kagablog

this interview first published here: http://thepopulation.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/the-cry-of-jazz-q-a-with-director-edward-bland/

Columbia College, for fiscal reasons, is now projecting termination of the Center for Black Music Research. A final decision will be reached in a few more weeks. Some reports indicate that the priceless and unique library/archives might be absorbed within the College Library’s activities, but not maintained by the current staff of splendidly experienced professional archivists and topic specialists whose services have benefitted the most exacting of scholars for the past two decades. There is a very profound anxiety that the stellar importance of the CBMR will be lost.

If you would wish to register your hope that the administration of Columbia College will find means whereby the Center, including its staff and materials, will be preserved, you are invited simply to send an email to dsl@afgconsulting.org, with CBMR as the subject. We will submit this statement to the institution’s president on Monday, 12 March, citing only the names of the supporters and their geographic location and/or academic affiliation. Because of the gravity of this crisis, it is most likely that you will register this concern by return mail.

Ref:

http://africlassical.blogspot.com/2012/03/chicago-tribune-preliminary.html

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-ent-0305-columbia-cje-20120304,0,1606161.column

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-03-05/entertainment/ct-ent-0306-columbia-closings-20120305_1_black-music-research-chicago-jazz-ensemble-cbmr

Preliminary recommendation: Close Chicago Jazz Ensemble, Center for Black Music Research
Howard Reich Arts critic

3:26 p.m. CST, March 4, 2012

Two prominent Chicago musical institutions — the Chicago Jazz Ensemble and the Center for Black Music Research — should be shut down, according to a preliminary recommendation from the Office of the Provost/Academic Affairs at Columbia College Chicago, where the organizations are based.

“In this time of declining enrollments and increasing student debt, Columbia is realigning its resources to focus on support for student learning and persistence to graduation,” reads the school’s internal document, “Blueprint: Prioritization,” which was obtained by the Tribune.

“To do this, the College must prioritize its available funds in new ways. Regrettably, this necessitates the elimination of financial support for several worthy organizations that have been a source of institutional pride for Columbia.”
In addition to the suggested closing of the CJE and CBMR, the report recommends the elimination of the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media.

The Center for Black Music Research, which was founded in 1983, also receives a “phase out/eliminate” recommendation.

“The Center has attracted financial support from a wide variety of funding organizations and individuals, and the Library’s reputation as a first-class repository has attracted ongoing donations of priceless historic materials,” says the report.

“It is with regret,” adds the report, that a recommendation is made that “the Center be closed with the exception of the Library/Archive.”

The suggested closures come despite a recommendation elsewhere in the report that resources for music at Columbia College be increased.

“Music has been bucking the overall trend of enrollment, showing significant growth while much of the College has suffered declines,” says the report.

Both the CJE and the CBMR fall under the Office of Academic Research, according to the report. The author of “Blueprint: Prioritization,” Louise Love, vice president of academic affairs and interim provost, points out that in the report she calls for the school to “increase resources” for the music department, per se.

But perhaps the CJE and CBMR are more deeply tied to Columbia’s music programs than the school’s flow chart indicates.

Considering the steady rise in music enrollment, isn’t it entirely possible — perhaps even likely — that the prominence of the CJE and the CBMR helped draw music students to Columbia in the first place?

“I don’t think we have any research on that. I don’t think we have evidence one way or another,” said Love.

Did Columbia try to find data to answer that question?

“No,” said Love.

In fact, years before the report was issued inside Columbia, the school has been cutting funds to both organizations. The CBMR’s annual budget, of about $500,000, has been reduced by about 70 percent over the last four years, and 56 percent in the past year alone, according to the CBMR. The CJE’s budget, similarly in the mid-six figures, has been cut about 50 percent since August 2009, according to the CJE.

Nevertheless, the organizations have continued to produce exemplary work and, not surprisingly, emphatically protest their possible liquidation.

ISBN 9781466462106

Physics, distinguished from that of chemistry and biology includes: mechanics, heat, light and other radiation, sound, electricity, magnetism, and the structure of atoms.

