kagablog

Dear Aryan

I saw the piece on your blog on music and repression in Apartheid SA. I am sending you a few pics I took almost three years ago, I think. I was doing research at the SABC in the sound archives and they allowed me to browse through a small room with stacks of unordered documents. I was left alone for a while, and found some amazing things. Here are some of them.

dear gwen

as you know i work at stellenbosch university. i am no stranger to the notions of ‘a prevailing eurocentrism’ or ‘naturalized apartheid’, and remain deeply complicit in both. as someone involved not only with an afrikaans university, but with other ‘relics of high apartheid’ (with your permission, jean-pierre) – from the gereformeerde kerk to the suid-afrikaanse akademie to the literature in my library to the composers i study to the afrikaans community of my children’s schools – i think you actually underestimate the scale of these problems. i inhabit the heart of the whore (and i don’t mean bellville, where i live).

of course academia is only a small part of the world, and stellenbosch academia miniscule even on this scale. and i don’t even represent this speck, nor the part of it which is the department of music. so in my case we really are talking the very definition of irrelevance and rear orifice disappearing acts. which goes some way towards explaining why i prize intellectual and musical exchange in the way i do, especially with people who are busy with what i suppose you’d call more relevant and useful things (and most of them i have met, i can confirm, cannot be found at universities in south africa). problem is, so many of these people have better things to do than engage with people of my background and interests. so they go and make music, remove themselves from mailing lists, sign off, plead privacy, anarchy, you name it. i suspect they (and you) don’t need me to the same extent that i need them (and you).

i know so little of the country i live in, that i return from an occasion like the one at the goethe institute educated by having heard and met people like steve dyer and warrick sony and muff andersson and xoli norman. next week my students will be discussing christine lucia’s paper (hopefully with her present), as they discussed the hartmann analysis with tim jackson a few weeks ago and the projects of the institute of suppressed music with michael haas the following week. this is why i wrote to every one of the people identified by muff as representing an ‘africanist’ perspective on exile to distance themselves from this divisive stand. i have everything to lose from this kind of polarization because it isolates me. don’t get me wrong, i think i also understand muff’s reaction. it is just that i think it is one best not endorsed or encouraged. for all our sakes.

however, when doors to collegial exchange slam shut, one strategy that remains, at least in stellenbosch, is the one described by jean-pierre: confronting the ‘musical time-capsule from the bogus white republic with its own genesis’. tunneling through the rhizomic history of the ‘apartheid music juggernaut’, i hope, will create more and more windows that open unto an understanding of the south african faultlines you write about. perhaps, somewhere in the future, this work will interest you as much as your work and ideas interest me.

so please keep me on the mailing list.

not signing off
stephanus

A conference on exile organized by musicologists is bound to raise some ambiguities. For a start the term exile exists under leaden skies after Edward Said : he conducted its most recent examination and concluded that using it to characterize anything short of mass political denationalizations like the Palestinian disaster is misleading and frivolous.

This also puts the topoi of literary exile off limits as voluntaristic and too imbued with creative transcendence to characterize the cruel political punishment meted out to the Palestinian people and others in their plight.

Biblical exile- despite its extremely rich theology of covenants, morality for life among strangers and vast pretext for prophecies and condemnations was too identified with Zionist Nationalists to illuminate other stories of exile without prejudice.

In sum Said was concerned with the way exile entered public opinion and wished to remove certain decoys between the public sense of culpability and the condition of ten million denationalized people whom he felt obliged to speak for.

Exile is neither creative nor allegorical, it has no distinct genres – or at least none adequate to serve as a voice to suffering collectively borne. It is not laden with promise or at least with no promise different to the promise of arbeit macht frei or the promise of self determination in homelands for the millions of south africans apartheid white supremacists denationalized between 1950 and 1988.

Said’s ultimatum -no metaphoric use of exile after the Palestinian disaster -has the same weight as Adorno’s more famous ‘all culture after Auschwitz is garbage’. Neither thinker wants to be thought of as placing the topics of exile or genocide off limits , merely highlighting inappropriate means by which to inquire into them.

