Composing Apartheid: Music for and against apartheid

by Grant Olwage (Editor), Gary Baines (Contribution by), Ingrid Byerly (Contribution by), Christopher Cockburn (Contribution by), David Coplan (Contribution by)

Overview

Composing Apartheid is the first book ever to chart the musical world of a notorious period in world history, apartheid South Africa. It explores how music was produced through, and was productive of, key features of apartheid’s social and political topography, as well as how music and musicians contested and even helped to conquer apartheid. The collection of essays is intentionally broad, and the contributors include historians, sociologists and anthropologists, as well as ethnomusicologists, music theorists and historical musicologists. The essays focus on a variety of music (jazz, music in the Western art tradition, popular music) and on major composers (such as Kevin Volans) and works (Handel’s Messiah). Musical institutions and previously little-researched performers (such as the African National Congress’s troupe-in-exile, Amandla) are explored. The writers move well beyond their subject matter, intervening in debates on race, historiography, and postcolonial epistemologies and pedagogies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781868149391
Publisher:	Wits University Press
Publication date:	06/01/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Grant Olwage is a professor at the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Gary Baines is Associate Professor in the History Department at Rhodes University, Grahamstown.
Ingrid Byerly is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Previous recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a Fulbright Award, and the Charles Seeger Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Christopher Cockburn lectures in music theory at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and is well known in South Africa and the United Kingdom as a concert organist and choral conductor.
David Coplan is Professor Emeritus and Chair in Social Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Grant Olwage Chapter 1: Back to the Future? Idioms of ‘displaced time’ in South African composition Christine Lucia Chapter 2: Apartheid’s Musical Signs: Reflections on black choralism, modernity and race-ethnicity in the segregation era Grant Olwage Chapter 3: Discomposing Apartheid’s Story: Who owns Handel? Christopher Cockburn Chapter 4: Kwela’s White Audiences: The politics of pleasure and identification in the early apartheid period Lara Allen Chapter 5: Popular Music and Negotiating Whiteness in Apartheid South Africa Gary Baines Chapter 6: Packaging Desires: Album covers and the presentation of apartheid Michael Drewett Chapter 7: Musical Echoes: Composing a past in/for South African jazz Carol A. Muller Chapter 8: Singing Against Apartheid: ANC cultural groups and the international anti-apartheid struggle Shirli Gilbert Chapter 9: ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’: Stories of an African anthem David Coplan and Bennetta Jules-Rosette Chapter 10: Whose ‘White Man Sleeps’ Aesthetics? and politics in the early work of Kevin Volans Martin Scherzinger Chapter 11: State of Contention: Recomposing apartheid at Pretoria’s State Theatre, 1990-1994. A personal recollection Brett Pyper Chapter 12: Decomposing Apartheid: Things come together Ingrid Byerly Chapter 13: Arnold van Wyk’s Hands Stephanus Muller