Poet: a person possessing special powers of imagination or expression

This is an exceptionally well-written uncontrite and at times humour-filled tale of seemingly trite White South African life in the dying days of apartheid….into the crossover of the ‘new’ reality…where the relatively sudden adjustment of having to accept that the ‘swart gevaar’ was to be the New Government was as difficult to grasp as any interrupted dream might be. Set in Durban between 1988 and 1990 this is an earnest coming-of-age story of teenage angst as it negotiates a way through sex, drugs and alternative music.

And then a gap in this nightmare: ‘Faces’ nightclub….a fissure enough to affirm a vital perspective.

Relating events is Charl Forth (roughly fifteen in the earlier parts of the story) who is in the throes of realizing that things are not quite right in this land of Nod. Not to mention the omnipresent emotional dishonesty bred through political disinformation that is fostered hand in hand with contorted truth. This reality check is eventually highlighted with the release of Nelson Mandela causing disparate political undercurrents within relationships to become starker: life was indeed very dire hanging at this abyss-edge of total onslaught. One scenario: as Belinda (the girlfriend) and Charl boringly await the release of Mandela from prison (poor T.V. coverage) their dialogue reveals Belinda’s racism and growing sense of threat welling up as a need for sexual affirmation.

The narrative of ‘Physics for Poets’ interweaves subtle allegorical cross linkages and nuances of sexual current/oppressive heat/weather/human behaviour/political change perceptively and craftily within the backdrop of contortions within family life. As such this tale becomes a most poetically inventive, linguistically ingenious, politically left convolution of these problematic times. The over-all dynamic of the text – where sentences and imagery constantly clip-flip into place – gives a sense that Charl is dealing with the intricacies of a South African Rubik’s Cube.
A troubled youth attempting to find cognizance of life’s profound imports while being held in the travails of its ubiquitous cavernous insanity: apartheid – perversely in every nook, cranny, classroom and graveyard. Charl is not only trying to negotiate his way through matric, he also has to face his own demons.

The grim prospects of a warped education system….hell bent on indoctrination….robbing white South Africans of authenticity – is well captured. To not be sucked into the convention needed a cutting edge intelligence counter balanced by a willingness to live in the moment. But, as Syd Kitchen famously said: “South Africa is not for sissies” we realise it is for those who somehow manage to plumb some depth into their psyche honestly, that salvation is possible. This twist of cognizance comes as a calibre that cannot be earned lightly: a spiritual mettle that cuts through the silly double-speak and one-upmanship with deftness….while at the same time realising that the bigger picture is far more serious….if not just a pack of cards so easily collapsible. Charls’ anarchy therefore rests in his spontaneity and he emerges as the antihero not indifferent to the scores he settles (private and political) launching his broadsides with startling accuracy. As such the innate (poetic) mien of his nature is affirmed. He represents the LIFE apartheid tried so hard to quell. The crime (for those who are not aware) is that this is any person’s automatic birthright.

The language is sharp and the sentences bristle with inventiveness and perspicacity. The pace is measured and, as such, creates space for the undercurrent to surface. The situations unfold effortlessly yet surprisingly. I could not put the book down – until closing it with a broad smile on my face. A must read.

ps: the club ‘Faces’ referred to – and experienced – in the novel quite clearly is PLAY at the Community Arts Workshop in Walnut Road. This barn-like building stood next to what became Tilt Night Club and was demolished in 1989 to make way for the multi-story Bureau de Change.

http://www.bookdepository.com/Physics-for-Poets-Nick-Darcy-Fox/9781466462106

10.66

Otherwise the kindle can be found here:

http://www.amazon.com/Physics-for-Poets-ebook/dp/B006NZFX8K/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1329442134&sr=8-8

as well as the actual book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Poets-Nick-Darcy-Fox/dp/1466462108/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1329442134&sr=8-3

sometimes there is a void, memoirs of an outsider
published by penguiin
2011

Music Faculty, University of Oxford, 18-19 May 2012
***

‘Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are’ (José Ortega y Gasset).
***

Nowhere is the only unattainable elsewhere; people are always already somewhere. This conference – the first of three inter-continental meetings between 2012 and 2014 – is concerned with any and all ‘somewheres’ that might be thought of as landscapes.

