buoa kata-kata ea motse oa Mahaese, / Kata-kata ea motse oa Ramanki. / Ke buoa feela, ke sa tsotelle letho. / Ke nka ka moea; ke lahlela koana. What do I say to you, gamblers [poets] of my home? / Speaking rollingly of Mahaese’s village, / Rollingly of Ramanki’s village. / I speak freely, not minding anything. / I seize [it] with the breath (soul); I cast [it] forth yonder. Rising attack becomes an immediate swoop upward of perhaps a minor third, and the rise is maintained until the final third of the poetic line or even longer, at which point phrase downdrift is introduced until the line ends. If the performer’s breath is not exhausted and there is semantic linkage between this line and the next, he may start the next phrase or line somewhere in the middle of the downdrift pattern, maintain this level for several syllables, and then continue downward to the end of the breath group/semantic unit. When the declamatory mode is employed, in Sesotho speech as well as in poetry and song, heightened dramatic and emotional intent is expressed by deemphasizing the internal rise and fall of intervening syllables, and by exaggerating the normally extended length of the penultimate syllable in the final word of each line or breath group. Frequent use of phrase-initial and phrase-final ideophones and interjectives increases this effect (Ibid., 28).255

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Ex 48 Male Sefela Sung by Rabonne Mariti The transcription of opening lines of a sefela by Rabonne Mariti (Ex 48) illustrates this performance style. Here, breath groups are enclosed within [square] brackets. Capital letters indicate the beginning of poetic lines, corresponding to the written transcription and translation that follow.

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[Khoali ee!] [Khoali ahlama, ba o bone manong; / Ba bone moo o jelang.] [O jelang lijabatho tsena? / Letsa la thaba] [Letsa la thaba ka mahlong le letšo, / Letso joalo ke ho koma lithlare. / Le tle le mamele;] [Le tle le mamele, banna ba thota: / Papatlele ea naha, / Esale ke theosa le mafatše.] [The black and brown spotted ox ee!] / [Mottled one open your mouth, so they see inside; / They should see you where you eat.] / [Why do you consume these cannibals? A mountain Springbok,] / [A mountain springbok is black-faced, / It is black from chewing medicines. / You should listen;] / [You should listen, men of the veld: / A vagabond of the country, / I have been going down along the lands.] Interestingly, the strength of this pattern and especially the structural force of the breath group will sometimes overrun a semantic unit, so that the first word or so of a line may be intoned at the end of a downdrift. The performer then takes a breath and begins in the middle of the line with a rising attack. This asymmetry may continue for another line or two, but a performer will soon correct it and return to the normal pattern where intonational pattern, breath group, and semantic unit are matched. Here, for example, is another passage from the same sefela by Rabonne Mariti: [Le se ke mpe la ikhoela, Basotho, / Kapa la tsoha le joinela bosoleng.] [Ntoa etlaba teng, banna, le tsebe: / Hitlilara][o qabane le Monyesemane. p Mohlomong] [le tla bitsoa, Basotho bo! p Ka ha le ntse le le batho ba likorone.] [Please do not harm yourselves, Basotho, / Or jump up to join the soldiering.] [A war will break out, men, you should know: / Hitler] [is quarrelling with the English. p Probably] [you will be called, you Basotho! p Since you are still people of a colony.] Here the word Hitlilara ends up isolated at the end of a breath group, as indicated by the end bracket. The next tone begins with a rising attack on o qabane, and ends with Mohlomong. The mid-downdrift pauses, indicated in the transcription by a down arrow that marks the end of semantic units at Monyesemane and Basotho bo! show the performer already correcting the asymmetry, and the normal conjunct pattern is back in place by likorone. What this slight, accidental variation implies is that the repeated performance of passages originally composed in performance or in rehearsal prior to performance gives them something of a fixed status as textual units, whose content the force of rhythmic organization and breath may occasionally override.

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In the next transcription, part of a women’s shebeen song entitled ‘Peka’ (a town in northern Lesotho), Thakane Mahlasi holds strongly to the rhythm of the accompanying accordion and drum (Ex 49). Women’s bar songs, unlike men’s lifela, are said to have names, but these refer to the short choral refrain for which the solo serves as leader. As in traditional southern Bantu song, the soloist follows the principle of ‘staggered entry’, overlapping her breath groups with the phrase cycle of the chorus, which in this instance is both played on the accordion and sung by the male accordionist. Similarly, her melody accords with the polyphonic ‘root progressions’ employed by the accordionist (Rycroft 1967, 96), although the intensity of her declamation leads to only microtonal variation within the body of a given breath group, and her tones are often pushed beyond stabilized pitch to forced palatal head-tones, virtual shouts or vibratory cries.256 Unlike male sefela performances, shebeen songs are organized both rhythmically and tonally by their instrumental accompaniment, and female performers universally declined to sing without it.

227 q=



Female Voice

80

 

Accordian

3

Perc.

Accord.

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5

S.

Perc.

Accord.

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Perc.

Accord.

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       



      

       

                   7

S.



       

Drum

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228 2 9

S.

Perc.

Accord.

   

11

S.

Perc.

Accord.

   

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          

      

       

                              

13

S.

3

Hae Hae Haee

Perc.

Accord.

3

kha hla li a Nkhahleeee

                                  

15

S.

Che ea

Perc.

Accord.

Nkha

hle be tho

Ra

kha bla na

Re

229 3

                                           

16

S.

Perc.

Accord.

                                       

17

S.

Perc.

Accord.

                                         

18

S.

Perc.

Accord.

                                  

19

S.

Perc.

Accord.

Ex 49 Women’s Shebeen Song ‘Peka’ [Hae bae baeeeee! / Khahlefi-a-Nkhahle,] [Che ea, Nkhahle, batho: / Ra khahlana, / Re khahlane teanong; Re sa tsebane - jo ’nake ngoanana!] [Puseletso, ngoananyan’a Seema:]

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[Bokhutsoanyane bona ke sebopeho; / Bosehlana ba liipone – Ngoanana!] [Hae hae haeeeee! / Khahleli of Nkhahle,] [Oh yes, of Nkhahle, you people: / We met, / We met at the crossroads; We didn’t recognize one another - jo, my darling girl!] [Puseletso, little girl of Seema:] [Her short stature is hers by nature; Her light complexion is self-made - Oh girl!] In past times, the songs of the shebeens ranked even lower than sefela because of where they are performed and because of the kind of dancing and musical instruments that serve as their accompaniment. European instruments such as the guitar, concertina, accordion, and drum are ‘played/resounded with the hands’ (letsa ka matsoho) and thus had less prestige than the lesiba and setolotolo, which are ‘played/resounded with the mouth’ (letsa ka molomo), with the ‘breath’ of life. The verb ho letsa is derived from ho lela, ho lla, ‘to cry’, and “refers primarily to sounds which sign and signal affective conditions” (Adams 1974, 100). Women’s seoeleoelele are sung amid dancing but are classified under ‘instruments’ (liletsa) rather than as songs ‘sung with the feet’. This played agreement of sound and movement, however, does not shift attention away from sound and sense, but rather reinforces them with the rhetoric of the female body in emphatic motion, commanding the emulation of women and the attention of men. Emotional communication through sounding leads informants’ to refer to sefela as ‘mouth played’, in the same category as a lesiba. It is this marriage of music and speech that shapes the narrative progression of texts, providing an aesthetic structure for both the display and the creation of cultural knowledge and feeling. The intense emotionality of games like sefela, combined with their capacity to reconcile disparate and even antagonistic domains, provides expressive mediation of the complex contradictions of Basotho migrant life (Adams 1979b). In Basotho performative theory, the elaboration of metaphors through the musically structured sounding of the soul, the emotional rhythm of the breath of life, recreates continuity among opposing social worlds, divided relationships, fragmented selves (see Comaroff 1985, 111). As Harold Scheub has commented, “The purpose of metaphor … is to harness the emotions of the members of the audience, trapped as they are in images of past and present, thereby divining paradoxes and resolving conflicts, and to move that audience into a new perception of reality” (1985, 6).

PART 4

A New South Africa

Isicathamiya in the 1970s-90s257 Veit Erlmann The remodelling of isicathamiya, the dialectic of restoration and reform in the third and most recent phase of isicathamiya history, is reflected in two related stylistic developments. The first of these is the growth of a genre called cothoza mfana. The term translates as ‘tread carefully, boy’ and is said to have been coined by SABC broadcaster Alexius Buthelezi. It enjoyed only a relatively short period of popularity before it was superseded by the term isicathamiya. Derived from the verb -cathama, to stalk, to stand on tiptoe, isicathamiya could be roughly translated as ‘stalking style’. Although more or less identical in sonic structure, cothoza mfana and isicathamiya differ with respect to the kinesic component in that isicathamiya choreography is generally considered to be of a more brisk and fastmoving nature. The transition to the ‘stalking style’ is epitomized, more than by any other single development in recent nightsong history, by the music of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The creative work and life Joseph Shabalala, the leader of this greatest isicathamiya choir of all time, is the subject of the final Chapter [Chapter 11 of Nightsong], and I must limit myself here to a discussion of the most important innovations in his compositions. Established in the late 1960s in Durban, this group quickly rose to national fame as the result of Shabalala’s attempts at ‘modernizing’ isicathamiya in four major areas: choreography, song texts, sound texture, and professional practice and organization of the group. To understand these adjustments, we first have to consider some of the changes that had occurred in the music of migrant workers after the 1950s, more particularly in guitar-based maskanda music. Rooted in various styles of traditional bow music, guitar music by the 1950s was at its peak. Largely promoted by the Troubadour label, maskanda and related musics by the mid-1950s to early 1960s came to dominate the record market, Troubadour at times selling two million records a year and for a time controlling as much as 85 percent of the entire market (Allingham 1989). A musician by the name of John Bhengu was one of Troubadour’s most successful artists. In 1971 Bhengu had by now acquired the epithet Phuzushukela (drink sugar) - this Nkandla-born guitarist became the first maskanda to switch to the electric guitar that had by then become universally accepted as the main instrument of popular band music in South Africa. The music that resulted from this and other innovations became known as mbaqanga because, like the maize porridge it is named after, it became the subsistence basis for scores of township and studio musicians. A typical mbaqanga

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number by, for instance, the Soul Brothers or Amaswazi Emvelo would feature a band of electric guitar, bass and drums, and sometimes keyboards and a horn section. Over a basic harmonic scaffold of four bars, a solo singer would alternate with short instrumental riffs, or with a backing chorus in the call-and-response pattern. This formula had a powerful impact on some of the isicathamiya performers of the 1960s. Thus, Joseph Shabalala was an ardent guitar player before he switched to isicathamiya, and Scorpions leader Gershon Mcanyana played a self-made tin guitar and socialised with musicians in mbaqanga circles. He also admired the Beam Brothers, and before he eventually assumed leadership of the Scorpions, he encountered Roxy Jila, then leader of the Scorpions and later a manager of the female mbaqanga group Qeue Sisters. Moreover, mbaqanga and isikhwela Jo were musically related and could be easily adapted to one another. The genre in which this fusion seems to have been experimented with first is called umgqashiyo. The term may be related to gqashagqasha, a word describing, according to Doke and Vilakazi’s Zulu-English Dictionary, a ‘person of brisk, spirited gait’. And indeed, as we shall see further below, the umgqashiyo choreography is characterized by light and quirky movements. Although the term itself may have been coined by radio broadcaster K.E. Masinga, it was the female vocal group Mahotella Queens who pioneered umgqashiyo. Other celebrated male groups such as the Soul Brothers and Abafana Baseqhudeni later followed suit. The songs by these groups that are most closely related to isicathamiya, feature a mbube-style vocal arrangement backed by a guitar band in which the bass guitar provides the harmonic framework interspersed with short glides and in which a solo guitar plays short formulas reminiscent of the ukupika style of maskanda guitar music. As for the thematic subjects of umgqashiyo, many songs share with isicathamiya a concern for the values and practices of an idealized past. The following two songs by the Abafana Baseqhudeni show this quite clearly. The first song, ‘Bumnandi Lobutshwala’ (Igagasi IAL 3001, A6) comments on the changed role of alcohol in the degrading environment of ‘hostels’, starvation wages, and loneliness. Chorus: Bumnandi lobutsbwala. (Nice, this beer.) Utshwala bumnand’ eKoloni madoda. (The beer in the Cape is nice, men.) Sibuzwile utshwala bumnandi. (We have tasted the beer; it’s nice.) Leader: Yizwa! (Taste!) Chorus: UKhumalo, uKhumalo ulibele utshwala. (Khumalo, Khumalo, you are wasting your time in beer.) Umuzi uyachitheka. (Your home is disintegrating.) Tshwala udlalelani ngomtanomuntu? (Beer, why are you troubling this man?) Uma wenzanjena ubulala abantu. (If you do like this, you are killing people.) Leader: Iza! (Come!)

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Beer, an essential marker of male identity and a nourishment of male bodies and as such an indispensable ingredient of meaningful social intercourse, is seen here as a killer of people and a destroyer of the homestead, the umuzi. As such, beer becomes a potent symbol evoking the dramatic effects of labour migration on core social relations. A similar theme, equally suggestive of the disturbing impact of labour migration on domestic life and gender relations, is addressed in ‘Ayisekho Intombi’ (Igagasi IAL 3001, B4), a song that voices the typical male complaint about ‘immoral’ women. Chorus: Ayisekh’ intomb’ ethandwa yimi kulomhlaba. (There’s no longer any lady that deserves my love in this world.) Bass: Awu!awu, ethandwa yimi. (Awu! awu, that I love.) O, ngiyesaba. (Oh, I am afraid of them.) Chorus: Izintombi zalonyaka zilal’ emaphathini (These days ladies sleep at the parties) zivuk’ emashibhini. (and wake up in the shebeens.) Leader: Kungcono ngiziphekele. (It’s better if I cook for myself.) Kungcono ngiziwashele. (I would rather wash my own clothes.) Ayisekh’ intomb’ ethandwa yimi kulomhlaba. (There’s no longer any lady that deserves my love in this world.) The destruction of the homestead, then, and its symbolic reconstruction in performance forms a rich poetics of labour migration cross-cutting numerous genres of migrant performance. In the case of umgqashiyo and isicathamiya, these intertextual linkages are made even more evocative by one further aspect of umgqashiyo. For the most prominent innovation introduced by the Mahotella Queens was a new dance style that, like so many components and styles of the nightsongs, was based on girls’ wedding dances. Journalist Alf Gwebu has written a detailed description of umgqashiyo choreography that is worth quoting in full. Basically, Jive Mqashiya is almost the same as jive Motella, only faster. As in jive Motella, jive Mqashiya starts with the stamping of the feet in the ‘Zulu war dance’ way, but instead of lifting the feet up in jive Mqashiya you lift both your heels and then move them rhythmically outward. After counting four you clap your hands and then repeat. Then you bend your right knee slightly forward and twitch your hands to the left four times. The position of the hands should be in the same position as it would be if you were stopping the light of a torch from reaching your face. The count for the twitching is also four. Then you put your hands on your stomach, fingers stretched, and stamp your feet rhythmically forward and backward in turn as you would do in an African wedding dance. At this stage you throw your arms wildly in the air, the ‘pepezela’ style. For the final step you turn left, clench your fists as though holding a hoe or golf stick and then, standing partly on your toes, wobble your knees rhythmically like a Coon in action. This is jive Mqashiya. Its variations consist of the hysterical shaking of the breast, the rocking of the buttocks and the spiralling tangling of the arms above your head. If you get this right you’ll be in fashion and very welcome at any mbaqanga party.258

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From Gwebu’s account and photographs showing the Mahotella Queens in action,259 it is easy to see that umgqashiyo is the product of a long articulation of rural-traditional performance elements with some of the oldest models of urban black performance - the wobbling knees of a ‘coon’. More fundamentally, however, Gwebu’s report demonstrates the close links between umgqashiyo and some of the dance steps still performed by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The incorporation of these umgqashiyo dance routines into their performances was the first major reform of isicathamiya performance in the 1970s. In fact, the blending of umgqashiyo and istep in the performances of Black Mambazo did much to reinvigorate some of the older cothoza choreography and helped to form the essence of present-day isicathamiya choreography. The stealthily moving bodies of isicathamiya, the ‘soft touch’, as Thembinkosi Pewa called it, signals not only urban sophistication but also a shift in the relationship between embodied emotions and feelings of corporeality. The ‘gentle alternative’ (as Joseph Shabalala explains in the introduction [to Nightsong]) was born when performers learned to control their emotions that had traditionally compelled them to stamp their feet vigorously. Although isicathamiya choreography is not devoid of emotional depth and requires no more control than ingoma, it seems that a link has been severed here between movement and ground, a link, that is, in which emotional intensity was coterminous with earth, dust, and a downward thrust. It is as if traditionally emotion was mediated by a grounded body, whereas in the isicathamiya stepping, kicking, and umgqashiyo-type of dancing, emotional expressiveness and the sensory experience of being a body passes through notions of lightness and detachment from the earth. Song texts are the second important area in which Joseph Shabalala set new standards in isicathamiya composition. Although the majority of his songs, like those of other choirs, express extravagant self-praise, Joseph Shabalala was the first isicathamiya composer to base his compositions on extended narrative sequences. The juxtaposition of disparate textual segments that characterizes the song texts of other choirs and that [in] itself represents an important statement on the dislocation of migrant life, plays only a minor role in Shabalala’s songs. The following example conveys some of the narrative logic in Shabalala’s songs. It is drawn from ‘Hamba Dompasi’, a track on the album Journey of Dreams that was composed on the occasion of the abolishment of the passbooks, one of the most odious and detested measures of the apartheid regime. Leader: Woza. (Come!) Chorus: Woza s’hambe siye lena kwelakithi eSouth Africa. (Come, let us go to our country South Africa.) Yizwe lokuthula. (The land of peace.) Yizwe lamaKristu. (The land of Christians.)

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Leader: Woza. (Come!) Chorus: Woza sidl’ igolide ne dayimani. (Come, let us enjoy the gold and the diamonds.) Leader: Thina … (We …) Chorus: Sihloba ngegolide nedayimani. (We dress with gold and diamonds.) Leader: Lena kwaZulu siphila ngokuthi (Down in Zululand we usually say) Chorus: ubothand’ umakhelwane wakho. (you should love your neighbor.) Leader: Kodwa ungilahla kanjani? (But how can you reject me?) Chorus: We makhelwane wami, ungilahla kanjani na? (Oh, my neighbor, why are you rejecting me?) Leader: La dum’ izulu. (The thunder roars.) Chorus: Wathi wafel’ usulu mawuthanda izulu. (If you die because of being impolite, it was your choice.) Leader: La dum’ izulu (The thunder roars) Chorus: nalizulu. (and it is raining.) Leader: Kwaqhaqhazel’ abantu, kwashayisanwa ngamakhanda. (And the people are shivering and confused.) Chorus: Duma laduma izulu. (Thunder, thunder and rain.) Leader: Ladum’ izulu. (Thunder roars.) Chorus: Wathi wafel’ usulu mawuthanda izulu. (If you die because of being impolite, it was your choice.) … … … … … … ….. Leader: Lapha … (Here …) Chorus: lapha kwelakithi eSoutb Africa (here in our country South Africa) sidl’ igolide ne dayimani. (we enjoy the gold and the diamonds.) Kuneng’ okunye, singeze sakubala okuhle laphaya. (There is a lot more, we can’t count all the beautiful things there.) Leader: Sibathanda bonke … (We love all …) Chorus: sibathanda bonke abantu, (we love all the people,) kodwa munye umuntu esimxoshile. (but there is one person we have chased away.) Leader: Hamba, hamba dompas. (Go, go away pass book!) Chorus: Hamba dompas. (Go away pass book!) Leader: Ubuyele kwelakini. (Go back to your home!) Chorus: Ubuyele kwelakini. Wo, buyela kwelakini. (Go back to your home! Oh, just go back to your home!) Leader: Hamba dompas thina asisakufuni kulelizwe. (Go away, pass book, we no longer want you in this country.) Ubuyele lapha waqhamuka khona. (Go back to where you came from.) Bazokulandel’ abakuthandayo. (Those who love you will follow you.) Hamba wena. (Go away, you!) Sonqoba thina, sonqoba simunye sonqoba sihlangene. (We will win, we will win being one, we will win united.) Chorus: Sonqoba simunye. (We will win being one.) Leader: Hamba wena. Ukube uyazi ukuthi amadoda kudala ebengizonda … (Go away, you! If only you knew that men have hated you ever since …)

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bedlula bengishisa. Ngo 1960 bangenz’ isilo sengubo. (they made fun of me. In 1960, people burnt me.) Chorus: Ngo 1960 bangenz’ isilo sengubo. (In 1960, they burnt me.) Hamba dompas. (Go away, pass book.) Leader: Sonqoba simunye, sonqoba sihlangene. (Together we will win, united we shall win.) Leader: Hayi. Chorus: He. Leader: Kumnandi … (It is beautiful …) Chorus: Kumnandi kwelakith’ eMnambithi. (It is beautiful, our place Mnambithi.) One of the most significant effects of a linear textual progression such as in the foregoing example lies in the fact that the performer becomes a voice that speaks from a position of authority. Instead of almost disappearing behind the jarring contrasts between stark images drawn from widely discrepant realities, this composer foregrounds his subjective position as a storyteller who impresses on his listeners a singular vision of the world. A song, Joseph Shabalala once told me, ‘is like a book. It tells people about the past and the future’. Joseph Shabalala’s experimentation with a new sound texture was another factor that revolutionised isicathamiya, even though in essence the changes probably represent Shabalala’s most conservative reform. Although cothoza mfana contained some low-key, close harmony material, Joseph Shabalala’s group sang all his compositions in a soft, velvetlike tone. The top parts, alto and tenor, while still being sung falsetto, were tuned down and reduced in volume and made to blend more with the rest of the bass parts that, over the years and with new members joining the group, began to sound less wiry. This technique, whose significance can only be compared to Solomon Linda’s augmentation of the bass parts in the 1930s, was even applied to songs that, strictly speaking, belong to the ’mbombing category. Thus, to name but one example, in the track ‘Iya Bhompa’ on the album Ushaka (Motella BL 129) the cues given by Shabalala and the sudden outbreaks of the responding choir are vintage ’mbombing, packaged in the fluffy sound of isicathamiya. It is arguable whether the new sound can be attributed to Joseph Shabalala’s creative genius alone. Some of the low-key, gently flowing choral harmonies had been tried successfully by the King Star Brothers, a slightly senior group from the Transvaal town of Standerton, that enjoyed tremendous popularity in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Moreover, as some of the best informed connoisseurs of isicathamiya such as SABC announcer Patrick Buthelezi argue, the Natal midlands and particularly the area around Weenen, Harrismith, and Standerton had traditionally known more down tempo and middle-register forms of vocal performance, and even in the majority of Solomon Linda’s recordings the overall sound is less compact than in ’mbombing songs from other areas. In any event, today’s performers and audiences have come to discern and appreciate an entirely

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unique aesthetic in Joseph Shabalala’s music that differs fundamentally from the ethos of fiercely contested manliness and vociferous regional pride expressed in previous substyles. The most telling expression, perhaps, of this new aesthetic are terms such as isithululu, pholile, and ubumnandi used to designate the music of Black Mambazo. The ideophone isithululu is derived from the verb -thula, to be quiet, peaceful, and connotes the rolling roundness of Shabalala’s songs. In fact, during particularly satisfying moments of collective involvement, isicathamiya performers at times abandon themselves to the gentle flow of their choral harmonies and sing short phrases, on words like thululu, or, as in some of the older genres, wi wi wi. The term pholile means ‘calm’, ‘polite’, and roughly conveys the same sound qualities as isithululu. Ubumnandi, for its part, means sweetness, a key aesthetic category in many African societies (Stone 1982). Even though the vocal skills of Shabalala’s group by far exceed the usual, we should equally keep in mind that the soft textures - for which Ladysmith Black Mambazo is now world famous - like the emergence of cothoza mfana earlier are in part also the result of far-reaching advances in recording technology and fundamental changes in studio and marketing practice. As a comparison between the early LPs of the 1970s and the most recent recordings of the late 1980s - such as the 1973 recording of ‘Nomathemba’ from the album Amabutho and the same song from the Grammy-winning album Shaka Zulu of 1987 - reveals, the perfect blending of voices in the later recordings is enhanced by a more pronounced echo and a softer sound space. I attribute these developments equally to a greater willingness on the part of producers to creatively work on a product rather than, as was commonly done in earlier times, to invest as little money and effort as possible in what was generally regarded as an artless culture. Joseph Shabalala’s fourth reform - one in which so far no other choir has followed his example - concerns the organization of his professional praxis. In the early 1970s, after the phenomenal success of the first LP Amabutho, Shabalala decided to become a full-time composer and performer. Above all, this decision had major repercussions on the composition of the choir. In the beginning, in addition to Walter Malinga, the majority of the members came from the Shabalala family - Headman, Enoch, and Joseph Shabalala - and Joseph’s in-laws Milton, Albert, and Joseph Mazibuko. In later years only Albert Mazibuko and Joseph’s brother Headman - tragically murdered on December 10, 1991 - remained from this nucleus. Most of the members that came in after the mid-1970s - Thamsanqa Mdletshe, Russell Mthembu, Jabulani Dubazane, and Ainos Phungula - were recruited because of their professional qualities, although Ben and Jockey Shabalala as well as Abednigo Mazibuko are also related to Joseph. But the professionalization of Black Mambazo in large part is also responsible for an unparalleled degree of perfection in their performances, even though other isicathamiya choirs spend a considerable amount of their spare time rehearsing. At the same time, this move enabled the group to build up a large following which in turn helped the sales of their albums.

Indigenous Instruments260 Andrew Tracey Andrew Tracey is Director of the International Library of African Music and Editor of African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music. Teacher of transcription, performance and compositional techniques in African music, producer of ethnographic films, and steel-band leader, Tracey’s seminal research work was on the Shona mbira dza vadzimu in the 1970s. He established the annual South African Symposia in Ethnomusicology in 1980, and in addition to writing and editing has devoted a large part of his life to promoting African music and instruments throughout the world. He is also founder of the company African Musical Instruments in Grahamstown. All musical instruments of the world are classified into four families, according to the part of the instrument that vibrates to make sound: Aerophones (air-sound), where air vibrates, as in flutes and horns; Chordophones (string-sound), where strings vibrate, as in musical bows; Membranophones (membrane-sound), where membranes or skins vibrate, as in drums; Idiophones. ‘Idio’ means ‘self’, thus ‘self-sound’, where the body of the instrument, or parts of it, makes the sound; this includes all instruments that are not included in the other families, such as mbira, xylophone, rattles and many others. African instruments belong to these families, and create their sounds in the same ways. Many of them are very ancient and are related to such instruments as the lute, lyre, harp and drum mentioned in the Bible. History and ecology The greatest musical instrument in Africa is the voice. This is especially true in South Africa, which has a strong choral tradition. Compared with most African countries, other indigenous instruments are few here. We have many bows, a few drums, some reedpipes, one xylophone... Why is this? The answer must be found in history and ecology. The majority of South Africans belong to the cattle-keeping Nguni and Sotho peoples, who live in open grassy plains, organise themselves in large-scale societies with powerful chiefs, and sing and dance together in large groups. In other similar parts of Africa, you also find that cattle people prefer singing to instrument-playing, for instance the Khoi peoples of Namibia, the Masai and Gogo in Tanzania, the Humbi and Himba of southern Angola and Namibia. The farmers of Africa, on the other hand, play more instruments. In South Africa this would mean such peoples as the Venda, Tsonga and Pedi. The ecology also determines what can be played. Traditional instruments are made where they are played, so they must be made of local materials. People who live in forests can use large trees to make drums and xylophones; people who live

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in bushveld, like most of South Africa, can make smaller instruments that use sticks, reeds, gourds etc. We will look first at chordophones, and then touch on membranophones, aerophones and idiophones. Chordophones: musical bows Musical bows are the main instruments of the Nguni and the Sotho, the predominant peoples of South Africa. Historians believe that many of our musical bows came from the Khoisan peoples, the original inhabitants of South Africa. A musical bow is a string instrument made of a long straight or curved wooden stick, with one string, usually of metal, stretched from end to end. There are many types of bow, but there are more bow names, because the same type may be known by several names according to language. Zulu: Umakhweyana, Ugubu, Umqangala Xhosa: Uhadi, Umrhubhe, Umqunge, Inkinge S. Sotho: Lesiba, Thomo, Setolotolo Pedi: Lekope Tswana: Segankure Tsonga: Xizambi, Xitende Venda: Tshihwana, Lugube, Tshijolo. Although there are differences between the many bows, all bows have two things in common: a resonator, and at least two fundamental notes. A bow is a very quiet instrument, so all bows need a resonator to amplify the sound. This is always something hollow, like a gourd or a tin (uhadi, umakhweyana, segankure, xitende etc.). Or, if the bow is held against the player’s mouth, the mouth itself is the resonator (umrhubhe, umqangala, tshihwana, xizambi etc.). ‘Fundamental notes’ mean the deepest notes which the string gives, not the higher notes (i.e. the harmonics),261 which you can hear from the resonator. There are always at least two fundamental notes on all bows. One comes from the string when it is ‘open’; that is, when the player does not touch it or shorten it. This note can be called VU in Xhosa, from the word ‘Vuliwe’ (‘open’). The other, higher, note comes from the string when it is ‘fingered’, touched, or shortened in some way by the player. It can be called BA in Xhosa, from ‘Banjiwe’ (held). Or it can already be on the bow string, if it is divided into two parts (umakhweyana, xitende). The difference between VU and BA is often a ‘whole tone’. In some traditions it can also be a ‘semitone’ (Zulu) or a ‘minor third’ (Tsonga). Some bows give more than two fundamental notes. The Zulu umakhweyana and the Tsonga xitende give three. The Venda tshihwana gives four.

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Fig 42 Nofinishi Dywili playing the uhadi © David Dargie There are several ways of making a bowstring give sound. Some are struck with a piece of grass or a small stick (uhadi, umakhweyana, xitende). Some are rubbed, or ‘bowed’, with a straight stick (umrhubhe), or with another very small bow made of cow or horse tail (umrhubhe, segankure, inkinge). Some are plucked with the fingers, or with a small ‘pick’ made of a thorn or a piece of wood (tshihwana, umqangala). Some are scraped, along the notched side of the bow, with a rattle-stick (xizambi). One bow is blown with the mouth (lesiba). We talked above about the ‘fundamental notes’. A bow must also ‘sing’, by using ‘harmonics’. To understand harmonics you have to know that any tight string gives only one main note, the fundamental, and many other higher notes at the same time. The job of the resonator (the gourd or the mouth) is to choose which of these harmonic notes the player wants to bring out at any moment. With a gourd bow, e.g. umakhweyana or uhadi, you can move the opening of the gourd to and from your chest to do this. With a mouth bow, e.g. umrhubhe or umqangala, you change the size of your mouth, using your tongue in the same way as when you whistle. Although bows are played by few people these days, they once played a big part in music here. It can be seen that the scales used in much traditional South

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African singing come from the bows, i.e. from their two fundamental notes and the harmonics of these notes.

Fig 43 Tsonga (Shangaan) tshihwana players © International Library of African Music Membranophones: drums Drums are said to be the typical African instruments. However, they were used little in South Africa, except in the north by the Venda (murumba, ngoma), Tsonga (ngoma) and Pedi (moropa). They are made of wood, with a skin on one end. A drum that is open at the bottom (murumba, moropa) can make different sounds according to how it is beaten; one that is closed (ngoma) has one clear sound. Large drums are played with sticks, smaller ones with hands. Every drum in a group plays a different rhythm. In Venda, most drums belong to the chiefs. They are symbols of his authority. Although Zulus (isigubu) and Swatis use many drums these days, these were probably borrowed in the late 1800s from British army bands. These drums, and those used by Zionist churches, are normally made of metal tins with a skin laced on at both ends. Even if they are many, they are usually all played together in the same rhythm.

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Fig 44 Pedi moropa drummers © International Library of African Music

Aerophones: reedpipes, flutes The best-known aerophones in South Africa are the reedpipes of the northern peoples, the Venda (tshikona) and the Pedi (dinaka), also the Tswana/Bamalete of Botswana (letlhaka). Reedpipes are played in large groups on important social occasions. Tshikona is the Venda national dance. Reedpipes are simple instruments made of river reed or bamboo cut to the right lengths to give the scale. The playing technique is complicated. Each man has to put his one note into the music at exactly the right place, and also dance at the same time. A set of drums is played, formerly by women only in the centre of the circle of dancing men. Flutes made of reed (Venda tshitiringo, Tsonga xitloti, Pedi naka ya letlhaka, Swazi umtshingozi) were often played by boys, but are rarely heard now. These have finger holes like a penny whistle, but are blown on the side, not at the open end like the reedpipes. The Zulu umtshingo (Xhosa ixilongo, Sotho lekolilo), made of reed or pawpaw leaf, is blown at the end. It uses harmonics, like the bows. The northern peoples sometimes blow on single kudu or sable horns (Venda phalaphala, Pedi phalafala, Tsonga xipalapala) during dances.

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Fig 45 Zulu umtshingo player. The instrument is made of reed or pawpaw leaf © International Library of African Music Idiophones: mbiras, xylophones, rattles The northern peoples are the only players of the mbira or thumb piano in South Africa. This is a small instrument which has a wooden body with from 10 to 22 or more tuned iron keys fixed to it. These are plucked with the thumbs or fingers. The Venda mbira (mbila deza) is similar to that of the Shona in Zimbabwe. The Tsonga mbira (timbila) is similar to that of the Ndau in Mozambique. The Pedi mbira (dipela) is played with fingers only, unlike all other mbiras, which are played with thumbs. There was only one traditional xylophone in South Africa, the Venda mbila mutondo, a large instrument with carved wooden keys and gourd resonators underneath, played with rubber-tipped sticks. Unfortunately it is no longer played. The modern Afro-marimba from Zimbabwe has become popular since 1980, especially among Xhosa speakers. It is played in groups, with instruments of four different sizes. Typical dancing rattles in South Africa are made of hard moth cocoons (Zulu imifece, Tsonga mafahlawane, Tswana matlho), with small stones inside. They are sewn together and worn on the legs when dancing. Other materials can also be used, e.g. gourds (Venda mathuzwu, Tsonga mafowane), ilala palm leaf, or reed (Xhosa iingcacu).