Now since Adorno was a defining figure in musicology and the sociology of fascism and Said equally inaugural of postcolonial studies it would be expected that a conference on Friedrich Hartmann and exile in the then quasi colony of South Africa would be an enterprise laced between Adorno and Said. What occurred was something quite different. A concert of music by a former leader of the Austrian Fatherlands Front - a fascist organization- was played . This was the centerpiece of the conference which turned out to have been occasioned by the musicological effort of Timothy Jackson to rehabilitate the music of this controversial figure -Friedrich Hartmann-and to rehabilitate his political reputation.

Jackson , a Canadian professor working in Texas, argued that Hartmann had been relieved of his teaching post in Austria because his new Nazi overseer did not believe his sincere declarations that he would divorce his half Jewish wife in exchange for keeping job. Nor was Orel , the Nazi in question swayed by a student petition instigated by Hartmann approvingly describing him persecuting his Jewish students. Hartmann was at that time a voluntary leader of the Austrian Patriotic Front.

Hatmann lost his job and came to South Africa with his wife and child where he continued his career as an academic and composed the music which Jackson aired. Subsequently Hartmann returned to Austria.

Now this would be merely one of those sidelights on twentieth century music which illuminate the roads not taken by the renowned composers - except that this all took place in South Africa. Now few sensibilities are so far off the beaten track as to have not heard of the apartheid government, a white supremacist prolongation of colonial minority rule which hijacked South Africa between 1948 and 1994.

This regime imposed its racist separate development policy on over ninety percent of South Africans, denationalizing people and forcing them into bogus reserves called native homelands. This event stripped rights from , displaced and deracinated far more people then even the Palestinian disaster and counts as one of the largest sustained political harassments in history.

South Africa is still counting the cost of this political misadventure which only came to an end when the apartheid government capitulated in a civil war. Many people who took part in that war were forced into exile by state terror and assassination programs which they were not spared even far over South Africa’s borders. Some of these people were present when Jackson made his case for F. Hartmann being an exile too - a fascist exile ironically fleeing Nazi persecution to became a civil servant in the apartheid regime.

From Jackson’s account, which he never claimed was more than an initial assay, certain facts about Hartmann are not yet clear . These facts determine the status of Hartmann in both 20 c Austrian history ( both fascist and Nazi) and South African apartheid history. These facts will shape Hartmann’s reception in South Africa and the entire scholarly and aesthetic perspective imaginable towards him.

The role of these facts is best grasped via two divergent historical narratives. We do not yet have the information to choose between these narratives. They are as follows:

A) Friedrich Hartman sincerely believed that volunteering for a leadership position in the Austrian Fatherlands Front was a reasonable thing to do. Since antisemitism was not official policy of the Austrofascists he married a half Jewish woman. He felt pressured to lie in order to keep his job in Nazi Austria. These lies included declaring he was in the process of divorce from his wife and also petitioning students to vouch for his zealous persecution of Jewish students .

When these lies failed to prevent his dismissal he fled Nazi Austria for South Africa with his wife, presumably not divorced and settled into an academic position where, chastened by his experiences with fascism, he became apolitical and applied himself to composition , administration and teaching. Alarmed by the growing intolerance in apartheid South Africa and by xenophobic denials of opportunity to him in the musical world, he ended his exile and returned to Austria where he spent the rest of his life.

B) Friedrich Hartmann was a deeply sincere fascist. He joined the Austrofascist Fatherland’s Front because it was politically and institutionally dominant- dominant enough under Mussolini’s protection to actively persecute Nazis as well as communists in the Austrian opposition.