Whether telescoped from afar or lived up close, landscapes are tense and contested sites of being, doing and remembering, of disaster and delight. In them we hear sounds, enact performances, partake in noise, rush and solitude. Yet these embodied and affective encounters are always already mediated in complex and conflicting ways; institutional, inter-personal, and ideological dynamics render landscapes amenable to the agencies of power, knowledge and desire.

From vast expanses to private quarters, landscapes articulate multiple and overlapping scales: global, local, temporal, virtual, universal. Landscapes, moreover, are rarely static or stable; at the frontier and the fringe, in the warren and the den we find marginal, interstitial and oppositional spaces.

Like a landscape, this call for papers cannot help but mark out its terrain: while acknowledging the contribution of existing work on landscape, too many studies have been concerned with purely scopic analyses, leaving multi-sensory experience and the historical materiality of landscape under-theorised. This conference thus seeks to expand, even explode our critical frames of reference, and develop alternative strategies for engaging critically and creatively with the poetics and politics of landscape.
***

Papers related to this agenda – including but not limited to the topics listed below – are welcome in the formats stipulated at the bottom of this CFP.

SITES OF POWER – occupation, reservation, institution, restitution, academy, capital, knowledge, ideology;
QUESTIONS OF STRUCTURE – smooth, striated, complex, chaotic, fixed, dense, in flux;
PERFORMING LANDSCAPE – theatre, narration, embodiment, language, song, immersion, everyday;
MOBILITIES – tourism, commuting, returning, tracing, dwelling and/as wandering, stasis and acceleration;
POLITICAL CONCERNS – subordination, exploitation, destruction, survival;
PHILOSOPHICAL CONCERNS – human, non-human, transcendental, nature, culture, ontology, epistemology, phenomenology.
***

Keynote speakers:

Prof. Julian Johnson (RHUL), “Aural Fantasies: Music, Modernity and the Imaginary Landscape”;
Prof. David Matless (Nottingham) will speak on landscape and sonic geography.
Other confirmed speakers include: Dr Daniel Grimley (Oxford) and Prof Stephanus Muller (Stellenbosch).
***

How to send proposals:

All proposals should be emailed to criticallandscapes@gmail.com (size limit = 5MB) by 31 December 2011. Please include name, affiliation (if applicable), postal address, email address and AV requirements on a separate cover sheet.
Individual papers (20 minutes) – abstract of no more than 300 words.
Panel sessions – describe individual papers and overarching theme in no more than 500 words.
Alternative formats – describe your proposal (i.e. performance, round table, film discussion, or whatever it may be) in no more than 500 words.
***

NB. Unfortunately, funding for travel will NOT be generally available for delegates. However, there may be some funds for student travel bursaries. If you would be interested in this, please indicate so on your cover sheet.

Hi Aryan

Woke up this morning to a Google “alert” as to a National Wake posting. Clicked through to your blog update! Glad you got the links.

I wanted to fill you in on some thoughts that have arisen in the process of re-mastering the material …

I started doing this about five years ago after Benjy [Mudie] approached me with the idea of a re-issue. Working off the original two-track masters for the album I had somehow managed to hang onto, I was struck with how poorly the disc cutting and stamping processes had been done back in SA in 1981 – we had always been really disappointed in the sound quality of the LPs. The sound on tape was vibrant and had the vibe of what was essentially a live band.

I also started digitizing all sorts of live recordings I had. Some from various performances recorded off the live mixing boards, some in our practice room with an incredible portable Nakamichi I had bought in the late 70′s. With a little distance that 25 years finally gave (the immersion and identification was pretty deep) the more I worked with the recordings, the more convinced I became that the Wake story was quite compelling and the songs and their evolution told this very directly.

I saw Benjy in 2008 and tried to communicate what I was feeling – I included Black Punk Rockers in the album as I felt it was key to presenting a full view of the band and where it stood. Benjy was set on a faithful re-issue (to complete his quest to re-release the albums he had been instrumental in releasing) and really could not see the band in any new perspective.

Soon after this came the “Punk in Africa” initiative where the Wake was given a pivotal role in terms of dissident music and the birth of the idiom in Africa. Of course, this has been amazing for me and the other survivors and their families. From a position of having virtually disappeared from the popular record “(Great South African Rock Bands” and other web sites had no reference to our existence at all), we are being recognized in the light in which the band was conceived and saw ourselves. It seems the thirty year time span has made the Wake songs and images read more starkly and clearly than ever.