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Fig 46 Pedi dipela player © International Library of African Music

Songs of the Venda Murundu School262 Kaiser Netshitangani Kaiser Netshitangani is a former lecturer at the University of Venda, and now works for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Mula or Murundu is a name used to mean the initiation school for boys in Venda. This is held with high respect and privacy amongst the Vhavenda people, which makes it difficult for any uncircumcised person to venture near the school. Whosoever does that is captured and circumcised by force. The ceremony is divided into two stages. The first stage extends until to the middle of the mula span, whereas the second stage would extend from there till the end of the school. From the first day of the school until the end, music forms an important integral part of all ceremonial activities of the school. Murundu is always held during the winter season, the reason being that it is a good time for the wound to heal. It is a general belief amongst the Vhavenda that the cold weather of the winter season dries up the wound, which gives it a better chance of healing fast. The span of murundu used to vary between six and three months in the past. But today it extends for a period of one month only or less. The fundamental contributing factor towards that is an educational one since almost all boys who are supposed to go for circumcision are school-going children. Which means that the period of murundu is determined by the number of days upon which schools will be on vacation. When winter season approaches, maine (doctor) identifies a place where murundu lodge is going to be put up. He then obtains permission from the local chief. Once permission is granted, a date is set and announced to the public. […] Usually maine is either a medicine-man or has knowledge about medicine. Once a place where murundu is going to be put up is identified, maine looks for a high powered medicine-man who will consecrate the place if he himself is not a medicine man. The reason for performing those rituals is to protect the lodge against all evil forces and to attract initiates. Again, maine looks for a boy who will be the first one to be operated. The first boy to be circumcised usually becomes mutswarabuli. After all the necessary rituals have been performed, Midabe (initiates’ assistants) begin to build huts using branches of trees. Warmelo says, “when murundu begins, the sable horns are blown, the midabe assemble and seek a suitable spot for building on … the next morning the candidates for circumcision come along” (Van Warmelo 1932, 6). The initiates are brought by their midabe in the morning. When mudabe who is accompanying the initiate arrives at the main gateway he shouts ‘hogoo!’ The other vhadabe who will be inside the enclosure will come running towards the gateway where they will receive the information about the candidates. The doctor (maine) then prepares his operation apparatus and

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goes to marogwe. Then a group of vhadabe assemble and start a hogo song. Each mudabe carries a long stick (mugwabere). The song begins with a recital: Recital: Hatshivhase / Tshivhase Ranyalimane / Nkuyu u ile mathubeni / Muri muhulu mutobvuma / Muliwa nga manoni matswu / Manoni matswu ndi maholi / Gangate na murathu wawe / Murathu wawe ndi Tshivhase. Solo: Haa mma vhasali! / Haa mma vhasalia hogoo! / Hogoo! Chorus: Hogoo! Hogoo! Huwelele! / Idani ngeno, huwelele / Hu ruba na vhasimanyana, hogoo / Vhasimanyana ri a wedza, hogoo / Zwa Vhotshinvhase zwi a lidza, hogoo / I khou roma dzithavhani, hogoo / Ntha ha thavha Makwarani, hogoo / Ro dia gwala Tshamanyatshe, hogoo / Hee mmalo goma, hogoo / Idani ngenoi, hogoo / Ni salelani na vhasadzi? Hogoo / Tshivhase vhanwe vha khou ruba / Tshingowzwi ndi thavha ya Dzanani. Recital: Hatshivhase / Tshivhase Ranyalimane / A bird was captured / A big tree mufobvuma is eaten by black birds. / Black birds are called maholi / Safhedza is a son of Gangale / Gangale and his young brother / His young brother is Tshivivase. Solo: Alas! Mother, women, hogoo. [Chorus:] Even young boys are circumcised, hogoo /Tshivhase is pitiful, hogoo / Up the mountains of Tshamanyatshe, hogoo / Next to Makwarani, hogoo / There we go in numbers, hogoo / Come here, hogoo / Why do you stay behind with women? / Tshivhase others are being initiated, hogoo/ Tshingozwi is the name of a mountain / found at Dzanani! The group of midabe moves to the main gate to join those who have brought the initiates. The two groups join together and move back to the enclosure. The initiates are surrounded by the group so that they should not run away, because it is sometimes frightening to see a group of people holding sticks and dancing haphazardly. One may think that he will be beaten. The whole group then moves to the marogwe (a place where circumcision takes place). Immediately after they pass through the gate, midabe quickly undress the initiates and blindfold them with their hands. When they get to marogwe, some of the men pick up some sticks and start to beat the branches of trees. The reason is to try and make as much noise as possible so that women who are at mnkhuni (a place where women who cook for the boys stay) should not hear any boy screaming with pain when he is operated. A new song is then started. They sing loudly and make a deafening noise. The song is called Ngosha and it is only sung at marogwe. Solo: Huwee hogo vhanna hogo! Chorus: Hogo ha he hogo! / Asiyo khombo vhanna hogo / Lotsha ndi shavhela thayhoni / Nne mahola a tho ngo ya vhanweni / Khombo a si yo yo wela vhana / Idani ri yo tshina vhanna / Idani ni do vhona vhanna / Vhamusanda vho Tshivhase / Khombo vho Tshivhase. Solo: Alas, hogo!

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Chorus: hogo ha he hogo! / Watch out men, hogo / At sunrise I’ll go to the mountain / Last year I didn’t go there / Children are in trouble / Come let us go to the mountain / Men, come and see / Chief Tshivhase, you are in trouble / Others are at the mountain! In the midst of deafening noise which is made by those who are singing, an initiate is placed on a stone (tshikalaha). He is then held tight by strong men so that he should not make any movement when the operation is in progress. Then the operator comes with his cutting apparatus carried in a skinbag of a wild animal. There are different ways of removing the foreskin of the penis, and how the operator should do it depends upon the skills that he had acquired from his master. Singing stops when the operation is completed. The initiate is instructed to spit out saliva on the ground and utter out some words. He must say, ‘nthu mafhefho’. ‘Mafhefho’ will become a symbol which will distinguish him from mashuvhuru (uncircumcised). He will utter those words whenever he is expressing pain, joy and surprise. Then an operator starts another song called ‘Mafhe’. Initiates do not sing because they have not been taught any song. Operator: Vhula vhutshavhona Chorus: Mafhe! mafhe! mafhefhoo! / Hee mafhefhoo / Mafhe! mafhe mafhefho! / Ahee mainee / Mafhe! mafhe! mafhefhoo! / Hee madalaa / Mafhe! mafhe! mafhefhoo! The maine (operator) raises his forefinger and says ‘dzii’ and the whole group repeats [it] after him. U fhefha (the learning of songs and secret codes) In the evening, midabe bring a large amount of wood to the fire, then all initiates come and sit around the fire with their sides being towards it. No one is allowed to face the fire as it causes pain to the wound. Then midabe start to teach them songs and secret codes. The activity is called ‘u fhefha’. Those secret codes are supposed to be recited whenever a person visits murundu so as to be identified as a graduate of the murundu school. The learning of songs and secret codes is done every evening after evening meal. The instructors sing a song while the initiates imitate. After they have sung each song several times, they stop singing and then start to recite the secret codes. They do that until they memorize them all. Many of the songs are sung either in Sotho or Shangaan. However, very few of them are sung in Venda language, because the circumcision rite is foreign to Vhavenda. Some of the words have been distorted and lost their real meaning or diction because the songs were foreign. Therefore many of the songs are too difficult to translate because nobody knows their meaning. Most of the songs are intended, however, to ridicule those who are not circumcised, and women. The subject matter is difficult to understand but it is centred around sexual education,

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for only a few of the songs are sung without the inclusion of the word ‘penis’ or a woman’s vagina. In fact many songs contain vulgar words. Nonetheless, many of the songs do carry important messages. Through songs, initiates are taught to respect their parents and old people. All songs follow the call and response pattern. There is a leader who sings a solo while the chorus responds. Some songs are mostly improvised. The following are examples of evening songs: […] ‘Vhonemashango’ Solo: Tshi a vhilavhila wee Vhonemashango Chorus: Tshi a vhilavhila wee Vhonemashango / Vhonemashango no vha ni gai tshakalekale? / No vha ni gai rine ri tshi ya / Ndo vha ndi hone ndo tou hana / Kweta dzhende zwi do fhola / Tshitornbo sha nwano shi vhona mikhuvha / Teku la teku vho tata / Vhonemashango tshi a vhilavhila! It is painful My Lord / My Lord, where have you been? / Where have you been when we went to the mountain? / I was around but I refused to go / Scratch the testes, you will be alright / The boy’s penis is in trouble / Teku la teku my dad / My Lord, it is painful! ‘Tshilidza mbila’ Solo: Hee tshilidzambila i da ngeo / Mbila Hamadata dzi a lila Chorus: I da ngeno, ri a lila / Hee tshilidzambila i do ngeno! You ‘mbila’ (thumb piano) player come here / ‘Mbila’ at Hamadala (initiate school) is played / Come here, we are crying / You ‘mbila’ player, come here! ‘Kureshu milayo’ Solo: Kureshu milayo, milayo kurumane Chorus: Kureshu milayo milayo kurumane / U nga shi kuma nyagonga, nyagongo, shi ile kaya / Vha ile vha ile ri ruba Hamadala / Phinimini yo thoila thoila tholo thola / Phinimini yo thoila ya wana vhe fhedzi! Kureshu [formulae] kurumane / You can’t find a woman, woman is at home / They are gone to Hamadala for circumcision / Phinimini (small bird) has peeped / Phinimini has peeped and found them naked! […] ‘Hee tshitombo’ Hee tshitombo mayoo / Tshitombo tshi a wetu toto mmayoo / Kundanani kundanani mmayoo / Kundanani shi to wetu mmayoo / Tshitombo a tho ngo tshi rengela shedo mmayo Alas my penis The penis is itching / Have sex / Have sex, it will be alright. […]

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‘Tsha ri vhone vhasidzana’ Solo: Tsha ri vhone vhasidzana / Ho vhuya mbolo ntswa Chorus: Tsha ri vhone vhasidzana Have a look girls /A new penis is back […] When the initiates are exhausted and tired, they go to sleep. But before they go, they must sing a song asking for a permission to sleep from Maine (operator). It is called ‘Ri humbela u lala’. […] After singing this song they all flock to their respective huts and sleep. Nobody is allowed to talk. They must all keep quiet immediately when they get into their huts. If ever there is any initiate who is talking mudabe will shout: ‘manuge!’ meaning quiet. The following morning early at dawn, all initiates are woken up and instructed to go out of their huts with their blankets. They then sit on the stones, with their blankets covering only their backs. They remove ‘rathelo’ from the penis in order to expose it to the morning cold air. The reason is to dry up the wound. Mula has two stages. The second stage of mula is entered into somewhere in the middle of mula span. There is no fixed time of entering into this stage. It all depends upon the discretion of maine (doctor) as to when should that take place. The process of entering into another stage is called ‘u fhindulela’ meaning ‘to turn around’. ‘U fhindulela’ comes from a verb ‘fhindula’ meaning ‘turning’. The second phase of mula is a time when initiates will be preparing themselves for going home.

The Art of Metamorphosis - Or the Ju|’hoan Conception of Plurivocality263 Emmanuelle Olivier Emmanuelle Olivier is a Research Fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Her Ph.D. at the Ecole des Hautes en Sciences Sociales was on Bushman vocal polyphony, and she is currently working in Namibia on Khoisan and Bantu music. If we consider Ju|’hoan vocal music as a semiotic system, we can say that this system is based upon strict rules to which the musicians refer on every performance of a piece. In this oral tradition, the Ju|’hoansi make use of a very rich terminology concerning musical repertoires, vocal ranges, rhythmic patterns and modes of performance. It is likely that they possess a large number of stories relating to the creation of songs. In this context, while not formalised, the learning process follows definite stages which the Ju|’hoansi are fully able to account for. This musical terminology enables us to understand both the Ju|’hoan conception of polyphony and their modalities of performance. […] General characteristics of vocal music Ju|’hoan song may be performed by either a single person or by a choir. In the latter case, each singer performs a different melodic line with multiple variations. The juxtaposition of these melodic lines - whose rhythmic articulations differ produces a counterpoint, which is the primary characterising procedure of this kind of song. From these multiple voices emerges the yodelling procedure, which alternates between chest voice and head voice. The songs are based around three tessituras which are named in the Ju|’hoan language: the low tessitura is called bòrò (‘low’) or tòànsí (literally ‘last’) or dohm n!a'àn (literally ‘voice - fat/large/old’) or dohm tih (literally ‘voice - heavy’); the median tessitura is said ||'amí (‘centre’) or nù n!áng (literally ‘middle - interior’); the high tessitura is !'aící (literally ‘peak/top’) or dohm cùi (literally ‘voice - highpitched’). These tessituras are hierarchical: depending on the village, the high or median tessitura is the most important. The melodies in the three tessituras are not different in nature: they comprise the same descending melodic contour but located in three different levels. The songs are typically underpinned by a rhythmic accompaniment produced either by hand-clapping (||'am) or by instruments (tcoq'ùngò rattles or two metallic bars !aq hit together) which perform the beat (!àbà - the yardstick for measurement of time) and one or more superimposed rhythmic figures (u). Concerning form, Ju|’hoan songs are periodic in character: the musical material within a period is

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repeated, in a varied manner, for as long as the singers desire. Each melodic line consists of several segments, distinguished on the basis of the repetition of their descending contour, which follow each other freely. Thus a similar segment is not necessarily reiterated at regular time intervals. The ways of performing collective song are characterised by a significant degree of freedom. In reality, anyone may intone a song (tchòàtchòà, literally ‘to begin’) and take up the lead, i.e. be responsible for its correct performance for a certain time, then blending into the background sound whilst another person takes the role of leader. The intermingling voices are complementary to one other: it is common to see a singer leaning towards one of his or her neighbours in order to hear their voice better and thus to be able to respond musically. The performance of a song thus progresses step by step, through the interaction of its many different performers (Olivier 1997b).

[…] Two vernacular concepts I shall confine the following discussion to a consideration of two vernacular expressions: the first gè'é sòàn (‘sing simply’) and the second dàbì (‘make variations’), which refer to actions located at the two extremes of the procedure of song elaboration. Gè’é sòàn: ‘sing simply’ Simple singing occurs during the learning phase. The expression means to repeat a basic melody (the simplest possible) in each of the three tessituras. From hearing one of these three melodies, every member of a Ju|’hoan community should be able to identify the song in question. However, if several people are asked to ‘sing simply’ in the same tessitura, the result would be noticeably different from one person to another. Furthermore, on each occasion of ‘simple singing’, the same person could also produce different versions of the melody. The Western ear would undoubtedly perceive these realisations as so many structurally different melodies, whilst on the contrary the Ju|’hoansi consider them as ‘the same whilst being a little different’, which we take to mean equivalent: they have a ‘family resemblance’. Within the same tessitura, no single version is considered as fundamental or more basic than the others. There does however exist a hierarchy between the tessituras: the melodies in the principal tessitura are more basic than the others. The former could be considered as prototypical in relation to the latter: in reality they comprise the ‘basic versions’ upon which the others are elaborated. The prototype is understood here as a reference which, within a collection of elements related to each other through family resemblances, appears “as basic or primary,

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without any implication of any judgement of representativeness” (Kleiber in Dubois 1993, 120). In Fig 47, which applies to all Ju|’hoan song, we can identify four levels of prototypicality: – the basic original version is prototypical in relation to the following basic versions in the same tessitura; – this version is prototypical in relation to the first basic version in each of the secondary tessituras; – the first basic version in each of the two secondary tessituras is prototypical in relation to the following versions in the same tessituras; – the basic original version is prototypical in relation to all basic versions in the secondary tessituras.

Fig 47 Transition from the primary basic version in the principle tessitura to the others © E. Olivier

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The basic original version serves as a reference during learning. It is not, however, more representative than the others, and any of these basic versions in the principal tessitura could take its place: this happens when a piece is transmitted by several people each of whom perform a different basic version in the principal tessitura. In terms of a reference, the primary basic version of each tessitura of a song is ephemeral in nature: once it has served as a reference to the following versions, it may be included in a collection of basic versions, or even simply be forgotten. The Ju|’hoansi never refer to it in terms of precedence. Nevertheless, some versions do become fixed and serve as a reference for some singers: these then keep their prototypical character, even if they are not historically the oldest versions. We are led thus to the question: which, then, are the common elements of the different basic versions of a piece? What is included in all the basic versions of a piece? In other words, what is it in terms of a mental reference shared by the group of singers during every performance of a piece? This common mental reference is indispensable for the Ju|’hoansi in enabling several people to sing together. The mental reference is not a fixed entity. It never appears in the form of one or several predetermined melodies, but comprises the collection of elements which permit the construction of the piece and the rules by which these may be combined: scale (constituent pitches), ‘standard’ duration of the period, durations of pitches, rules of sequencing pitches, rules of superimposing pitches. The constituent elements of the mental referent enable the melodies within a song to be constructed, whatever their tessitura, since these melodies share the same syntactical rules. The mental reference is never unequivocally expressed, and moreover is never actually expressed at all, appearing only in the form of multiple basic versions in each of the three tessituras. It thereby differs from the model defined by Arom, which “condenses into a purified form (our emphasis), the collection [of] relevant characteristics and these alone [of the musical object] (Arom 1991, 70)”. In Ju|'hoan songs, the mental referent condenses the various resources of a song, that the musicians partially exploit at each performance (cf. Olivier & Furniss, forthcoming). Dàbì, mànì (literally ‘change, change direction, transform, turn, answer’): make variations How then is the resultant counterpoint embellished on the basis of the basic versions in each tessitura? The musical material common to different melodic lines undergoes multiple procedures of variation, some of which are given names in the Ju|’hoan language. It is these which will be discussed here.

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Variation is considered primarily by the Ju|’hoansi as an individual phenomenon: each person ‘transforms’ the version of the melody which they began to sing, until they abandon it to embellish a new one which itself will be varied in turn. Variation procedures The Ju|’hoansi have expressions to refer to irregular duration of a period, degree of filling out, transposition of a melody to another, transition from one tessitura to another. • Periodicity There are two expressions to indicate the irregular duration of the period: gè'é g!à'ín (literally ‘sing - long’) indicates the lengthening of the period duration, and gè'è !òmà (literally ‘sing - short’) its shortening. The validity of this phenomenon has been demonstrated by Ju|’hoan hand-clapping (at our request) at the start of each new period. This can be ‘measured’ by counting the number of beats separating each signal for the start of a period. It thus appears that modifications to the duration of the period are not necessarily in a simple ratio to it. For example, a standard period of 16 beats can have any whole-number multiple of 2 beats added to or removed from it. The period therefore comprises a minimal number of beats, equivalent to those of the rhythmic figure which underpins the song. • Pitches The phrase gè'è tzí aeh (literally ‘sing - song - below’) indicates a transposition of the melody located in the principal tessitura (high or median depending on the village) to the low tessitura (a fourth, fifth or octave below). In order to produce counterpoint when several people are singing together, this procedure is always linked to a modification of durational values. • Filling out the period Each singer can fill out the period partially: either a part or the whole of a melodic segment is thus replaced by a silence. Two singers ||káé ||káé khòè (literally ‘put together - each one’), if the first performs the first part of the period and the second the second part, come together at the middle: the end of the first singer’s melody is superimposed on the beginning of the second. • Transition from one tessitura to another Each singer is free to move from one tessitura to another at the end of each musical segment. Thus the entire ambitus of a song may be covered by a single person. Ju|’hoansi singers can move from the high tessitura to the low - they gè'é kháúá (literally ‘sing - get down’) or gè'é khàrú (literally ‘sing - climb down’) and, on the other hand, from the low tessitura to the high - they gè'é tsáú (literally ‘sing - rise, go up’) or ||háí tsáú (literally ‘pull - rise, go up’). When two people begin to sing in the same tessitura and one of them decides to change, the Ju|’hoansi say that the voices sàràà khòè (‘separate’). They ||káéá khòè (‘meet up, come back together’) when this voice comes back to the initial tessitura.

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Counterpoint gives rise to multiple procedures of variation of the same musical material performed in three tessituras. When there is a significant number of singers, they divide up the variations: they dàbì ||kàèà khòè (literally ‘vary - divide up - together’) or n|áng (‘seat in one tessitura’). They divide into groups which each perform the same kind of variations within the same tessitura, in order to avoid any excess which would detract from good performance (!aihn n|à'ng, literally ‘tasty sound’) and from identification of the piece. The auditory impression is that of great complexity, resulting not from the superimposition of different constituent parts but from the superimposition of variations. Conclusion Ju|’hoan music is in perpetual motion: on the basis of a mental representation which contains the collection of elements enabling the construction of a piece and the rules by which they may be combined, each performer embellishes his or her own version of a melody. Through the superimposition of the same musical material, constantly under transformation, the illusion of a complex contrapuntal polyphony is created. The same musical material is concealed by multiple variations such that to the listener it appears to be constantly undergoing renewal: this is the art of metamorphosis.

Index of Ju|’hoan musical terms and expressions bòrò dàbì dàbì

dohm dohm cùì dohm n!a'àn dohm tih dohma gà'ín gè'é kháúá gè'é khàrú

low tessitura. make variations, to move from one tessitura to another. Specific musical term. dàbì ||kàèà khòè lit. ‘vary - divide up - together’: when there is a significant number of singers, they divide into groups which each perform the same variations, in order to avoid any excess which would detract from good performance and from identification of the piece. voice. lit. ‘voice - high-pitched’: high tessitura. lit. ‘voice - fat/large/old’: low tessitura. lit. ‘voice - heavy’: low tessitura. lit. ‘sing - long’: to lengthen the vocal period’s duration. lit. ‘sing - get down’: to move from the high tessitura to the low. lit. ‘sing - climb down’: to move from the high tessitura to the low.

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gè'é kòà aeh kè

lit. ‘sing - below - this’: to transpose the melody located in the principal tessitura to the low tessitura (a fourth, fifth or octave below). gè'é sòàn lit. ‘sing - easy’: to sing without variation. gè'é tsáú lit. ‘sing - rise, go up’: to move from the low tessitura to the high. gè'é tzèmà lit. ‘to sing - small’: to come to a gradual end, through descending vocal motion. gè'è tzí aeh lit. ‘sing - song - below’: to transpose the melody located in the principal tessitura to the low tessitura (a fourth, fifth or octave below). gè'é àn lit. ‘sing - have in mind/lead/to direct’: to sing without variation. gè'é !òmà lit. ‘sing - short’: to shorten the period’s duration. kòà tzí aeh kè lit. ‘where - come - below - this’: to transpose the melody located in the principal tessitura to the low tessitura (a fourth, fifth or octave below). mànì lit. ‘to change/to change direction/to move into something else/to answer’: make variations, to move from one tessitura to another. n|om tzísì lit. ‘supernatural energy - songs’: healing songs. n!ún tuih lit. ‘to stop doing something’: to end a song. nùu n!áng lit. ‘middle - interior’: median tessitura. sàràà khòè lit. ‘separate’: when two people begin to sing in the same tessitura and one of them decides to change. tchòàtchòà lit. ‘to begin’: to intone a song. tòànsí lit. ‘last’: low tessitura. !àbà beat performed by hand-clapping. !aq lit. ‘iron’: metallic bars hit together. !hún ká lit. ‘kill - it’: to end a song. !'aící lit. ‘peak/top’: high tessitura. u rhythmic figure clapped by the singers. aúcè gè'é lit. ‘slowly - sing’: to sing slowly, without variation. ||háí tsáú lit. ‘pull - rise/go up’: to move from the low tessitura to the high. ||káé ||káé khòè lit. ‘put together - each one’: when the end of the first singer’s melody is superimposed on the beginning of the second. ||káéá khòè lit. ‘meet up, come back together’: when a voice comes back to the initial tessitura. ||xàmsì lit. ‘accompany, go with, follow’: to follow a vocal line, whilst trying to avoid an identical reproduction. ||'am to clap, hand clapping. ||'ám kxàè kxàè |'àn lit. ‘hand-clapping - together - be ready to - kill’: to end a song.

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||'ám !hún ||'ámí

lit. ‘hand-clapping - kill’: conventional rhythmic sign. lit. ‘centre’: median tessitura.

Analysing Kevin Volans’ White Man Sleeps264 Justin Clarkson Fletcher et al. Justin Clarkson Fletcher, Joanna Dazeley, John Taylor and Eric Wetherall were undergraduate students in 1998 when they wrote a joint conference paper on the problems of analysing Kevin Volans’ White Man Sleeps under the guidance of composer Michael Blake. Blake has introduced extracts from their analysis. Introduction Post-structural analysis is a relatively late arrival on the South African compositional scene, and still largely shunned in favour of structural (motivic or harmonic) analysis. Kevin Volans’ White Man Sleeps however is not about what goes on below the surface for there is no structural harmony with chords that can be labelled, or motifs that can be identified and matched up across the landscape of the score. It is, rather, structured around principles that concern different notions of surface. In its original 1982 version for two re-tuned harpsichords, viola da gamba and percussion, White Man Sleeps thus demands new analytical tools. It is moreover a major South African work not previously scrutinised. Armed with some knowledge of Schenkerian and post-Schenkerian techniques, the students set about finding these tools, keeping in mind the question, ‘which approach is most appropriate to the music?’ Some things were immediately observable: the music’s postmodern use of African references, its minimalist surface, and its syncretic postcolonial aesthetic. Volans invokes John Blacking’s analogy of the waterfall (Venda Children’s Songs 1967) in explaining his relationship to an African aesthetic in early works such as White Man Sleeps. “The repetition of short patterns, with only minor variations within the total structure, gives to Venda music the character of a waterfall: it is for ever moving, and yet its overall pattern never changes” (Blacking 1967, 18). The score of White Mand Sleeps tells the reader as much (or little) of how the music sounds as the scores of John Cage’s prepared piano pieces, or Stockhausen’s Stimmung. Most readers will hear the music in well-tempered tuning, for example, but it employs heptatonic tuning – seven pitches to the octave – and it is the tuning that makes it sound ‘African’. (For some listeners, the harpsichords sound ‘out of tune’.) By the same token, the second version of White Man Sleeps for strong quartet (1986) uses equal temperament and immediately sounds ‘Western’, an effect emphasised by the use of the string quartet.

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The four students applied semiotics and information theory to a work that has become almost canonical in the South African context. Where our analysis falls short is where so many do: useful conclusions drawn from the findings are in themselves more pre-analytical than analytical. The main problem with semiotic analysis for example is the lack of criteria for segmentation, and the fact that music is given meaning “purely by virtue of abstract relations existing between its component parts” (Cook 1989, 181), while information theory leaves us with a bunch of statistics.

Analysis There are two versions of White Man Sleeps,265 the first dating from 1982, when performances of Kevin Volans’ African Paraphrases were programmed in the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Mbira and Matepe, composed for Western instruments but using tuning systems derived from African mbira music, were on the programme,266 and Volans was asked to compose a piece which would complement them. To the existing ensemble of two retuned harpsichords and rattles he added a viola da gamba, which with its movable frets was capable of coping with the African tuning … He drew his source material from Tswana and Nyanga panpipe music, San bow music and Basotho lesiba music; his structural conception was partly drawn from Baroque concertino style. In the first and third movements of White Man Sleeps Volans’ sources are explicit, the first dance drawing on transcriptions of Tswana pipe music made by Christopher Ballantine (1965), the third on Nyanga panpipe music transcribed by Andrew Tracey (1971). Volans’ approach to the transcriptions was not purist: he redistributed the music between the instruments, cast it in non-African metres such as the 13-beat pattern of the fifth movement, and employed some Western compositional techniques.267

‘First Dance’: using a semiotic approach The entire ‘First Dance’ revolves around four main pitches A, G, E and D, related to the four fundamental groups in a panpipe ensemble; an additional note C also appears momentarily, alluding to a pentatonic scale. As Ballantine discovered, the relative pitches of the pipes vary from one group to the next (Ballantine 1965, 52-53) and so the re-tuned harpsichords give a fair idea of the original pitch relationships, but certainly not the timbral quality of the panpipes. The music assigned to the harpsichords is taken directly from Ballantine’s transcriptions of Tswana pipe melody and constitutes the basic material of this dance. The role of the viola da gamba is similar to that of a Baroque basso continuo, strengthening the

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bass line. The rattles are ‘swirled’ randomly throughout the dance, making their role quite ambiguous: perhaps they represent the shakers attached to the dancers’ bodies. The texture of the harpsichord writing is quite dense in comparison to the original panpipe music, as the pitch-range seems more compressed on the harpsichords. The first step towards a semiotic analysis268 of ‘First Dance’ was to take a quaver as the shortest pulse and determine a time-line (including the repeats). We found that a pseudo-binary form encapsulated the entire dance (Fig 48). Part A 1 ://: 16 pulses 6 repetitions total pulses 96

2 ://: 24 pulses 7 repetitions total pulses 160

3 ://: 20 pulses 8 repetitions total pulses 160

Part B 4 ://: 24 pulses 4 repetitions total pulses 96

5 ://: 20 pulses 6 repetitions total pulses 120

6 ://: 20 pulses 8 repetitions total pulses 160

Fig 48 Binary form of White Man Sleeps ‘First Dance’ © Clarkson Fletcher et al.

As each pitch represents a pipe within the panpipe group, the sections were dissected at every pitch level. Ex 49 shows how pitch-class ‘A’ is configured for the entire dance.

261 Player 1 Treble





Player 2 Bass

































 



 

  









 

 







 

 







 

P1 Bs.



  





 



 







  





























 



 



P1 Bs.



 







 

 

 

 

 





















 















 

 









 

 























 













 











 

  



















 









 



 



 







 



























 









 















 





P2 Tr.





  



P1 Tr.



















 













  

















 





 

















P2 Tr.



  

 



 

P2 Bs.

 













VdG.





Player 1 Bass

P1 Tr.







Player 2 Treble

Viola da Gamba









3 











   





  



 











 



 



 









 



 



 









 



 













P2 Bs.



  





   







  

 

 

 

 

VdG.





 

 















  

 



 



 



Ex 50 Pitch-class ‘A’ configured for ‘First Dance’ © Clarkson Fletcher et al. The same process was applied to each pitch-class. Then, by referring back to Ballantine’s transcriptions, it was possible to identify which sections related to each of the original dances (see Fig 50).

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Part

Section

Dance

A

1

Motseo

A

2

Gdumaduma

A

3

Mmayoo

B

4

Rasebolela

B

5

Khunofu

B

6

Tlasikwe

Fig 50 Relationship of parts and sections to original dances in White Man Sleeps ‘First Dance’ © Clarkson Fletcher et al. Exs 51-53 show how the discrete units from B:5 relate to the inner parts of the original pipe dance Khunofu.

Player 2

  

   3    



  





 

Ex 51 Right-hand part of harpsichord 2 in WMS ‘First Dance’



A



G



E



D







3







 

















































  







 





Ex 52 Units for B:5 right-hand part of harpsichord 2



 



 

263

 

Pipe in A



G



E



 



 

 D













 







    

3   

A



G



E



D



































 



















  

 





















 



 

 

















 

 

  











 



 





 

  

Ex 53 Extract from Ballantine’s transcription of ‘Khunofu’ (Ballantine 1965, 66, first 8 staves) ‘Second Dance’: using information theory and semiotics The ‘Second Dance’ is cast in two distinct parts. The first, performed by solo viola da gamba, was inspired by San bow music; the second, played by viola da gamba and lute-stopped harpsichord, was derived from Basotho lesiba music. The parts are quite different in nature but both are based on the idea of overtones employed in these styles of traditional music, overtones produced by sounding the fundamental with a stick or bow. The pitches used in the first part are C#, D, E, F and G which make up a fivenote scale. In terms of information theory, the rate of occurrences of intervals are the seventh which occurs 39% of the time, the fifth 33%, the sixth 15% and the augmented fourth 13%, thus establishing the seventh as the dominant interval. In the African tuning system employed the seventh is slightly flat, as indeed it is in the natural overtone series. The first part can again be divided into two sections with one idea per section dominating. There is a constant developing or mutating of ideas: sometimes the rhythm is altered from a crotchet into two quavers, for example, or an extra beat or two is added to the bar. This makes it difficult to identify paradigms or units within this section: because of the repetitive yet subtly varying nature of the material it is difficult to establish which paradigms are related

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to previous ones and which have been altered to the point where they are to be considered a new idea. In the second part of ‘Second Dance’ the harpsichord and viola da gamba approximate the fundamentals and overtones produced on the lesiba (Ex 54).

                                                      arco

f

IV VIV

II III III III III

V

f 

f

f

Ex 54 Emulation of fundamentals and overtones in WMS ‘Second Dance’ The pitches that were derived from this process can be seen as a major and a minor ninth chord. The viola da gamba has the pitches D, F, A and E, while the harpsichord has G, B, D and A. The two sets of pitches are superimposed and there is a fair amount of repetition in both parts. In the example (Ex 54) the upper (viola da gamba) bar is repeated frequently throughout the section with some variation. In the lower (harpsichord) part the pitches A-G-G can be heard as a recurring figure. ‘Third Dance’: using semiotic principles The ‘Third Dance’ is transcribed and ‘filtered’ from Nyanga panpipe music (see Volans 1990). Volans virtually maps the panpipe music directly onto the medium of two harpsichords, viola da gamba and rattles. The dance is structured in two parts with each containing three sections, most of which are repeated several times. The six sections, labelled A to F in the score, are arranged in the following order (read vertically): Part 1 Sections:

Part 2 Sections:

A

A

B A Rattle

C A Rattle D E D

A

F D

Fig 51 Sections of WMS ‘Third Dance’ © Clarkson Fletcher et al.

