African Journals Online
South African Journal of Musicology (SAMUS)

Volume 21 2001
Abstracts

OF WIZARDS AND MADMEN: VENDA ZWILOMBE, PART II

Jaco Kruger

Tshilombe deviance is shown to be regarded as a form of relatively non-threatening 'madness', manifested in behavioural tendencies such as unusual dress, impolite speech, alcohol abuse, a roving existence, bachelorhood and womanizing. The label of 'madman' essentially is a counterbalance for the powerful role of zwilombe as critics of social hierarchies and the excesses of entrenched power. Tshilombe behaviour therefore is explained more adequately by structural factors than by some suspected innate tendency towards deviance. In addition, tshilombe deviant characteristics are shown to be related directly to contemporary conditions of widespread poverty which have stimulated tshilombe stereotyping. Tshilombe deviance thus also has come to function prescriptively in processes of moral redefinition.

EXPLORING THE AESTHETICS OF RECONCILIATION: RUGBY AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATIONAL ANTHEM

Stephanus Muller

Turning to the great white South African ritual, rugby, this article probes the role of South Africa's national anthems in the elaborately staged and self-congratulatory global spectacle of the Rugby World Cup 1995 and the politics of nation building of which it became part. Following Roland Barthes' reading of Eisenstein film stills, the article ponders the meaning of the obtuse in the opening ceremony of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, which remains one of the most poignant and powerful moments in post-1994 South Africa. It dwells on the meaning of difference, which, in Rian Malan's tortured phrase, exists in South Africa as 'parallel kingdoms of consciousness'. Reading the singing of the South African national anthems during the opening ceremony of the 1995 Rugby World Cup allows the possibility of contrasting difference as an independent and regulative agent to moral difference, which paradoxically depends on an improbable degree of 'sameness' in all other categories, including the historical. Even if South Africans are not (yet) a nation, it is possible to explore what can at the very least be called an intuitive sense of interdependence.

RECENT SOUTH AFRICAN POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH IN MUSIC

Beverly Parker

It is natural that the postgraduate theses that were accepted by South African universities during the ten-year period from 1990 through 1999 were affected by the deprivations and prejudices that were a part of the larger South African society during that and preceding decades. Not surprisingly the strongest effects are those concerning the race of those writing such theses and the strong European and American orientation evident in the topics that were studied. Until recently, universities have accepted works that have not problematised theoretical and methodological issues, including the purpose of music analysis. Few important works on South African music have been written by musicologists or ethnomusicologists who live in the country, a state of affairs that raises many questions about music researchers and the contexts within which they work.

SUDDEN CHARMS: THE PROGRESS OF AN ARIA

Roger Parker

The first part of the paper involves a consideration of one of Handel's most famous arias, 'Dove sei, amato bene' from Act I of Rodelinda, paying particular attention to certain changes that the composer made to the opening of the aria. The second part then examines a particular moment in the aria's twentieth-century reception, Kathleen Ferrier's famous recording of 'Art Thou Troubled?', one in which Handel's text, both musical and poetic, is boldly changed. While Handel scholarship has tended to take a negative view of such operatic migrations, the present paper suggests some ways in which both 'original' and 'transcription' might coexist fruitfully, perhaps even casting interpretive light on each other.