I am working on a Live collection – largely from a cassette copy of our showcase performance at the Chelsea in Hillbrow, plus some really precious practice room tapes from our base in Parktown. This being our final set of songs up until we fell apart in 1982.

The band “lived” for live gigs, and were up for anything and everything that came our way. Keep in mind, this is primarily music to dance (vigorously) too. I think we developed a unique circuit that grew out of our composition. These are some that come to mind;-

We played all the available alternative clubs in the cities that had rock venues – 1866, DV8, Purple Turtle, Faces in Durban. We played clubs in the homelands (Bapong), townships – Kwa Thema, Sharpeville. Community halls – Wits great hall, Wits the box theatre, Parys township, Sharpeville township, Vishoek, Mowbray etc

We played the few festivals around at the time – Hermanus, Free Peoples (although we didn’t actually perform as Punka was arrested on the Friday for a “passbook” offense, and the concert was shut down anyway due to noise complaints. I was primed to get up in our slot and talk about “free people” and the incarceration of Punka in prison), Gunston 500 in Durban, Lenasia (the Cohen brothers South African style – “colored” family with a resort facility south of Jo’burg), and one amazing festival in Alex township sponsored by Smirnoff or Gilbeys … not sure which. Opened for Isaac Hayes at the Jo’burg Colliseum due to cancellation of his regular act. Some free street performances in Hillbrow and Rockey street (the best venues of all!). Private parties around Jo’burg.

We rehearsed in the summer house in the wild decayed “garden” of the house we all shared in Parktown (check out the photo album on the Facebook National Wake page). We rehearsed often – there were jams going on most days. After being together for over a year or so, most jams became songs, and thus, group compositions. Before any gig we would run through our set in the days before, and polish new songs up for performance, and do them till we were happy and felt ready. As I remember, we chose the songs we wanted to put down on the album and rehearsed those specifically – recording and listening back and discussing and always incorporating any new ideas as to arrangement etc.

We all came to the band with our different backgrounds, and the songs reflect this. It’s a pity I have misplaced the earliest practice room demo of our first line up with Paul Giraud. Very interesting punk numbers, and also very funky blues numbers that Gary and Punka brought with them. It was actually a really nurturing space we made for ourselves. We tried many songs which we were all free to bring in, and the ones that felt good got developed and tighter and were incorporated. In our last set, most of the songs were totally group compositions evolved in rehearsal/jam situations. We would usually start a rehearsal off with a free form jam … some became songs and part of the repertoire.

I am sending you a link to one such jam – with Gary, Punka, and myself that we recorded on the aforementioned Nakamichi cassette deck I had. It is one of my most treasured bits of tape. The jam developed into a song, Vatsikateni and I have a version of that live at the Chelsea. The jam version is the closest I think I have to the heart of the band’s core spirit. It was at the time (three years or so into it) when the bright eyed vibe of “we gonna dance apartheid to its doom” had evolved to “the man on the hill … measuring time … for bombs and burning!” Vatsikateni literally means “I’m warning you!”

As to master plans … I think we all believed we could make it big … we didn’t have any real practical skills in marketing … I think we succeeded in creating our name and image. There wasn’t any management on a commercial level. And when we got released, the company knew nothing really about creating something in the rock and roll market – they only knew how to reap in the bucks on proven international acts. There was survival management, you know. How to get in and out of the townships, how to get past the club managers and the terror in the white areas for loss of liquor licenses, how to score ganja anywhere anytime, how to get medical treatment in apartheid hospitals and so on!

We came together at a particular time with, I believe, a certain commitment to forging a band out of our situation – we honestly never voiced this programmatically/conceptually. We all knew what we stood for, and the act of “standing up” was a statement and our attitude totally in the punk spirit of claiming our freedom to take our place. Initially, we were fired up with the defiance and sheer shock value of the Wake, and our first set had the most punk driven songs, and our style of delivery was loud and rapid. It also had funk, folkrock, new wave rock, and blues elements. This reflected our roots – mine in folk (mainly protest), soul and rock, Gary’s and Punka’s in funk, jazz, soul, The Comodores, and rock, (Hendrix), and then Steve with a classical training, rock, his definite identification of the Wake with “the Can”, and then I suppose quite consciously, new wave, with the Safari Suits example. Kelly joined around the time we were making the album, and slotted in quite seamlessly, bringing his jazz and township roots.