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The dance uses a sequence of chords derived from Andrew Tracey’s transcription of Nyanga panpipe music (Tracey 1971). The sequence, indicated by pitch letter-names and shown in root position (Ex 55), is used in every section of the dance, the chords moving either a third or fourth up each time. As happens in the source material, Volans uses the third note of the chord as a kind of passingnote to the next chord. 3rd

        E

G

C

3rd

A

C

                                                               = blown note  = voice note

   

3rd

3rd

3rd

3rd

                    E

E

G

B

3rd (of D)

E           D

B

                         

                                                                            

   

Ex 55 ‘Third Dance’ Chord Sequence (Tracey 1971, 80: ‘Condensation of the pipe and voice parts’) There are no time signatures; instead there are 24 pulses in each section, with one pulse representing a crotchet, which is maintained in the first part. Emphasis seems to be placed on the first and third pulses though there is a definite underlying 6/4 metre in each section. The rattles provide rhythmic counterpoint by playing on the pulses 2-3-5; 7-10-11 and 13-21-23 - a direct transcription of the dancers’ steps in Nyanga panpipe music. In 2:D Volans introduces quavers after the rest on the second pulse, pushing the time-line forward. The second harpsichord, playing a straight crotchet pulse melody, offsets this rhythm. Though there is an absence of melodic and motivic structure, one can find melodies in sections D and E. In D Volans uses what sound like broken seventh chords in root position and inversions: E-G-B-D, E-G-A-C, D-F#-G-B. These units are found in section C of both harpsichord parts: this could be seen as one of the ways in which the two parts relate. The melodic units in section E are repeated exactly in section F, which is played in unison by both harpsichords. This repetition of melodic units in sections E and F, which frames one of the D sections, is what the composer sees as continuation in the music, coming closer to the African perception of repetition. Throughout this dance the viola da gamba,

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playing transcriptions of the voice parts in the source material, provides more of a rhythmical accompaniment, filling the rests left by the harpsichords.

Kwela269 Lara Allen Lara Allen is Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the University of the Witwatersrand. She received her Ph.D. from Cambridge University and held a Junior Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge. Allen’s research has focused on the history of black South African popular music in the 1950s and ’60s, especially the role of women in the music industry. Kwela is an urban South African popular music style which developed in Johannesburg’s black townships during the 1950s. Originally played on pennywhistles by small boys, adolescents and young adults, kwela was later also performed on saxophones. An eclectic mix of ‘traditional’ South African music and American popular music styles of the day, it was the first township style to cross the colour bar and attract a substantial white following. […] Although Willard Cele’s ‘Pennywhistle Blues’ and ‘Pennywhistle Boogie’ were released in 1951, the ‘kwela boom’ did not occur until late in 1954 when Spokes Mashiyane made his first recordings. The latter sold exceptionally well, their immediate and overwhelming success generally being attributed to Mashiyane’s use of local musical elements. Albert Ralulimi, a friend and pennywhistle colleague explained the appeal of his music in this way: “Spokes became more popular because he took tunes from the community, something that he felt. He went about stokvels270 and watching people singing their old songs ... So Spokes improvised the pattern of the type of music that was sung by anybody or small boys playing on the street”.271 The fusion and interplay between American and South African elements forms a recurrent theme in [the] construction and production of kwela music. […]

Structure, melody, harmony and rhythm in kwela music Structurally kwela music consists of the repetition of a short harmonic cycle over which a series of short melodies or motifs, usually the length of the cycle, are repeated and varied. The internal structure of a kwela number is delineated by melodic variation rather than by harmonic movement and there are two fundamental methods of organising melodic material over the harmonic cycle: either a series of motifs are repeated and alternated with improvisatory passages; or a solo is improvised over an ostinato backing riff. Other variants of structural organisation include: combinations of the above, versions of the blues form and,

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occasionally, longer progressions of primary chords which are repeated like verses of a song. The cyclical repetition of a short harmonic progression of primary chords fuses the fundamental organising principles of African and Western music: cyclicity and functional harmony respectively. Another primary structural element which locates kwela within the African and African-American musical traditions is the style’s utilisation of the call-and-response principle. In compositions constructed from motifs and solo sections, the solos represent the ‘call’ and the motivic sections the ‘response’. In compositions of the solo-over-ostinato variety, the ostinato backing riff can be interpreted as fulfilling the response function. Call-and-response also frequently occurs between a solo instrument and its backing chorus. Harmonic structure is one of the areas of continuity between kwela and other urban South African musical styles such as marabi and mbaqanga.272 There is no specific kwela chord progression although two progressions, I-I-IV-V and I-IV-V-I, are particularly prevalent. Kwela compositions are constructed almost exclusively of the primary chords, generally in their triadic form. Seventh or substitution chords occur only in compositions strongly influenced by jazz.

Fig 52 Pennywhistlers © Jurgen Schadeberg The short repetitive melodic motifs, often closely modelled on the chord tones of the harmonic progression, are the most important and memorable components of any kwela number. Each composition is defined by these motifs and their creator is recognised as the composer. Although large parts of the rest of a kwela number, for instance the solos and backing, are added by other members of the band, they do not lay claim to partial composition. The melodic structure of much kwela, within

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both motifs and solos, tends to be dominated by arpeggiated figures and scalar passages. Kwela rhythm is defined primarily by the guitar rather than the drum-set and can be described as a ‘lilting shuffle’. The most important rhythmic difference between kwela and marabi or mbaqanga, is that the former is ‘swung’, whilst the beat in the latter two styles is usually ‘straight’. Kwela instrumentation Although the structural, harmonic, melodic and rhythmic criteria discussed above are important, the definitive component of kwela music is instrumentation. A composition may contain all the most typical elements indicated above, but without the sound of a pennywhistle, or a solo saxophone, such a composition would generally not be recognised as kwela by musicians or by the general public. Various combinations of instruments constitute the front line in a kwela ensemble. The earliest line-up was simply a solo pennywhistle accompanied by a guitar. Later the solo pennywhistle was accompanied by the typical kwela rhythm section: a guitar, a string bass and a drum set … The most stereotypical kwela line-up is, however, a solo pennywhistle backed by a pennywhistle chorus and a basic rhythm section. ‘Tom Hark’ which rose high on the British Hit Parade in 1956 and catalysed the ‘kwela boom’ in South Africa, is one of the most famous examples of such instrumentation. […] The role of the pennywhistle in kwela music The pennywhistle is the most important instrument in kwela music. It was popular with kwela players, most of whom came from financially impoverished backgrounds, because it was relatively inexpensive. As children some kwela musicians could not even afford metal pennywhistles. Peter Macontela describes the plastic instruments he played on as a child: The first plastic flute that came in was shaped like a trumpet. It was this small [10 cm] and it had three holes. Then I started with that [in] 1949, 1950 … [it was] shaped like a trumpet, made of plastic, but it’s so little. But you play something, you can build up a song. You used to buy it for a tickey [sixpence]. Then from there ’50, ’51, ’52 came a fish flute. It’s broad - made just exactly like a fish. It had a hole underneath like a recorder now. That was a difficult one, broader here at the mouth … After that came this straight pennywhistle, with six holes on top with the mouthpiece you could dismantle like a sax. It used to be white and mouthpiece yellow or red or green, it was colourful … nobody recorded with that … you can get it from any shop in Soweto … I got hold of my first flute in 1955 I think, the metal one … You sort of graduate from plastic to that.273

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Other young aspirant musicians made their own instruments. In rural areas reeds provided the basic material whilst a bicycle pump, or any other available metal tubing, was used in the towns. Albert Ralulimi describes his early attempts at instrument building: “I remember pinching my uncle’s bicycle pump. It was made from steel. I looked for stronger nails to punch holes in it and I was even given a hiding for that. But after they listened how I made use of it, they became excited”.274 The pennywhistles available in South Africa in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s were made of brass.275 In 1958, however, the Hohner Company in Trossingen, Germany, started mass-producing nickel-plated pennywhistles for the South African market apparently using a “home-made flute acquired from a South African youngster in Johannesburg” as a prototype (Kubik 1987, 19). British nickelplated pennywhistles were also sold in South Africa under the trade name ‘Generation’. Musicians who were accustomed to brass pennywhistles found the nickel instruments inferior: Peter Macontela declares “the Hohner was too tinny, too light. I have never recorded with that”. Describing his preference in pennywhistles Macontela says: “I have my brass, copper you know when it fades, the genuine ones … it’s silver coated. But as it wears off you could see there’s brass coming. But you can hit it and it dents. Those were our pennywhistles”. All the Solven Whistlers, including Ben Nkosi, played on these ‘genuine’ instruments because, as Macontela explains, “you have to have the correct sound, you must be uniform. All play same make otherwise they don’t tune the same way”.276 In the early 1950s it was fairly difficult to obtain metal pennywhistles. By 1955, however, Indian shopkeepers in central Johannesburg were stocking the instruments. Peter Macontela reports: “Indian shops where you could cut suits and things, that’s where we would get our pennywhistles from”.277 In other areas the most likely place to sell pennywhistles was the local bicycle shop. Macontela remembers that the price of a pennywhistle in downtown Johannesburg was 5s.6d. This was substantially less expensive than music shops in the city centre where, in 1956, B flat and C pennywhistles were advertised for 8s.6d. and 7s.6d. respectively.278 The limitations and possibilities inherent in the pennywhistle as an instrument had a significant effect on kwela composition. In the 1950s, the pennywhistle was made of a cylindrical metal tube moulded at one end into a fipple mouthpiece. Pennywhistles have six reasonably evenly spaced finger holes, the top hole placed approximately in the centre of the instrument. The diameter of each finger hole is slightly different, which controls the tuning of the instrument; the larger the hole, the sharper the note. As a pennywhistle does not have a thumb hole it may only be conveniently played in one major key. The most commonly available pennywhistles were those in B flat and G with the result that most kwela compositions were recorded in these keys. The key of a pennywhistle is taken to be that note which is sounded when all the finger holes are covered so that the air stream vibrates along the entire length of the tube. The range of the pennywhistle is two octaves, the second octave being obtained by over blowing. Fig 53 illustrates

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the fingerings required to produce a scale of B flat major on a B flat pennywhistle. Notes foreign to the particular major scale a pennywhistle is designed to produce may be obtained either through the use of cross-fingering, or by partially covering the tone-holes.

Fig 53 The fingering of B flat major on a B flat pennywhistle

Pedi Women’s Kiba Performance279 Deborah James Deborah James is a South African-born anthropologist who worked for many years at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research investigates how women migrants use song and musical performance to define themselves as ethnic subjects, showing how, through the dual role of musical expert and family breadwinner, they have charted a path through the difficulties of everyday life in an oppressive environment. She specialises in ethnicity, migration, musical performance, and, more recently, land and land reform, her fieldwork being conducted mainly in the Northern Province. She is now a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Women’s lyrics: composition and interpretation Dinaka is not supposed to be sung by women … Now men have left it and women are trying to bring it back; that is why we say ‘lebowa’.280 In the old days of marashiya [a rural, pre-kiba style], there was no monti [for women]. We sing it today with our mouths while men blow pipes.281

These two statements capture some of the transformations which have brought female performance into the kiba fold. The first was made by Lucas Kgole, a musical entrepreneur who, with a female backing group, has recorded several albums with the company Gallo Africa, and who currently makes a living from herbalism in the village of Sephaku, in a district adjoining Sekhukhune. It asserts that dinaka, or men’s kiba, is more or less defunct in village life. Previously excluded from the genre, women are now seen as having revived it by starting to engage in its performance (albeit, in his case, under the patronage of a male groupleader). The second observation was made by a rural female singer in the Sekhukhune village group Dithabaneng. It indicates that, while women’s songs like marashiya were previously named separately, they now have the status of female parallels to standard items in the male repertoire, distinguished from these by being sung rather than rendered instrumentally and by the much more sedate style of dancing. What women’s monti shares with men’s, stylistically, is a distinctive pattern played on a set of four drums (meropa) [cf Fig 44]. Similarly paralleled by women’s equivalents, and similarly sharing with them easily recognised drumming patterns, are the other core songs in the men’s repertoire: lerago, kiba (from which the style takes its name), fesi, and others (see Tables 1.1-1.4).

273 _______________________________________________________________________ Table 1.1 Core songs documented by Huskisson in the 1950s, and still played today Monti Lerago Kiba Fesi

A regimental song Buttock (From ‘to stamp or beat time’)

_______________________________________________________________________ Table 1.2 Additional songs, played by some of the groups met by Huskisson, and still played today Madikoti Lekwapa O le metše Segoata-goatana Magana go bušwa

The girl with dimples Shangaan You used to steal The one who sneaks away They refuse to be ruled

_______________________________________________________________________ Table 1.3 Additional songs played today, not listed by Huskisson Mahlwa le mpona Mojeremane/ke epa thaba

You have always seen me German/I dig the mountain

The standard rhythm for each song in the male repertoire provides a kind of peg to which a range of women’s songs adapted from previously existing rural genres have been attached. In some cases, a man’s song may have only one female equivalent, but in others it has several, each with its own lyrics, melody and dancepattern (see Table 1.4). _______________________________________________________________________ Table 1.4 Some men’s tunes with women’s equivalents Men Women 1 Women 2 Lekwapa Lekwapa Lerago Setimela Monti Legalane Ke na lengwana wa mošemane Kiba Lebowa Sekopa sa maiesane

Women 3

Mpepetloane

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The multiplicity of women’s songs reflects two things: the greater diversity and scatter of home areas, and thus of female rural styles represented in a single woman’s group, and the greater improvisational challenge posed - and freedom allowed - by songs with lyrics than by those without. If lyrics can be heard and appreciated, they can also be adjusted to enable the precise expression of particular sentiments. It is in the creation of new lyrics, the re-creation of old lyrics, and the constant process of reinterpreting both that one can see women’s music, having sought legitimation within the recognised migrant genre of kiba, moving beyond the constraints imposed by this definition to express concerns of its own. If the features of women’s kiba suggest its recognition as a separate stylistic entity, this distinctiveness is most apparent in its links to older, rural-based female styles. Although the new style of kiba has become popular and has replaced older ones in both urban and rural areas, there is a continuity of musical features and of subject matter. Fragments of older songs are integrated into the context of newer ones, which are then reinterpreted by their performers: new lyrics are added which give older ones a different slant and which then provide the basis for a changed significance to an older song. This observation provides a key to understanding the contrast between the unheard lyrics of dinaka (pipes: men’s kiba) and the audible ones of dikoša (songs: women’s kiba). At first glance, this appears as a contrast between a nostalgia expressed in heroic and metaphoric terms for grand public occasions in bygone days, and a concern for domestic situations in the more recent past expressed with critical and often comical directness. Dinaka tell of beautiful virgins given to brave warriors in far-off times, while dikoša, like other women’s genres with similarly domestic preoccupations (Gunner 1989, 13, 33), comment wryly on such matters as the need to conceal an illicit love-affair from one’s husband. But this apparent preoccupation with the domestic and mostly rural setting of women’s experience conceals the capacity of these songs to undergo a continual process of recomposition and reinterpretation. They are thus not fixed in structure or in meaning, but are characterised by what Barber and others have called an ‘emergent’ quality. Lyrics which derive from older songs, and which on one level might be seen as reflecting on rural women’s domestic involvements in the past, on another level express a set of very contemporary and often urban-based concerns, and provide commentary on extra-domestic as well as domestic issues. The lyrics of these songs, like the West African oriki documented by Barber, consist of different parts which were composed by different people at different times, with the most recent contributions being those of the contemporary performer/composer herself (Barber 1984, 504). In women’s kiba, the solo singer adds her own new words on to those of an existing song, and sings the resulting combination interspersed with a chorus, usually also the song’s title, in which the other singers dumela (sing a repeated refrain, lit. ‘agree’). The juxtaposition of old and new elements may at first glance appear confusing: some chorus singers, questioned about the significance of lyrical

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remnants composed by unknown singers in the past, claim ignorance because they are from ‘an old song’. This suggests a throwing together of newer with older elements in a spontaneous and perhaps unconsidered way. But the use of these elements in the hands of accomplished composers, and their interpretation by seasoned performers and audiences, reveals a logical structuring which underlies this apparent lack of design. Themes of the lyrical fragments retained from past performance are often echoed, inverted, or transformed in those of the newly composed sections.282 It is through this structuring that the relevance of “the past in the present” is made explicit (Barber 1991, 15), and that statements of singers’ contemporary preoccupations, problems and aspirations are given a transcendent quality which links them to the concerns of previous generations, and to “tradition” (Vail and White 1991, 42; Coplan 1987, 415). […]

Fig 54 Rural women singers performing to greet their urban visitors, SK Alex. Mamone, Sekhuhkune © Santu Mofekeng

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Fig 55 SK Alex women: drummer and solo singer in performance © Santu Mofekeng Composers [situate] their criticisms within the context of history. The fragments of older songs may provide evocative descriptions of a past way of life in which leadership and area loyalty were sacrosanct. But the existing songs from which fragments are drawn may, themselves, describe more recent situations in which the deprivation, harassment and anxiety of the migrant existence are a feature. Setimela (steam train) is an example which demonstrates this point. The song, today performed by a range of women’s kiba groups, urban and rural, is presented here in the version sung by the rural-based group Dithabaneng: Setimela sa Mmamarwale / Nthshwanyana / Setimela nkabe se rwale buti bokgolwa / Buti e sa le a eya bokgolwa / Ngwana-mme o tla hwa ese ka mmona. / Setimela nkabe se rwale / Se re iseng ka lebowa khutlong sa thaba / Ka ntshe gago tsotsi gago mathatha. Train of Mmamarwale / Black carrier / Train should carry my brother from bokgolwa [i.e. the state of being a migrant who never returns] / My brother home from bokgolwa / My mother’s child would die without me seeing him. / Train should carry women / It would carry us to Lebowa mountain / Where there are no tsotsis [gangsters] and no problems.

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The first part of the song is a fragment which was composed about fifty years ago. The last three lines, recently composed by the leader of a neighbouring group and copied from it by Dithabaneng, evoked an elaborate and lively interpretation: They mean something that can carry them away from the past into the new style of living where there are no problems. I think they also have education in mind, where an educated person can rid his family members of financial problems. We are no longer, as in the past, milling our own crops, today we take them to the mill or get 283 mealie meal from the shops.

The original character of this song, with its plaintive cry by an individual girl about the absence of her migrant brother, has been transformed through new composition into a self-aware statement of female group identity, linked with notions of modernity and nationhood. At the same time, this optimistic view of the benefits brought by the ‘new style of living’ is mediated by linking it to the deprivation which women have previously suffered on account of migrancy and the modern way. Heartland rural singers, while orienting themselves to progress and the future, regard themselves and their performance as firmly situated within the world of sesotho.284 Another song which juxtaposes its composer’s experience with the relatively recent predicament of other women has harassment by police as its central theme. Paulina Mphoka, encouraged by her friends to compose a new song, added new lyrics to the existing ones of Mosadi wa sepankana:285 Mosadi wa sepankana, mosadi wa diphafaneng / O rekiša bjalwa / Mapodisa a ka Lebowa aa monyaka. / Tsodio o otile, mokgwa ntshe ga a robala / O tshwenya ke malome-agwe / E le go Matšhabataga / Tsodio o bolaile Matšhabataga / Le yena Tsodio o nyakwa ke mapodisa. / Basadi ba joinile ke masole / Batšea pasa le banna. Woman who wears a skin, woman of beer She sells beer The police of Lebowa are looking for her. Tsodio is thin, he does not sleep He is troubled by [the ghost of] his uncle Who is called MatCshabataga Tsodio has killed MatCshabataga He is also troubled by police. Women have now joined the soldiers They are getting passes just like men. The middle section is based on a song which, although part of the corpus of mmino wa setšo, was itself recently created by harepa player and composer Johannes Mokgwadi, one of the best-known exponents of mmino wa setšo in the Northern Province. It concerns the molesting by police of Tsodio, who, having killed his uncle Matšhabataga, is being both haunted by the ghost of his victim and plagued by the less ethereal representatives of law and order. This fairly neutral reference to the police is made more pointed by its juxtaposition with the last section, of two lines. Deriving from earlier female performance, this refers to the inclusion of women in the late 1950s within the legislation requiring Africans to

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carry passes. It records a time when, moving to South Africa’s urban areas, women became subject to the same indiscriminate raids and arrests by police which men had been experiencing for decades. Paulina’s own more recent experience of harassment, this time at the hands of the Lebowa rather than the South African police, is recorded in the first section, of three lines. Like a number of other kiba singers before they became migrants, she had supplemented her family’s income by brewing illegal liquor and had been arrested by police for doing so. This combining of three separate incidents lends a weight to each of them which it could not have possessed on its own. None has the links with precolonial rural experience which might be thought necessary to a genre claiming links with the past, but each enshrines a broader view, critical and detached from immediate experience, of such scenarios of harsh persecution. Paulina’s addition, here featuring as a new fragment set against an older backdrop, might some years hence appear as part of the collected stock of wisdom passed down from the experienced singers of the past to the novice composers of the future. But Paulina’s song is not only about police harassment. It has also been explained to me in other terms. It is about women’s new-found identity as migrants who, like soldiers, form strong collegial bonds, in a disciplined group, with others who share their situation away from home. Another interpretation foregrounds the quality of botho (humanity or human goodness), illustrated by default in the story of the murderous Tsodio. Described here in the context of other lyrics which refer to the strength and fortitude of women, botho becomes, against this backdrop, a quality especially of women. As with other ‘emergent’ genres, the audience interprets the lyrics’ significance, and may construct the song anew at different performances through their differing interpretations (Barber 1991, 15; Gunner 1989, 21).

Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town286 Denis-Constant Martin Denis-Constant Martin is a Research Director with the Centre for International Studies and Research (CERI) at Sciences-Po, Paris. His research focuses on the social representations of power and the expression of communal identities through popular culture, and has published on Charles Mingus, Chris McGregor, and the New Year carnival in Cape Town. He has been a regular contributor to Jazz Magazine (Paris) for the last 30 years. It’s midnight on New Year’s Eve in the Bo-Kaap, at the foot of Signal Hill. People flock to the pavements lining the narrow streets. Whole families - grownups, children and babies in their prams - arrive with folding chairs, picnic baskets, thermos bottles and blankets to keep warm in the cool summer night. Here and there small stalls have been erected where boerewors, samoosas or koeksisters can be bought. And Karima’s little shop at the corner of Rose Street and Longmarket Street is bursting at the seams - customers come and go with cooldrinks or curried sandwiches while in the kitchen friends of the owner are chatting over what will happen tonight, and during the year to come. There is an atmosphere of tranquil gaiety and friendliness, but there is nevertheless a sense of expectation. Voices are kept at a low level and all eyes regularly glance towards Wale Street. At about one o’clock in the morning the stoep of the Star Club is crowded solid as Capetonians continue to gather in Rose Street and the other main streets of the Bo-Kaap. The choirs At first it’s like a rumour. One can hear ‘they’re coming’ whispered by hundreds of mouths. And after a little while, a steady beat and a solid melody drift up from the direction of Wale Street. All stand up and try to see who is coming. A ‘board’ - the decorated emblem attached to a staff - is now in view, A voorloper, a drum major, appears and capers wearing his peculiar high hat adorned with ostrich feathers, followed by a group of men dressed in track suits and caps and carrying sticks. They walk a sort of dancing step until they stop in front of the Star Club. All along they have been singing and, as they come nearer, the words become clearer. It’s a moppie, a comic, upbeat song, making light of events that are a source of worry - in this case, the new VAT imposed on South African consumers. The group, a nagtroep, on other occasions also called a Hollandse team, sangkoor or Malay choir, stops at the foot of the stairs leading to the Club. Its members assemble in a half-circle, with guitars, cello and the ghoema drum at one end. A singer stands in the middle and starts a beautifully ornate tune in a high yet sweet

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voice. It is a love song, praising the faithfulness of a lovely sixteen-year-old girl. The choir answers quite squarely and on certain sentences the fusion (if the soloist’s melody and the chords sung by the group creates a unique, almost magic sound. When they are finished, the choir climb the steps to the Star Club and are congratulated by listeners massed on the stoep. Inside the club they are offered a tafel (literally. a ‘table’ in Afrikaans), drinks and snacks, biscuits or sweets. They do not stay very long for they have many other places to visit where the same ritual will be repeated. As they leave, another team arrives, sings and is welcomed into the Club. All night long, choirs march, sing and are offered tafels. They keep alive a very ancient Capetonian tradition. New Year’s Eve, in the summer, during the holidays, is the apex of what many people call the ‘Big Days’. The time of the year when one can have fun, when one can ‘let go’, whatever your circumstances, whatever pains and scorn have been endured during the past year. And when the sun rises on the first of January, those who remained in the Bo-Kaap all night long can still hear the last choirs’ harmonies floating in the streets. The Coons At about the same time, another episode of the New Year festivals is being prepared. Women and men, girls and boys gather at a klopskamer, that is, the headquarters of a carnival group known as a klops (club) or a Coon troupe. Some of them have marched with the nagtroepe in their track suits and must now don their Coon ‘uniform’. Others will arrive already wearing the costume of their team. And there will always be those who make the last minute decision to go with the Coons. Sometimes they beg the ‘captain’, the leader of the troupe, to give them a free uniform because circumstances have prevented them from paying their ‘laybyes’, the instalments delivered to the troupe’s treasurer during practices that have been taking place for several months. The captain must decide whether he can let some of the uniforms go at a last-minute ‘sale’ price or not. The costume of a troupe must differ from year to year and was originally inspired by the stage attire of nineteenth-century blackface minstrels - the same comedians who introduced the word ‘coon’ in Cape Town. The costume has evolved over the years and is now quite different from what can be seen on pictures taken at the turn of the century. Today, each Coon regardless of their sex needs a jacket and pair of trousers, cut in a shiny synthetic fabric which is still called ‘satin’, a hat and an umbrella. The style of the ‘gear’ is identical for most troupes, although an odd one may still sport the tailcoat and top hat that were the norm long ago. The exception is the few remaining troupes of Atjas - the ‘wild Indians’ who wear feather head-dresses, tomahawks and masks, and are accompanied by two red devils. Colours and decorations differ from troupe to troupe. Red, white and blue are always popular, assembled in innumerable designs, but all colours may be combined on a uniform: yellow, green, purple and white;

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pink, silver and black; rose, beige and black. Stars, stripes, polka dots and other motifs personalise the costume of a troupe and allow it to be identified easily. The troupes have peculiar names, many of them evoke the founding influence which touring groups of American blackface minstrels had on nineteenth-century Capetonian serenaders, while others are derived from film titles or borrowed from the international pop music scene. In the 1990s, some of the most popular troupes were the Young Pennsylvanians Crooning Minstrels, the Mississippi Nigger Minstrels, the Good Hope Entertainers, the Beach Boys, the Billionaire Boys. The Cape Town Hawkers emphasise the number of hawkers among their members and the Penny Pinchers All Stars [see Figs 56 & 57] advertise the name of their sponsor. Before leaving their klopskamer, members apply make-up to their faces. Some stick to the old minstrel pattern: black with white circles around the eyes and the mouth, or a variation on it where half the face is painted black and the other half white. Many now prefer to use bright colours and a sprinkling of glitter, while others do not put any make-up at all. Tradition demands that, when they are ready to go, the Coons, who have been joined by musicians, sing a song in honour of the captain and give the neighbours a preview of their choreographed march. If the headquarters are at the captain’s house, or if he does not stay too far from it, they can be offered some snacks and drinks before they board the buses that will drive them to the stadiums where competitions take place. […]

Fig 56 The Penny Pinchers All Stars marching on the Green Point Stadium Track 2 Jan 1999 © Melvin Matthews

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Coon competitions There are approximately twenty categories of competition. The competitions start on the afternoon of 1 January and continue through 2 January, Tweede Nuwe Jaar, and the following two Saturdays. The following are some of the categories in which the Coons compete: -

The Grand March Past - a parade in a quasi-military style The Exhibition March Past - displays more fantasy and is precisely choreographed Best Dress - for the most beautiful uniform Best Board - for the finest and most imaginative emblem Adult and juvenile Drum Majors - judged on the quality of their dances English and Afrikaans Combined Chorus and Group Singing - songs rendered by the troupe’s choir, usually in part harmony English and Afrikaans moppies - comic songs sung by a soloist and the choir Juvenile and Adult Sentimentals - love songs interpreted by a soloist and frequently borrowed from pop music Best Band - awarded to the best brass band accompanying the troupe on the road and in some of the competitions Coon Song - an American tune, a jazz standard or a Tin Pan Alley success, sung by a soloist

Fig 57 Close-up of Penny Pinchers All Stars showing instrumentalists © Melvin Matthews -

The Special Item - any form of performance chosen by the troupe and presented during twenty to thirty minutes. It can be a succession of comic skits, a musical show, a display of acrobatics or any mixture of these. It is frequently the occasion for addressing current issues in the languages of

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contemporary entertainment; violence, drugs, political events treated in rap, disco and techno are regular features of Special Items in the 1990s. But the nostalgic memory of a District Six bioscope (movie theatre), the mad surgeon operating with a saw, the laughing policeman or the stereotyped Babu Indian are also often staged. The competitions are judged by a panel of adjudicators and every troupe scores points in each of the competitions. For every category, the first three troupes are awarded a trophy, a cup or an engraved shield which will be kept at the klopskamer or at the captain’s house until the next Coon Carnival. The overall winner is the troupe which has been given the highest total of points when the results of the different competitions are added up. Winning a trophy and being the carnival champion confer prestige and contribute to the popularity of a troupe. On the last Saturday of carnival when the adjudicators announce the results and the prizes are awarded to the winning captains, the carnival ends tumultuously with troupe members and spectators singing and dancing on the playing field while a few disgruntled leaders argue and contest the judges’ decisions. Late in the night, the troupes go back to their klopskamer, riding buses or walking when it is possible, singing and proudly displaying the trophies they have won. After the competitions, the captains have to offer a tafel to thank all those who have contributed to the troupe’s strength and the quality of its performances. This usually takes the form of a festive meeting in the area surrounding the headquarters. […] Captains and committees The captain is the undisputed leader of his troupe. He funds the troupe, invests his own money, collects contributions from his friends and looks for sponsors. He also hires the musical director, the musicians and the soloists, organises the transport, decides on the colours, buys the material and places orders with the tailors who cut and sell his uniforms. In popular parlance, it is frequently said that the captain ‘owns’ a troupe and he will often speak of ‘his Coon’, meaning his troupe. Although the captain is the one responsible for the aesthetics of his troupe, his main concerns are always financial. Most troupe captains complain that they lose money when ‘investing’ in a troupe although some of them, even when all expenses are taken into account, may well end up with a profit. […] The captain of a popular medium-sized troupe explains his worries as follows: I was in different Coons already you know, say four or five Coons and troupes I was in already, so as the time went on, myself I also wanted to own my own Coons … I’m only a man that works, I work by the [City] Council and now me and my son we had a few blokes, we had to put our money together … This one gave 200 Rands, 500. Now we had to buy the material for the Coons. Even the man who

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plays the guitar or banjo, you have to pay him, even if you want to buy a hat in a shop you have to pay you know, it’s a lot of work and business inside in the Coons. For people who just enjoy themselves, it’s all right. If you come as a Coon member, you pay your money. The captain want 100 Rands or 120 Rands, you pay your 120 Rands, then you don’t have that worries anymore, you just get your uniform and there you go. But you that’s working for the Coons, like you’re the captain, you’ve got a lot of hassles during the few months that you start preparing for the year that is coming on you see … One of the committees follows up: You see the thing in this being a captain, you’ve got responsibility. Say for instance I’m a member, now I start drinking, I get drunk, now I’m messing around with you and fiddling around with her and then the captain comes. If you don’t obey him, he take off your cloth and once you’re without cloth, you’re no Coons anymore … So if you don’t listen to him then you must go, and you don’t feel like going because you also got that feeling of New Year …287 […] The captain also hires solo singers and, when he can afford it, tries to attract famous artists. The troupe may also feature acrobats or a moffie who follows the drum majors … The carnival moffie is a homosexual who parades in women’s clothes and usually likes to dress in an extravagant way. There are no formal competitions for moffies, although there have been moffie troupes and shows outside of the carnival in the past. Many captains, however, consider the moffie to be very important element of their troupe because ‘she’ brings popular support, because she commands a respect, which homosexuals are not granted in ordinary society and because she symbolises autonomy and the freedom to choose her own costume and appearance.

Nazarite Hymns288 Carol Muller Carol Muller studied at the University of Natal and completed her Ph.D. at New York University in 1994. Her research has included migrant performance, indigenous religious practices, gumboot dance, women’s narratives, white South African popular music, and South African women in jazz. Muller is Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Nazarite song performance practice: women’s ukusina Isaiah Shembe was a supreme bricoleur. In song performance he combined the hegemonies of both Nguni tradition and European Christianity to create his own repertory. These hymns in their written form reflected the powerful medium of mission Christianity, and in practice, that of Nguni tradition. He then juxtaposed song performance with sacred dance, accompanied by an indigenized trumpet and bass drum289 (which may also have been copied from the model of the Salvation Army marching bands).290 Isaiah thereby constituted a music and dance style that articulated the tensions between the powerful signs and symbols of mission Christianity and those of his own religious tradition. Isaiah instilled in his repertory of song and its accompanying dance performance practice the privileges and untouchability of hegemonic practice. He inscribed Nazarite song and dance into the domain of the sacred - where it is (theoretically) immutable, and always capable of reenactment, wherever there is a collective gathering of Nazarite believers. The earliest recorded evidence of the emergence of Nazarite style is found on a recording made by Hugh Tracey291 and issued by Gallotone (South Africa) in 1948. It contains one of Isaiah Shembe’s best-known hymns, number 183, entitled Lalela Zulu (Listen, O Zulu).292 Percival Kirby comments on the recording. He writes: There is no doubt that in Shembe’s hymn ‘Lalela Zulu’ we have authentic Zulu 293 choral music, such as the early pioneers in Natal must have heard. This hymn is of great interest, for its music dates back at least to the days of Chief Mpande (1840294 72). The main melody is pentatonic, as might be expected, and it is executed by baritone voices. But at times, deeper voices, which normally sing in parallel with the others, double the melody in the lower octave. The ‘embroideries’ sung by the women are of a comparatively free nature (Kirby 1971, 249-50).