When it became clear that Hitler was in the ascendant, Hartmann decided to switch allegiance to the Nazi party as more appropriate to his convictions To achieve this he was prepared to abandon his wife and to persecute Jewish students. He sincerely wished for Nazi acceptance and was shocked when his former allegiance to the Vaterländische Front was, despite his sincere zeal , held against him and he was purged from his job. His fascist beliefs led him to chose South Africa as more promising frontier for his extreme rightist thinking, using his wife’s half Jewish status as a sweetener to his immigration bid he entered South Africa under the mask of political exile and joined over six hundred other fascist and Nazi diehards who were recruited by the sa nationalist government to man its upcoming state and academic takeover. When the South African government realized that it could achieve its white supremacist goals without retaining now unpopular neo Nazi ideologies , Hartmann found his role as fascist aesthetic and ideological exemplar undermined. Unable to endure the decline of explicit fascist thinking in the wily apartheid state- by then trying to construe itself as a democratic whites only republic- Hartmann went back to Austria where a strong neofascist movement had never declined and where he lived in hope of the return of the VF.

both scenarios are over etched, designed to convey the ideal-typical sketches which Max Weber believed were indispensable to the beginning of any historical or social investigation- ladders which, once climbed, can be thrown away in favor of more subtle hypotheses once the most parsimonious explanations are put in place.

The historical and aesthetic evaluation of Hartmann, which Tim Jackson has begun will not progress until scenario A can convincingly refute scenario B or vice versa.

It is likely that this evaluation exceeds the capacity and expertise of any one scholar. Judgment beyond musicology is required to understand the migrations between the VF and the Nazi party- the kind of judgment possessed by general historians of the era such as Michael Kater and his colleagues. The relation of Hartmann to fascist recruits into South African administration and universities needs to be investigated by historians of apartheid structures and of the fascist diaspora.

Why does any of this matter ? Because Hartmann’s music was presented in South Africa on the strength of narrative A. This narrative is based on anecdotal evidence which at the moment is insufficient to rule out the plausibility of narrative B.

If A turns out to be well supported in future then premiering Hartmanns music and theming a conference around his then proven exile will seem a commendable exercise in historical objectivity and insight.

If B turns out to be well supported then South Africa has unwittingly hosted the celebration of a fascist, an apartheid zealot and an unrepentant opportunist.

The present issue is simply whether the conference rooted in Hartmann’s exile and promoted alongside a premiere of his music should ever have gone ahead before the musicological, historical and South African political communities had an opportunity to adequately weigh the evidence for A or B. No single scholar, however gifted, can claim to represent consensus on a matter that they themselves have only recently brought to discussion I hope that the decision between A and B is not still simply seen as some scholarly stake because it is a political issue which at worst portrays South Africa today as a safe cultural harbor for neofascists.

Today we consider the merits and contributions of Leni Riefenstahl, Martin Heidegger, Gottfried Benn, Werner von Braun, Giuseppe Terragni, Richard Strauss, Herbert von Karajan, Paul de Man and many others only against a clear understanding of their involvement in fascism . It is only correct that a recently rediscovered composer who shares their provenance should be subject to equal deliberation and scrutiny. This has nothing to do with witch-hunting ; it has everything do with bringing appropriate collateral and contextual information to bear before putting a work of art into candidacy for our appreciation.

The denazification process around Heidegger did not turn on the high opinion in which he was held by peers- including Sartre- but around his role in the National Socialist state and institutions. The German people had a right to deliberate whether they wanted Heidegger’s ideas to re enter the public realm as authoritative opinion in a society recovering from Nazism. South Africa held a truth and reconciliation process to deal with apartheid crimes against humanity. Its statutes ought to apply to the process of rehabilitating Hartmann. Certainly no more unilateral construals of Hartmann or other apartheid era public figures as exiles or victims ought to be simply accepted at face value. What if , on further examination, Hartmann turns out to be Hartmann B?

After decades of equivocation few who examine all the facts doubt that Heidegger was a sincere Nazi. Somehow it became possible to imagine Germanys best philosopher and Nazism as compatible- a perception that eluded earlier generations.

Has Nazism become more subtle? Has Heidegger simply slipped out of contemporaneity in being well enough understood and settled more obviously in his era?

When a significant piece of thought, art or music is put into candidacy for our appreciation, it is vital that its provenance be disclosed and understood for this alone confers its identity. This is obvious in those far from rare cases when a painting long attributed to a famous name is revealed as a fake (despite remaining physically identical to itself , it becomes a different work overnight ) The great Viennese architect Adolph Loos stands today under consideration as a pedophile.