We were listening to a wide range of sounds at that time, and the punk/new wave groups were most current. I had gotten into Bob Marley a few years before, and really dug his whole thing – the music, the message, the social comment. The reggae element came into the band during our evolution, and from our last set of compositions, was definitely the direction we were moving in.

Bolina, I feel, stands out as where our sound started forging a unique identity. The Clash was an influence, and the ska/two tone bands were certainly a reference, as was the early UB40. Reggae artists also got lots of airplay round the house. Over all these strands, I believe we always saw ourselves as a “rock” band in terms of identity and stance, and our ears were open to many genres. I think the range is a reflection of our non-discriminatory attitude and acceptance of “many”, and the anarchic spirit with which we operated. The effortless quality comes out of the truth that we really loved playing as a group. The music was always what made sense. Much of everything else we had to deal with was really difficult and fraught. Our focus was primarily internal – we lived pretty much in the world we created for ourselves. Our reality was very different from anything else existing at that time around us.

On the local scene the general vibe of that time was totally inspiring – the punk/new wave energy opened up a pretty moribund local music scene, with an established set of gatekeepers etc. to the possibility of individual initiative. Bands like Radio Rats had certainly given notice that home brewed sounds were potential hits. Wild Youth were happening and kicking down doors. Things were opening up. Our first gig was with Young Dumb and Violent at the Box Theatre. We felt we were part of this. Six months later we were billed for a series of performances in the Cape Peninsular – “The Riot Rock Tour” with the Youth, Safari Suits, Housewives Choice.

Within this, the competition amongst the bands was pretty cutthroat! Roger Lucy was an inspiration – the courage to get up and say what one felt. He had also brought me on at his gigs at the Market to do one of my songs in the year before the Wake, which certainly encouraged me to pursue performance again after my early coffee shop days as a teen.

Other South African influences? Well, always the theatre – Fugard, Barney Simon, Glass Theatre, Junction Ave., Gibson Kente. And not to forget Phillip Tabane and Molombo! Artists like Norman Catherine celebrating indigenous absurdity, David Goldblatt (the usual suspects) … I’m sure there’s more, but that’s what comes to the surface effortlessly …

Further inspiration I should celebrate … the example of the Soweto schoolkids in ’76, the many people working to expose and overthrow the apartheid state!

Finally a word or two about the songwriting. Initially, we brought songs to the group. After time together as a unit, we were composing together out of jams that may have developed from an individual’s idea/riff, or lyric phrase. At that point it was pretty fluid. (Although Wake of the Nation was an early song and developed out of a jam with all of us contributing musical ideas/riffs the lyrics were Punka’s). Generally, whoever is singing, composed the lyrics.

The album is representative of a live set, although quite abridged – our repertoire consisted of at least 30 songs at the end with about 20 songs current and within a performance. At the time the album was released we had a new set with a whole bunch of songs, of which Walk in Africa is quite representative. I’m hoping to put something out of these, largely from a live tape at the Chelsea.

Gary wrote Supaman, Black Punk Rockers, Kalabash. Punka wrote the lyrics to Bolina, although the song started as a jam while we were in Swaziland. Punka also wrote Skango, and Gary and Punka wrote the first verse of Walk in Africa. (Someone is giving me a hang-dog look). I wrote the second “white” verse – “yes in Amsterdam”. I contributed Dreams in my Head, International News, Time and Place, Student Life, Stratocaster. Steve Moni contributed Mercenaries.

“International News stood out as a great
80′s classic of resistance punk agit pop”
Warrick Sony (Kalahari Surfers)

International News started where the song starts; with that driving, syncopated strum. Then. I’m not sure how it all works but “they put a blanket, over Soweto” came next and I think there was something going down (1979) in the township and the police had sealed it off. The song is an attempt to reflect the absurdity of press laws, loopholes and the general madness of state propaganda trying to control the population’s exposure to reality. The fact that the local press could only report what was going on by quoting the international press agencies …”it was reported today by the AP network that South African troops are on the outskirts of Luanda”.