Both Kirby’s remarks and Tracey’s rather early recording are particularly salient for the analysis of Nazarite performance practice and style, specifically as they pertain to women’s participation. Kirby comments on the free nature of the women’s sung ‘embroideries’, pointing to the seemingly ornamental (and implicitly peripheral) function of

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women’s voices in the sound image. This is perhaps a result of Hugh Tracey’s recording technique, because the women are placed so far from the recording equipment that they can hardly be heard. It was obviously the ‘main’ melody, as sung by the mostly male voices singing in parallel (among which there may have been the voices of young girls), that was deemed the most important musical parameter by these two men. Based on my own field recordings of women’s song performances, I suggest that it is rather the ‘free nature’ of the women’s voices that constituted the emergent sense of Nazarite style. This is what sets it apart from other missionderived African hymn performance in the late 1930s, the time when the recording was apparently made. While Tracey and Kirby may have been correct in attributing different musical functions to men’s and women’s voices, they were wrong in privileging the function of a main melody over the freedom of the women’s voices. I propose that this ‘freedom’ forms the substance of the Nazarite melodic and rhythmic texture. It is indeed this ‘free nature’ and complex rhythmic texture articulated in song and dance performance (along with the indigenous poetic texts) that has defined Nazarite performance style in the region. I argue, therefore, that the definitive element of Nazarite performance style is embodied in the Nazarite notion of rhythm, particularly as it is articulated in the women’s performances at the meetings of ama14.295 This conceptualization of style emerges most powerfully in the contexts in which song is integrally related to religious dance (ukusina). It is this style that encapsulates the most sacred form of Nazarite ritual, and also represents the strongest break with Western hymn performance practice, thereby encapsulating the “objections to the ruling ideology” (Hebdige 1979). […] Married women’s ukusina performance For the purpose of analysis, I have focused on a single kind of Nazarite song. This is the genre that accompanies religious dance. The specific performance includes two stanzas of Nazarite Hymn 45, Ngamemeza ebusuku nemini (I cried out night and day), which I recorded at a meeting of ama14 at Vula Masango on March 13, 1992. At the meeting of ama14, women’s dance296 usually takes place in the first half of the meeting. This particular performance of the two stanzas lasted about forty-five minutes. The overall structuring of a Nazarite hymn for dance performance was explained to me by Bongani Mthethwa’s daughter Khethiwe.297 […] [Frame 6] One of the most powerful aesthetic preferences, not only in song performance but indeed, in the religious community as a whole, is to do things slowly, never to hurry, and always to take time. Similarly, the singing of a single stanza of a hymn can take as much as an hour to complete. The momentum of performance, however, is maintained through a gradual intensification of all musical parameters over an extended period of time. In this regard, the song starts

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at about 60 quarter notes per minute, and speeds up to about 90 quarter notes per minute before it suddenly drops off; the ‘key’ of the performance rises gradually (in this recorded performance it moved up a fourth from ca. C major to ca. F major); the improvisation becomes more intricate, and a greater number of musical layers appears as more women sing different parts, and all the drummers and trumpeters enter. The increased musical intensity is paralleled by an augmentation of emotional excitement, of bodily movement, and of the sense of social unity. This is the feeling of community wholeness articulated by Feld (1988) as ‘getting into the groove’, or ‘finding the beat’. Such collective unity, however, is not created by everybody singing or playing the same pitches or harmonies, as happens in Western hymn-singing. Instead, the ideal Nazarite performative texture is one in which every voice is individually heard in the context of a densely articulated texture - in relationship to the multiplicity of other voices. The melodic lines in particular facilitate the weaving in and out of the fixed beat of the dancing, drumming, and handclapping. More than any other ‘voice’ in the fabric, the singers create what Feld defines as the ‘in-sync’ but ‘out-of-phase’ sensation of musical performance. This sense of style is crystallized by Keil’s (1987) concept of ‘participatory discrepancy’ - those who are ‘out of time’ and ‘out of tune’. The most spiritually mature, and certainly the most proficient song performers, are always those who just ‘miss the beat’. This is clearly evident in recorded performances of women’s meetings in which there were a large number of spiritual leaders performing.298 […] [Frame 7 ] ‘Getting into the groove’ and ‘feeling the beat’ emerge from the music but are components of an inherently social process. Each singer and dancer must actively ‘tune in’ to what is happening musically (and emotionally) around her in the context of ukusina performance, and respond accordingly. This participation requires sonic reciprocity - what one person sings or calls is answered by another. But this answer is never an exact repetition of what was heard. It creates its own sonic space and identity through slight rhythmic or pitch discrepancies. The answer always overlaps to some extent with the end of the call it takes on something of the musical identity of the caller - to create a sense of continuity, and to avoid rupture and silence. It then fabricates its own sound and rhythm. In turn, this answer becomes someone else’s call, which is then answered in a slightly discrepant tone and form.

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Fig 58 32-beat cycle of Hymn 45: Ngamemeza ebusuku nemini (I cried out night and day)

Stefans Grové: Sonate op Afrika-motiewe299 Stephanus Muller Stephanus J. van Z. Muller is a graduate of the University of Pretoria and Balliol College, Oxford, and teaches at the University of Stellenbosch. He also works as a free-lance writer and journalist, and is writing a biography of Arnold van Wyk. His research is concerned with issues of identity in South African art music. Ek ken die Afrika-son wat warm op my musiek skyn. Ek ken die nagsugte en die fluistering van die ‘vuurmense’ oor eeue-oue dinge in die skadu’s van vervloë mane. Ek voel die geluid van Afrika in hart en wese. Ek is ’n Afrikamens wat Afrika-musiek skryf. [I know the African sun that shines warmly on my music. I know the sighs of the night and the whispers of the fire people about ancient things in the shadows of passing moons. I feel the sound of Africa in heart and soul. I am an African person writing African music] (Grové 1997a). Afrika-mens/Africa(n) person Afrika-mens. Africa(n) person. Not African, but Africa(n) person. Somehow the English translation of the Afrikaans concept is inadequate, for what the speaker refers to is more a state of being than a description or classification of race, nationality or even geographical origin. It is African existence as a lived symbolic form, as opposed to blander ‘namings’ such as ‘South African’ or even the irremediably pejorative ‘Afrikaner’. An Africa(n) person composing Africa. How does this music sound and where does it come from? Europe, where Stefans Grové’s ancestors hail from, the United States, where he spent eighteen years teaching and composing, or (South) Africa, where he has only ever lived in white suburbia? None of these, Grové seems to say when he writes of his seminal Sonate op Afrika-motiewe, a work composed for violin and piano in 1984: This sonata … is the first work I composed after my stylistic Damascus Road experience. It can be seen as a bridge between my Eurocentric and my Afrocentric styles, as the first two sections represent my leave taking of my previous style, whilst the last three are my first homage to the way I am bound to Africa [Afrika gebondenheid]. The last three parts are based on an indigenous song that I heard one day, under the midday sun, as sung by a pick-ax wielding black man. The song first appears in its totality at the beginning of Finale II. In parts 3 and 4 fragments thereof try finding their way, and the strongest of the motives is worked out to such

290 an extent that the appearance of the ‘mother theme’ from which it is taken, forms a logical conclusion (Grové 1997b).

Where does this music come from? The question of where this music comes from elicits a surprising response. A stylistic Damascus Road experience suggests that it comes from ‘above’, or ‘beyond’, or ‘inside’, or wherever that place is that is inhabited by metaphysics and/or divine inspiration. It is, however, Jean Cocteau to whom Grové points as the catalyst of his musical catharsis - his pronouncement that “the more a poet sings from his family tree, the more authentic his song will be” (Grové 1997a), supposedly triggering the Sonate op Afrika-motiewe and with it Grové’s musical ‘African’ series in 1984. We return to Grové’s short programme note on the Sonate, and specially mention of the indigenous song. It is worth pausing on the idea of this song (see Ex 56), that recalls the Primitivism so much in vogue during the previous fin de siècle and the early part of the twentieth century; a Primitivism very much part of the panoramic modernist gaze enmeshed in the ideologies of empire and colonialism. Meno mosso q = 138 Sul D .

Violin

        

         

       

           

f

Ex 56 Sonate op Afrika-motiewe Finale 2, violin, bars 7-10 Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907, the picture symbolising the inauguration of Modernism in the arts, provides a fitting analogy to Grové’s use of an African melody. Like Grové’s five movements, three of Picasso’s five female figures display stylised African masks. The figures blunt our perspective, the space of the room creates the feeling that everything is pushed to the surface. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was the beginning of the end for perspective in painting in favour of simultaneity of exterior and interior, of inner and outer space. A revolutionary idea of space-time, availing itself of the voodoo magic of ancient and primitive ritual, where the conceptual rudimentariness of the African art is perhaps more of an energizing authority than an obsession with primitive societies of a distant past. Grové’s ‘song’ is a bit like these stylized African masks, sharing their space with the two remaining etiolated European faces: ahistorical, anonymous and devoid of the political potency infusing the song of the African who, under the strain of centuries of repression, breaks into song. But there is more to Grové’s project than the trajectory linking his practice with the Primitivists would suggest, and it is to trace the multiple references and overlapping fields of meaning that we

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now turn to examine the Sonate op Afrika-motiewe, indexing as it does the more ambiguous discourses and phantasms of belonging that refute the idea of cultural homogeneity and that constitute the politics of memory and the search for new identities in post-apartheid South Africa. Sonate op Afrika-motiewe: contrast between the first two movements and the rest The five parts of the sonata are called Recitativo: Notturno 1; Ditirambo; Intermezzo: Finale 1; Notturno 2; Finale 2. As Grové himself has indicated, the first two movements fit together conceptually, as do the last three. At first hearing, a significant contrast does indeed become apparent between the first two movements and the rest of the work: in the former the absence of an identifiable melodic, harmonic or rhythmic idea creates a universal law impervious to the accident of time and place. As Christopher Waterman has pointed out, the metaphoric forging of correspondences between musical and social order is often more a matter of expressive qualities (timbre, texture, rhythmic flow) than of abstracted musical structures (in Erlmann 1996, 236-37) and indeed the selfconscious juxtaposition of registral soundscapes in these two movements becomes primarily a deception of universal space. Diachronic time absents itself from movements one and two: static passages hypnotize temporal awareness in movement one, fractured melodicism mesmerizes the listener in its almost palpable sensuous sound in movement two. Time and place float out of reach in the fusion of the composer’s own deep spirituality and modernity in a dream of unity and wholeness of which the ‘meaning’ is no longer in the world (and therefore not merely global), but truly transcendental and universal. But the claim to this kind of ‘wholeness’ can be traced to a Platonic-Christian metaphysic scope that is essentially anti-terrestrial and where the ‘truth’ can only be asserted in what Wole Soyinka has succinctly described as “an idea of the cosmos that recedes so far, that while it retains something of the grandeur of the infinite, it loses the essence of the tangible and the immediate” (in Soyinka 1976, 3-4). In movements one and two we therefore observe modernism’s deceitful conceit: the promise of wholeness exposed as an imagined unity, maintained only by the sheer impossibility of bridging the chasm between the tangible and the imagined. In movements three, four and five, however, this cosmic Manichaeism is shattered by the motivic scatterings of the song breaking forth from the African soil, as it were. Time and space are localized and cosmic totality reasserted by reclaiming that mundane part of it which is the local place. The invented nature of the category ‘indigenous’ in Grové’s description of the song he uses, invoking long-defunct Western fixities of place and identity, hardly matters. Though not reducible to a local dialect - “working in Afrikaans” as Breyten Breytenbach contentiously asserts of the painter François Krige (Breytenbach 1998, 117) Grové’s music does posit (like Krige’s paintings) the possibility that the ‘universal’

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embracing African and Western musics lies not at the level of immanent structures, but at the level of poietic, (production) and esthesic (reception) strategies (Nattiez 1990, 76). It is a move that partakes “of the goal of all symbolic practice: the returning of the whole” (Erlmann 1996, 133), becoming no less than the transformative gesture of the global imagination with which Grové enters Soyinka’s ‘fourth space’ of African metaphysics: “the dark continuum of transition where occurs the inter-transmutation of essence-ideal and materiality” (Soyinka 1976, 26). Structural relationship in this sonata There is another structural relationship at work in the sonata - one that is first hinted at not in the music but in the accompanying rubrics - that suggest that movements one (Notturno 1) and four (Notturno 2) have a special relationship, as do movements three (Finale 1) and five (Finale 2). Finale 1 and Finale 2 exhibit obvious similarities: the motoric momentum, the ever more recognizable African melody, the airy textures, the dance-like rhythm. Finale 2 takes the music up where Finale 1 has left it, providing the postponed ending to the false start of the end promised by Finale 1 (movement three). It is Notturno 2 that creates a fissure in this act of closure. The rubric inevitably turns our thoughts back to movement one, also entitled Notturno. It is not difficult to see or hear the musical relationship between the two movements, a relationship most notably confirmed by a dialogic form and piano chords composed out in elaborate diminutions (see Exs 57 and 58). But there is also a difference: in Notturno 1 the violin’s voice, although distinct, remains anonymous, whereas the emerging violin in Notturno 2 can be recognized as belonging to both Africa (the first notes of its initial appearance, marked in bars 4 and 6 of Ex 58, are taken from the African song), and to the occidental world of the first nocturne. This latter identity is the result of the repeated major 2nd interval (marked in bars 4 and 6 of Ex 58), that follows the ‘African’ notes, and which is taken from the first two notes of the violin in Notturno 1 (first two notes of bar 2 of Ex 57). Though made present by the iconic prominence of the major 2nd, the latter world is now transformed (transposed): the distinctness of the major 2nd concatenated into a single sound gesture by a glissando that becomes a feature of its subsequent appearances. The two worlds (South) Africa and the West, are imagined on a sliding scale transfiguring power from the structured interval of measured difference to the agency of the irreducibly ambiguous physical sound that now fills it.

293 Sognante = 54 Violin

 



     Piano

p

mp

 

  



marc.

    

 mf  

 





 

mp

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

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mf

           f

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p



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

pp







 

mp

    

mf

 







f

  



 

 



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Pno

  

p sub

 

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    

Vln

mf

 

pp

 

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     

Pno

Vln



non vibr



mf  

  mp

 



  

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  

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 poco accel. 3

rit

flautando

 5  (vibr) non vibr                                     pp `p mf p f mf p          

nat.

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

3

 mf

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

 

294 2 Vln

  

mp   

  

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

p

  

 

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Sul G nat 

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  

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 5 3 3 5                      

p

mf

    

  

 



   

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          

sf

mf

 

p  

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 4

   

senza vibr

3

                         pp

pp p

f

dim.

p





Pno   



Ex 57 Sonate op Afrika-motiewe Notturno 1, violin and piano, bars 1-6



295

Ex 58 Sonate op Afrika-motiewe Notturno 2, violin and piano, bars 1-7 […] And yet, despite this almost mystical use of soundmaterial, it is clear that the conception of the work owes more to the Beethovenian reworking of small motivic cells in an exquisitely translucent counterpoint than to a process of exotic collage. A theme is prepared in such a way in order that its appearance at the apotheosis of the work is perceived as ‘logical’. That this material is derived from an African theme is almost incidental, but nevertheless noteworthy in one important respect: Grové uses his technical facility as an art music composer to make the outcome,

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which he imagines as the transculturated movement, sound ‘logical’. One might add, ‘natural’. The technique used is anything but natural in relation to the aims sought, and we are reminded of Arnold Schoenberg’s (1984, 167-69) disapproval of what is in fact a Bartókian idea: …ideas from folk-art [are] treated according to a technique that [was] created for ideas of a more highly developed kind. The difference between these two ways of presenting an idea [is] overlooked, and there may even be an underlying difference between two whole ways of thinking.

What Schoenberg did not think possible is what we are contemplating here: that this perceived discontinuity between materiality and technique can only be resolved in the person of the composer, who experiences both African (sonic) identity movement and the technical means with which he manipulates it as ‘logical’ and ‘natural’ and thus as somehow not only compatible but even the same, or identical. To interrogate Grové’s Africanicity (especially as a token of political good faith) is of no use. To quote Roland Barthes writing about Erté’s Women, it says nothing more than itself, “being scarcely more loquacious … than a dictionary which gives the … definition of a word, and not its poetic future” (Barthes 1991, 114). The characteristic of the signifier is to be a departure; and the signifying point of departure, in Grové’s music, is not Africa; it is Authenticity, i.e. a restoration of (art) music as symbolic fact into a living social and cultural content. The music’s conceit is that of a microcosm, which, as Wole Soyinka has written with regard to ritual African theatre, “involves a loss of individuation, a selfsubmergence in universal essence” (in Soyinka 1976, 42). But with Grové the loss of individuation taken aboard by vicariously adopting Africa as ‘theme’ is checked by the vigorous assertion of creative individualism that makes diversity the single most common denominator of the composer’s ‘African series’, and while the name of ‘Africa’ is invoked over all this difference, it would be fanciful to say that these compositions evoke ‘Africa’ in any sense. Grové’s (possibly disputed) success in denoting ‘Africa’ is not immediately (if ever) apparent in or through his soundscapes, but rather through the concurrent structures of titles, fables, dreams, intertexts, narratives and descriptions. […] Grové is in step with what André P. Brink has called “the inevitable return to roots which political events and the fin de siècle have prompted in South African writing across the cultural spectrum” (Brink 1998, 26). This constant in Grové’s compositions since 1984, namely that we have musical structures existing side-byside with linguistic ones, also manages to leave much unsaid. In fact, Grové creates two heterogeneous structures that occupy separate if contiguous spaces informing one another, but refusing either to homogenize or mingle. The denoted message of ‘Africa’ is, for now, nothing but Name - open and vague - and therefore

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encouraging of connotation. How do we relate the analog (which is the Name) to the concurrent musical structure? I have tried to show how, in the case of the Sonate op Afrika-motiewe, this can be done as an act of conscious imagination, but not without the aid of language. Grové knows, and here I am following Barthes closely again, that the Name has an absolute (and sufficient) power of evocation; that if a work is called Africa Hymnus, for example, we need not look for Africa anywhere except, precisely, in the Name. To write Boesmansliedere is to hear Bushmen. Ignore the title (language), the composition, it would seem, escapes. […] This is music that conceives of Africa as a meaning (and identity), not as subject. But, and this is an important difference, with Grové the adoption of Africa as analog is both an act of participation in the reconstitution of meaning and social gestus. This music does not metaphorically enact the crossing of two radically opposed worlds, but rather suggests a gesture at interaction between two facets of the same social space.

Abdullah Ibrahim and the Uses of Memory300 Christine Lucia Christine Lucia is Professor and Chair of Music at the University of the Witwatersrand, and she previously held posts at the Universities of Natal, DurbanWestville and Rhodes. Her publications have been concerned with multicultural education, Schumann’s chamber music, women musicians, and South African music. Born in London, Lucia emigrated to South Africa in 1974. The name Ibrahim has given to successive ensembles from the 1970s onwards is ‘Ekaya’ (Xhosa = ‘home’), and home is a recurring motive both in his many interviews and in texts associated with his music (titles, liner notes, occasional lyrics). In 1976 Ibrahim went into exile, a word inadequate to denote the cruel act of distancing that gives poignant resonance to expressions of cultural belonging. In exile an uneasy psycho-physical continuity was severed, and in order to continue it symbolically and artistically - perhaps also out of sheer self-defence against the alienating environment of New York - some reconnection with ‘home’ had to be made. One obvious way of doing this was by evoking the power of memory, using the past to create an anchor that that had both a spatial axis (South Africa the place) and a temporal one (South Africa the past).301 … By referencing the past in musical ways [Ibrahim] created an affective mode of expression [whose] denotative power depended on shared associations among listeners from very different (South African) backgrounds. And it did so through evoking the power of memory. There are probably any number of Ibrahim’s tunes through which one could trace the workings of this power, but ‘Mamma’ - which exists in two recordings, one for solo piano and one for ensemble,302 although not Ibrahim’s best-known composition (of those from the 1970s most people would probably choose ‘Mannenberg’, ‘Soweto’, or ‘The Wedding’) - uses the tug of memory perhaps even more effectively. It does so, I suggest, because it is composed in the tradition of a generic and widely significant medium, the spiritual or hymn, in tandem with conventional blues form. Originating from the late 1960s (Rasmussen 2000, 10), ‘Mamma’ first appeared on record in 1973 on an album called African Sketchbook.303 [ …] In the first phase of its reception this piece addressed a South African audience that had been locked into a network of laws and practices that governed every aspect of life: upbringing, school, education, entertainment, where you lived and with whom you would ‘normally’ speak; a Foucaultian grid of surveillance second to none. Cultural difference was inscribed as racial difference, which paradoxically meant that bi-culturalism … (American and African music conjoined in the aural memory) did not officially exist. School history was rewritten as the history of the Afrikaners and British; millions of people were uprooted from places where their

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families had lived for generations. An acute dislocation of place and identity resulted in the development of the need for an imagined past embedded not in national or regional history but in personal memory. The present was a suspended sentence, and an overwhelmingly future-oriented discourse gradually gathered momentum during the 1970s and ’80s in all forms of cultural representation, including poetry, visual art, fiction, drama, film and academic writing. The experience of such dislocation was important part of what Ibrahim’s music articulated and partly explains, I think, the significance of its reception. It resonated directly with those fractured “realms of memory” (Nora 1996) that constitute the past from which people had become culturally severed. How did it do this? The music itself is unassuming and unaffected, as my transcription of the 1973 recording shows (Ex 59). x

A

                      I

   

    

z

   

  

   

   

        

(V)

A'

  

y

    

    

IV

z

 

         I

 

    

 

 

    

    



 

    

 

 

    

    

 

(IV)

(I)

x y   z                                                (ii)

y

    

(I)

B'

(I)

x

   

(V)

x

y

I

z



 



   

 

I

Ex 59 Author’s transcription of the 1973 recording of ‘Mamma’ by Abdullah Ibrahim

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[…] ‘Mamma’ is clearly not a jazz tune in the ordinary sense.304 It is played with almost identical harmonisation and chord voicings from verse to verse and from one recording to the other: surely, then, a set piece rather than a skeleton tune to be fleshed out. It is as if ways to treat the tune are deliberately restricted, and perhaps this is what Ibrahim intended, for he recalls in an interview that hymns and spirituals were always “played more or less the same” (outside the context of jazz) “because there’s not much you can do to a spiritual except sing it as it is” (quoted in Palmer 1985, 21). Another obvious thing to say about the piece - as it is - is the way its chords are rooted in church hymnody. Their voicings come from a pianist’s sense of keyboard geography, never far from the imagined distribution of voices in a choir. ‘Mamma’ could be any congregational hymn of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, as found in the black American Alexander Hymnal for example. It is the kind of tune and harmonization Ibrahim heard frequently in his childhood in the American Methodist Episcopal Church where his mother played the piano (Palmer 1985, 21). It has an eminently singable melodic line although there are no words (on the 1973 recording Ibrahim hums along reminiscently as he plays), and one or two arching leaps mark focal points of the tune’s AA'B structure. The harmony includes the kind of chromatic inflection used in nineteenth-century hymns - substitute chords or ‘secondary dominants’ enhancing the primary triads I, IV, V to which the harmonies are tied by a kind of centrifugal force … [It] can be seen as an essence, a residue of the syntax of centuries of encounter between English, Dutch, German and North American hymns and psalms and indigenous music, where chords such as I, IV, V have dissolved into the vast complexity of a gradually modernizing Africa. Victorian Hymns, psalms, choruses and part-songs co-opted by the colonized, reconstituted, defamiliarized, and used in a variety of new compositional ways and cultural scenarios. As indeed here. ‘Mamma’ is more than a hymn embodying the history of South African music that uses I, IV, V;305 it is a kind of collective memory, its cloying, homey style connoting family, church, identity, a certain respectability.306 [ …] The key to Ibrahim’s ‘decentring’ or ‘remastery’ of a hymnic chord progression lies partly in his treatment of it as jazz. Yet on the 1973 solo recording of this piece Ibrahim’s style of playing is not immediately obvious as jazz. He begins tentatively, the music sounding as if it were being remembered, or remembering itself: “traditionally everything was remembered”, comments Ibrahim in one of his interviews. “The notebook has messed up our memory … What I do is more like … crystallising an experience. It’s like a seed growing in the dark” (Ibrahim quoted in Palmer 1985, 20, 21). The seed grows into a twelve-bar tune that Ibrahim plays four times over without any variation or improvisation beyond an increasingly syncopated rhythm. In a sense he becomes the organist, the listeners his congregation. The way he intensifies emotion from verse to verse as an organist would - gradually ‘thickening’ the sound (through rising dynamics in place of

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registration) - is reminiscent of congregational practice rather than jazz. One place of memory that Ibrahim established here, then, is the church and all its associations with family histories, traditions, community practices, congregational singing, rituals and symbols of all kinds. Above all, the ‘place’ is not only a building or an institution, it is a remembered community, recalled in sound; and as with Ibrahim, so for many listeners in the 1970s: it was the sound of childhood. ‘Mamma’ is hymnodic in its presentation of stanzaic repetitions, harmonies and chord voicings, yet it is not a hymn in structure. It is a twelve-bar blues, displaying the classic structure of three lines of four-bar material and an overall AA'B form. [ …] Classic blues structure Bars A Bars A' Bars B

1 I 5 IV 9 V

2 I 6 IV 10 IV

3 I 7 I 11 I

4 I 8 I 12 I (+ turnaround …)

2 V 6 IV 10 IV (ii)

3 I (IV) I (ii) 7 I (IV) I (ii) 11 V

4 I (V/vi vi V/IV) 8 I (V/vi) 12 I (+ turnaround …)

Structure of ‘Mamma’ Bars A Bars A' Bars B

1 I 5 IV 9 (vi I)

The first line of ‘Mamma’ (A) is tonic-based - a tonic reinforced by skirmishes with other chords. The second line (A') is related to the first melodically while deviating harmonically - beginning in the subdominant then moving back to tonic. The third line veers between dominant, subdominant and tonic. Such a pattern is recognizably blues, however freely treated.307 Two moments when the classic blues chord sequence is interrupted - bars 2 and 11 where chord V is given in italics on the score [above] - are the opening and closing phrases of the tune where, for example, in a hymn one might find an imperfect (I-V) or perfect (V-I) cadence: these are the moments, one might say, where the language of hymning takes over from the language of bluesing. The syncopated rhythm of ‘Mamma’s opening motif articulates the rhythm of the word ‘mamma’ (pronounced as one would say ‘mother’ - and another obvious realm of memory). [ …]

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Listening to the 1973 solo recording one is alerted to one further aspect of ‘Mamma’, which is its rhythm. Ibrahim plays the tune within a continuous sequence or “collage” (Mellers 1983), in his customary solo style. It emerges cautiously out of the previous tune, as if Ibrahim is piecing it together fragment by fragment from a store of memories. The ending dovetails into the next tune where another side of the composer altogether is revealed; a plunge into something darker, more dissonant. As ‘Mamma’ begins, then, the sense one has is of being taken on a journey, the rhythm coming into being under Ibrahim’s fingers as they slowly recover ‘lost time’. The tune solidifies into the metrical average (my transcription) only from the third verse. This arrival brings with it a certain feeling of regret, and by the close it has become imbued with a profound sense of loss. In this sense, the piece is not so much an embodiment of nostalgia as a journey towards nostalgia. This is not merely an impromptu recall of the past, unsolicited, surprising us with the force of “unanticipated recollection” (Botstein 2000, 535); we are taken there. More than this, the past is not only Ibrahim’s personal past, or the past of Cape Town or of South Africa’s bruised history; it is an ideal past that the listener is invited to share, and one that we can share because it is an imaginary, archetypal terrain, the lost domain of childhood, inscribed through the title of the piece as the unimaginably sweet and forever unattainable realm that embodies the genesis of our being. We are talking about a symbol: ‘mamma’ as security, sense of being, utopian place. Memories of individuals, collected through oral testimonies - the approach of oral history and ethnomusicology - would in terms of this paper only tells us what Ibrahim is remembered for … It is Ibrahim’s evocation of collective memory, in the sense of memory as history, that I am exploring through this piece: his way of drawing listeners into a social participation where music function as a mnemonic device for recalling the subjectivity of a shared experience. [ …] [M]emory - the past - is evoked through Ibrahim’s music and becomes present. But it is not the real present, the ‘cruel reality’ of Ibrahim’s poem, the fractured society of 1970s South Africa. The presence of the past that music evokes is much freer than this, much less chained to time and place, beyond the control of political surveillance. It can be whatever the listener wants it to be, and it is here that the performative element becomes crucial. Ibrahim as performer-composer had a very powerful agency to aid the process of memory-formation. Audiences at live concerts were not simply passive listeners; they shared in an act of remembering. This was particularly true of his solo concerts in South Africa, where, typically, he would play for ninety minutes to two hours without stopping, weaving together the collage of tunes that I referred to earlier, often in an atmosphere charged with emotion.308 The axes of time and space across which memory worked became blurred: music, the focal point where the axes cross, offered an uncontaminated site where the process of remembering and imagining could blossom. This site, even while filled with the presence of sounds, held at the same time a consciousness of certain absences. Michel de Certeau has put this beautifully in his

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essay ‘Walking in the City’ (1987). Reading the city of Manhattan as a text (from, poignantly, now, the 107th floor of the World Trade Center), Certeau uses the notion of ‘sites’ to describe the patchwork of roads and buildings below him as a psychic as well as physical network. The buildings are “sites that have been lived in … filled with the presence of absences” (Certeau 2000, 104). I offer this fuller extract from Certeau as analogy to Ibrahim’s use of memory: What appears designates what is no more: ‘Look: here there was … ’, but can no longer be seen. Demonstratives utter the invisible identities of the visible: the very definition of the site is, in fact, to be this series of movements and effects between the shattered strata of which it is formed and to play upon those shifting levels … Every site is haunted by countless ghosts that lurk there in silence, to be ‘evoked’ or not … such ghosts … neither speak nor see. A kind of knowing has fallen silent. Only whispers of what is known but is silent are exchanged ‘between us’. Sites are fragmentary and convoluted histories, pasts stolen by others from readability, folded up ages that can be unfolded but that are there more as narratives in suspense … What is memorable is that we can dream about a site. In any palimsestic site, subjectivity is already articulated on the absence that structures it like existence, and the fact of ‘being there’, Dasein (Certeau 2000, 104-5).

The most immediate image from this rich description is, for me, the Heideggerian notion of ‘being there’. The absences Certeau refers to, in terms of the experience of Ibrahim’s music, allowed connections to be made - psychological connections with place, family, community. The subjectivity of the past is irretrievable: “How many thousands of days passed between infancy and early adulthood vanish beyond direct recall!” as Benedict Anderson puts it; and since they cannot be ‘remembered’, they must be narrated (Anderson 1991, 204). Music is one such narration. It offers a structure that appears whole; it makes ‘being there’ (Dasein) possible, gives the listener a sense of identification with place that is dependent not on place itself but on time, since being there in the Heideggerian sense implies a temporal rather than a spatial ontology. […] The music feeds off an immense sense of loss - reaching back into the past through denotations of tropes such as the hymn, gospel, spiritual, slavery, the church, blues, motherhood - but it is not merely a familiar tune used in a communal context (not merely ‘Abide with Me’ sung at soccer matches); it is a familiar generic type: hymn-blues. This allows it the freedom to become a site for imagining the utopian dream of South Africa after apartheid, to be part of the future. Perhaps the most important thing is that ‘Mamma’ addressed an audience at that time and place - the South Africa of the 1970s - which desired to be the viable sociopolitical community it had not yet become. The affective hearing of music like this in the 1970s relied on contexts that nurtured beliefs in the solution of the future … Music such as this functions today to remind us of the past as heroic struggle, desire for community, of the hope and hopelessness out of which culture

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under apartheid operated, of pain numbed by the power of musical expression, and of the places of memory that music provided.

