kagablog

I

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

When I was asked to participate in the conference from which this book was born, my initial reaction, after giving it some careful thought, was to decline the invitation. I told myself: I am too busy to do this. But in reality, I was discomforted by the conference theme and the sentiment that seemed to drive it. A press release by NewMusicSA on 30 April 2004 left little doubt of what that sentiment was. In this press release, the composer Michael Blake (then President of NewMusicSA) was quoted as saying:

while everyone in music and the arts are busy looking at the achievements of the past 10 years, NewMusicSA felt that it was a good idea to reflect on composition in the years of apartheid when white composers – the current whingers – had quite a good time thanks to their big patrons: the old National Party, the Broederbond, the SABC and Anton Hartman, and the apartheid system itself. Never before (or since) has so much mediocrity achieved such heights …

It was difficult to see how open and explorative the conference could be in the face of such provocative and simplistic views. Nor was it clear how research on white composers who lived during apartheid (in my case the Afrikaner Arnold van Wyk) could be presented unless it somehow tied into this already established master-narrative of apartheid complicity and aggrandizement.

But my reservations went deeper still. I was reluctant to prepare yet another major academic paper in English at this time. I had recently decided that I wanted to create more of a balance in my professional writing between English and Afrikaans, my mother tongue and the language in which I am also writing my biography of the composer Arnold van Wyk. The decision to revisit the possibilities of writing in Afrikaans was not only prompted by the promise of a broadening of register, a change of style, a discovery of spaces hidden in the nuances of a different vocabulary and semantics, although these considerations with their echoes of belief in an admittedly Herderian Urwüchsigkeit of language were important to me. But I also found that when I wrote in Afrikaans I instinctively wrote for a different audience. This would happen without any intent or planning. Writing the language I grew up in, I found that I (also) spoke to people like my parents and siblings, my school friends, aunts and uncles, or rather: ‘ooms en tannies’. Writing in the language, English, I have grown more proficient in professionally, I invariably found that I addressed colleagues. I wanted to see how my writing would change (the ‘what’ as well as the ‘how’) after an enforced change of tongue. ‘My use of “constituency,” “audience,” “opponents,” and “community”’, writes Edward Said, ‘serves as a reminder that no one writes simply for oneself. There is always an Other; and this Other willy-nilly turns interpretation into a social activity, albeit with unforeseen consequences, audiences, constituencies, and so on.’ In South Africa, Afrikaans academics have to negotiate the linguistic tightrope between Afrikaans and English with, in the best of views, a broadening of perspectives on the work language can do. But let it also be said that it is a painful process, bifurcating between an honest desire for communication with a broader scholarly community in which the lingua franca is English (and the flip-side fear of parochialism), and the desire to think and write and conduct verbal retrospection in the language of one’s home and therefore inevitably coupled with the politicized responsibility of Afrikaans academics to maintain Afrikaans as an academic language, and ultimately as a spoken language, for future generations of South Africans. The responsibility I speak of is not a responsibility to a political idea, at least it is no longer so to me, but to all who might be driven out of themselves in future by finding the doors of the past locked in strange accents and unknown combinations of sounds. More controversially, I would claim, it is to keep the options open of positioning oneself in a discursive space with the potential to stake out in an authentic voice a postcolonial South African position in a global discourse shaped by English. And more respectably, finally, it is tethered to the problem of nomenclature set out classically in Marc Bloch’s incomplete work The Historian’s Craft, a rather intractable problem I can only mention here but that has to be left unexplored.

After I had declined the invitation to go to Grahamstown, where the conference was held, I was unable to banish the conference working title from my thoughts: Composing ApARTheid. During this time I also received the proofs of a correspondence I conducted in an American musicological journal, in which I had replied at some length to an article written in a previous edition by a South African-born composer, David Hönigsberg, then resident in Switzerland, now deceased. Reading through it, this correspondence seems to me now to be extremely defensive and even apologist to a degree, although I do not want to distance myself from the substance of what I wrote, forwarding for my defense the notion of advancing a more balanced ‘understanding’ than the undifferentiated ‘explanation’ that was offered. Because of its relevance to the conference title, I should like to recount some fragments of this correspondence with Hönigsberg. About South African music history under Apartheid, Hönigsberg wrote as follows:

To this end [legitimation of white racial superiority], the cultural apparatchiks set about finding and promoting white talent. As of 1948 the search for the South African Bartók/Kodály had begun … Much time and debate was spent attempting to define the exact parameters that such a composer would have to fulfill. To try to define the more-or-less officially required style in South Africa is troublesome. I would readily call it Christian National Realism, taking advantage of the corresponding meaning envisaged by Soviet Social Realism. Christian National Realism refers to music that meets all the requirements demanded of it by the ‘culture controllers’ of the National Party.

I felt a need to respond to these and other statements, and did so at some length, a reply that I cannot repeat here in its entirety. Here, however, is part of my response:

Who were these ‘cultural apparatchiks’? The writer won’t say. Neither does he venture an opinion on how they ‘set about finding and promoting white talent.’ Nor does he inform the reader whether this Boer-Bartók was ever found, and who he was (it would have to be a ‘he’), or what these traveling talent scouts or their controllers did when two gay, non-Calvinist, non-Nationalist Afrikaner composers (Arnold van Wyk and Hubert du Plessis) emerged as among the most important standard bearers of the so-called ‘Christian National Realism.’ Hönigsberg provides no documentary or even anecdotal evidence to support the notion of musical style ‘debates’ and, not surprisingly, the ‘officially required style’ that he finds so troublesome to define, is not illuminated by examples or a source-based indication of official guidelines or preferences – a tag (this time linking Afrikaners with the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union) suffices. It seems that for Hönigsberg Afrikaners can only ever be understood in analogy to other ideological evils.