And then, when I went to the movies (which we couldn’t do as a group), and increasingly as my reality became more and more tied into the band’s attempts to live a group life in the apartheid state, I was always struck by the vacuum in which the protected and privileged lived – in these moments of extreme alienation I could fathom what the terror bombs were about and how only the concussion of such explosions could shatter the unreality of “normalcy”.

And then, much as one lives in an earthquake zone, I would shrug it all off and go in for my dose of entertainment, enlightenment, whatever. And with the main feature came the “news” – yachting in some English venerable cove, horse jumping, all by the grace of Rothmans of Pall Mall – via Rhodesia no less. It was all so mind-fucking, and then, I suppose finally, the thought that as weird as the reporting was, the next steps would be to suffocate any news whatsoever.

International News was never released as a single. The only station that would play us on our release was 702 and the song they chose was Time and Place. I took a demo through Port St Johns, I forget the stations name. (Capital?) It was the only marginally independent radio at the time. The DJ spun the track. John Peele played it once that I know of. (Best royalty I ever got – in fact the only I ever got! Seventy quid!)

“…post post city late post” is a fragment from my summer holidays in port Elizabeth where the young black newspaper sellers used to call this phrase out in a really haunting, piercing cry on the streets after afternoon movies, and into the rush hour bustle of the city emptying out.

Cheers
Ivan

Letter montaged together from email conversation between Ivan Kadey and Aryan Kaganof March through May 2010.

Goethe Institut, Johannesburg

The Johannesburg International Mozart Festival (JIMF) in partnership with Goethe Institute invites participation in a Symposium on the theme Music and Exile: Songs, Styles and Sub-texts that will take place from 4 to 5 February 2011. This event follows the Music and Exile: north-South Narratives Symposium that was held at Goethe Institute in January 2010. Whereas the latter event had initiated the discussion on exile and had moreover focused on exile as a discourse, the rich discussion that opened up around this topic will be continued in 2011, but with a particular focus on notions of exile in vocal music and the way these are articulated by composers and performers.

South Africa has a rich history of song that has supported and reflected various notions of exile. Iconic figures like Miriam Makeba have become customary examples of the power that song has exerted on the South African and international soundscape as an expression of exile. But beyond these over-familiar icons are many other instances of exile that are often overshadowed by more famous presences. It is these lesser-known instances of exile that this symposium is aimed at. Exile is not only something of the past, and this symposium acknowledges the continuing relevance of this topic today. Current cases of exile include emigrations from South Africa as well as large-scale immigrations to South Africa due to dire socio-political or economic circumstances elsewhere, especially in Africa; and it is often women who bear the brunt of suffering, and whose voices are unheard. The interpretation of exile may be extended to include other instances of displacement, such as the voluntary migrations prevalent in a globalized world. All instances of displacement may profitably draw on discourses of exile if the latter are understood to embody politically motivated migration only. The notion of inner exile (without physical migration) is a case in point, where the senses of displacement and alienation experienced within familiar environments necessitate a nuanced interpretation of exile, inaugurating a set of themes that include considerations of ‘those who stayed behind’ and the practice of art forms that are at (or are pushed to) the peripheries of a dominant culture.

In line with the JIMF’s celebration of vocal music in its concert series of 2011 – which will feature works of its first resident composer, Mokale Koapeng – the symposium will engage with the role of songs1 and choral music in voicing themes of displacement and exile. Textual and stylistic interrogations become important here, as references to exile or displacement can be embedded in subtext or metaphor, or implied by musical style, making the songs politically charged.

Themes that would link to the topic outlined above include:
o Definitions and meanings of exile and/or displacement
o Women in/and exile music
o The relationship between performance spaces and musical meanings
o Definitions of inner exile
o Music on the margins of contemporary culture
o Contemporary composition as an expression of exile
o The role of song in experiences and expressions of exile
o Black choral music in inner exile during the 20th century
o Relationships between music and text
1 The word ‘songs’ for the purposes of the symposium is used in a very broad sense and is intended to encompasses a wide
range of vocal music.
o The importance of notions of textuality in music strongly reliant on text
o The role of style in the articulation of musical meaning
o Stylistic influences and adaptations as a result of exile
o The appropriation of styles as subtexts
o Folkloristic aspects of song
o Discourses around national anthems
o Song and resistance
o Contexts and subtexts in the controversial songs such as Umshini Wami, De la Rey etc.