Vocal Jive and Political Identity during the 1950s309 Lara Allen In 1954 Bantu World, a South African broadsheet with an extensive black readership, announced that “a new kind of record has burst upon the market in the last twelve months”; with a “monotonous solid beat, [and] crazy ad-lib solos”, the music “rocked like mad - and sales started to jump like mad too”. The infectious new style was pioneered by Troubadour Records who, claimed the paper, discovered that “Africans prefer ‘beat’ jazz with rocking instrumental accompaniment, honking saxophones, and more sophisticated singers like Dorothy Masuka”.310 This music did not, as the paper prophesied, turn out to be a ‘passing infatuation’: it was in fact fundamental to the development of vocal jive, the primary vocal genre popular in South African townships during the 1950s, that ultimately developed into one of South Africa’s internationally best-known styles, 1960s mbaqanga.311 […] [The 1950s] constituted a significant moment in the evolution of black popular music in South Africa because it was the period between the establishment of the mass media for black consumers and the full institutionalization of high apartheid. It was a time of change and negotiation, in which alliances between commercial and political forces formed and dissolved as hybrid styles sought to articulate the experience and aspirations of township audiences. I focus on Troubadour Records, a particularly successful recording company during this period that at times controlled up to seventy-five percent of the African record market (Allingham 1991, 4-5), and whose political approach was somewhat different from that of its competitors.312 Troubadour’s top singer Dorothy Masuka receives the most attention here because she is widely acknowledged as the single most influential artist in the development of 1950s female vocal jive, and because she was arguably the most politically-oriented star of the period. I would argue that the issues raised by this case study enjoy broader applicability, for the context in which Masuka functioned, and her musical response to it, well exemplify those, not only of many other female vocal jive artists, but also of a much larger group of musicians who collectively evolved a number of similar hybrid township styles, including male vocal jive, ‘African Jazz’, and kwela.313 […] Allingham suggests that a great deal of Troubadour’s commercial success was due to the speed with which their recordings were released. Songs were frequently composed, rehearsed, recorded, pressed, and released within twenty-four hours. When, for instance, Masuka and Miriam Makeba workshopped songs together on the train from Pimville to Johannesburg, Masuka’s versions would be selling long before Gallo Record Company issued Makeba’s release (Makeba 1988, 66; Allingham 1991, 5). Recounting to me the recording process, [Troubadour backing

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singer Mary] Thobei related that someone would ‘come with a number’ - basically the melody and lyrics - and the other musicians and singers would ‘fit their parts in’, creating the harmony, rhythm, and form. Matumba and all the musicians would ‘touch up nicely’, make suggestions for improvements and changes until everyone was happy, and then the number would be recorded. There was rarely more than one take; Thobei recalled: ‘We just test, and from there - microphone. One go, both sides! Those were the 78s. Okay, after that we go for a break. Come back. Start with another number again’. As she recalled, when top singers like Masuka were present, they could record four to six songs a day. Troubadour’s copious output included versions of its competitors’ hits, many of which were more popular than the originals. One such example is Masuka’s recording of ‘Ei Yow (Phata Phata)’.314 Thobei related that Matumba hastily flew Masuka back from Southern Rhodesia to record the number, which was on the streets and selling well the very next day. Rehearsing and recording occurred in the studio, a bare rectangular space about forty-five by sixty feet. The musicians were grouped under single microphones in the corners, while Matumba would direct them and the recording engineer from the centre (Allingham 1991, 5). Masuka remembered sometimes being alone in a corner with her own microphone, but on other occasions sharing a microphone with her backing singers. Although it was somewhat haphazard, Masuka preferred this method of recording to today’s system in which musicians lay down tracks on their own; the latter, she told me, ‘loses the feel … because the thing is not together’. When everyone records simultaneously, ‘it’s like we are on stage ... you’ve got the whole thing there, it brings the artist out’. Matumba’s mode of direction often included suggesting changes to Masuka’s compositions, but he did not make her feel as if her artistic authority was being usurped, or her creativity curtailed. Rather, Masuka regarded his input as helpful and inspiring: ‘He felt what I was all about you know, and he would put something into it, add something to it’. The musical characteristics of vocal jive315 In terms of style there were three streams of influence on Masuka’s musical development. The first to become deeply internalised was probably the marabiinfluenced Rhodesian urban hybrid style tsaba-tsaba, for as a young child she sang tsaba-tsaba songs for customers at her mother’s eating house in return for pennies. This style formed an integral part of the soundscape of Masuka’s youth; she told me that she remembers its most famous exponents, August Musarugwa and the Bulawayo Sweet Rhythm Band,316 travelling around the locations playing on the back of an open lorry to advertise their concerts. Secondly, Masuka cited the traditional musical influences on her music as isiZulu, arguing that the people of Southern Zimbabwe who are now known as amaNdebele are descendants of amaZulu clans who fled the wars of the Mfecane period in the early nineteenth century.317 She mentioned the haunting songs of amaZulu sangomas (traditional

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healers), characterized by descending slides, as a particularly vivid childhood memory. Although not an especially obvious aspect of her style, certain elements in some of Masuka’s compositions do echo features of traditional isiZulu music. The suggestion of root movement between two chords a tone apart may, for instance, derive from ugbubu and umakweyana bow music (Rycroft 1971, 1975/76), while overlapping call-and-response relationships between solo voice and chorus is typical of much traditional isiZulu vocal music (Rycroft 1977, 22224).318 Not withstanding the contribution of these two idioms, the influences of American blues, jazz, and swing are more strongly evident in Masuka’s compositional and performance style. She learnt American songs from gramophone records and the radio from an early age, and as a young teenager evaded school restrictions through various ploys in order to listen to popular recordings (Masuka, p.c.; Allingham 1991, 3). Rhythmic patterns are the most important stylistic elements that Masuka drew from American sources. Particularly characteristic are the basic swing rhythm, with accented back-beats or equal accentuation of all four beats in a bar, typically with walking bass. Harmonically and in terms of formal structure, Masuka’s initial compositions were more strongly influenced by American models than her later output. Many of her early songs employ relatively extended chord progressions, exhibiting a verse-and-chorus structure rather than the African jazz-style cyclical repetition of short, four-chord progressions.319 By 1956 vocal jive had become standardised and was exhibiting many of the distinctive characteristics of African Jazz. The late African Jazz veteran Ntemi Piliso cited the cyclical repetition of short (usually four-chord) progressions of primary chords (generally not more complex than triads or dominant sevenths) as the definitive harmonic characteristics of this genre (Allen 1993, 24). Melodically, African jazz compositions are built from the repetition (with small variations) and alternation of two or three short melodic motifs (the length of the chord progression) interspersed with solo improvisations. There is usually a rough sequence to the order in which motifs and variations are repeated although disruptions to the sequence are fairly common and do not disrupt the final effect. By the mid-1950s these characteristics - along with swing rhythm and call-andresponse between soloists and choruses - were typical of much vocal jive and other contemporary urban hybrid styles such as kwela. […] Vocal jive lyrics customarily consist of a few lines, repeated and alternated. The lines of lyrics and melodic motifs coincide with the length of the four-chord harmonic cycle. While each line relates to a central theme, there is usually no narrative story, allowing for the repetition and alternation of lines of text without disturbing the sense of the song. The lyrics generally state the subject simply, without providing commentary, explanation, or narration. Thus the lyricist’s skill lies in the ability to imply layers of significance in a few lines, leaving audiences the challenge of deciphering deeper meanings - a poetic strategy typical of South

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African hybrid musical styles (Blacking 1995, 218; Erlmann 1996, 204-06). A literal translation of Masuka’s ‘Mhlaba’, for instance, reads: “In this world we are having problems, black people are sorrowful, black people are having problems, black people are sorrowful”.320 However, the song’s meanings reach beyond direct translation. Masuka explained that she recorded the song because, “I didn’t understand why I should be barred to go to that restaurant, why I should be barred to be with that person” (Allingham 1991, 6). Similarly, Thobei (p.c.) interpreted ‘Mhlaba’ as saying, “In this world we are having a very tough time. Black and white are fighting each other. Now what are we supposed to do? Because now we are being treated like slaves”. Both the semi-improvisational, mosaic-type structure of the lyrics, and the inference that there are deeper levels of meaning that may be reached by the listener, are distinctive characteristics of lyrics in traditional and popular, musical and poetic forms throughout Southern Africa (Gunner 1979; Berliner 1981; Vail and White 1991a). The ability of cryptic lyrics to accommodate multiple interpretations is particularly useful in a repressive political climate.321 On occasion, a song’s surface meaning thinly veils a coded message, whose interpretation can be reinforced by the performance context. For instance, one press report claimed that Mafuya’s recording ‘Udumo Lwamaphoyisa’ (A Strong Police Force) was sung by ‘look-out boys’ to warn shebeen queens and illicit drinkers of police presence and the possibility of a liquor raid.322 One of the most famous examples of the successful covert expression of anti-government politics through multiple readings, reinforced by a song’s use within a particular context, is ‘Meadowlands’, written by Trutone talent scout Strike Vilakazi. Relying on a literal translation, the government interpreted the song as supportive of their removals programme. Black record buyers, however, interpreted it as meaning the opposite, and ‘Meadowlands’ became a protest anthem against the Sophiatown removals (Sampson 1956, 228; Kavanagh 1992, i; Allingham 1994c). In a similar act of creative cooptation and resignification by ordinary people of an oppressive practice, anti-establishment sentiments were believed by some to be encoded in the dance accompanying one of Masuka’s most famous recordings, ‘Ei Yow (Phata Phata)’. A contemporary press report claimed that the movements of the phata phata dance originated in Johannesburg’s main prison. The dancers shuffle along in a line simulating prisoners queuing for food, sometimes with their hands raised above their heads. In another step the male dancers stand in a row with their arms extended out to the front, palms to the floor, while the women pat each in turn in a manner resembling security-search body-frisking, after which the men do the same to the women.323 Political criticism was more easily expressed in some forums than in others. Despite his success with politically topical songs, for instance, Strike Vilakazi did not receive the support from Trutone’s directors that Cuthbert Matumba enjoyed at Troubadour. Matumba knew that [Troubadour directors Israel] Katz and [Morris] Fagan, who were, constantly in search of commercially successful ventures, would routinely tolerate the release of politically sensitive or subversive material. Their

309

attitude was illustrated in an episode relating to one of the company’s early overtly political recordings, Masuka’s ‘uDr Malan Unomthetho Onzima’ (Dr Malan’s Government is Harsh).324 The recording sold well and was even played on the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s African re-diffusion service before it was banned.325 When security police arrived at the Troubadour studio to demand the master tape, Katz and Fagan attempted to defuse the situation by claiming that the number was a praise song (Allingham 1991, 6), and that such recordings were not political, but merely functioned as ‘the newspaper of the world’. Another song entitled ‘Chief Luthuli’ again brought the police Special Branch to the studio, although several other seditious recordings eluded the censors entirely (Thobei, p.c.). Dorothy Masuka and politics While Masuka’s early songs were largely inspired by personal experience love, parting, and the difficulties of township life - she increasingly sang about social hardship and politics, particularly as more oppressive apartheid laws were introduced and enforced towards the end of the 1950s.326 Masuka’s last recording for Troubadour, inspired by the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, provoked another security police raid. Fortunately Masuka had flown to Bulawayo immediately after making the recording; however, she had become a ‘wanted person’, a status that prevented her from returning to South Africa for over three decades (Masuka, p.c.; Thobei, p.c.; Allingham 1991, 6-7). Masuka’s commitment to the anti-apartheid movement dominated the next period of her career and life. Her ability to set political lyrics to music that was simultaneously ‘modern’ and African was appreciated by the South African ANC and proindependence movements elsewhere in Africa. Under the protection of these organizations, Masuka spent the early 1960s travelling through Central and East Africa with musical troupes performing pro-independence songs. When the colonial authorities in one country became aware of her activities, she would be spirited over a border into another country. After this period she spent several years in exile in London and New York, housed and supported by ANC sympathisers, after which she lived in Zambia and Zimbabwe until 1992, when she finally returned to South Africa (Masuka, p.c.).

John Knox Bokwe and Black Choralism327 Grant Olwage Grant Olwage studied at Rhodes University and Christ Church, Oxford, recently completing a Ph.D. on Victorian choralism and its reception in nineteenth-century colonial South Africa. In addition to topics in South African music, his interests include ‘the voice’, contemporary dance music and club culture. He is currently Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand. Music of revival Around the time of the ‘Great Hymn’ transcription-arrangement, [John Knox] Bokwe composed ‘The Heavenly Guide’, a ‘sacred song’ the text for which had been taken from a Scottish-compiled revivalist hymnal, Songs of Zion (Wilson n.d. [c1877; 1st publ. c1860]): I know not the way I am going, But well do I know my Guide, … ‘Suffer me not to lose my way, But bring me home at last’. From his ambivalent flirtation with precolonial Xhosa music, Bokwe, in this song, returned home compositionally. Not simply to the compositional discourse of Victorian hymnody tout court, but to the music of revivalism, which became, I suggest, Bokwe’s single most important model. ‘Heavenly Guide’, for instance, is a duet with piano accompaniment. Not a form of mainstream Victorian hymnody as represented by LOVEDALE,328 it is more properly a ‘popular Christian Song’, a genre popularised in Britain by “the eminent American evangelists, Messrs. Moody and Sankey” (Wilson n.d. [c1877], 3).329 Ira D. Sankey’s world-wide popularity followed quickly upon his first appearance in Britain in 1872; that this success was routed through Britain says something about the efficiency of the network of Empire. Sankey’s songs were “so universally sung and so highly prized, not only in [Britain], but throughout Christendom”, that later editions of Songs of Zion were compelled to incorporate a fair sampling of them; their popularity became a selling point for other books - almost everywhere: They have been translated into the language of almost every people among whom the Christian Church exists, and, if we except the Psalms, have had a circulation, and wielded a power, unparalleled in the history of the Church. They are known and sung in every country in Europe. They have spread throughout Eastern lands. They are to be heard in the various tongues of India and China, and of the distant islands of the sea. They have thus come to constitute a new bond of Christian brotherhood,

311 uniting together the East and the West, the North and the South (Wilson n.d. [c1877], 3).

Sankey’s music had an enthusiastic reception in South Africa too. Lovedale [the eastern Cape mission institution] campaigned long and hard, to no avail, for Moody and Sankey to make an appearance at the institution; reported frequently on the pair’s metropolitan goings-on, as well as on the local reception of Sankey’s Sacred Songs and Solos (1st publ. 1873): the song ‘Home over There’, for example, was “very popular, in Shigwamba”, and could be heard in “distant villages where nobody would ever dream of hearing anything else but heathen songs” (Christian Express Feb. 1878, 7). Closer to home, the music inspector of the Cape Education Department attributed the lack of ‘real native tunes’ in the eastern Cape mission schools to the ‘vogue’ for Sankey’s hymns (Reports of the Superintendent General of Education 1903, 165a). At Lovedale itself, the choir, under Bokwe, used Sacred Songs as one of two choirbooks (Letters 1/12/1883).330 ‘Heavenly Guide’ - see Ex 60 - bears the influence of revivalist music in several respects. One is the conspicuous parallelism. The two voices track each other predominantly at a third (bars 1-6), and less often at a sixth (bar 13), letting up almost only for cadencing. Parallelism has for long been recognised as a feature of Nguni musicking, but it is not confined to thirds and sixths, and more typically occurs at the fourth, fifth and octave (Kirby 1926, 958; Hansen 1981, 698; and Dargie 1988, 75-89).331                                    I

    

know not the way I am going

             

child - like trust I give my hand

  

 The

    

But well do I know my

     

Guide,

       

Suf - fer me not

 

to

say

 lose

With a

          

To the migh - ty Friend by my side.

                                  

on - ly thing that I

   

to Him as He takes it,

      my way,

But



is, "Hold it





bring me home

 

fast,

    at last".

Ex 60 Vocal part of John Knox Bokwe’s ‘The Heavenly Guide’ (A Duet). Autograph manuscript (c1894) Cory Library, Rhodes University332

312              

           

                                              

I know not the hour when my Lord will come To take me a - way to his own

          But I

        

   

                                    

       

dear home;

           

know that His pre - sence will light - en the gloom, And that will be glo - ry for me.

Ex 61 Gospel parallelism. Opening of J. McGranahan’s ‘That will be Heaven for Me’. Ira D. Sankey, Sacred Songs and Solos (c1890) Xhosa parallelism, then, was not compositionally operative in ‘Heavenly Guide’, and the most one can claim is a relationship of affinity. Revivalist hymnody, on the other hand, was dominated by a third- and sixth-based parallelism - see, for instance, the first two lines of Ex 61, ‘That will be Heaven for Me’ (Sacred Songs c1890 [1873]).333 Both an acceptance and refusal of the rules of Victorian popular harmony, consecutive thirds and sixths, unlike fourths, fifths and octaves, were permitted, though the incidence of their occurrence was to be limited. With the upper two voices of entire songs often in thirds, the excesses of the gospel song flaunted this prescription. In the revivalist hymnal, third- and sixth-based parallelism occurred more typically in the upper two voices of a fourpart texture than in a duet song, a technique Bokwe was to use extensively in fourpart settings throughout his career, and in the song immediately preceding ‘Heavenly Guide’, ‘Iculo Lomtshato’ (‘Wedding Song’) (Amaculo 1894). The distinction between LOVEDALE and ‘Heavenly Guide’, between dominant Victorian hymn composition and the sacred song, was above all marked by a different sense of time, by what I will call ‘movement’.334 When John Spencer Curwen suggested that the “one question asked about a [Salvation Army] tune [was], ‘will it go?’”, the popularity he referred to was literally a matter of the tune’s peculiar movement (1885, 24). This temporal difference has been represented simply as ‘rhythm’, the hallmark of gospel songs signified especially by the prevalence of dotted rhythms and a quick tempo; ‘catchy’ tunes at a ‘lick’ (see, for example, Curwen 1885, 24-5; and Watson 1997, 494). […] At this point I might pursue a semantic reading335 of movement in ‘Heavenly Guide’; one aesthetic that sacred song did share with dominant Victorian hymnody was the premise of semantic setting. Mainstream hymn composition, as we saw with LOVEDALE, performed this largely through harmonic ‘colour’, by enriching the basic primary triad canvas with a brush of seventh and chromatic chords. The gospel song attended to the text more by brushing up against musical time, through procedures which collectively might be called the ‘rhetoricising of musical time’. This involved less a composed rhythm than its performance and most commonly signified through the deployment of pauses; sometimes composed as rests, more usually signalled by the pause sign. In Ex 62, ‘Go Work in My Vineyard’ (Sacred

313

Songs), both strategies are at work. The basic pattern, here, is an entire phrase, constructed, as we would expect, by much movement and a little rest - a musical working out of the message of labour? - and its repetition three times generates the swing-flow movement of the gospel song. In the fourth repetition, though, the pattern is disrupted through a series of interruptions. First by the pause-stressed rest, then by two further pauses: one unexpectedly on a ‘moving’ note, the other less surprisingly on the final note of rest. In moderate time



                                work in My vineyard;" there's plenty to do; The har vest is great,and the                                                         

                               "Go          

     

                                       

   

   

              lab' rers are few;            

                      

There's weeding, and fencing, and clearing of roots, Andploughing,and sow ing, and gath'ring of fruits.

      

               

   

   

   

                 

   

                        

                             

                              D.S.                           

There are fox - es to take, there are wolves to destroy, All a - ges and ranks I can ful - ly employ:

                  

                                

   

                        

Ex 62 Musical Rhetoric in T.C. O’Kane’s ‘Go Work in My Vineyard’. Ira D. Sankey, Sacred Songs and Solos (c1890) In light of the gospel song’s swing-flow movement the start-stop rhetoric seems incongruous. The contradiction, however, resolves itself in the text. Until the pauses, the text is an invitation to work, a farm-worker’s job description. The fourth phrase - ‘and gath’ring of fruits’ - continues the theme of labour, but also heralds its end, a distinction marked by the paused rest. After this, the remaining pauses progressively slow down musical time until the song, like the worker, comes to rest. If the basic pattern’s movement establishes the rhythm of work, then the fourth phrase disrupts it only because the message of work has concluded; at least temporarily before the second section starts up, restarting the pattern amidst a resumption of the job description. The pauses, in addition, emphasise the final reward - the ‘fruits’ of work - made emphatic in the final note by the ‘clipped’, staccato-accented quaver preceding it.

314

The rhetorising of musical time entailed a whole set of tropes - sudden pauses, unexpected rests, jarring accents, ‘misaccented’ rhythmic patterns - that seem, in the musical discourse, misplaced, but which more properly considered as ‘rhetoric figures’ deliver the verbal texts oratically.336 … Bokwe frequently employed a range of rhetorical figures in songs throughout his career. In ‘Heavenly Guide’, for instance [Ex 60], bar 11 is musically awkward in the wake of the song’s flow. Both signed and lengthened, the off-beat accent ‘distorts’ the verbal accent as a crude means to flag the arrival of a change in narrative voice. Similarly, the pause in bar 14 beat 3 on the final note of the penultimate phrase - a favourite rest station in revivalist hymnody - suspends movement as it generates suspense: ‘will the sinner lose her way?’ (Pause ... ). ‘No’, proclaims the music triumphantly as it resumes a tempo, ‘the Lord will guide her home’. What I have called movement and the rhetoricising of musical time were, of course, conceived as strategies of ‘moving’: the body, the heart, and, ultimately it was hoped, the soul. For Curwen, the repetition of a “simple phrase” “over and over again” was evidence that the “American Gospel Hymn [was] nothing if it [was] not emotional” (1885, 40). The late Victorian (and more recent) construction of the hyper-emotionalism of revivalist hymnody (see, for example, Heywood 1881, 11-12, 16-17; and Watson 1997, 496) inscribed gospel hymning within the discourse of emotional ‘difference’ … For the hymn critic John Heywood, the gospel tune was the province of “Camp meetings, and Mission services for ‘outside Christians’ and practical heathen in schools and halls, where violent appeals [were] made to the feelings” (1881, 16-17). By contrast, the Anglican “Englishman” did “not greatly like sudden outbursts of popular feeling” (Shuttleworth 1892, 4; my emphasis). Gospel hymnody’s emotionalism, then, made it the music of “mission work”, suited to “reach[ing] the masses” (Curwen 1885, 39-42). It is unlikely that Bokwe employed the compositional discourse of revivalist hymnody specifically as a strategy of evangelising; he composed as often in the dominant idiom of LOVEDALE. More likely, gospel songs were just one of the genres of Victorian choral composition that Bokwe used as a model. His composerly intervention in the mix of mission choralism was, however, for the sake of another revival. […] ‘Plea for Africa’ Amaculo’s337 publication coincided with the South African Industrial Exhibition, a regular trade fair at which the mission displayed its works. Bokwe insightfully captured the logic of this exercise: “There seems such a call always for Native work especially from Lovedale ... it seemed almost compulsory to do something, lest harm should occur from absence of this required evidence of progress” (Letters 16/11/1885). This was the other discourse within which Bokwe inscribed Amaculo, his other use of music, and of himself.338 The black elite’s ‘complicity’ in the missionary discourse of trophyism is not difficult to understand.

315

Given the always precarious position of the mission, on the one hand competing for resources from the home public, on the other up against an often hostile colonial government, the self-exhibiting game was, as Bokwe noted, compulsory a matter of the mission’s survival. […] More than any of Bokwe’s songs, ‘Plea for Africa’ performed the work of trophyism. The events surrounding its composition are unusually clear. Having spent twenty-five successive years at Lovedale, Bokwe requested a “short relaxation” from the mission, during which he planned to join the ‘African Choir’ then touring Britain (Bokwe-Mrs Stewart 13/6/1891).339 It was just before, or during, his trip to Scotland, that he wrote ‘Plea’ on 21 July 1892. Composed for a British audience, its text, ‘by a Glasgow Lady’, is a typical mission hymn: pricking the white conscience through a diagnosis of Africa’s benightedness as it prescribes the cure of the Gospel. Equally, the song in Example 63 is exemplary revivalist music.

316

Give a thought to A - fri Acompt. by

Organ or

Sustained Vocal Humming.

          

      

 



   

 





swamps and

sod



 

 

 

   

  

 

 

  



 

of Je

Tell the love

  



   

God bless A - fri - ca,

   

     

     

 

-

   

 

 

 



 

 

 

  

 





   

By her

hills

   

For the liv - ing God.

  

 

   

& wa

  -

   

ters

         

 

By her hills and wa - ters;

Je sus



   

          

   

           

And her sons & daugh

   

    



 

sus,

   

  

 

              

          



There are voi - ces cry - ing now

Tell the love of

  

 

Ma - ny lives have pass'd a - way; but on

                            

 

       

     

             

 

'Neath the burning sun There are

Waiting to be won.

      



ca

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Ex 63 John Knox Bokwe’s ‘Plea for Africa’. Autograph Mansucript (c1894). Cory Library, Rhodes University The verse-chorus form is perhaps the hallmark of revivalist hymnody, “that most social, most heart-impelling contrivance” which “unite[d] soloist or choir with the congregation in inter-reacting sympathy, drawing all into the circle”. Most

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of Sankey’s pieces thus have a “refrain, burden, or chorus, which a congregation pick[ed] up by ear in a moment” (Curwen 1885, 41 ).340 ‘Plea’s debt to Sankey’s songs was more specific. It seems that the ‘effect’ of Sankey’s own performances inhered in his “power of expression, and especially of soft singing”, through means of which he compelled vast congregations to silence in order that they might hear, and listen to, him (40). Curwen contrasted this to the practice of the home mission choirs, which, no sooner had Sankey’s “influence withdrawn”, reverted to “a level and noisy monotony”; Sankey attributed this to the “impression” that “not to exert the full power of voice [was] to show lukewarmness in the cause” (41). The solo verse-choir/congregation chorus, I suggest, was a structural solution to the problem. Through his soft-singing during the solo verse section, Sankey would quieten the audience, who, their attention captured, would then be rewarded, and sufficiently enthused to join in, as the choir let rip in the chorus. The musical logic of this complimented that of the text. As the verbal text differed with each verse, Sankey’s quiet solo singing forced the congregation to focus on the changing words, whereas in the chorus, constructed of repeated stock verbal phrases, the ‘music’ took over. In addition, the excitable choir was held back during the solo sections either by being silenced by the accompanying organ or by having its mouths shut as it hummed the accompaniment; ‘Plea’ gives the option, while another ‘Plea’ - ‘Africa’s Cry, A Plea for Africa’, ‘inscribed to all Missionary Societies’, with words by S. Trevor Francis and music by Livesey Carrott - also has a slow moving organ accompaniment in the solo section, ‘with Chorus (ad lib.) humming’. Bokwe was to structure much of his music in the solo-chorus form and he used the humming accompaniment elsewhere. These features came, in fact, to be seen as ‘African’. At least by the British press in its reports on the African Choir’s repertory. One review, ‘The Music of Africa’, picked up on “the native fondness for vocally accompanied solos”, “how the natives hum some portions of their songs”, and the preference for the solochorus form. These markers occur, or were only noted, in the Victorian-influenced works.341 But the review did not essentialise them; they were simply ‘fondnesses’, perhaps for something familiar to the reviewer. The bodily movement of the ‘traditional’ songs, by contrast, was “singular”; unspecified performance practices were in “true Kaffir style”; and a “Kaffir wedding song”, its harmonies not “in any way Europeanized”, “purely native” (Ludgate Monthly Dec.1891, 11-12). Even as it was implicated in a discourse of racial otherness, the compositional discourse of the Victorian works was not specifically racialised. The distinction is crucial. For while the humming and solo-chorus form are not essentialised, they have nevertheless become part of ‘The Music of Africa’. This recognition of Victorian music as African choral music is the dawning not of black choral composition but, to paraphrase [ethnomusicologist Bongani] Mthethwa, of how Victorian hymnody came to be received as black South African choral music (1988, 28). […]

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Yet, as we saw with the British reception of the African Choir, around the 1890s black-composed Victorian music was beginning to be read as ‘black’. The same was happening in the Cape, as a colonial review of Amaculo makes clear: So far as we know, this is the most complete collection of music pieces, composed by a South African Native, that has yet to be published. From the songs, and the music, one is able to discern more clearly the prevailing qualities of Native music. Every nation has its own peculiar way of expressing its joys and its sorrows, its aspirations and its defeats in the music of song, and the South African Natives are no exceptions to the general rule. In reading through the pages of ‘Lovedale Music’, we could not help being struck with certain traits (Imvo 25 July 1894).

The ‘traits’ of the new black South African national culture, however, are grossly unspecific: “The melodies are very simple”, “the harmonies ... are very simple”. In sum, “it is a very noticeable fact, that, the first and last quality of the music in ‘Amaculo ase Lovedale’ is its simplicity of melody and harmony” [review in Imvo 25 July 1894]. Just one only slightly less broad analytic observation is made: the “pronounced” “tendency of the minor mode”. Clearly a misprint, the songs in Amaculo are all in the major mode, with exceptional localised modulations to, or tunes starting out in, the relative minor (for example ‘Imini Zokupila Asizazi’ [‘Days of Life Uncertain’]).342 There are two Victorian antecedents for the majorness of Bokwe’s and subsequent black choral composers’ works. The first is compositional model. The influence of Sacred Songs and Solos, for instance, which similarly makes only exceptional excursions into the minor, extended perhaps to modality.343 The second is pedagogical. In the sol-fa course the minor mode was introduced long after the ‘common scale’, and only as part of the requirements for the advanced certificate, which most black sol-faists, as I discussed [in Chapter 3 of Olwage’s thesis], never attained because their mission music education stopped short of it.344 The compositional ‘traits’ identified as black South African, then, don’t tell us much about Bokwe’s music. But this is beside the point, which is that Amaculo’s Africanness was located in its music, its Victorian music. For had the writer cared to look beyond ‘race’, s/he would have found contemporary Britain awash with songs like Amaculo’s. It is surely significant that the moment black elite oppositional politics took off the music that accompanied that politics was closed off by race. The race spin it seems could be, often was, put on anything - even Victorian composition. This move is more than just the displacement of race politics on to culture, it is the racializing of music for politics: a black music that would bolster the colonial state’s nascent segregationist intentions, a black music that could charge an emergent black South African consciousness. Bokwe’s music, for example, became part of The Struggle. Writing from prison in 1987, the late ANC elder statesman Walter Sisulu claimed ‘Plea for Africa’, that exemplary Victorian mission hymn and text of trophyism included in the second edition of Amaculo, unambiguously for Africa. Sisulu suggested, though he gave no evidence, that “J.K. [Bokwe] inspired the composition of our ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ by his own

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composition ‘Give a Thought to Africa’”, the first line of ‘Plea’. Perhaps the textual affinity suggested the influence; the chorus in ‘Plea’ ends with the benediction ‘God bless Africa’, also the preferred translation the of ANC anthem’s title line. From this Sisulu concluded that it was “obvious” that Bokwe was “concerned with the whole of Africa”, “a forward-looking outlook much advanced for his time” (quoted in Bokwe Matthews 1995, 105-6).345 The illustrious genealogy into which Sisulu inserted ‘Plea’ is not that far off my mark. As inspiration for ‘Nkosi’, the ‘African’ credentials of which are as impeccable as Ntsikana’s hymns (Blacking 1980, 197), the status that Sisulu accords it as progenitor of black choral composition is little different to the reception of Bokwe’s Victorian music as black South African music, almost a century earlier.

The Globalisation of South African Art Music346 Martin Scherzinger Martin Scherzinger is a composer and Professor of Music at Eastman School of Music. His research spans the fields of music theory, historical musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies and philosophy as they intersect with European and African music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent awards include an Outstanding Publication Award (2002-2003) from the Society for Music Theory, and the Mellon Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the American Council of Learned Societies (2002-2003). He recently joined the Princeton Society of Fellows at Princeton University. Following the achievement of material independence in 1994, the already thriving South African popular-music scene entered a renewed wave of eclectic innovation and experimentation. The unprecedented influx of musicians from across Africa, coupled with a growing music-festival culture, encouraged creative exchanges between local and international musicians, and in the process new musical genres were invented and old ones transformed. For example, the highly synthesized 1980s bubble-gum pop of divas like [Yvonne] Chaka Chaka and Brenda Fassie morphed into the pulsating pop style known as kwaito in the 1990s; in this new era, the outrageously provocative Fassie (affectionately dubbed the ‘Queen of Kwaito’) mostly abandoned singing in English and adopted instead an innovative blend of Sotho, Xhosa and Zulu. (Her 1998 album, Memeza or ‘Shout’, was the first South African album to go platinum on its first day of release.) Kwaito is a genre-defying style blending the programmed percussion and vibrant call-andresponse vocals of 1980s bubble-gum with British garage, American hip-hop and the new Jamaican ragga music; this inter-cultural mix, in turn, is framed by laidback bass lines that can sound like Chicago-based house music in slow motion. New kwaito bands like Bongo Maffin and TKZ Family raised their international profiles when they appeared on the Central Park Summer Stage in 2001. While most popular South African music of the 1980s and 90s was the hybridized result of transatlantic borrowing, blending and metamorphosis, Africanized ‘art' music in the region tended strategically to limit its aesthetic parameters to the structural configuration of specific indigenous idioms. […] [In contrast to popular music], [t]he tendency towards unfettered transcription, paraphrase, and quotation of local African music became a hallmark of artcomposed music of South Africa in the 1980s and 90s. Unlike the ‘art’-music tradition in west Africa (broadly speaking a tradition committed to integrating African and European musical structures), the new South African art music opted to identify local forms of African music as a self-contained form of ‘art’ music.347

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By the beginning of the 1980s, southern African music had entered the concert hall on both a local and global scale: before forming the rock-oriented band Juluka, Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu had performed traditional music for Zulu mouthbow and guitar to an audience of contemplative listeners at venues such as the Market Theatre in downtown Johannesburg, while [on a broader scale] the then exiled jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim performed in sit-down concert venues in Europe and the United States. Ibrahim’s unique pianistic style - blending a motley array of distinctly South African idioms (from Sufi music to Xhosa music) - was harnessed to messages of political defiance and hope; in this way the concert piano became Africanized in both form and content (the comparison with Euba’s concept of ‘African pianism’ is telling). Building on these foundations, South Africa had produced by the end of the 1990s a number of innovative musical genres approximating the condition of ‘art’ music, ranging from the Soweto String Quartet (performing African popular music) to the gospel group SDSA Chorale (showcasing the rich a cappella traditions of South Africa). In this way locally made music became increasingly classicized in the post-apartheid era. In southern Africa, local musicians have long adopted Western instruments (the guitar, the trumpet, the concertina, the piano and so forth) in the service of African aesthetics, and the idea of performing indigenous idioms on Western orchestral instruments in the final decades of the twentieth century was an extension of this. Such reconceptualization of African music as ‘art’ music emerged in a complex historical conjuncture. First, the cultural boycott against South Africa in the apartheid years paradoxically produced an era of fervent artistic innovation grounded entirely in local resources. Second, in the context of growing antiapartheid sentiment many of the arts actively experimented with imagining delineations of a genuinely post-apartheid South African cultural identity. Third, the emergence of new marketing categories in the music industries of the industrialized nations brought a potentially international profile to homespun forms of African music: for instance, the Kronos Quartet release Pieces of Africa was marketed and styled in terms representing an intersection between avant-gardeoriented new ‘art’ music and tradition-oriented ‘world’ music. In apartheid South Africa, the minority government invested considerably in Western forms of culture, including the building of impressive institutions housing productions of symphonies, ballets, operas and drama. Consequently, in the domain of music education, the central methodological and canonical reference point was European music. A coterie of white composers, largely supported by institutional bodies propped up by the apartheid state, created ‘art’ music reflecting and sustaining this ideological orientation.348 However, in the 1980s and 90s, a number of calculated attempts to resist the then prevalent anti-African aesthetic surfaced within the art tradition, with composers like Kevin Volans, Michael Blake, Mzilikazi Khumalo, and Bongani Ndodana creating works prominently featuring African modes of music-making. Ndodana treats the source material grounding his music as an open-ended palette … [He] bases the first movement of his Rituals for Forgotten Faces (IV) for string quartet on the unmistakable ughubu

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playing of the late Princess Magogo. Vacillating unpredictably, but incessantly, between two fundamental pitches, the music evolves into a web-like array of motivic ideas … The chromatic pitch collection coupled with the free transformation of themes and ideas exceeds the language of the original ughubu bow, but by elaborating simultaneous layers of melodic-rhythmic groupings, even the non-traditional transformations sound like African modes of variation … Another example of music distinctly modelled on African idioms is the music of Michael Blake: his Let Us Run Out of the Rain (for two players at one piano or harpsichord or for percussion quartet), for example, is a refracted paraphrase of Nsenga kalimba music from Zambia. The music filters and recombines typical kalimba fingering patterns into novel fragments, which in turn articulate unpredictable formal episodes of call-and-response. By transferring the overtonerich sounds of the kalimba to the time-worn blandness of the modern industrial piano, the music paradoxically conjures up the faded colours and open spaces of the southern African landscape. […] Likewise, the pioneering work of Kevin Volans’s African-inspired work is a critique of the commonplace figuration of African music in the metaphorics of ‘folk’ or ‘world’ music (and its attendant de-emphasis of ‘pure’ aesthetic value), drawing attention instead to the profound formal complexity and beauty of African music. In the words of the composer, “I … did quite consciously want to elevate the status of street music and African music in South Africa” (in Taylor 1995, 514). Volans’s strategy was to take a hands-off approach and allow the music to be heard as quotation. The source material is overt, vivid, literal, almost tangible … Even the titles are pre-given: ‘She Who Sleeps with a Small Blanket’, ‘Cover Him with Grass’, or ‘White Man Sleeps’, for example, are taken from African song titles (the last a translation of Nzungu agona, one of the silent dance patterns of the Nyanga Panpipe Dance of the Nyungwe at Nsava, Tete, Mozambique). It is precisely because of the immediacy of this recognition that the African dances themselves recede from earshot and the listener is drawn to something else: released from their familiar context, the musical materials are experienced as a formal play of sound, giving rise to a purely ‘aesthetic’ hearing. For instance, in his string quartet Hunting: Gathering, Volans juxtaposes a variety of pieces of African music - kora music from Mali, lesiba music from Lesotho, an Ethiopian folk tune, and so on - in a musical pastiche that passes like a journey or a dream. In the middle of the second movement, the mbira tune ‘Mutamba’ appears in its traditional form; this was the song played by Zhanje for Pasipamire, the legendary spirit medium for Chaminuka, during the nineteenth-century Shone/Ndebele wars (legend has it that the song endowed Pasipamire with superhuman strength in the face of certain death). Volans then builds a set of variations on it, characteristically separating the two mbira parts by one pulse - a technique which, on a note-to-note level, is in keeping with Shona tradition. But in the context of the quartet the passage is striking for its gentle, almost Schubertian, melodic character. By placing the mbira music in the strings’ most comfortable range, and by framing the passage

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with more abstract colouristic sections (such as angular leaping gestures in the violin, random fragments of pizzicato, desolate tapestries of extended harmonics, and suddenly outbursting double stops), Volans draws attention to the intricate melodic and harmonic power of ‘Mutamba’. Challenging the Eurocentric stereotyping of African music as ‘rhythmic’, he effectively downplays the musical exoticism of the mbira, and the passage in this way makes a unique aesthetic and political point. The emergence of an Africanized ‘art’ music in southern Africa was an overdetermined confluence of contradictory historical factors. Consequently, the music paradoxically both aspires to cultural legitimacy in an international context and aims to resist the global juggernaut threatening local traditions. While its significance to the overall African cultural scene is contested and in doubt, African ‘art’ music has a substantial role to play in the context of global intercultural relations. First, the creative tension between local African music traditions and Western ‘art’ music has the potential to encourage new directions in the evolution of international ‘art’ music in the twenty-first century. As Nketia argues, while intercultural encounters were considered idiosyncratic throughout most of the twentieth century, they came to be regarded as a “distinct area of contemporary compositional practice … an alternative or complement to modernism” in its final decades (Nketia 1995, 224); since 1977, for example, an international composers’ workshop hosted in Europe under the auspices of the International Music Council (UNESCO) has facilitated globally based intercultural contact between composers. Second, although its role has been systematically under-narrated, the importance of African music to the development of Western music in the twentieth century has been considerable: aside from the extensive quotations of African music in that of the West, African procedures and structures arguably lie at the heart of some of Europe’s most ground-breaking musical production. Just as the figure of the ‘primitive’ in Pablo Picasso’s middle-period work culminated in the radical abstractions of analytic Cubism, European music’s radically abstract mathematical formalizations in the twentieth century coincided with a fascination with African and other non-Western music. In this way the impact of non-Western music was felt in Western music’s most ‘formalist’, and thus apparently culturally ‘pure’, musical production, no less than in its more overtly hybridized production: even Pierre Boulez’s very first attempts at total serialism (the serial organization of all musical parameters) in the 1950s were carried out on the terrain of African music in this case sanza music from the Cameroon, in his Etude for tape. But what is really remarkable is the fact that almost all standard historical accounts have been wholly silent on the contribution of African music to both the formation and the displacement of Western music’s various aesthetic categories: the work of the minimalist composers is generally interpreted within a wholly Western framework, despite the literal and overt references to African and other non-Western music and, in the case of Steve Reich, the composer’s welldocumented study of African drumming. African music, in short, has become a central reference point for defining a genuinely post-serialist aesthetic in the West.