Perhaps everybody who knew Loos knew this fact about him. Perhaps only today has pedophilia become sufficiently established as a violating criminal occurrence to begin attracting some sense of heinousness to Loos? The recent arrest of Roman Polanski has brought underage sex and the power to evade answerability for it into public debate . Nobody can argue that the answer to these questions is irrelevant to our relationship to Loos. Nowadays he has to be great despite his vice- a complex case to argue, not viceless because he is great.

Hartmann’s actual stance on Nazism and his role in the apartheid state makes a nonnegotiable difference to how we consider his music. Riefenstahl’s lifelong denial of the extent of her Nazi involvement is a salient fact in how we experience her films . Her achievement would be different- not better or worse but different (as all historical differences picked out by counter factual conditional sentences are) if she had even once seriously been puzzled by her former self. If Tim Jackson wishes to attain historical justice for Hartmann, pre empting reliable consensus by presenting Hartmanns music as the music of a victim is not a useful way to do this.

Another strand at the exile conference that struck me as interesting but exposed to misunderstanding is the movement to meticulously reconstruct the worlds and idioms of Afrikaans composers of the mid twentieth century. Flowing from the very innovative Stephanus Muller a new kind of archival awareness and biographic detail has entered the musicology of the nationalist and apartheid period: it certainly achieves, in that scholar, a tremendous suggestiveness and adventurousness - as in his examination of Arnold van Wyk via the counterfactual setting of a vast roman a clef. Esme Berman and Karel Nel’s extraordinary Alexis Preller monograph and exhibition is of a piece with this fine grained contextual , document and biographic based inquiry, a final dispensing with the thin, allusive generalities that have stalled South African art writing for decades.

But before this kind of study can reveal the fine grain of musical cultures – the way Baxandall , Podro and Alpers revealed the filigree of period visual cultures, the issue of the cultural policies and academic framework of the apartheid state needs to be addressed. This is not from some wish to put an obligatory political ball and chain on this scholarship but to augment its strength and consequences. It is hard to imagine a contemporary study of reniassance painting without an understanding of mercantile capitalism or a study of Thoreau which ignored agribusiness or the civil war. The danger in South Africa is that apartheid is so central to post 1948 scholarship that it has become a kind of premiss, a background noise to be acknowledged with regret. In recent South African memory, apartheid was the ether in which the spectrum bathed- capitalism, politics, rights, culture.

Ironically it regained some of this former pervasiveness after 1994- the study of apartheid seems always to be either completed or to be somebody else’s problem.

Since 1964, at least , the frame of art and music study has been the elaboration of a world- an art world through which works achieve stable identity or value or a music world such as the ones elaborated in recent ethnographic studies of IRCAM or the attempts to see Darmstadt and die Reihe as a discursive formation. There is - following the extraordinary work of Mary Douglas, Bruno Latour, David Bloor or Ian Hacking, no way in which even the study of logic,probability or polynomials can evade the methods by which groups achieve cohesion and consensus. The synthetic moderne whites only civil society is a veritable Mont Blanc on the horizon of worldmaking - of contrivances of cohesiveness- its reach into education and patronage was subtle and filled with paradoxical effects. The school of Muller- as I like to imagine it, is as close to a genealogical perspective as SA scholarship has yet come. It is a phenomenon to be strongly supported and encouraged for its subject matter as well as the methodological and stylistic sophistication it brings; nonetheless it stands in the same danger as Tim Jackson’s far more conventional dealings with Hartmann- in all these excavations of the personal and the contingent a dimension for analysis of power and the state needs to be reserved Not as a concession to South Africa’s perennial Marxism – which like its expressionism missed its moment and lingers on as a ghost- but as an analysis of public life, patronage, civil society and consensus building that can only honor music by illuminating the seductive matrix in which it made its way.

jean-pierre de la porte

Dear Colleagues,

There are a few points that I would like to address in the comments by professors Lucia and Muller.

Prof. Lucia writes: “hartmann was sympathetic to national socialism and tried (unsuccessfully it seems) to divorce his half-jewish wife in order to retain a high position at the vienna hochschule before he was somehow forced to leave and without too much hassle found his way to sa, where he was immediately appointed as lecturer at rhodes university.”