Although the symposium will have a strong South African emphasis, it also aims to engage and find points of intersection with international discourse on the topics outlined above. The discussion sessions that follow the presentations are therefore of particular importance. The theme lends itself to interdisciplinary approaches and also to various modes of presentation (papers, panel discussions, interviews, personal reflections on creative output, creative responses to the theme like as performances etc.). Furthermore, the symposium situates itself between ‘academic’ and ‘public’ discourse, and strives to establish dialogue between these often-separated spheres of discussion.

We invite 20-minute papers or presentations as well as proposals for panel discussions or live interviews (please include a list of the proposed participants). Longer time slots could be considered depending on the programme – please contact us if you wish to request this. Send a proposal of your contribution (no more than 300 words in length) to Stephanie Vos at stephe.vos@gmail.com by 4 October 2010 to be considered for inclusion in the programme. For further information, contact Stephanie at +27 84 520 5919 or e-mail stephe.vos@gmail.com.

Background on the Symposium

The Music and Exile Symposia form part of the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival (JIMF) and are held in partnership with the Goethe Institut. The Johannesburg International Mozart Festival is a concert series that has taken place in Johannesburg annually since 2006 and the first symposium held in conjunction with the JIMF concert series was in 2010. The Symposia provide a ‘think-tank’ around topics related to the JIMF concert series and are intended to generate ideas and stimulate initiatives for future JIMF events. This approach strives to establish a productive dialogue between music practice and discourse.

How does Mozart fit in? Constantly pushing the boundaries, departing from and developing the canon and creating new frameworks of experimentation, Mozart regarded almost anything as an invitation for his creative genius and even today remains one of the most versatile yet profound musical figures of all times: as composer, arranger, performer, conductor, teacher, writer, commentator and scholar. It is the ambition of the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival to reflect upon Mozart’s genius and ingenuity and to create a setting that might translate at least some of Mozart’s truly inspiring characteristics into the twenty-first century. The Music and Exile Symposia proceed from this philosophy of innovation, and aim to traverse the boundaries that frequently exist between different music genres, disciplines and discourses.

Visit www.join-mozart-festival.org for more information about the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival and the Music and Exile Symposium, and visit www.goethe.de/johannesburg for more information about the Goethe Institut.

today is motlhabane’s funeral. rest in peace bra’ si

The Music and Exile: North -South Narrative event created wide dissent among scholars, political activists and musicians. This scission was prolonged on the pages of Kagablog where multiple fronts and broader confrontations rapidly emerged. http://kaganof.com/kagablog/?s=music+in+exile

The event and its sequel proved that discussion of music in the apartheid and cold-war eras has scarcely begun in earnest and that the received views of all protagonists are vulnerable to documentary research and to historical, political and even aesthetic clarification.

In http://kaganof.com/kagablog/2010/03/01/sequel/ I sketched four tasks through which the emerging landscape of the debate might be surveyed and embedded in the research community and in the public realm :

“…much needs to be done to understand the ways south african music resisted or capitulated to the force field of the soviet vision of anti-imperialist struggle . just as much needs to be done to understand the extent and inherence of nazi conceptions of society, of race-unique modernization, of aryan manifest destiny, of cultural and educative frameworks and of mono-racial civil society in apartheid south africa. a third research programme in musicology would be needed to understand the role of scholars like anthropologists or art and music historians and philosophers, jurists, economists and the media in bringing about the fake ethnicity and invented traditions of the ‘bantustans’. finally the way the white republic constructed itself out of the elements and styles of colonial administration while appearing to combat these is scarcely understood. “ (ibid)

I would like to convene a discussion in which these four tasks can be commenced -at least in sketch- by participants with the experience and interest to do so.

Jean-Pierre de la Porte
director of research
IASAI

afrenco@yahoo.com