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And yet, shorn of its African heritage, the conventional historical narrative emphasizes the music’s abstract organization at the expense of any understanding of the complex inter-cultural negotiations of sound and meaning that gave rise to it. This is where the African ‘art’ music of the 1980s and 90s paradoxically reclaims a stake in the making of the world’s musical history.

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References

1 Barrow, Sir John, intro. M. Osborne. 1975 (1806b). A Voyage to Cochinchina, in the Years 1792 And 1793 ... To Which is Annexed an Account of a Journey, Made in the Years 1801 and 1802, to the Residence of the Chief of the Booshuana Nation, Being the Remotest Point in the Interior of Southern Africa to which Europeans Have Hitherto Penetrated. The Facts and Descriptions Taken from a Manuscript Journal. With a Chart of the Route. Kuala Lumpur and London: Oxford University Press (1975) (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies in the Strand (1806)). Extracts: 397-98, 400. 2 [At ‘Leetakoo’, now in the Kuruman district of the Northern Cape, close to Botswana.] 3 [A family of small mammals including the ferret and mongoose.] 4 [BaTswana.] 5 Alberti, L., trans. W. Fehr, ed. F.R. Bradlow. 1968[1815]. Ludwig Alberti’s Account of the Tribal Life & Customs of the Xhosa in 1807. Translated by Dr William Fehr from the Original Manuscript in German of The Kaffirs of the South Coast of Africa. Cape Town: A.A. Balkema. Extracts: 12-13, 79, 80; illustration opp. 18. [The AmaXhosa were also referred to in Alberti’s day as ‘Kaffir’.] 6 [The illustration (with its long caption reproduced here) is a contemporary handcoloured engraving by L. Portman based on a drawing by Chevalier Howen and J. Smies “after several originals taken from nature in Kaffirland itself by Captain W.B.E. Paravicini di Capelli … Aide de Camp attached to His Excellency General Janssens” [Governor of the Cape Colony 1802-06] (Alberti’s Foreword, 1968[1815], 3). It is one of four colour plates published in the 1968 English version of Alberti’s book. Although this one (opp. p.18) is placed far away from the page in which the scene is described (p.79), the engraving and description are parallel representations of the same event. The classical orientation of landscape and poses struck in the engraving (the men of the left) resonates with Alberti’s description of the event as if it were a scene from an early nineteenth-century ball: “communal entertainment”, “resume their positions after a tour in this fashion” and “takes place at a dance”.] 7 Barrow, J. 1813. Travels in the Interior of Africa, by Mungo Park, and [Travels] in Southern Africa, by John Barrow. Interspersed with Notes and Observations, Geographical, Commercial, and Philosophical. By the Author of the New System of Geography. Glasgow: A. Napier. Extracts: 310, 314, 315-16, 340, 400, 411, 452-54. 8 [From the Dutch word ‘boer’ (farmer).] 9 [In later periods known as Khoi, Khoin, or Khoe.] 10 [‘Bushman’; now often referred to as ‘San’: a population comprising a number of different peoples living over a wide area of Namibia, Botswana and parts of west and northeast South Africa.] 11 Latrobe, C. I., introd. F.R. Bradlow. 1969 (1818). Journal of a Visit to South Africa in 1815 and 1816 with Some Account of the Missionary Settlements of the United Brethren, Near the Cape of Good Hope. Cape Town: C. Struik (London: L.B. Seeley). Extracts: 68-69, 81, 109, 143-44, 146, 212, 299-300. 12 [Latrobe wrote this at “the original Moravian Settlement at Baviaanspoort, now called Genadendal [Gnadenthal, in Latrobe], which had been established by George Schmidt

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with the consent of the Council of Seventeen at Amsterdam in 1737” (Bradlow in Latrobe 1969 (1818), 9). It fell into disuse but was re-established in 1792 and “re-named Genadendal by General Janssens in January 1806, shortly before the second British Occupation” (Ibid.). The second mission at Mamre [Groenekloof in Latrobe], established in 1808 [see Latrobe 1969(1818), 43-44] was smaller but also served a large “congregation of Christian Hottentots” (Ibid. 44). Both missions mainly served the ‘Hottentots’. The present-day settlement Genadendal, lying just off the N2 motorway between Cape Town and Swellendam, is preserved as a historic monument.] 13 [Latrobe’s “grand subject” is, presumably, music.] 14 Smith, A., ed. & introd. W.F. Lye. 1975 [1837]. Andrew Smith’s Journal of His Expedition into the Interior of South Africa 1834-1836… Cape Town: A.A. Balkema. Extract: 237-38. 15 [AmaZulu.] 16 [Mzilikazi (referred to by Andrew Smith variously as Mosulacatzi, Mosilikatsi, Musulacatzi, Umsiligas and Silikats) lived c1800-1868 and was founder of the Ndebele kingdom (Lye in Smith 1975 (1837), 317).] 17 [Mzilikazi and his clan (the Khumalo Ndebele) overcame many ‘characters’ in the course of their flight from Shaka during the 1820s and from others, including Griqua chief Barend Barends and Kora leader Jan Bloem (‘John Bloom’), during the 1830s. When Smith wrote his observations Mzilikazi was near the end of his trek north, about to establish “a new base at Bulawayo near the Matopo hills, in 1837” (Davenport 1991, 16).] 18 [AmaXhosa, whom Smith also refers to in this extract as Amakosa and Amakosie] 19 Godlonton, R. 1971 (1844). Memorials of the British Settlers of South Africa: Being the Records of the Public Services, Held at Graham’s Town and Port Elizabeth on the 10th of April, and at Bathurst on the 10th of May, 1844, in Commemoration of their Landing at Algoa Bay, and Foundation of the Settlement of Albany in the Year 1820. Compiled by the Editor of the Graham’s Town Journal. Cape Town: South African Library. Extracts: v, 2-3, 34-35, 50, 51, 74, 75, 101. 20 [These “beautiful lines [were] written by one [Thomas Pringle] who wrote from the fullness of his own heart, when laboring with the emotions which a lover of his native soil must feel on bidding it farewell – perhaps for ever” (Godlonton, v).] 21 [After the service, 500 people processed from the Cathedral to nearby Oatlands Park.] 22 [In Port Elizabeth the commemoration began with a “salvo of twenty-one guns fired near the Beach” (Godlonton 1971 (1844), 50) and continued with a service in St. Mary’s (Anglican) Church.] 23 [At the gala dinners in Port Elizabeth and Bathurst, toasts were interspersed with songs and glees.] 24 Birkett, C. 1871. Preface. In Ingoma: Or, Penult Psalm-tunes, Compiled for the Use of the Native Churches in Southern Africa. Also Adapted for the Use of the Missionaries in Madagascar, Australasia, and Polynesia, [n.p.]. London: Tonic Sol-fa Agency. 25 [Accent that falls on the penultimate syllable in many English words, and subject of much debate in the pages of missionary journals during the early days of liturgical, biblical, psalm and hymn text translation from English to Xhosa, Zulu, etc. ‘Wrong accenting’ was later a preoccupation of early twentieth-century South African ethnomusicologists.] 26 [Part II never appeared.] 27 [1855.]

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28 Anderson, A. 1974 [1888]. Twenty-five Years in a Waggon: Sport and Travel in South Africa. Cape Town: C. Struik. Extracts: 62, 108-109, 374-75, 375, 376. 29 [Griqua (Khoe) chief Nicholas Waterboer lived in Griqualand West, annexed to the British Empire in 1871.] 30 [A Khumalo Ndebele like Mzilikazi, Lobengula granted mining concessions to the British during the 1880s and early ’90s in such a way that it eventually cost him “both his lands and his life” (Davenport 1991, 157).] 31 Bokwe, J.K. [n.d. c1904]. Ntsikana, the Story of an African Hymn. Lovedale [Alice], Eastern Cape: Lovedale Press. Extracts: 13-15, 18-20, 27-31. 32 [In the original, the first stanza is ten lines and the second eleven.] 33 Househam, J.W. 1923. The Wings of Song. In The Story of a Century: 1823-1923, ed. W. Eveleigh, 49-57. Cape Town: Methodist Publishing House and Book Depot. Extracts: 50, 52, 53-55, 56-57. 34 Praise poets. 35 [Three years later Edwin Smith, superintendent of the British and Foreign Bible Society refers to this process more bluntly. Reporting on the international missionary conference at Le Zoute, Belgium in 1926, he writes: “[m]embers showed out of varied experience how in the proverbs, folk-tales, legends and religious rites pegs are to be found upon which to hang Christian truth. Reference was made particularly to African music. Mr Ballanta, a Negro who has devoted himself to a study of this subject, said: The African loves music intensely. I believe that one way of approaching him is to get him to sing about the love of God in his own way. The songs you hear in Africa may not be suitable for use, but substitute other words and adopt the tunes. Take short stories and put them to African music. Fit words to his tunes telling the truth of the Gospel and you will do a great deal towards getting that truth into his mind (Smith 1926, 43).] 36 Caluza, R.T. 1931. African Music. The Southern Workman 60(4), 152-55. Courtesy of Hampton University Archives. [“In the November 1930 issue of the Southern Workman mention was made of the Zulu Choir in London and of Mr Caluza, its leader, now a student at Hampton Institute” (original “Editor’s Note” that prefaces Caluza’s text).] 37 Kirby, P. 1968(1965, 1953 [1934]). The Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa. Second Edition. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Extracts: 171, 174, 176-77, 181-82, 189-92, 349, 350. 38 [Kirby 1967, 275-6. See also Grobler 1982 elsewhere in this book.] 39 [See above: Barrow 1806a and 1813, and Alberti 1968[1815].] 40 It must be understood that the pitch of the notes indicated in this and in the following examples is not what it would be if they were played in equal temperament (as on a piano), but as if played as the natural harmonics of a stretched string or open pipe. The relation of the pitch, as noted, to the standard pitch is likewise only approximate, although this is comparatively unimportant. [Kirby’s footnote, as with all other original authors’ footnotes given from here onwards, are not shown in square brackets.] 41 Matthews, F.B. 1935. African Music in South Africa. Unpublished monograph. Rhodes University: Cory Library MS 11073. 42 [Percival Kirby later acquired the typescript and deposited it in the Cory Library for Historical Research, Rhodes University.] 43 [Page 1 of the two-page typescript ends at this point and the following page begins as shown. In between, Matthews played recordings and sang examples, including her

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father’s arrangement of Ntsikana's hymn and a song composed by Bokwe in her honour, ‘Vuka Deborah’ (Dr V.J. Matthews, pers. comm. 19.11.03.).] 44 Dunn, E. 1949. A New Era for Music and Musicians in South Africa. The Outspan July 8 1949, 17, 79. Shortened. 45 [Influx control was enforced under Hertzog and Smut’s coalition United Party in 1937 to control the settlement of black labour in (white) urban areas. It was briefly relaxed after World War II “to recruit European skills to beat the manpower shortage” although extremely unpopular “in Afrikaaner opposition circles on the ground that it was an attempt to ‘plough the Afrikaaner under’” (Davenport 1991, 320). Influx control was strongly reinforced again soon after the 1948 election that brought the Herenigde Nationale Party (HNP) to power under D.F. Malan, “on a platform of apartheid” (Saunders and Southey 1998, xix).] 46 [Existing pillars of this ‘design’ were Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban.] 47 [A conference (organised by Dunn) of “directors of music policies of the Municipalities of Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg” in Bloemfontein earlier in 1949, which developed a plan “for the municipal and national advancement of music culture, as it might be applied in a National Co-operative Plan” (17). This was later legislated as the Arts Councils Bill.] 48 Tracey, H. 1954. The State of Folk Music in Bantu Africa. African Music: Journal of the African Music Society 1(1), 8-11. Shortened. 49 [The paper was originally subtitled ‘A brief survey delivered to the International Folk Music Council, on behalf of the African Music Society by Hugh Tracey (Hon. Secretary, African Music Society) at Biarritz, July 14th, 1953’.] 50 [See Part 4: ‘Indigenous Musical Instruments’.] 51 [Chords I, IV, V.] 52 [The International Library of African Music is housed at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, under the Directorship of Tracey’s son, Professor Andrew Tracey.] 53 Mphahlele, E. 1958. Down Second Avenue. London: Faber and Faber. Extract: 9597. 54 Blacking, J. 1959. Problems of Pitch, Pattern and Harmony in the Ocarina Music of the Venda. African Music: Journal of the African Music Society 2(2), 15-23. Extracts 15-17, 20-23. Shortened. 55 If we were studying, say, a Chopin Mazurka from the evidence of performances, as we study an item of folk music, we would have to transcribe several different pianists’ interpretations before arriving at a transcription which resembled Chopin’s score. Only then would we be in a position to understand the structure of the music. The actual performance of the folk musician is really equivalent to the composer’s act of writing down the music on paper, so that the music ‘to be performed’ has been ‘in existence’ in the mind of the composer; Veenstra’s distinction, therefore, seems to be invalid. 56 The information on which this article is based was collected during twenty-two months’ fieldwork amongst the Venda of the Northern Transvaal, between 1956 and 1958. My work was sponsored and financed by the International Library of African Music, assisted by an ad hoc grant from the Union Department of Education, Arts and Science (National Council for Social Research). I wish to thank these two organisations for their financial assistance, and also the Director of the I.L.A.M., Mr Hugh Tracey, for promoting

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and encouraging my fieldwork. I am also grateful to Mr Andrew Tracey for helpful comments and criticisms made during the preparation of this paper. 57 It is not my purpose to discuss whether this ‘harmonic’ sense arises from contact with the music of peoples from other parts of the world, or from recognition of the harmonics of stretched strings, as Professor Kirby has convincingly argued (Kirby, op. cit., and other works), or whether there is yet another factor to be considered. I am here concerned with an analysis of the phenomenon in one small item of Venda music. 58 De Beer, M. 2001 (1960). King Kong: A Venture in the Theatre. Cape Town: Normal Howell. [(Original author’s name was Mona Glasser; the reprint is by Compress.)] Extracts: 53, 52, 55-56. 59 [Ian Bernhardt, producer.] 60 [The show opened at Wits University Theatre, but its run was interrupted by a break when the University’s claims to the venue had to be met.] 61 Brand, D. 1970 (1966). Africa, Music, and Show Business: An Analytical Survey in Twelve Tones Plus Finale. In Journal of New African Literature and Arts, Vol. 1, ed. J. Okpaku, 296-302. New York: Thomas Crowell. Extract: poems V & VII, 297-99. 62 Blacking, J. 1970. Tonal Organisation in the Music of Two Venda Initiation Schools. Ethnomusicology: Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology 14(1), 1-56. Extracts: 2, 13, 15-17. 63 Moyer, R.A., ed. 1973. Coko: Reminiscences of Joseph Scotch Coko, A Grahamstown Resident. Grahamstown: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University. Occasional Paper Number Eighteen. Extracts: 58, 59, 94, 122, 124, 125, 127-28, 157, 159, 163-64. 64 [“F[rederick]. Farrington, Departmental Instructor in Vocal Music, Eastern District of the Cape Education Department” (Moyer 1973, 159).] 65 [“W.R. Caley came to Healdtown in 1896. He became head of the training institution and continued in that position until his retirement in 1932” (Moyer 1973, 157).] 66 [“This method of musical annotation is called Tonic Sol-Fa … It is a system of letter notation based on tonality, or key relationships, and replacing the usual staff symbols by letters and syllables, do, re, me, etc.” (Moyer 1973, 159).] 67 [Anglican training institution in the eastern Cape where Coko worked 1928-29.] 68 [Professor Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu, eldest son of John Jabavu who founded the first African newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu in King William’s Town in 1886. Jabavu “was influential in the founding of Fort Hare Native College in 1916 [and] was actively involved in Cape politics” around the time of Union. Jabavu Jnr. was one of the first black South African students to study overseas – at London and Birmingham Universities – and was later famous as an academic at Fort Hare, author of several books, and a prominent Eastern Cape politician (Moyer 1973, 163-64).] 69 [A choral song written by Tyamzashe in the 1920s, protesting “against the loss of voting rights by Cape Africans” (Moyer 1973, 179).] 70 [When in 1963 the South African government granted ‘the Transkei’ a “limited form of ‘self-government’” (Moyer 1973, 181), the anthem was adopted by Transkei (having already been adopted by Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe). 71 [The anthem continues to gather its own histories. In the 1980s it became a resistance song of the non-racial anti-apartheid movement, and it is a version from this time that is captured in Ex 9.]

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72 Rycroft, D. 1975/76. The Zulu Bow Songs of Princess Magogo. African Music: Journal of the African Music Society 5(4), 41-97. Extracts: 41-43, 41, 44-45, 49, 53-54, 9395. 73 [Princess Magogo died in 1984.] 74 International Library of African Music, ‘The Sound of Africa’ Series, issues nos. TR 9 and TR 10. 75 Directed by Stanley Baker and Cy Enfield, Diamond Films, released by Paramount Studies, 1963. 76 Uppsala, Svenska Institutet fĘr Missionsforskning, 1960, pp. 94-101. There are a few inaccuracies in this book, concerning Zulu instruments and music. The musical bow shown in the plate on p.97, entitled ‘Zulu woman playing Ugubu (Mahkweyana)’ is neither the ughubhu nor the umakhweyana but the stave is more flattened, in section and the calabash resonator appears to have a very much larger opening. It is in fact typical of instruments from further north. 77 [A list of song titles is given in the Appendix to Rycroft’s article, and he also refers to a monograph and disc issued in 1969 called Zulu, Swazi and Xhosa Instruments and Vocal Music (Tervuren, Musée Royale de l’Afrique Centrale and Belgische Radio en Televisie).] 78 Gallo SGALP 1678, Music of Africa Series No. 37: ‘The Zulu songs of Princess Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu’. [Rycroft’s article gives short transcriptions of all 14 songs, translations of texts, commentary and analysis of musical structure, information about the ughubu, and list of other songs and sources of other recordings made by Princess Magogo between 1956 and 1970. He acknowledges assistance with the translations from Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, Mr A.B. Ncgobo, J.E. Msomi and Professor E.T. Sithole (93).] 79 Macebecebana (here linked with indoda (man) by the Relative Concord e-) is not a dictionary entry. Chief Gatsha Buthelezi suggests the English translation given here, probably on the assumption that it is coined from the verb –ceba, ‘inform against, report about’. (The final –ana is a ‘diminutive’ suffix.) There is a regular noun, u(lu)cecevana, however, for which one meaning is a ‘gadabout (especially a woman who is never at home)’. Possibly Macebecebana might have resulted from a corruption of this (but this has not been discussed with Princess Magogo). 80 Literally, the verb –phothula means ‘grind up boiled maize’. The overall implication of this line is that ‘he only thinks of his stomach’ [author’s footnote]. 81 In a later performance of this song, this line was sung three times and the next line was omitted. 82 Though ‘courting’ is the nearest short English term, the verb stem –qonywa (Passive form of –qoma) implies a recognised premarital relationship between a young man and a girl, as lovers. 83 In another performance, Princess Magogo substituted the phrase ‘Engaseshel(i)’ for ‘Engaqonywa’, giving roughly the same meaning. 84 This refers to differences of personal status. To sit near the door way implies seniority. It appears as if the question expressed in the previous line is being addressed both to someone junior and to someone senior. 85 In this performance, the chorus part, sung by Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, commenced during line 10 of the leading part and was repeated throughout the song. 86 [In their (1999) ‘recomposition’ of eight of Magogo’s songs (including four used in Rycroft’s 1975/76 article), Mzilikazi Khumalo and Peter Klatzow say of Magogo’s version

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of this song that she “almost certainly made it in memory of her lost love, Khiphakonke Ndwandwe” (SAMRO programme notes, 1999).] 87 This line recurs, like a refrain, before each of the lines printed below, serving as initial phrase and thereby creating a series of couplets throughout the song. Since it is identical each time, it was deemed unnecessary to reprint it throughout the text. The entry for this word in the Zulu-English Dictionary (Doke and Vilakazi, 1948) is as follows: “hélele (phon. hélele:2.5.3-6) interj[ection]: 1. of encouragement or incitement to compete: Go it! 2. of approbation as on seeing a victor or a bride”. Under another spelling, the word ‘yelele’: “interj. of pleasurable excitement” is probably a variant. “What a fine sight! What a lovely mess!” R.C. Samuelson’s Dictionary has “surprise or admiration”. Despite these common usages, Princess Magogo claims that she feels the implication of ‘helele’ in this song to be more like that of ‘wo-wo-wo’, expressing ‘pining, longing, despairing’- ‘O alas, woe is me!’. She uses it initially in her song ‘Ngibambeni, ngibambeni’. 88 Presumably a variant of the normal isitemela, ‘train’. 89 Issued on D.K. Rycroft, 1969, Side B, band 1. 90 Recorded on ILAM disc, AMA TR 10, B2. 91 Transcription of the text was done mainly by Mr J.E. Msomi. 92 We are not quite certain of this date. Another source gives 1926. 93 Cf. Rycroft , 1975 (a). Mention has already been made of such songs when discussing item A.1, above.[The separation from Magogo’s preferred choice as life-partner (Mankulmana Ndwande) no doubt also accentuated the ritualised sorrow, and from this angle the song can be seen to embody a form of artistic control “in a situation where social or domestic control is held by others” (Lucia 1995, 154).] 94 The name eMadaka is a shortened form of kwaMadak’adunuse, one of the former residences of Chief Mnyamana of the Buthelezi, where Princes Magogo’s marriage took place. The metaphor of the sun setting in the wrong direction is commonly used to signify personal misfortune. 95 This line was sung twice. 96 Rycroft, D.K. 1977. Evidence of Stylistic Continuity in Zulu ‘Town’ Music. In Essays for a Humanist (An Offering to Klaus Wachsmann), U.C.L.A. [no ed.], 216-60. New York: The Town House Press. Extracts 216-17, 221, 222, 223, 224-28, 229, 246, 248-55, 256-57. 97 This was a sideline to more ‘serious’ academic research, linguistic and ethnomusicological, that I was conducting at that time under the auspices of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. While my recordings of indigenous Zulu country music have been published on an LP disc (see Rycroft 1970), the items under discussion in the present paper are unfortunately accessible only from the original tapes, since these items, together with all my other ‘town’ material, were consistently rejected by a succession of recording companies to whom they were offered. 98 The solo ‘leading’ part shown at the left of the outer circle [in Fig 16] heralds the entry of the chorus, at the top of the inner circle. The second solo phrase, entering at ‘3 o’clock’ and overlapping the chorus, heralds the impending physical downbeat, marked ‘X’, when pick-axes are swung down together, followed by delayed entry of the final chorus phrase. Re-entry of the first solo phrase coincides with the finalis of the chorus, so that interlinking and continuous repetition occurs. In the leading part, in such music, improvised variations may be added to the chorus part. For fuller treatment of this subject see Rycroft 1967.

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99 [Rycroft’s approach adopts a suggestion by Klaus Wachsmann, “that in African musical studies the instrument must be regarded essentially as “an extrapolation of basic motor activity”, and that we should take the view that “musical instruments belong to the corporeal equipment of the player, as extensions of the body, as it were” (Wachsmann 1970, 134-35, quoted in Rycroft 1977, 222).] 100 The specialised Scottish meaning for this term is not implied here. 101 For sound recordings, pictures, and analysis, see Rycroft 1970. 102 [The painting of Princess Magogo used in Rycroft’s 1977 article is not reproduced here. See Fig 42: Nofinishi Dywili playing the Xhosa equivalent, uhadi.] 103 For sound recording and more detailed analysis, see Rycroft 1970. 104 [In the opinion of Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu … the umakhweyana … was borrowed from Tsonga in the early nineteenth century, and largely displaced her favourite ‘classic’ form of bow, the ugubhu, which has an undivided string. Nevertheless, one must also take into account the preference, by nineteenth-century Zulu innovators, for the borrowed instrument. Now, in the twentieth century, Zulus have been turning once again to more sophisticated media (Rycroft 1975/76, 256)]. 105 For choral examples, see Rycroft 1967, 91ff. 106 For examples, see Rycroft 1967, 98-100. 107 [Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniginge (Afrikaans = Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Societies).] 108 Van der Walt, J.J.A. 1979. Afrikaans Church and Mission Music. In South African Music Encyclopaedia, ed. J.P. Malan, Vol. 1, 4-20. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Extract: 5. 109 Cillié, G.G. 1979. Sacred Songs in South Africa. In South African Music Encyclopaedia, ed. J.P. Malan, Vol. 1, 20-26. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Extracts: 20, 24, 25. 110 [A footnote to Cillié’s arrangement in the FAK-Sangdundel (4th ed. Johannesburg 1979, 614) tells us that the melody of ‘Magaliesburgse Aandlied’ was recorded in the home of Frans Fouché, Doornhoek.] 111 Trewhela, R. 1981. Song Safari: A Journey Through Light Music in South Africa. Johannesburg: The Limelight Press in association with SAMRO. Extracts: 109-111, 114115, 116-117. 112 Mngoma, K. 1981. The Correlation of Folk and Art Music Among African Composers. In Papers Presented at the Second Symposium on Ethnomusicology, ed. A. Tracey, 61-69. Grahamstown: International Library of African Music. Shortened. 113 E. Krige (1936) mentions that everybody among the Zulus has the “ability to compose their own songs”. 114 These composers write in Tonic Solfa notation, and have not got anything to fall back on by way of formal training in composition. They are thus obliged to use extensively models or folk songs, and get their inspiration from the same sources that inspired folk musicians. 115 [See Bokwe [n.d. c1904] earlier in this book.] 116 [“As alluded to by Professor Kirby (1965): ‘This type is widely distributed, being found among the Chwana, Thonga, Sotho, Swazi, Zulu and Xhosa’. The instrument provides the potential for solo voice composition which African composers of art-music have missed out on. D.K. Rycroft has pointed similarities of tonal effects by guitar players of the many ‘Zulu-guitar styles’. This phenomenon strongly suggests that the influence comes from

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ughubhu and makhweyana - both instruments are still in use in rural Zululand” (Mngoma 1981, 61). This and some of the following footnotes are extracted from the text of Mngoma’s article.] 117 [“In this regard Kirby (1965) has this to say: not only are the fundamental tones of the string heard by the performer, but also the harmonic sounds generated by those fundamentals. The harmonies are either: 1. sounded together as a chord; 2. isolated for melodic purposes; or 3. used in conjunction with fundamentals in order to produce elementary polyphony” (Ibid., 62).] 118 [“It has been my experience as a teacher of singing and conductor of choirs, to have singers who have such resonant voices that they have posed problems for me, other choristers, and themselves, because of the complexity of the resonant tones that they emit in their singing. The singer himself often hears a multiplicity of sounds that undermine satisfactory intonation. In 1978 and 1979 I had a contralto in the University of Zululand choir, from whose singing a sound was discernible a Fifth above each fundamental note she sang. The effect was quite uncanny at first for all who were involved, especially the choristers who stood or sat near her” (Mngoma, 1981, 62).] 119 [Sources of Songs:] Caluza. R.T. Awuthi nyikithi (Unpublished manuscript [n.d.].) Caluza. R.T. Umaconsana (Unpublished manuscript [n.d.].) Mbele, C.Q. Tanana (Unpublished manuscript, 1980.) Mohopeloa, J.P. Khalima--nosi tsa ‘mino oa kajeno, Morija: M.P.P., 1951. ------------------Meloli le lithallere tsa Afrika (Buka ea bobeli). Morija: M.P.P., 1939. -----------------Meloli le lithallere tsa Afrika (Buka ea boraro). Morija: M.P.P., 1947. Qwesha, C.B. UNtsikana (Unpublished manuscript, 1978). Raseleso, F.M. Mohoang (Unpublished manuscript, 1991). Tlakula. A., ed. Selection of Vernacular Songs: 1958-67. Johannesburg: ATASA [African Teachers’ Association of South Africa], 1968 (Mngoma 1981, 69).] 120 Amahubo among the Zulu and Mohabelo, and Mokorotlo among the Sotho. 121 [These examples have long song-texts that Mngoma quotes in full and have been shortened or excluded in some cases.] 122 [Mngoma refers at this point to a recording he played during his paper, of the Soweto Teachers’ Choir in 1978, made - perhaps by a member of the choir’s family - during the Ford Choir Concert in the Johannesburg City Hall. Although there are many transcription recordings of choral music, commercial recordings are rare, and tend not to circulate (somewhat like the tonic solfa scores) outside the choral community.] 123 [Text and translation of ‘Zweliyaduduma’ kindly provided by Mavis Mpola.] 124 Grobler, W.S.J. 1982. The FAK and Afrikaans Music. In South African Music Encyclopaedia, ed. J.P. Malan, Vol. 2, 52-53. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Shortened. 125 [In the development of Afrikaans music during the 1930s prominent instruments were the piano accordion, concertina, and violin.] 126 [Percival Kirby relates a different account of how ‘Die Stem’ became the national anthem, where he was the judge of a national anthem competition (see Kirby 1967, 275).] 127 Dargie, D. 1982. The Music of Ntsikana.127 South African Journal of Musicology: SAMUS 2, 7-28. Edited extracts: 8-12, 15, 17, 22, 23, 25.