Implied in my reasoning, and more explicit in the actual correspondence, is my belief that in white-dominated South Africa, music was not a primary parameter of cultural style (to use the terminology employed by Leonard Meyer). I think that many of the erroneous generalizations regarding art music in South Africa stem from the tendency to disregard, probably with the best of methodological intentions, this discontinuity between ‘black’ and ‘white’ culture. Whereas, in the case of the former, I think that it can be argued persuasively (as has been done in the work of David Coplan, Veit Erlmann, Lara Allen, and others) that music was and is indeed a primary shaping force in culture, a manner of expression definitive of black cultural struggles and aspirations, in the case of the latter I believe this to be untrue. One consequence of this hypothesis would be a differentiated positioning (and consequently a differentiated analysis) of different musics vis-à-vis the other cultural parameters like politics and ideology in a synchronic sense. Being a primary shaping force in a specific cultural field (as was and is music in black South African culture), music must be considered more productively politically and ideologically relational within such a field (even as an institutionally/structurally marginalized discourse) than music that constitutes a secondary parameter in a specific cultural field (as was and is art music in white South African culture) but is nevertheless institutionally ensconced or at least protected. In the case of Apartheid, one would therefore expect black music-making to be amenable to historiographical and stylistic analysis with regard to effects of this ideology by virtue of it being such an important vehicle of expression for its constituents. Conversely, even though art music was as a marker of European high culture, a desired form of musical expression for the white political elite, its relative unimportance to the constituency supporting that political structure and for the political structure itself (and here lies the burden of proof for the historian), makes it somehow more removed from the social, political and economic processes of that culture, so that an analysis conducted from that perspective might yield unsatisfactory or confusing results. This way of thinking might be seen to perpetuate a kind of binary thinking – them and us, black and white – but I believe the opposite is in fact true. As soon as we realize that the contingencies for an existentialist voice vis-à-vis ideology and politics can inhere in one kind of musical expression and not in another occupying the same synchronic space, it is lack of differentiation that perpetuates ethnic divides.
The correspondence quoted above marks only the latest salvo in my English-speaking involvement with Apartheid and a specific body of South African music. It is clear that in generalizing, I nevertheless try to import a sense of the uniqueness of the South African situation, a process that needs to be taken further by music historians in order to deal with these kinds of naïve allegations that amount to little more than political posturing. The perspectives offered in my doctoral work are clearly also very personal instances of coming to terms with a specific cultural inheritance and the burden of guilt and historical responsibility Afrikaners have to shoulder for Apartheid. When I was busy writing these case studies, it seemed to me as if I was writing my way out of an existential dilemma. I took the deconstructionist possibilities of stretching the text to the utmost in unashamedly strategic readings intended to reclaim part of my cultural inheritance for a discourse that was intent on excluding it. From this point of view, it was a thoroughly conservative enterprise, as well as a rather ambitious one. It moved beyond scholarship as a ‘science’ aimed at clarifying the ‘truth’ and became a narrative refiguring truths to create livable new identities. In one such a reading I placed Arnold van Wyk’s Missa in illo tempore into orbit within a constellation of texts in order to read, strategically, Adornian formulated immanent critique in its a cappella textures. This reading has subsequently been critiqued and stabilized in other readings prompted by the iconoclastic potential of my methodology. Personally, my scholarship has therefore been tied inextricably to Apartheid and its effects on the music that interest me most, and I have spoken about this at length in English to a mostly English scholarly audience. This scholarship contains elements of confession, of retrieval and of defense.

Reciting this history as the context of the above scholarly altercation has the purpose, firstly, of putting on the table the documented arguments necessitating defense of a kind with regard to the music I study, lest my concerns are seen as purely personal and psychological. Of course, they are also that, but in that sense I at least control the agenda to the extent that I could theoretically ‘move on’ once my personal business had been transacted to my own satisfaction. Even though Apartheid, and in a broader sense colonialism in general, is destined to remain a paradigmatic conceptual framework for South African (musical) culture of the twentieth century and well beyond, I find myself at a personal junction where defining a position with respect to Apartheid – whether it be one of atonement or justification or revelation – can no longer be the sole reason for my visitations to my, and our collective, pasts. I find the Apartheid-framed skirmishes and debates directed at audiences gathered together by a global English-speaking consensus mentality – an Apartheid spelt but rarely pronounced in the Afrikaans fashion, as though English wishes to distance itself from the word even when using it to English-language effects: ApARTheid – to be indifferent, if not antagonistic, to my own research interests. And while I do not imply that our scholarship can take place in a space where politics do not intrude or are not important, I should like to think that it can be practised without us all becoming politicians. If you detect in this a degree of exasperation with the conference topic, you are correct. It is, however, exasperation accompanied by the full knowledge that we have not even begun to articulate adequately the impact of Apartheid-thinking on our musical landscape.

But my short exposition of my own scholarship’s fascination and involvement with Apartheid is intended also, secondly, to register clearly and briefly that the agency implied in the title ‘Composing ApARTheid’ rests perhaps more convincingly in the concerns and preoccupations of scholars today than in the hands of the creators of musics during the Apartheid era. Perhaps we are the true composers of Apartheid in the construction of a retrospective historical discourse that veers from polemics to apologetics without going to the trouble to explore the fascinating spaces within these polarities.