This is not what I said; I thought my report was more complicated and nuanced than that. What I attempted to demonstrate from the documents was that it SEEMED that Hartmann was planning to divorce his putatively half-Jewish wife in order to retain his position. But Orel had his doubts about Hartmann’s sincerity; furthermore, he - Hartmann - had not provided any proof of having done so. Orel also suspected that Hartmann was NOT truly sympathetic to National Socialism because he had volunteered for a leadership position in the Patriotic Front, which Orel probably rightly claimed showed Hartmann’s true political orientation: Hartmann was an Austro-Fascist, but not a Nazi. As Michael Haas observed, the Austro-fascists were trying to resist German Nazism and retain Austria’s independence. Orel also believed that Hartmann was lying about his intention to divorce his wife and join the Party. Obviously, the new Nazi-controlled Education Ministry also suspected Hartmann of dissimulation, otherwise he might not have been dismissed.

My larger point is that the documents show the lengths to which a person MIGHT go to hold onto his position and avoid exile. In such extreme situations, angels are few and far between. My point was that Hartmann was certainly not lily-white. But in being a shade of gray, he was no exception, certainly among artists and musicians, who, as I suggested, have been all too willing to serve any master, regardless of the circumstances, as long as they could retain their prestige, power, and income. The claim that “Hartmann was sympathetic to National Socialism” is a stretch; better to say that he /appears /to have tried to accommodate with it in order save his job and livelihood. In connection with the Hartmann case, I also mentioned Hindemith and Sibelius. A careful review of the documents shows that Hindemith too wiggled and squirmed mightily in the hope that he might be able to stay in Germany. In retrospect, Hindemith was fortunate that Hitler simply hated him personally and he was kicked out. And, Sibelius, even though by 1943 he was fully aware of the criminal anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime, continued to take its money and collaborate in various ways right up to the bitter end.

Hartmann was infinitely fortunate that Prof. Smeath-Thomas of Rhodes University decided to hire him. In Hartmann’s case, no commission composed of Afrikaners or of ex-Nazis or others was involved: Hartmann was hired by Smeath-Jones, the Master of Rhodes University, who saved his career and possibly his life and that of his wife and daughter. Smeath-Jones deserves further investigation. A chemist, he remained at the University of Liverpool after he had obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in 1908 and worked his way up through the ranks until in 1919 he was awarded his Doctorate and appointed Senior Lecturer in Analytical Chemistry. He was appointed Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Cape Town in 1923 and held the post until 1938 when he was elected to the Mastership of Rhodes University College, Grahamstown. Thus, Smeath Jones must have come into contact with and hired Hartmann soon after he became Master.

Unfortunately, our knowledge of Hartmann’s biography is still too sketchy to allow a detailed correlation of the life with the music. After the conference, I spent a morning in the archives of the University of Capetown. I discovered that the beautiful fair copy of “Grahamstown Mass,” the great song of atonement and thanksgiving that Hartmann completed shortly after his arrival in South Africa in the summer of 1939, is dedicated to his wife and daughter (the pencil draft bears no dedication). Was this composition somehow connected with Hartmann’s earlier thoughts of abandoning them to save his career? And then another curious fact: among Hartmann’s large-scale works, the “Grahamstown Mass” was the only one never to be performed. Is this because the forces required were simply too large, or were the biographical associations just too painful?

Regarding the affair that seems to be behind “The Song of the Four Winds,” again I learned only after the conference the following: Hartmann did have an affair with his teacher Franz Schmidt’s daughter Emma, apparently a great beauty, who died from complications of childbirth in 1932 (whose child?). Apparently, Schmidt experienced a spiritual and physical breakdown after her death, but achieved an artistic revival in his Fourth Symphony of 1933 (which he inscribed as “Requiem for my Daughter”) and, especially, in his oratorio “The Seven Seals.” Surely, Hartmann must have heard Schmidt’s Fourth Symphony, premiered in Vienna in 1934. Was he present at the premiere of Schmidt’s oratorio on 15 June 1938? This would have taken place not long after the events described in Orel’s report, which is dated March 31, 1938, i.e., during the very difficult period when Hartmann was desperately trying to leave Austria. Is this affair referred to in “The Song of the Four Winds,” or is it a later affair in South Africa? If it is the earlier affair, are there also musical connections between “The Song of the Four Winds” and the related pieces by Schmidt - in addition to those discussed with Joseph Marx (Hartmann’s other composition teacher), Mahler, Puccini, and Bruckner?