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128 [“Ntsikana Gaba (c1780-1821) is an attractively mysterious figure in Xhosa history. A Cirha, and the son of a councillor of the famous chief Ngqika, he was the first Xhosa Christian” (Dargie 1982, 7).] 129 [See also Bokwe [n.d. c1904], 31.] 130 [See also Bokwe [n.d. c1904], 33.] 131 The Sound of Africa Series, ed. H. Tracey a.o. (Roodepoort n.d.), disc TR-26, side A, band 1. 132 Amaculo 100 esiXhosa (Transkei Christian Council 1969). 133 The Sound of Africa Series, disc TR-26, side B, band 1. 134 Coplan, D. 1985. In Township Tonight: South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre. London and New York: Longman. Extract: 105, 106, 258-63. 135 Bender-Brink, A. 1986. Christian Schubart and the Earliest Music About the Cape. South African Journal of Musicology: SAMUS 6(1/2), vi, 1-2. “This short article is based (with permission) on a fuller account by the same author published in Afrikaans in Geleentheidmusiek in Suid-Afrika 1786-1896 (Pretoria 1983)” [original author’s note]. 136 RISM [S2251] records two extant copies (in Marbach and Ulm, Germany); photocopies are kept at the University of Pretoria (F.Z. van der Merwe Collection) and the Johannesburg Public Library (Africana Library). 137 See for more information: R. Gerard, Military Formations at the Cape (16521806), n.p., n.d.. 138 Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakkaatboek, ed. S. Hage and M. Nijhoff (Batavia 1892) Vol. 10, 960-78. 139 O.H. Spohr, The Württemberg Regiment at the Cape (from letters by Baron Karl von Wohlzogen), Quarterly Bulletin, S. Afr. Library (December 1974), 47-56, 143. 140 There are several books and articles on Schubart. See the bibliographies in Riemann Musik-Lexikon, Personenteil L-Z, 637, and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 16, 750-51. Also see W. Steffanides, ‘Das Kaplied “Auf, auf, Ihr Brüder …”’ (transl. S. Paxinos), Ars Nova 5(2), 11-20. 141 Malan, J.P. 1986. Theatres and Concert Halls. In South African Music Encyclopaedia, Vol. 4, 330-42. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Extracts: 332, 337-8, 338-9. 142 This piece was commissioned by Chris McGregor in 1986 – four years before his death. He needed, at very short notice, an article that would be published in the programme booklet for his appearance at the ‘Open Ohr Festival’ in Mainz, Germany, on 17 May. The concert was recorded live by SWF Mainz, and issued eleven years later on compact disc as Chris McGregor and the South African Exiles’ Thunderbolt (CD PAM 405, 1997). The article was republished in the booklet accompanying that CD. 143 Ferguson, H. 1987. Arnold van Wyk. In Composers in South Africa Today, ed. P. Klatzow, 1-31. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Extracts: 1, 2, 3-4, 21-23. 144 [Upon receiving a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in 1937, van Wyk spent several years in London. While studying he “joined the recently formed Afrikaans Section of the BBC, where he worked for … five years as announcer, translator, news-reader and deviser of programmes” (Ferguson 1987, 2).] 145 Makeba, M., with J. Hall. 1988. My Story. Johannesburg: Skotaville. Extracts: 211212, 219-220. 146 Mthethwa, B. 1988. The Songs of Alfred A. Kumalo: A Study in Nguni and Western Musical Syncretism. In Papers Presented at the Sixth Symposium on

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Ethnomusicology, 1987, ed. A. Tracey, 28-32. Grahamstown: International Library of African Music. Shortened and edited. 147 [Mthethwa generally replicates the (incorrect) form of the surname used in the 1971 publication by Shuter & Shooter (Kumalo, A.A. 1971). Occasionally, as here, he uses the correct Zulu spelling.] 148 [“‘African music’ here refers to South African Nguni music, especially that of Zulu people; ‘Western music’ refers to European compositional styles founded on the baroqueclassical principles of writing music” (Mthethwa 1988, 32).] 149 [In tonic solfa notation there is usually no time-signature shown. The metre is implied by the way solfa letters are grouped within a bar.] 150 [The speech-tone markings are not given in the original and have been added here, as high (Ɵ) or low (Ɲ) vowel sounds. (I am grateful to Mr Lwazi Mjiyako for this information.)] 151 [The compiler of the book was Mr Elwin Rees, according to Dave Ryder of the publisher Shuter and Shooter (pers. com. 12.11.03.).] 152 Faktor-Kreitzer, L. 1988. Taking a Bow. Cape Town: The Gryphon Press. Extracts: 8, 65-66, 70-71, 72, 73. 153 [“The Cape Town Promenade Pier [was] situated at the foot of Adderley Street. In 1914 the Cape Times music critic ‘Treble Violl’ spoke of ‘drinking in the soft air and listening to a little Orchestra [which sometimes played at the end of the pier] which in itself is a precocious child of the right kind’” (Faktor-Kreitzer 1988, 10). The illustration used here is not exactly the one used by Faktor-Kreitzer but is a contemporary view.] 154 Dargie, D. 1988. Xhosa Music: Its Techniques and Instruments, with a Collection of Songs. Cape Town: David Philip. Extracts: 56-59, 164. 155 The text excludes exclamations. 156 Smith, B. 1988/1989. The Royal School of Church Music and the Church in South Africa. South African Journal of Musicology: SAMUS 8/9, 49-50. 157 [“It would be appropriate to mention that these Principles laid emphasis - as they do today - on the need to strive for the highest. technical standards and to choose music with care, on the overriding importance of text and its meaning, and on the commitment on the part of choirs to lead congregations in both words and music” (Smith 1988/89, 49).] 158 Jackson, M. 1989. Tiger Dance, Terukuttu, Tango, and Tchaikovsky: A PoliticoCultural View of Indian South African Music before 1948. The World of Music: Journal of the International Institute for Comparative Studies and Documentation (Berlin) 31(1), 5976. Shortened. 159 This paper is based on data collected for the M.Mus. dissertation (Jackson 1988b). The financial assistance of the Institute for Research Development of the Human Sciences Research Council is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed in this publication, and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the IRD or the HSRC The kind permission of the Lawrence family, A.G. Pillay, Maya Devi Ramchandra, and S.S. Singh for the use of photographs is gratefully acknowledged. 159 Transliteration of terms used in Indian South African literature is highly variable. I have followed the local custom of leaving out diacritical markings but have attempted otherwise to approximate the Sanskrit where possible. 160 Transliteration of terms used in Indian South African literature is highly variable. I have followed the local custom of leaving out diacritical markings but have attempted otherwise to approximate the Sanskrit where possible.

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161 Lawrence sisters 1987: interview; Jackson 1988a: 20-1. [Interviews for this paper were conducted by the author with “Granny” James (Stanger, 1988), the Lawrence sisters (Reservoir Hills, Durban, 1987), “Farooqi” Mehta (Overport, Durban, 1987), and A.G. Pillay (Shallcross, Durban 1984-87).] 162 Qabula, A.T. 1989. In the Tracks of Our Train. In A Working Life: Cruel Beyond Belief, 69-71. Durban: National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa. Extracts: 69, 70-71. 163 Erlmann, V. 1991. African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Extract: 119-35. 164 Interview with F. Caluza. 165 The song was later published as ‘Si Lu Sapo or I Land Act’. Lovedale Sol-fa Leaflets No. 1C. 166 Ilanga, September 7, 1928. 167 Natal Archives, CSO 1865, 6884/1908; Dube to Colonial Secretary, December 9, 1908; Ilanga, December 21, 1912. 168 Ilanga Lase Natal, February 26, 1915, January 9, 1920, January 12, 1923, and January 25, 1924; Natal Archives, CNC 1768/1914; Dube to Native Chief Commissioners, December 7, 1914 169 Interview with S. Khuzwayo. 170 Ibid. 171 Ilanga, December 24 and 31, 1915, and April 5, 1918. 172 Ilanga, January 5, 1917. 173 Ilanga, November 12, 1915; Interview with E. Mbambo. 174 Interview with F. Caluza. 175 Ilanga, December 22, 1916, and January 5, 1917. 176 Ilanga, November 12, 1915. 177 Ilanga, June 22, and December 14, 1917. 178 Ilanga, April 4, 1924. 179 Ilanga, October 5, 1923. 180 R.C. Samuelson to Mayor and Town Councillors, November 8, 1923, TCF, Native Affairs in the Borough, File 1, 1915-24. For a photograph of Mthethwa and the Zulu Union Choir, see Samuelson 1929, 117. 181 Ilanga, November 23, 1917. 182 Ballantine, C. 1991. Music and Emancipation: The Social Role of Black Jazz and Vaudeville in South Africa between the 1920s and the Early 1940s. Journal of Southern African Studies 17(1), 129-52. Extracts: 129-31, 131-33, 134-35, 136-38, 138-40, 141-42, 145-46, 147,148-49, 151-52. 183 Imvo Zabantsundu, 4 February, 1930. 184 For a full discussion of the diverse components of this contradictory subculture, see my ‘Concert and Dance The Foundations of Black Jazz in South Africa between the Twenties and the Early Forties’, Popular Music, 10, 2, 1991, 121-45. That article, like the present one, emerges from a large research project which I have undertaken into the social, political and musical history of black South African jazz and related styles. This project in turn forms part of a much larger commitment, made by the Department of Music at the University of Natal, to the study of the past, present and future of urban black music in South Africa, and to the process of cultural reconstruction in this country. (The article by Veit Erlmann, ‘“A Feeling of Prejudice”: Orpheus McAdoo and the Virginia Jubilee Singers

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in South Africa 1890-1898’, in Journal of Southern African Studies, 14, 3 (1988), also grew out of this overarching project.). 185 I derive these references to Gramsci from Eddie Koch’s excellent essay,, ‘“Without Visible Means of Subsistence”: Slumyard Culture in Johannesburg 1918-1940’, in B. Bozzoli (ed). Town and Countryside in the Transvaal (Johannesburg, 1983), 151-175. 186 Umteteli wa Bantu, 25 January, 1930. 187 ‘African Music: Where is it?’, Ilanga Lase Natal, 10 February, 1933. 188 The sources of the jazz and vaudeville repertoire, and the methods by which it was appropriated, are discussed in my ‘Concert and Dance’. 189 Bantu World, 7 May, 1932. 190 Umteteli wa Bantu, 14 March, 1936. 191 Umteteli wa Bantu, 17 April, 1937, and 10 April, 1937. 192 Author’s interview: Louis Radebe Petersen, Johannesburg, 2 February, 1984. 193 Bantu World, 6 December, 1941. 194 Umteteli wa Bantu, 14 June, 1941. 195 Umteteli wa Bantu, 22 November, 1941. 196 Ilanga Lase Natal, 9 September, 1944. Dhlomo was writing here under his ‘Busy Bee’ pseudonym. (For a comprehensive clarification of pen-names, see T. Couzens, ‘Pseudonyms in Black South African Writing’, Research in African Literatures, 6, 2, 1975, 226-31.) 197 I hope to devote a separate article to a comprehensive treatment of these and other social constraints, which provided the context for black jazz and vaudeville in the period under review. 198 Bantu World, 21 May, 1932. 199 Bantu World, 18 January, 1936; Bantu World, 17 April, 1937; Bantu World, 9 June, 1934. 200 Bantu World, 30 October, 1937. 201 Bantu World, 24 May, 1941. 202 Author’s interview: Peter Rezant, Riverlea, 3 June, 1984. 203 Author’s interview: Marjorie Pretorius, Johannesburg, 18 October, 1987. 204 Bantu World, 25 January, 1936. 205 Bantu World, 15 February, 1936. 206 V. Erlmann, ‘Black Political Song in South Africa - Some Research Perspectives’, in Popular Music Perspectives 2: Papers from The Second International Conference on Popular Music Studies, Reggio Emilia, September 19-24, 1983 (IASPM, 1985), 199. 207 H. Bradford, ‘“A Taste of Freedom”: Capitalist Development and Response to the ICU in the Transvaal Countryside’, in B. Bozzoli (ed), Town and Countryside, 135. 208 E. Koch, ‘Doornfontein and its African Working Class, 1914 to 1935: A Study of Popular Culture in Johannesburg’. University of the Witwatersrand: Unpublished M.A. dissertation, 1983, 172. 209 For a full discussion of the New-African philosophy, see T. Couzens, The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H.I.E. Dhlomo (Johannesburg, 1985). 210 Bantu World, 16 February, 1935. 211 Bantu World, 2 February, 1935. 212 Bantu World, 13 July, 1935. 213 Umteteli wa Bantu, 11 July, 1936. 214 Umteteli wa Bantu, 27 September, 1941.

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215 Bantu World, 11 January, 1941. 216 Bantu World, 22 February, 1941. 217 Drum, July 1957. 218 For a discussion of marabi, see for instance my ‘Concert and Dance’, 134-137. 219 The term mbaqanga – commonly the Zulu word for ‘African maize bread’ – has designated different kinds of music during the course of the last forty-odd years; but its first musical usage was as a synonym for African Jazz. 220 The Champion Papers, Library of the Church of the Province of South Africa, University of the Witwatersrand, A922. 221 Goodall, S. 1993. The Role of Devotional Music in the Homogenisation of South African Hinduism. South African Journal of Musicology: SAMUS 13, 1-5. Edited. 222 ‘Neo-Hinduism’ includes Hindu movements founded after about 1870 in India. (See Singh [n.d.].) In South Africa Neo-Hindu movements are represented by Ɩrya SamƗj, Ramakrishna Mission, International Society for Krҕsҕnҕa Consciousness, Divine Life Society, and Saiva Siddhanta Sangam. 223 ‘Meeting house’ is a term used by Naidoo to denote non-temple meeting places, namely halls, classrooms or ashrams. (An ashram is literally a ‘place of refuge’ where devotees may live as in a Christian monastery but with a level of community involvement that is much higher than in the traditional Christian concept.) See Naidoo, T. [n.d.]; and Hofmeyer 1979, 133). 224 These figures include Muslims, who generally have a higher rate of vernacular speaking. See Arkin, Magyar and Pillar 1989, 102. 225 [The bhajan used as illustration here has been imported from another source (Goodall 1991, 413). It was transcribed from recordings made at the Surat Arya Bhajan Mandal in Prince Edward St., Durban, in the late 1980s (see Goodall 1991, 182-96 and 24952). The text is in Gujarati, as are most bhajans sung by this group, which was formed in the 1940s by a few Gujarati families. Bhajan-singing is the mode of worship during the Saturday bhajan hour, and the repertoire, all of which originates from India, is learnt through texts written out in various forms and through melodies passed on orally from one generation to the next. Out of a core of about twelve participants in the Saturday service two can play harmonium, and they accompany themselves and others with the melodic line. Most of them play the cymbals and about three do this at any one time. One plays the tablƗ or dholak, one plays sarangi and sometimes there is a violin-player … In every song an introductory dedication leads directly into the song which is started very slowly and tentatively. There is often some searching by the lead-singer and/or the harmonium player for the appropriate pitch, and the first line might be repeated several times before pitch and tempo have settled (Goodall 1991, 250). The first line of the bhajan implies “unconscious of everything except his flute” (Goodall 1991, 413).] 226 MƗyƗ, the physical world, also ‘attachment’, which is in conflict with bhakti, devotion to God. 227 = Krҕsҕnҕa. 228 The conflict between mƗyƗ and bhakti. 229 Loving devotion to God. 230 By teaching the path of loving devotion Krҕsҕnҕa gave the devotees a boat to cross the ocean of life.

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231 This is not true of the Ɩrya SamƗj weekly service (a Vedic hawan or ‘fire sacrifice’) consisting almost entirely of Sanskrit mantras. But the vast majority of Hindus see this as a ‘special’ service and do not celebrate it often. 232 These instruments, together with variously-named cymbals, are the ones most commonly used for local devotional performance. TablƗ drums are chosen most often but m̙rdangam and dholak are quite commonly found. 233 Ɩnhat nƗda is ‘unstruck sound’, as opposed to Ɨhat nƗda, ‘struck sound’. 234 Desai, D. 1993. The Ratiep Art Form of South African Muslims. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis: University of Natal. Extracts: 315-20, 322-26, 327-27.1, 328-29, 331. Edited. [The first Cape Muslims (more commonly also called ‘Cape Malay’ or simply ‘Malay’) arrived in 1652 at the Cape. These political prisoners, slaves and exiles came from Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Madagascar (Davids 1981, 8; du Plessis 1935, 7). They transplanted their Islamic religion and some of their customs and cultural traditions to South Africa, and settled in areas such as the ‘Bo-Kaap’ (upper-Cape) in the city of Cape Town.] 235 [Accounts of the social background and musical activity of Cape Muslims since the early days of Dutch settlement may be found in the work of Lichtenstein (1928), Thunberg (1795), Mayson (1963), du Plessis (1953), Duff Gordon(1925), and Desai (1986), (Desai 1993, 316.] 236 Secular forms reflect more of an indebtedness to Dutch musical traditions, than sacred forms. 237 [All musical transcriptions and text translations are by the author. The transliteration from Arabic is non-standard, although Desai provides a key in his 1993 dissertation.] 238 [The ra’king was used formerly [in place of these string instruments] (Desai 1993, 331).] 239 See Desai 1986, 183-94. 240 Davies, N. 1994. The Guitar in Zulu Maskanda Tradition. World of Music: Journal of the International Institute for Comparative Studies and Documentation (Berlin) 36(2), 118-37. Extracts: 118, 120-23, 125-28, 129, 130-31, 133, 135-37. 241 The reference to old men implies respect. They are important and respected people in the society and play an important role in rituals and ceremonies. At the same time, the music sung at these rituals and ceremonies is characterized by a slow beat. 242 S. Mchunu, personal communication, Durban 1991. 243 Notes on transcription: the intela is not transcribed in its entirety but indicates the important features such as scale, pitch range and prominent intervals which occur between the voice parts. The ostinato pattern can be clearly seen in the upper bass line. The thumb of the right hand plays both the ostinato and bass melodic line. This obviously necessitates a break in the ostinato which is not indicated in the transcription since it is not aurally noticeable and does not affect the continuous, unbroken pulse. The forefinger of the right hand plays the upper melody. 244 S. Ngcobo, personal communication, Durban 1990. 245 This ‘home’ generally refers to the place where he spent his childhood and where the older members of the extended family still reside. Many musicians are permanently resident in urban or peri-urban areas although they might regard it as a temporary residence. The ties with their ‘home’ are often very strong and the term ‘inkaba’ (umbilical cord) is sometimes used in reference to this.

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246 These two categories are derived from my analysis of the styles and are not used by the musicians. 247 Until that time, most recordings made were of solo artists. These recordings are housed in the library at the SABC but are not available on the market. 248 Wells, R. 1994. Sesotho Music: An Introduction to the Music of the Basotho. Morija, Lesotho: Morija Museum and Archives. Extract: 220-24. 249 A. Mophethe, interview Maseru 10/05/1993. 250 [In the Preface to his book, Robin Wells explains his method of transcription : I have used an adapted form of standard European staff notation in the musical examples. Though such a system has its critics, it was felt that this was the most easily understandable system available and the most flexible, given the type of music to be notated. For reasons of space, musical extracts are provided rather than full-length songs: due to the cyclical nature of much Sesotho music, such a limitation is not felt to detract from what is being illustrated. In all cases, the song text is given in full. Most musical examples have been transposed into the tonal centre of C, for ease of reading. In such cases, the degree of transposition is noted above the staff. It is common for Sesotho songs, especially dance songs, to rise in pitch during performance. This pitch rise is also noted (Wells 1994, vi).] 251 Coplan, D. 1994. In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa’s Basotho Migrants. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Extracts: 202, 204-5, 206-7, 208, 209-216. 252 The following discussion of Basotho ethnoaesthetics is in part a revised version of that published in Coplan 1988, 350-66. 253 Yes, my use of ‘interlocutor’ is a pun on the stock minstrel show character ‘Mister Interlocutor’. 254 The final line makes use of ambiguities in Sesotho that are unavailable in English. Pelo e nyeka is an idiom for nausea that literally means ‘sickhearted’, and the last phrase may mean he was nauseous either because or although his stomach was empty. 255 ‘Ideophones’ are ideas, concepts, actions, or images expressed by lexemes or compound lexemes representing sounds. Extremely common in ordinary as well as aesthetic Sesotho, they represent the most naturalized form of sonic metaphors in the language (see Kunene 1965). As Burbridge put it, “The ideophone is the key to native [Basotho] descriptive oratory. I can’t imagine a native speaking in public with intense feeling without using it” (quoted in Finnegan 1970, 66). 256 In In Township Tonight! I referred to root progressions as “the short sequence of bass roots and the melody or melodies moving in relation to the tone centre in multipart structures of African music. Rycroft used the concept of root progression as a substitute for ‘chord sequence’ because African polyphony does not have real chords or a fixed harmonic scheme” (Coplan 1985, 258). 257 Erlmann, V., with an Introduction by J. Shabalala. 1996. Nightsong: Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Extract: 82-93. 258 Bona (April 1965), 41. 259 [A remarkable photo of the Mahotella Queens dancing umgqashiyo, 1965, is used in the original source (Erlmann 1996, 87) but could not be traced for reproduction here, nor could the photograph of Ladysmith Black Mambazo (Erlmann 1996, 88) that shows a striking similarity of pose between the two groups: hands on stomach, feet stamping.]

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260 Tracey, A. 1996. Indigenous Instruments. The Talking Drum 19, 8-11. Durban: University of Natal. 261 [See elsewhere in this book : Rycroft 1977 and Dargie 1988.] 262 Netshitangani, K. 1997. The Songs of the Venda Murundu School. In Papers Presented at the Symposium on Ethnomusicology Number 13, 1995, ed. A. Tracey, 13-19. Grahamstown: International Library of African Music. Extracts: 13-14, 15, 17. 263 Olivier, E. 1997a. The Art of Metamorphosis – Or the Ju|’hoan Conception of Plurivocality. In The Proceedings of the Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage Conference, ed. A. Bank, 263-68. Cape Town: InfoSource. Edited. 264 Clarkson Fletcher, J., J. Dazeley, J. Taylor and E. Wetherall [n.d. 1998]. Towards New Models for the Analysis of Post-serial and Post-tonal Music, with Particular Reference to Kevin Volans’ White Man Sleeps. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Congress of the Musicological Society of Southern Africa, Grahamstown August 1998, ed. W. Lüdemann, 718. [Stellenbosch: Musicological Society of Southern Africa.]. Extracts: 7-14. Shortened and edited. 265 [The title comes from a moment in the song ‘Nzungu Agona’ (lit. ‘White Man Sleeps’) as described by Andrew Tracey , when “[t]he panpipes are not played, leaving only the sound of the dancing ‘so as not to wake the white man’”(Tracey 1971, 82).] 266 [Volans has since withdrawn Mbira from his composer’s catalogue.] 267 [He describes his treatment of the African originals as “unacceptably Germanic, but at the time I was still very much a Cologne composer. I feel the piece has more to do with European music in the 1980s than anything else” (Volans 1990, liner notes).] 268 [In a language system, semiotics is the study of signs, semantics and syntax. As applied to music, it involves locating independent units, each with their own unique characteristic, and relating them to other quite similar units. Much of White Man Sleeps, especially the first movement, is written in short repetitive units that lend themselves very well towards a semiotic style of analysis (Clarkson Fletcher et al [n.d. 1998], 7.] 269 Allen, L. 1999. Kwela: The Structure and Sound of Pennywhistle Music. In Composing the Music of Africa, ed. M. Floyd, 227-263. Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate Publishing. Extract: 227-30, 241-43, 257-60. 270 A stokvel is a fundraising party; a method of raising money for individuals, often to save for sudden big expenses like funerals. Members of a particular stokvel association each host a party in rotation. The other members of the association agree to attend the party and encourage the attendance of non-stokvel members. The host keeps the profits accumulated from the sale of alcohol (and sometimes food) and an entrance fee. 271 Albert Ralulimi. Author’s interview, 12 February 1990. 272 Marabi was “the name given to the ‘hot’ highly rhythmic repetitive single themed dance tunes” of the period from the 1910s to the early 1930s. It was primarily a keyboard, banjo or guitar style based on a cyclical harmonic pattern. It originated in Johannesburg’s slumyards and was associated with the consumption of alcohol and wild ‘lowlife’ (see Ballantine 1993, 25-27). 273 Peter Macontela. Author’s interview, 13 July 1990. 274 Albert Ralulimi. Author’s interview, 12 February 1990. 275 Frederick Maphisa. Author’s interview, 11 July 1990. 276 Peter Macontela. Author’s interview, 13 July 1990. 277 Ibid. 278 World, 25 August 1956.

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279 James, D. 1999. Songs of the Women Migrants: Performance and Identity in South Africa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and International Africa Library. Extracts: 80-85, 86, 89-90, 209-10. 280 Lucas Kgole, recorded discussion with D[eborah] J[ames] and Neo Phakathi (hereafter NP), Sephaku, 3/11/89. Lebowa is the mostly rurally used name for the women’s equivalent of the men’s song kiba from which the entire genre takes its name. The popular recording artist and herbalist Johannes Mokgwadi, in recorded discussion with DJ and P[hilip]M[nisi], GaMasha, 16/7/91, gave a similar account of the origins of women’s involvement in kiba. 281 Dithabaneng, recorded discussion with DJ and PM, Nchabeleng, 14/7/91. The name marashiya (or marashea) probably comes from the name given to the ‘Russian’ gangsters from Lesotho, whom northern Transvaal migrants encountered on the Reef (Sam Nchabeleng, personal communication). 282 See Kuper (1987, 187). I am grateful to Adam Kuper for suggesting this line of investigation to me. 283 Lyrics and interpretation from women of Dithabaneng, recorded discussion with DJ and PM, Nchabeleng, 14/7/91. 284 [See James 1999 Chapter 5.] 285 Lyrics from Pauline Mphoka, recorded discussion with DJ and PM, Johannesburg, 2/10/91. 286 Martin, D.-C. 1999. Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town, Past and Present. Cape Town: David Philip. Extracts: 7-9, 10-11, 12-13, 15, 16. 287 Interview with a troupe captain and a committee recorded on 18 January 1994 [extract]. 288 Muller, C. 1999. Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women’s Performance in South Africa. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Extracts: 104-106, 109, 115-117, 283-84. 289 Rycroft (1971, 214-15) is of the opinion that other than the friction drum used in female initiation songs, most of the drums now used in South Africa have been borrowed from non-Nguni neighbors. He writes that there “is no evidence that elaborate drums and percussion ensembles like those found elsewhere in Africa have ever held a place in [Nguni] communal dance music”. Nevertheless, the drum remains a contested symbol in indigenous religious groups. It is used extensively by the Zionist movement. Jean Comaroff (1985, 230) endorses Rycroft’s theory of the absence of drum ensembles for precolonial Tswana, though she says that Tswana Zionists are adamant that the drum has always been part of their dance tradition. Contrary to Rycroft, Comaroff cites Harriet Ngubane (Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977]), who says that the drum “was part of the ngoma cult of possession, divination, and healing” among the Zulu. 290 Dargie (1987) writes that for the Xhosa Zionists, the drum they used is called igubu, and “is patterned on the European brass-band bass drum, and is usually made by stretching cow-hide over both ends of a section cut from a 44-gallon drum”. The impact of the Salvation Army on black performance culture - not only in South Africa, but certainly in those areas of Africa that were colonized by the British and Americans - has not yet been analyzed. Ranger (1975) and Coplan (1985) both made passing references to the Salvation Army in their research. Certainly, in my own research in KwaZulu Natal, I am finding

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increasing numbers of black musicians who have in one way or another been provided with instruments and/or training by the Salvation Army. 291 I was given this information by Rob Allingham (August 1993), archivist at Gallo Records in Johannesburg, South Africa, who also provided me with a copy of the recording [Muller discusses these recordings in Chapter 5 of her book]. 292 [Muller refers here to the CD accompanying her book, which includes this and other songs discussed by her.] 293 Kirby provides no evidence for the historical ‘authenticity’ of the sound, and I suggest, based on the work of Bongani Mthethwa, that Kirby’s statement is incorrect. In this regard, Mthethwa strongly contends that Shembe’s repertory is a cultural accommodation and synthesis of two different musical styles - that of Euro-American hymnody (i.e. distilled in the Baroque period of European music history) and that of Zulu tradition). 294 Rycroft (1971, 216) debunks the assumption that all Nguni music is pentatonic, saying only that “[e]arlier claims by some writers that Nguni music was pentatonic were no doubt based upon limited experience, perhaps of only one type of Nguni music …”. He also remarks that “even within a single tribe or family, a variety of ‘scales’ may be found” (Ibid.). 295 Vilakazi et al. (1986) suggest that hymns 1-157 are all in either the Western or Shembe style. Hymn 158 is the first in the indigenous style, and is meant for religious dance. This is the style into which Nazarite women’s performance fits. (They remark that the hymns in ‘Shembe’s style’ have also increasingly been used for religious dances.) [Regarding the ama14: “[T]he control of the fertility of young girls, and the maintenance of their virginity, secured the socioeconomic and political well-being of the religious community …” [Within this belief system] “participation in all-night sacred rituals required all married women, also known as ama14, to sacrifice sexual desire for their male companions on the fourteenth day of the month – symbolic of the most fertile day of the menstrual cycle – and to meet with other women to worship their God/Shembe instead” (Muller 1999, 21).] 296 Since my research has been with the female membership of ibandla lamaNazaretha, and I have been unable (because I am a woman) to attend men’s meetings, I have recorded only women’s singing, youth choirs, and congregational worship. Based on these recordings, my conclusion is that there does seem to be a range of song performance styles in this religious group, both diachronically and synchronically. I have focused largely on women’s religious dance, and in Chapter 5 [of her book], discuss the youth choir and cassette repertories. 297 [Mthethwa’s narrative divides the performance into sections that Muller calls ‘performance frames’ (109-110), which Muller then analyses by means of discursive description. The titles of Frame 6 (“After thirty minutes the leader changes to the third and fourth lines of the song, but faster and with more variation”, and Frame 7 (“They all listen to the changing”) are both taken from Mthethwa’s narrative.] 298 I was told that the women who sing above the others in a performance, and also those who start the singing, are the ones who are considered to be the most powerful in the spiritual sense (N. Mthethwa, pers. comm., August 1993). Similarly, Bongani Mthethwa told me that in Zulu tradition, the political power of a leader should always be reinforced by his musical leadership.

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299 Muller, S.J. Van Z. 2000. Imagining Afrikaners Musically: Reflections on the ‘African Music’ of Stefans Grové. Literator 21(3), 123-38. Extracts: 123-27, 128-31, 13334, 135, 135-36. 300 Lucia, C. 2002. Abdullah Ibrahim and the Uses of Memory. British Journal of Ethnomusicology 11(2), 125-43. Extracts: 127, 131-40. Shortened. 301 [A powerful sense of the use of music in recalling the past in order to survive and define the present, in exile, is reflected in Ibrahim’s poem ‘where loneliness still waters meet nostalgia’. Written from the perspective of his new home in New York, the author speaks eloquently in this poem of the way memories of music from his childhood sustain him through the grim realities of a life “hemisphered” - a life, as he puts it, “neither here nor there” (Lucia 2002, 127). (See Brand 1970 earlier in this book.)] 302 African Sketchbook 1973 (Berne/Germany: Enja Records MvN MVC3580) and African Marketplace 1979 (New York: Elek 6E252). See note 303. 303 My source for [the above-mentioned LP] African Sketchbook is the version held at Eleanor Bonnar Music Library, University of Natal. According to the bibliographic authority on Ibrahim’s work, Lars Rasmussen, ‘Mamma’ was “[o]riginally part of Anatomy of a South African Village [1965], but not included in the recording of that suite” (Rasmussen 2000, 172). It was recorded again in late 1968 or early 1969 at the SABC studios in Johannesburg (Rasmussen 2000, 33), then for Swiss Radio in 1969 (34), appearing on the albums African Sun (I), Ancient Africa (I) and Fats, Duke & The Monk (39, 42, 49), and later recorded at a session in Switzerland in April 1973 (51): all apparently before African Sketchbook was released in 1973. The African Sketchbook version is the one to which I refer in this paper, together with a later version for ensemble (African Marketplace, 1979). The year of release of African Sketchbook is not quite clear: Rasmussen gives it as 1969 (34), but on the LP cover the date 1973 is given. These kinds of difficulties have made Rasmussen’s task a painstakingly difficult one (see Lucia 2000). The most likely scenario is that the music for African Sketchbook was recorded for radio in 1969 and released on LP in 1973. Rasmussen’s list of tunes for the recording session (34) differs slightly from that on the LP, which rather supports this view. Rasmussen’s list is ‘Air’, ‘Khoisan’, ‘Peace - Salaam - Hamba Khale’ [sic], ‘Slave Bell’, ‘The Stride’, ‘Mamma’, ‘Krotoa’, ‘Machopi’, ‘Tokai’, ‘The Dream’, ‘The Aloe and the Wildrose’ (‘The Aloe and the Wildrose - South Easter - Sadness’), ‘Tariqua (1)’, ‘Nkosi’, ‘Selby That The Eternal Spirit Is The Only Reality’, ‘African Sun’, ‘Nkosi’, ‘African Sun’, ‘Peace - Salaam - Hamba Khale’. On the LP there is no ‘Khoisan’ or ‘Selby …’; ‘African Sun’ only appears once (after ‘Nkosi’), there are different spellings – ‘Kroto’ and ‘Tariq’ - and ‘Salaam’ is in the order ‘Salaam - Peace - Hamba Kahle’ (‘Kahle’ here correctly spelled). On both versions, ‘Mamma’ appears on a medley between ‘The Stride’ and ‘Kroto[a]’. 304 There are a number of things one can say about this kind of document, aside from making a structural analysis on the score showing how harmonies, motivic cells and quotes are used … Most obviously, it is not a jazz lead-sheet but a full transcription, which I made many years ago after repeated listenings to both the 1973 and 1979 recordings (Lucia 2002, 131). 305 See for example the discussions of root movement using I, IV, V in Blacking 1959, Rycroft 1977, and Coplan 1985. 306 The traces of two well-known hymn tunes on the surface of the music - from Samuel Sebastian Wesley’s ‘The Church’s One Foundation’ (end of the first phrase of Wesley and Ibrahim), and Lewis Redner’s ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ (last phrase of

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Redner and Ibrahim) - reinforce a connection with Ibrahim’s childhood. Despite his conversion to Islam in 1968, still in 1973 Ibrahim makes direct reference to hymns sung in the African Methodist Episcopal church community in which he grew up in the 1930s and ’40s. These quotes are not random, but important signifiers from the past. Ibrahim discusses ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ on film (A Brother With Perfect Timing, 1981) and ‘The Church’s One Foundation’ in a radio interview (‘Abdullah Ibrahim: A Self-portrait’: Radio South Africa, 1991) (Lucia 2002, 133-34). 307 Ibrahim’s loose interpretation of the blues - sometimes much looser than in the case of ‘Mamma’ - is a hallmark of his style. See for example ‘Blues for Bea’, ‘Blues for His majesty King Sobuza …’, ‘Carnival’, ‘Good News’, ‘Gwangwa’, second section of ‘Kippie’, ‘Knight’s Night’, ‘Moniebah’, ‘Thaba Nchu’, or ‘Tinti(n)yana’. 308 [For two different interpretations of such emotion see William Patry (1983) and Ben Watson (1990).] 309 Allen, L. 2003. Commerce, Politics, and Musical Hybridity: Vocalising Urban Black South African Identity during the 1950s. Ethnomusicology: Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology 47(2), 228-49. Extracts: 228, 229, 231-33, 235-37, 243-45. 310 Bantu World (Johannesburg), 20 February 1954. 311 Mbaqanga was popularised internationally during the mid-1980s by Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens. 312 Allingham’s assessment of Troubadour’s domination of the recording industry is based on interviews that he conducted with sound engineers and other personnel who were involved in the industry during the 1950s (Allingham, p.c.). Other major companies producing recordings for black South Africans included Gallo Africa and its subsidiary Gramophone Record Company (GRC), and Trutone, a local subsidiary of EMI. 313 For discussions of African Jazz, kwela, and male vocal jive, see Coplan 1985, Allen 1999, and Ballantine 1999. ‘African Jazz’ was the term most commonly used in the 1940s and early 1950s to describe the fusion of American big-band swing with local styles such as marabi and tsaba-tsaba by South Africa swing bands. The other commonly used term, mbaqanga, now risks confusion with a different style of the same name that emerged during the 1960s. 314 [Masuka, Dorothy. 1991. Hamba Notsokolo and Other Original Hits from the ’50s. Gallo Music Productions] CDZAC 60. As it would be difficult for readers to source the original 78 rpm recordings, wherever possible I refer to recordings that have been reissued on compact disc. 315 The following conclusions about the basic musical characteristics of vocal jive are formed on the basis of discussion with musicians and analysis of 360 vocal jive songs, including twenty-seven by Masuka. 316 Also known as African Dance Band of the Cold Storage Commission of Southern Rhodesia. 317 Mfecane refers to the period of warfare and destruction wrought by uShaka during the expansion of his amaZulu kingdom. 318 See, for example, ‘Five Bells’ and ‘Baya Goli’, on CDZAC 60. 319 ‘Hamba Notsokolo’, for instance, consists of two sixteen-chord progressions that are repeated and alternated; its original flip-side, ‘Mama Ngi Niki’, is a twelve-bar blues. The structure of ‘Hamba Notsokolo’ is, in fact, akin to that of many Manhattan Brothers compositions, which frequently consist of a local melody alternated with a newly composed section, added to make the song less repetitive (Mototsi, p.c.; Allingham, p.c.).

