African Journals Online
South African Journal of Musicology (SAMUS)

VOL. 19/20 (1999/2000)
ABSTRACTS

Whose Music of a Century? Performance, History and Multiple Voices

Nicolas Cook

It's the small words that do the most cultural work. THE MUSIC OF A CENTURY, the title of the conference for which this paper was written, imputes a spurious singularity to a multiplicity of cultural practices, and begs the question of in whose interests this singularity is being constructed. An alternative question, 'WHOSE MUSIC OF A CENTURY?', could be explored in political terms (and nowhere more fruitfully than with reference to South Africa), but in this paper I focus on the broader intellectual and ideological factors that lead us to construct music in this manner. I do this by showing how, through its emphasis on score and structure, musicology silences the multiple and divided voices of music in performance, and argue that the same restrictive assumptions pervade our writing of music history. The fundamental problem in doing justice to the historical development of twentieth-century music is that of writing multicultural history.

Of Wizards and Madmen: Venda Zwilombe, Part I

Jaco Kruger

Zwilombe are a class of Venda male musicians regarded both as folk heroes and social deviants. This essay, which is the first part of a two-part discussion of this contradictory social status, focuses on the heroic role of zwilombe as social critics and popular entertainers. The critical function of zwilombe is located in a political economy marked by hereditary political power. Zwilombe are shown to have spiritual sanction to reveal and oppose political excesses. The heroic status of zwilombe also is related to their capacity to entertain and to involve others in performances that dramatise shared social experiences.

Protesting Relevance: John Joubert and the politics of Music and Resistance in South Africa

Stephanus Muller

Accusations of disingenuous opportunism arising from overtly political stances can be difficult to counter, and politics thus may not be a particularly convincing point of departure from which to generate satisfactory readings of art music anywhere. Yet the filtering of music through a political prism at a specific time and in a specific place is perhaps a useful and even necessary opportunism. John Joubert's Second Symphony provides an opening for a political reading of a musical text in a South African context. While this reading, needless to say, is not 'the correct' or 'the definitive' reading, it is a legitimate reading nonetheless. It begs the question: why banish politics from musicological discourse in present day South Africa as a matter of principle when music strategically stands to gain by establishing the connection. In this sense this article is as much about the strategic politicization of musicology as it is about art music. Reinventing a traumatic past and negotiating a difficult present through musicological discourse and musical texts is not to create a paradigm or theorize a systemic approach. It is a temporary strategy intended to benefit its stakeholders, which in this context include those active in both art music and musicology.

Towards a Music-based Understanding of Improvisation in Music Therapy

Mercédès Pavlicevic

Attempts to make sense of improvisation in music therapy of ten rely on psychological, medical, psychoanalytic, musical or other discourses. These attempts seem to ignore the musical aspect of clinical improvisation and make an unsatisfactory leap of logic from the musical event to its extramusical meaning. This article makes a case for grounding all interpretations within the music itself: micro-analysis of excerpts from two examples of clinical improvisation show a wealth of interpersonal meaning embedded in the music.

The Moon and the Insomniac: Musical Personae in Elliott Carter's "Insomnia"

Brenda Ravenscroft

Elliott Carter's system of setting a text is examined by means of an analysis of the song 'Insomnia' from A Mirror on Which to Dwell. The close relationship between the poetry and the music is seen in the way that Carter relates his music to the details of the poem, both in form and content. Linear continuities in the music, defined in terms of textural streams with specific musical characteristics, signify personae in the poem through their extra-musical connotations, while stream interaction and textural processes within individual streams relay Carter's interpretation of the text. The formal structure of the poem generates the large-scale tripartite form of the song and plays a role in determining smaller-scale musical subsections. The analytical method presented in this paper, with its focus on linear texture, is appropriate for the analysis of other recent compositions by Carter.

Op Soek na 'n Hermeneutiese Venster

Bertha Spies

In a search for meaning below the surface of the music, music-rhetorical figures in Brahms's Minnelied are used as a kind of 'hermeneutic window'. A dualistic approach is followed in the empirical phase of the search, namely the identification of static synchronic rhetorical figures on a micro-level and of a diachronic view of the dynamic transformation of rhetorical figures on a macro-level. The results of this strategy lead to the disclosure of ambiguous musical meaning in the Minnelied. The relationship between congeneric and extrageneric meaning is explored, with technical knowledge viewed as the embodiment of congeneric meaning and connections between music and linguistics drawn upon to determine extrageneric meaning. Because rhetoric and music both aim at effective communication as well as the shaping of content, rhetoric serves well as an aid to the disclosure of musical meaning.