I would be in favor of a publication arising out of the conference. I found the level of the presentations high, and the diverse yet related topics fascinating. People will, of course, have the opportunity to refine and expand their presentations, and perhaps the organizers can contribute an introduction addressing some of the excellent points raised by our colleagues.

Best wishes,

Tim Jackson, Ph.D.
Professor of Music Theory
College of Music
University of North Texas

dear christine

i read your impressions on the exile conference in johannesburg, and feel compelled to respond. there is much in your piece that puzzles me: the connection of irony (or lack of it) to the specter of an old musicology; the idea that hartmann’s status as exile was attributed ‘without any evidence’; the notion that trauneck could be more ‘interesting’ as a musical figure because he is politically less distasteful; the pique about balance and representation and evenness.

much of this, forgive me dear friend, is nonsense, or is made so by the way you present it. hartmann’s work and politics were not kept separate at all. in fact, jackson’s presented research opened the interface between the two. hartmann’s exile was not presented as a fact without evidence, but as a researched historical narrative with continuing gaps in understanding. trauneck might romantically better align with south african narratives of struggle than does hartmann, but as a composer hartmann is infinitely more interesting than has been realized locally (as is trauneck in his own way). and as for everything being ‘far from representative’, well, you will know that this is the trump card to question the integrity of any dialogue in our country. And it can (and will) apply to any and every conference on anything anywhere in the country. in the light of the musical, political, generational, racial and gender diversity on display in presenters and topics, however, i note this concern with some consternation. as far as dyani’s ten minutes goes or koapeng’s ‘short shrift’ as evidence of uneven ‘grabbing’, i am bemused. since when have you started minute-counting to weigh the importance or impact or significance of a contribution? It is a flawed methodology, in this case demonstrably so because dyani’s ten minutes was a mind-grabbing performance and koapeng’s short shrift was augmented by two 30 minute presentations later.

but mostly i am upset by your assertion that ‘there would be great harm in putting this sheaf of preliminaries out as an academic book or journal or volume or set of “proceedings”’. how could the publication of ideas be harmful? and to whom? and again, how will this take us back into old south african musicology? this seems to connect to your idea of the presentations containing ‘too little critique’. i disagree, unless you understand critique to mean coherence, systematic probing, coordinated analysis and then go on to apply it to the collective of the symposium as a whole, rather than individual contributions (of which the standard was very high). tell you what, though, you’ll have to do some travelling to find a conference with enough ‘critique’, if that is what you mean by it. you are expressing the wish for the well-matured and carefully considered argument of a monograph, not a symposium proceedings. but why should south africa be so profoundly different from other places in the world and wait for our collective deliberations to mature into monographs before considering publication? is this a colonial obsession with getting it right? and can we ever get exile right? and is what we managed now not as much as can be achieved now, and therefore valuable and legitimate and historically important (also to record) for that reason? anyway, as pirandello showed us long ago, papers in search of a theme are revealing, shocking, illuminating and unsettling in the best of ways. more so, if anything, than papers that march in step to one.