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320 CDZAC 60. 321 See, for example, the interpretation of chimurenga songs during the Zimbabwean struggle for independence (Frederikse 1983; Pongweni 1982, 1997; Sherman 1980). 322 Ilanga Lase Natal (Durban), 6 June 1959. 323 World, 17 January 1956. 324 Ilanga Lase Natal, 11 August 1956; Masuka, p.c.. 325 Re-diffusion was a cable radio service incorporated into houses when areas such as Orlando in Soweto were built. 326 For example, ‘Marshal [sic] Law’ (AFC 510); World, 20 December 1958), and ‘Kunzima’ ‘ (AFC 529; World, 24 June 1959). 327 Olwage, G. 2003. Music and (Post)Colonialism: The Dialectics of Choral Culture on a South African Frontier. Rhodes University: Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Extracts: 143-46, 147-49, 153, 154-57, 162-63. 328 [Bokwe’s hymn-tune LOVEDALE was “the first known notated composition by a black South African, the first of Bokwe’s about forty original compositions, the first music published by what was to become African’s largest mission institution, Lovedale”. Composed in June 1875 and originally titled ‘Msindisi Wa Boni’ (Saviour of Sinners), the hymn was taken to Scotland by A.N. Somerville and became popular enough to be published in 1893 (adapted) in Hymns and Melodies, For School and Family Use (Gall Inglis 1893) as LOVEDALE (Olwage 2003, 129, 130, 134).] 329 ‘Heaven’ was the largest ‘subject’ in Ira D. Sankey’s expanded, 750-piece latecentury edition of Sacred Songs and Solos (c1890; 1st publ. c1882). 330 Dale Cockrell mentions Sankey’s presence in late-nineteenth-century Natal (1987, 418). 331 Practising his motto that “the musical historian should call in the aid of the ethnologist”, Kirby intervened in debates on the nature of early European polyphony, claiming that the parallelism at the fourth, fifth and octave of African ‘primitive polyphony’ was evidence that ‘medieval “diaphony”’, or organum, was the earliest European polyphonic practice (1926, 952-60). 332 The E natural in bar 5 is probably a misprint for an E sharp. 333 I base my claims for gospel hymnody on an analysis of Sacred Songs and Solos and Songs of Zion. Although known as Sankey’s Sacred Songs, the songbook is a compilation, mostly of American music, with few songs composed by Sankey himself. 334 Albeit popular, the movement I analyse below is not a compulsory feature of gospel hymnody. More generally, there is no single gospel song type. The revivalist hymnal included, for example, many mainstream type hymn-tunes. Conversely, the ‘Standard collections’ incorporated revivalist hymns, though typically, as Curwen noted, reharmonised (1885, 40). 335 See Roger Parker (1997, esp. Chapter 8) on the application of ‘semantic reading’. 336 While not yet conceived as a ‘system’ of figures, as has been claimed for instance for especially eighteenth-century German Figurenlehre, musical rhetoric in gospel hymnody functioned similarly and for the same end as in pre-nineteenth-century European practice: to create meaning, and to persuade, through the strategic deployment of musical figures (see McCreless 2001). 337 [Amaculo ase Lovedale (Songs of Lovedale), a collection of hymn-tunes and partsongs compiled and mostly composed by John Knox Bokwe, first published in 1885 by Lovedale Press.]

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338 From a visit to an earlier exhibition in Cape Town, Bokwe reported that “Lovedale Music was one of the curiosities sought for” at the printing department stand (Christian Express Dec.1884, 190). All available evidence, much of it from Bokwe himself, suggests Amaculo was first published in mid-1885. The reference here is perhaps to a specimen copy. 339 It is unlikely that Bokwe joined the African Choir. There is no record of it, and he stipulated that he would do so only if they were “proceeding successfully” (Bokwe-Stewart 13/6/1891). By mid- to late 1892, when Bokwe finally got to Scotland, the Choir’s tour had been derailed (see Erlmann 1999, 14, 99-100). In a complex analysis of late Victorian Britain as a ‘society of the spectacle’, Erlmann reads the British reception of the African Choir, as well as other exhibition-type events that involved Africa, for how their production of ‘race’ was implicated in the history of commodity consumerism (1999, Chapter 4). Only in a discussion of the Choir’s costume does he address the chorister’s self-(re)presentation, as dressing to advertise the civilising mission (100-107). Elsewhere, while not specifically discussing the Choir’s repertory within the analysis of spectacle, Erlmann’s reading of the British press’s reviews of the music itself is revealing of a point relevant to my discussion. The programme consisted of a mix of Victorian music and ‘traditional’ southern African musics; at the least the latter category was a mix of the two, the ‘Great Hymn’, for example, being programmed. To varying degrees and, as Erlmann shows, for diverse politics, the press picked up on details of the musical texts and inscribed them variously within a civilised sameness or primitive difference. Erlmann does not emphasise, however, that the hybrid programme on the whole, and its inclusion of a musical ‘racial’ otherness, in no way seemed to jeopardise or negate the Choir’s message of its civilised status. For instance, while the first half of the programme was performed in ‘native’ dress, and the second in Victorian, thus illustrating quite literally, as one paper put it, ‘Africa Civilized, African Uncivilized’ (100), both halves of the programme, contradictorily, included both ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ music (see 88; and Ludgate Monthly Dec.1891, 111-12). In the hierarchy of signifiers music seems not to have occupied too important a place. Bokwe did not risk the possibility of musical misrepresentation, displaying only the music that white audiences were familiar with as their own, only the civilised music that was his own. 340 Songs of Zion justified its introduction of ‘refrains’ because of their suitability for “evangelistic meetings and gatherings of children” (Wilson n.d. [1877], 4). 341 The possible exception is ‘Lutukela’, ‘a duet, composed by a Kaffir’. The ‘duet’ however, was a favourite metropolitan form, for instance of revivalist music, and the authorial designation distinguishes it from the other ‘traditional’ music on the programme which is authorless except for the ‘Great Hymn’. The other pieces from which the ‘native’ preferences were identified are all exemplary Victorian choral compositions: ‘Lovedale’ by R. Kawa and J.J. Sikwebu (Amaculo 1910); ‘Does anybody here know the Big Baboon?’ by the colonial composer James Hyde; ‘Africa’, which The Times had difficulty in accepting ‘as a specimen of native music at all’; and ‘Send the Light’, arranged by Bokwe (Amaculo 1894), and published as a companion piece to ‘Plea’ by the Scottish firm Paterson and Sons. By contrast, none of the descriptions of the traditional songs makes mention of humming, vocal accompaniment or the solo-chorus form (see Ludgate Monthly Dec.1891, 11-12). Though they may well have done so. Variously called ‘ukumemelela’, ‘ukumbombozela’, or ‘imbuyo’ in the ethnomusicological literature, humming is a common

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vocal technique in traditional Xhosa musicking, either accompanying or alternating with singing (see Hansen 1981, 132; Dargie 1988, 60). Similarly, the idea of a solo and chorus defines communal Xhosa musicking (see Hansen 1981, 116-17, 240, 616; and Dargie 1988, 103-4). But to look for structural affinities in the details of the solo-chorus relation between traditional Xhosa musicking and revivalist hymnody would be an exercise in vain. I make these observations to point out that similarities between Victorian choralism and traditional Xhosa musicking can be found, not to suggest that Bokwe’s music includes Xhosa African characteristics. In the Xhosa-text versions of ‘Plea’ and ‘Accept the Light’, the instructions remain the English “Humming”, “Very softly. With closed lips” (Amaculo 1910 [n.p.]). 342 While the predominance of the major mode in black choral composition has long been noted (see, for example, Kirby 1979, 88 on Bokwe), reasons for the preference have seldom been forwarded. Mthethwa attributed it enigmatically to Nguni ‘taste’: the minor mode being considered ‘unmusical’, “musical sadness is expressed in intense harmonies in major tonality” (1988, 30-1). There seems not to have been any consideration of possible affinities between precolonial Xhosa tonality and the major modality of black choral composition. For a discussion of indigenous Xhosa tonality, see Dargie (1988, Chapter 6). 343 The majority of Victorian hymn-tunes were in the major [see Olwage 2003 Chapter 1]. 344 One example each from the metropolis and the Colony: in Curwen’s Standard Course the minor mode was introduced as late as the fifth, penultimate ‘step’ of the sol-fa course (1896 [1858]); in the Cape Education Department’s syllabus it appeared only from standard 6 on (Educational Gazette, 25 Oct. 1901, 43). 345 The pan-Africanism that Sisulu claimed for ‘Plea’ derives from the song’s evangelical message for the continent, a legacy to a more broadly conceived Christianinfluenced ‘humanism’ that informed the worldview of Sisulu’s generation as much as Bokwe’s (see Chanaiwa 1980). In the language of patria, Bokwe’s favoured mode of address was pan-Africanist; his English use of ‘countrymen’, we saw, was qualified with the parenthetical “(and all the native races of Africa I hold to be my fellow-countrymen)” (Christian Express Sep. 1891, 150). Whatever the address, though, Bokwe’s political action, and his composition as political act, was intended primarily for local effect. Certainly, it was devoid of the internationalism that marked early pan-Africanist politicking. 346 Scherzinger, M. 2004. Art Music in a Cross-Cultural Context: The Case of Africa. In The Cambridge History of Twentieth-century Music, eds. N. Cook and A. Pople. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 584-613. Extracts: 606, 607-11. 347 One exception to this general rule is Hans Rosenschoon’s Timbila, which combines the music of Venancio Mbande and the Chopi xylophone players with a symphony orchestra; the work was commissioned by the locally based Oude Meester Foundation in 1984, a time of particularly intense state-sanctioned oppression. 348 Representative composers include Arnold van Wyk (1916-83) and Hubert du Plessis (b.1922).

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Index accordion 107, 130, 207-8, 225-6, 230, 333 Adams College 29 aerophones 81, 238ff aesthetics 221ff, 259, 282, 320, 339 African jazz 189, 191, 302, 306, 336, 343 African Choir 314-5 African Music: Journal of the African Music Society 44, 328, 330 African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music 238 African Music Society 47, 328, 330 African National Congress or ANC 172, 175, 180-1, 191, 308, 318 African pianism 321 Afrikaanse Kultuurraad 59 Afrikaans churches 90 Afrikaans composers 108 Afrikaans 90, 108, 124, 198, 279, 282, 289 Afrikaans music 107-8, 333 Afro-marimba 243 Albany 15-16 Alberti, Ludwig 3, 32, 325, 327 Allen, Lara 267, 305, 341, 345 amakwaya or makwaya 177 ‘Amaculo ase Lovedale’ 346 AmaXhosa or Xhosa 32, 67, 109ff, 130, 154, 171, 176, 221, 296, 320-1, 332 AmaZulu, Zulu or Zoolas 13-14, 31, 67, 72ff, 79, 89, 94, 100, 116, 140, 235, 306, 324-5 American Methodist Episcopal Church 299 analysis 51, 54, 63-5, 79, 116, 121, 175, 193, 214, 260, 284-5, 317, 322, 339, 344ff Anderson, Andrew 19, 327 Anglo-Boer war 72, 128 anthropology 40, 51, 79, 175 apartheid 41, 131, 146, 150, 234, 291, 303ff, 309, 319, 321, 328-9 ‘art’ music 98, 100, 294, 319, 332, 348 Associated Board of the Royals Schools of Music 108 Ballantine, Christopher 130, 187, 259, 334, 336 Bamalete 243

Bantu 31, 44ff, 59, 67, 142, 146, 181-2, 18990, 226, 328 Bantu World 337-8, 345 BaPedi, or Pedi 35, 238-9, 241ff Barnard, Lady Anne 32 Barrow, John 1, 6, 32, 325, 327 BaSotho, or Sotho 35, 38, 99-101, 116, 172, 216, 220ff, 230, 238-9, 242, 247, 259, 263, 320, 322, 334-5 Batavia 334 Bathurst 17, 326 BaTswana, Tswana or Booshuanas 1-2, 240, 243-4, 259, 325, 342 Bechuanaland 34, 182 Bell, Charles Davidson 13 Bender-Brink, Anna 122, 334 bhajan 193ff, 336-7 Bible 5, 89, 238, 325 Birkett, Christopher 18, 326 Blacking, John 62, 64, 116, 119, 140, 174, 306, 317, 326-7, 344ff Blake, Michael 321-2 Bloemfontein 125 blues 120, 220, 265-6. 296, 299, 301, 305, 343, 344 Bokwe, John Knox 24, 108ff, 174, 308-10, 312ff, 325-6, 332, Bokwe, S.T. 108-110, 113-4, Boer or Boor 5, 19, 72, 128, 176 Bo-Kaap 277-8 Botswana 39, 242, 325, bow 4, 73, 79ff, 98, 118-9, 139, 151, 153-4, 207, 212ff, 231, 239ff, 258, 262, 305, 319, 328, 330 Brand, Dollar [see Ibrahim, Abdullah] Brink, Ann [see Bender-Brink] Britain 16, 93-4, 103, 310, 315, 318, 347 British garage 320 British national anthem 16 bubble-gum 320 Bushmen [see San] Buthelezi, Mangosuthu 73, 83 Buthelezi, Mathole 72-3, 7506, Buthelezi, Alexius 231

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call and response style 201, 248 Caluza, Reuben 29ff, 100, 104, 172ff Cape Colony 4ff, 16, 325 Cape Town 10-11, 59, 68, 91, 122ff, 131, 1334, 147ff, 157-8, 163, 280-1, 302, 326, 328, 335, 339, 347 Carnival 279ff, 342, 345 Chaka Chaka, Yvonne 320 choirs 10, 15-16, 29, 46, 67, 101, 108, 11011, 114, 116, 129, 145, 148, 156ff, 161, 175ff, 179-80, 234, 236-7, 250, 280, 282, 300-1, 215ff, 327, 333, 335-6, 343, 347 choral music 29, 31, 73, 80, 82, 87-8, 94, 989, 141-2, 146, 149, 164, 177, 207-8, 226, 236ff, 285, 314, 317ff, 321, 329, 332-3, 346ff chordophones 208, 238ff Christian Express 311, 347-8 Christian mission 7, 13, 18, 21, 26 Church of the Province of Southern Africa 238 Cillié, G.G. 90ff, 332 Ciskei 111 Coko, Joseph Scotch 66ff, 329 colonial life 15, 90, 146, 258, 278, 290, 30910, 315, 317-8, 336, 342, 346ff Columbia Hall 48ff composers 43, 47, 94, 97ff, 104ff, 108-9, 1223, 125-6, 128, 130, 142, 145-6, 148, 175, 177, 179, 191, 234, 236-7, 268, 274ff, 278, 291, 195-6, 302, 314, 318, 321ff, 328, 332, 341, 347-8 composition 10-11, 13, 64, 87, 94, 98ff, 108, 123, 133, 141, 175, 177, 179, 190, 231, 234, 236-7, 258-9, 268ff, 274, 277, 296ff, 306-7, 310, 312, 314-5, 317ff, 323, 330, 332, 335, 345ff concertina 98, 107, 207-8, 230, 321, 333 Coon Carnival 279ff Coplan, David 116, 119, 275, 334, 340, 342, 344-5 Curwen, John 312, 314, 316-7, 346, 348 dance, African 39ff, 140, 178, 180, 238; ballroom 148, 177; Boor 5; dance-bands 182, 185; Coon Carnival and 279, 282-3; Griqua 19; Hottentot 5; Indian SA and 159; indlamu 191; ingoma 210, 214; Makeba and 138; marabi 48-9, 191; maskanda 207, 213; Nazarite 285ff; Ndebele 20; Ntsikana and 23; Nyanga

265, 322; Pedi 272-3; phata phata 308; Shembe 285-6; Sotho 216, 221-2, 230; township 131; tsaba-tsaba 190-1; Tswana 1; umgqashiyo 233-4; Venda 242-6; Xhosa 3ff; Zulu 13, 31 Dargie, David 109ff, 152ff, 240, 311, 333ff, 342, 348 Davies, Nollene 207, 339 de Beer, Mona 57, 329 de Villiers, M.L. 32, 108 Desai, Desmond 119, 339 Dhlomo, H.I.E. 116, 185, 337 dholak 204, 338-9 dinaka 242, 272, 274 dipela 243-4 District Six 149, 283 Dollar Brand (see Abdullah Ibrahim) domba 63-4 Drum Magazine 48, 57, 67 drums, African 47, 238, 241-2; Cape Malay 204; Coon Carnival 282, 285; Indian 161, 168, 197; jazz 49, 164, 168, 207, 210, 232, 268; Pedi 272, 276, 279; Sotho 225, 230; Venda 62; Zulu 81, 177 Dunn, Edward 41-2, 348 du Plessis, Hubert 348 Durban 41, 43, 59, 71, 72, 79, 147, 159, 161, 163, 172, 176ff, 180, 182, 184, 192, 194, 207, 215, 231, 298, 328, 336, 338-9, 341 Dutch East Indian Company 122 Dutch psalms 5, 90-1 eastern Cape 10, 15, 18, 21, 26, 66, 109, 130, 152, 311, 327, 329 East London 41-2 eighteenth century 26, 199, 346 Ellington, Duke 60, 130 Eoan Group 148-51 Erlmann, Veit 172, 231, 291-2, 308, 336-7, 340, 347 ethnomusicology 50, 72, 140, 172, 192, 238, 267, 302, 320 Ethnomusicology Symposia 238 FAK 90, 92, 107-8, 133, 332-3 FAK-Volksangbundel 107, 124 Faktor-Kreitzer, Lucy 147, 335 Fassie, Brenda 320 Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniginge [see FAK] Fehr, William 325

365

Ferguson, Howard 133, 334 first fruits 14 flutes 80-1, 207-8, 238, 242 folk music African 44ff, 97ff, 144, 146; Afrikaans 108; Indian 169 Fort Hare University 154, 329 Gabriels, Joseph 151 Gaika 21-2 Gallo 93-4, 272, 285, 305, 330, 342-3, 345 Genadendal or Gnadenthal 9, 325-6 George 10 Glasser, Stanley 57, 94-5 globalisation 320 Gluckman, Leon 93-4 Godlonton, Robert 15, 326 Goodall, Sallyann 192, 238 Gora 32ff, 234 gourd-bow 81ff Grahamstown 13, 15-16, 18, 26, 66, 238, 3289, 341 Graham’s Town Journal 15 Griqua 19, 326-7 Groenekloof [see Mamre] Grobler, W.S.J. 107, 333 Grové, Stefans 289ff guitar 6, 47, 55, 60, 84, 98, 117, 119-20, 130, 146, 168, 204-5, 207ff, 230ff, 268-9, 279, 284, 321 harmonics 33, 82, 87, 98, 146, 152ff, 239ff, 263-4, 323 Haydn 7, 10-11, 189 Healdtown Training Institution 66-7, 329 Hinduism 159-60, 166-7, 192ff, 338 Hottentot [see Khoi] Househam, J.W. 26, 327 Huskisson, Yvonne 273 hybridity 345 Ibrahim, Abdullah 60, 298ff, 321, 344-5 identity 99, 105-6, 121, 176, 222, 233, 277-8, 287, 289, 291-2, 296-7, 299-300, 305 idiophones 238ff Iingcacu 243 ilala 243 Ilanga Lase Natal 182 Imvo Zabantsundu 329 indentured labour 159ff Indian music 159ff, 192ff Indian Opinion 160, 163

ingoma [see dance] ingungu 81 initiation 40, 62ff, 245, 329, 342 inkinge 239-40 instruments 4, 6, 32ff, 44ff, 52, 79ff, 84, 98, 109, 167-8, 204, 207ff, 230, 238ff, 250, 259, 269-70, 321, 327 Intimate Theatre 93-4 International Folk Music Council 45 International Library of African Music 44, 56, 238, 328 ‘Ipi-Tombi' 93 isigubu 241 isitolotolo or jew’s harp 207 isicathamiya or mbube 216ff, 231ff ixilongo 25, 242 Jackson, Melveen 159, 335 James, Debra 272, 342 jew’s harp (see setolotolo) Johannesburg 28, 32, 38, 41, 57, 59, 67-8, 73, 94ff, 96-7, 116, 122, 126ff, 131, 170, 176, 182ff, 188, 216, 267, 270, 305, 308, 321, 327, 332ff, 341, 344 Ju|’hoan 250ff kiba 272ff, 342 King Kong 57-8, 93ff, 131, 138 Kirby, Percival 32, 51, 56, 87, 154, 179, 285, 311, 327, 333 kƯrtan 194, 196ff Khoisan or Khoi or Khoin 5-6, 8, 10, 32ff, 199, 238-9, 250, 325, 341, 344 Khumalo, Mzilikazi 321, 330 Klatzow, Peter 94, 330, 334 kora 322 Korana 33-4 Kronos Quartet 321 kudu or sable horn 242 Kumalo, Alfred Assegai 140ff, 334-5 Kuruman 325 kwaito 130, 320 kwela 267ff, 305, 307, 341, 345 Ladysmith Black Mambazo 216, 231, 234, 237, 340 Latrobe, Christian 7, 325-6 Latvia 147 liederwysies 91-2 Lebona, Aaron 116, 119 lekolilo 242

366

lekope 239 lesiba 34ff, 38, 230, 23, 239-40, 259, 263-4, 322 Lesotho 116, 216, 221, 225, 322, 340, 342 letlhaka 342 Lobengula or Lo-Bengulu 20, 327 London 1, 19, 29, 39, 72, 95, 127, 147, 183, 309 London Missionary Society 18, 22 London Tonic Sol-fa College 66 Lovedale Mission 21, 24, 67, 174, 311, 314-5, 318, 327, 346 LOVEDALE (hymn tune) 310, 312, 314, 346 Lovedale Music (publisher) 21, 318, 347 Lucia, Christine 298, 344 lugube 239 Lumko 109, 152, 155 Lutheran church 10-11 Lyric Opera Company 126ff mafahlawane 243 mafowane 243 Magogo, Princess Constance 72ff, 83-4, 322, 330ff Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens 232ff, 340, 345 Makeba, Miriam 58, 94-5, 138, 305, 334 Malan, Jacques 126, 332ff Malay 199ff, 279, 339 Mamre or Groenekloof 8, 326 Manhattan Brothers 94, 138, 345 mantra 194, 196-7 Marabastad 48-9 Mariannhill Training Institute 29 Martin, Denis-Constant 279, 342 Mashiyane, Spokes 267 maskanda 207ff, 231-2 Masuka, Dorothy 305ff, 345-6 mathuzwu 243 matlho 243 Matshikiza, Todd 94ff, 190 Matthews, Frieda Bokwe 39, 326 mbaqanga or mbhaqanga 130-1, 191, 209, 231ff, 268, 305 mbila 243 mbira 238, 243, 322-3 McGregor, Chris 130ff, 279 Mdledle, Nathan 58, 94 membranophones 204, 238ff Methodist Church 26, 28, 66, 327 mfecane 306, 345

military band 10, 15, 129 Mngoma, Khabi 97, 332 modernism 291, 323 Moghul, The 166-7 Mohapeloa, Joshua P. 99-100, 102-3, 216 Moeketsi, Kippie 131 Moppie 199, 279 Moravian Church or United Brethren Church 7, 325 Morija Publishing 103, 333, 340 moropa 241 Moshoeshoe 216 Moyer, R.A. 329 Mozambique 243, 322 Mozart 10 Mphahlele, Es’kia 48, 328 m̙rdangam 339 Mthethwa, Bongani 140, 286, 317, 334-5, 343 Muller, Carol 285, 342 Muller, Stephanus 289, 344 murumba 241 murundu 245ff, 341 Musicological Society of South Africa 126 musicology 41, 79, 175, Muslim 159-60, 166, 199, 201, 204, 206, 3389 Mzilikazi, Chief 326-7 Nagtroep 279-80 ‘Nagmusiek’ 133ff Namibia 238, 250, 325 Napoleonic wars 1 Natal Colony 159 Natal Indian Congress 164 Nationalism 97, 105, 167, 172 Nationalist Party 169 Nazarite Church 285-6, 342 Ndau 243 Ndebele 306, 322 Ndodana, Bongani 321 neo-Hinduism 197 Netshitangani, Kaiser 245, 341 nineteenth century 21, 73, 105, 159, 164, 177, 179, 280-1, 300, 306, 310, 320, 322, 325, 332, 346 ngoma 142, 207, 210, 214, 234, 241, 306 Nguni 99, 119, 140ff, 146, 213, 238-9, 285, 311, 334-5, 342-3, 348 ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’ 142, 207, 210, 214, 234, 241, 306 Northern Cape 19, 325

367

Northern Province 272, 277 notation (general) 50, 91, 109, 346 Ntsikana 21ff, 109ff, 319, 327-8, 333-4 ocarina 50ff, 117, 328 Ohlange 29, 172, 175ff Olivier, Emmanuelle 250, 341 Olwage, Grant 310, 346 opera 42, 125, 126ff, 321, 148ff, 190, 321 opera houses 126ff overtones (see harmonics) pennywhistle (see kwela) phalafala, or phalaphala 242 phata phata 308 piano 8, 10, 67, 100, 108, 131, 133-4, 136, 162, 167, 177, 179, 187, 190, 207-8, 243, 258, 289, 292, 294-5, 298, 300, 310, 3212, 327, 333 Pietermaritzburg 41-2, 140, 159-60, 169, 176 ‘Plea for Africa’ 314ff plurivocality 250ff popular music 47, 79, 267, 117, 305, 337 Port Elizabeth 16, 32, 41-2, 59, 182, 326 post-apartheid South Africa 291, 321 Pretoria 41, 48, 58-9, 122, 126, 128, 133, 170, 186, 289, 334 Pringle, Thomas 326 Qabula, Alfred 170, 336 Queen’s University Belfast 50, 140 ragtime 116, 167, 172, 177ff ratiep 199, 201ff, 339 rattles 47, 81, 238, 243, 250, 259-60, 264-5 reedpipes 19, 34, 51, 62, 177, 238-9, 242-3, 251, 269 Revivalist movement 161, 310ff, 346ff Rhodes University 109, 10 Robben Island 125 Robeson, Paul 189 root-progression 39, 52-3, 55-6, 109, 117, 119-20, 226, 310 Rosenschoon, Hans 348 Royal Academy of Music 133, 147, 334 Royal College of Music 133 Royal School of Church Music 156ff Rycroft, David 72ff, 79ff, 117, 214, 330ff, 340ff SAMRO 331-2

San 32, 250, 259, 263, 325 Sankey and Moodey 91, 311, 317, 346 Scherzinger, Martin 320, 348 Schubart, Christian 122ff, 334 sefela 220ff segankure 239-40 setolotolo 230, 239 settlers, British 15 settlers, Dutch 5 settlers, Indian 159ff seventeenth century 133, 199 Shabalala, Joseph 231-2, 234, 236-7, 340 Shalimar Records 166-7 shebeen 100. 220, 225-6, 229ff, 308 Shembe, Isaiah 140, 285, 343 Shona 238, 243, 322 ‘Silusapho Lwase Afrika’ 172ff Sisulu, Walter 191, 318-9, 348 Slaves 125, 199, 308, 339 Slaven Gezangen 91 Smith, Andrew 13, 326 Smith, Barry 156, 335 Smith, Edwin 327 solfa (see tonic solfa notation) ‘Sonate op Afrika-motiewe’ 289ff ‘Songs of Zion’ 310, 346-7 Sontonga, Enoch 68, 175 Sophiatown 308 Sotho [see BaSotho] South African Broadcasting Corporation or SABC 43, 73, 93, 126, 134, 147, 163, 215, 245, 309, 340, 344, South African Indian Council 163 South African Music Encyclopaedia 126, 332ff South African Native National Congress 172 Soweto String Quartet 321 staff notation 94, 144, 182, 340 Standard Theatre 127 St. George’s Cathedral, Cape Town 156ff St. George’s Church, Grahamstown 16 Stokvel 267, 341 sufism Swazi 76, 138, 242, 330, 332 syncretism 140ff, 163, 166, 334 tablƗ 167, 338 Tamil 159ff, 165-6, 193 thomo 239 timbila 243 ‘Timbila’ 248

368

tonic solfa notation 18, 24, 99, 109ff, 144, 329, 332, 335 Tracey, Andrew 93-4, 238, 259, 265, 328-9, 341 Tracey, Hugh 44, 50, 73, 110, 112, 285-6, 328 traditional music 73, 79-80, 99, 109, 120, 140, 145, 263, 306, 321 transcription 2, 50-1, 54-5, 83, 86, 88, 109, 113-4, 116, 119, 212, 224-5, 238, 259, 261, 263, 265-6, 299, 302, 310, 320, 328, 330-1, 333, 339-40, 344 Transkei 67-8, 109, 334 Transvaal 19, 33, 35, 57, 124, 159, 166, 236, 328, 337, 342 Trewhela, Ralph 93, 332 Trinity College of Music 39, 156 Troubadour records 231, 305ff, 345 Trutone records 308, 345 tshihwana 239ff tshijolo 239 tshikona 62ff, 242 tshitiringo 51, 242 Tsonga 51, 238ff, 332 Tswana [see BaTswana] twentieth century 72, 122, 130, 290, 300, 320ff, 326, 332, 348 twenty-first century 323 Tyamzashe, B.P.J. 67, 100, 104, 109, 329 ugubhu or ugubu 81ff, 89, 213ff, 239, 330, 332 uhadi 239-40, 332 ‘Ulo Tixo Mkulu’ 25, 109, 112-3 umakhweyana or umakwayana 74, 80ff, 213, 239-40, 307, 330, 332 umgqashiyo 232ff umngqokolo 152ff umqangala 239-40 umqunge 154, 239 umrhubhe 15, 29, 152ff, 239-40 Umtata 104 Umteteli wa Bantu 182 umtshingo 242-3 umtshingozi 242 Union of Federated Artists 97 University of Cape Town 131, 133, 156 University of Durban-Westville 159, 192, 207 University of (KwaZulu) Natal 130, 140, 159, 170, 199, 207, 285, 336, 344 University of Potchefstroom 90 University of Pretoria 59, 122, 289, 334

University of Stellenbosch 90, 108, 133, 289 University of the North 48 University of Venda 245 University of the Witwatersrand 32, 48, 50, 94, 116, 267, 272, 298, 310, 329, 337 University of Zululand 29, 97, 333 Urdu 159, 166-7 van der Walt, J.J.A. 90, 332 van Wyk, Arnold 133ff, 289, 334, 348 Venda (see Vhavenda) Vhavenda 50ff, 62ff, 117, 238ff, 245ff, 258, 328-9, 341 Victorian music 46, 161, 300, 318ff Vilakazi, Strike 308 violin 4, 84ff, 147-8, 161, 207-8, 289, 292, 294-5 vocal jive 305ff, 245 Volans, Kevin 258ff, 321ff, 341 ‘Vuka Deborah’ 328 ‘Wait a Minim’ 93-4 Waterboer, Nicholas 19, 327 Wells, Robin 216, 340 Wesleyan Methodist Church 16, 26 Western classical music 31-2, 39, 53, 79, 97, 140-1, 161, 164, 177, 208, 268, 292, 323, 334-5 Williams, Rev Joseph 22 ‘White Man Sleeps’ 258ff, 341 Xhosa [see AmaXhosa] Xhosa music 98ff, 102, 109ff, 115, 130, 152, 240, 243-4, 309-10, 319-10, 329, 332-3, 346, 348 xipalapala 242 xitende 239-40 xitloti 242 xizambi 239-40 Xylophones 238, 243 Zimbabwe 243, 306, 309, 346 Zionist Church 231, 342 Zulu [see AmaZulu] Zulu music 29ff, 71ff, 79ff, 86, 98, 100, 115, 140ff, 172, 176ff, 191, 207ff, 233, 239, 241ff, 285, 306-7, 320ff, 330ff, 337ff, 342 Zwelitsha 110