you write that the cards are now on the table, and that the game can now be played. says who? and at whose behest? your own, as discourse referee? the ‘authentic exiles’? michael haas, who opined on ‘how and when to do it’? and what am i supposed to be doing with myself while i wait for the ‘development of historical distance’? and my students who are in their early twenties? meditate on where the bus is going? we’re already playing the game, and like all play it is fulfilling and fun and messy and surprising and creative and random and dangerous and challenging. ‘god knows what we were trying to do in johannesburg’, you write. leave god out of it, she’s too busy looking after our overheated planet and the rest of the problems afflicting the ideological faithful in these days of blingful spectacled bliss. allow me to tell you what we were doing: we were connecting/juxtaposing/representing widely divergent stories and people and musics. we were listening to one another, talking with and to and past one another, eating together, listening to music together, getting to know people and ideas radically different from our own. we were laughing and crying in each other’s presence and getting angry with each other. we were bringing generations and interests and ideologies that exist separately in our world into contact. we were feeling our way towards a shared future by trying on the clothes of exile (why the negative vibe about intellectual cross-dressing?) we were doing what scholars and musicians everywhere and of all ages do, which is to engage with ideas and music that confound and confuse us and to emerge confounded and confused but in this case more humanly connected: mk veterans with dominees’ daughters with german exiles with up-tight calvinists with deleuzian architects with jet-lagged texans with opportunist film-makers with feminist stalinists with traumatized jazz musicians with behatted anthropologists with strangely accented conductors with playwright-composers with examinations tsars with double-barelled passport holders with, deliver us from evil, young afrikaner musicology students honing their craft.

i know, i know. not representative or diverse enough. you’re a hard one to please. but i think you’ve got this wrong, and hope you will make your work (thoughtful and outstanding as always) available to an eventual publication.

with great affection and respect
stephanus

27 January 2010 9.00 a.m. – 6.00 p.m. (followed by the Hartmann/Moerane concert at the Linder Auditorium at 8.00 p.m.)

Wednesday 27 January 2010

9:00 Welcome and introduction

Session 1: Exile, Literature and Music

9:15 Muff Andersson - The nomad sings, the nomad walks, the nomad rests: the ‘condition’ of exile
9:35 Matildie Thom-Wium - ‘My country, my dry, forsaken country’: On exile in Arnold van Wyk’s, NP van Wyk Louw’s and Ovid’s Tristia.
9:55 Willie Kgositsile - Title to be confirmed

10:15 Questions/comments/discussion
10:45 Tea

Session 2: Identities

11:15 Michael Haas - From Bach to Schönberg: How “German” was music from fin de Siècle Vienna?
12:05 Xoli Norman - Title to be confirmed
12:25 Stephanie Vos - Interpreting the notion of nationality in the case of John Joubert

12:45 Questions/comments/discussion
13:15 Lunch

Session 3: In conversation

14:00 Stephanus Muller, Steve Dyer, Warrick Sony, Michael Blake and Mokale Koapeng
Discussion panel

15:30 Tea

Session 4: Exile in composition and performance

16:00 Jean-Pierre de la Porte - Exile on the spot: how does one recognize minor music?
16:30 Pre-concert talk by Mokale Koapeng (on Moerane) - Title to be confirmed
17:00 Pre-concert talk by Tim Jackson (on Hartmann) - Title to be confirmed

18:00 Symposium ends

18:05 Drinks and dinner at Goethe
19:15 Travel to Linder
20:00 Concert at Linder - Moerane, Hartmann and Mozart

Thursday 28 January 2010

Session 5: Places

9:00 David Coplan - S.A. Jazz in Exile: Exporting Sophiatown and District 6
9:20 Hilde Roos - Opera in exile: the Eoan Group
9:40 Gwen Ansell - So close to home: South African jazz in African exile

10:00 Questions/comments/discussion
10:20 Tea

Session 6: People

10:50 Tim Jackson - keynote address - Title to be confirmed
11:40 Aryan Kaganof - Blue Notes from Johnny
12:00 Chris van Rhyn - The wingless flight – A consideration of Priaulx Rainier and her Requiem in the context of exile
12:40 Colette Szymczak - Jonas Gwangwa, musician and cultural activist

13:00 Questions/comments/discussion
13:30 Lunch

Session 7: Perspectives

14:15 Christine Lucia - The smell of a grass fire
14:35 Chats Devroop - Emotional displacement amongst South African Jazz Musicians who stayed behind
14:55 Mokale Koapeng - Composing in South Africa

15:15 Questions/comments/discussion
15:45 Closing remarks
16:00 Symposium ends

Goethe Institut Johannesburg

The Music and Exile: North-South Narratives Symposium explores the relationship between sound and place in South Africa and internationally. This is done from the perspective of scholars, performers, composers and other stakeholders in the discourse, and covers a wide variety of music, including art music, jazz, South African traditional and popular music. The Symposium forms part of the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival, and will present an informative and thought-provoking extension of the Festival’s 16 music concerts. The Symposium is specially linked with the concert on 27 January at the Linder Auditorium, where works of double-exiled composer Friedrich Hartmann and South African composer Michael Moerane will be performed.

The topic of exile is of great significance in music of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century, as the political situations of Apartheid and the Second World War, to name only two instances, caused many migrations. Exile is, however, not only limited to experiences of political oppression: exile could be forced or voluntary (or combinations of both), as well as physical and/or spiritual. Composers or performers who have been forced to leave their countries are different to those who leave it voluntarily; musicians who use their music to migrate ‘inwards’ in their art are different to those who use it to remember the places they have left behind. Exile prompts categories like ‘Before the departure’; ‘uprootment’, ‘flight’, ‘arrival’, ‘place’, ‘new beginnings’, ‘nostalgia for home’ and ‘return’. Although these conditions of exile are universal, and enable a geographically and historically wide-ranging discussion, exile can be seen as a topos of South African cultural, and specifically musical, production.

Some of the prominent scholars who will present papers at the symposium include Timothy Jackson (University of North Texas), Michael Haas (Jewish Museum, Vienna), Christine Lucia (Stellenbosch University), David Coplan (University of the Witwatersrand) and Gwen Ansell (author of Soweto Blues). There will also be discussions led by Stephanus Muller (Stellenbosch University) with composers and performers Michael Blake, Mokale Koapeng, Steve Dyers, aryan kaganof and Warrick Sony.

Members of the public are welcome and attendance is free. To reserve a place please send an e-mail to dpt@johannesburg.goethe.org. For more information, contact Stephanie Vos at 012 429 6782 or svos@unisa.ac.za, or visit the website www.join-mozart-festival.org. The symposium programme will be made available on the website next week.

Exile could be forced or voluntary (or combinations of both), as well as physical and/or spiritual. Composers or performers who have been forced to leave their countries are different to those who leave it voluntarily; musicians who use their music to migrate ‘inwards’ in their art are different to those who use it to remember the places they have left behind. Exile prompts categories like ‘Before the departure’; ‘uprootment’, ‘flight’, ‘arrival’, ‘place’, ‘new beginnings’, ‘nostalgia for home’ and ‘return’. Although these conditions of exile are universal, and potentially enable a geographically and historically wide-ranging discussion, exile can be seen as a topos of South African cultural, and specifically musical, production in a number of ways:

• The peculiar dynamics of the colonial extensions of empire, resulting in white settler populations with a (sometimes only subconscious) nostalgia for ‘home’. In the case of Australia or the USA, this ambivalence is mostly submerged under an overwhelming sense of ‘this is where we belong’ and the dominance of Western values in politics, economics, culture, etc. In South Africa, on the other hand, this ambivalence is always close to the surface. David Hoenigsberg could still write in 2003 of European art music in South Africa as ‘exotic given its locality and provenance’. Thus exile could be read as a topos in cultural production resulting from the specific South African conditions of colonialism.
• Exiled musicians like Friedrich Hartmann, who made South Africa their home.
• The vibrancy of urban black music and the exile from the traditional homesteads and villages induced by industrialization. Here the work by David Coplan and Veit Erlmann is of importance, but also of more traditional ethnomusicologists such as Andrew Tracey and Dave Dargie.
• Internal South African exile caused by separate development. Black people who remained in South Africa but had been evicted from their homes. This introduces the music of Sophia Town, District Six, etc.
• Exile of white and black artists during Apartheid, which has probably had most academic and commercial attention until now. One thinks of Stanley Glasser, John Joubert, David Hoenigsberg, Miriam Makeba, Abdullah Ebrahim, etc. But one could also include performers like Mimi Coertze here. Exile has something to do with her patriotic Wiener programmes and the iconic S. le Roux Marais song ‘Heimwee’. Other performers like Anton Nel, Niel Immelman, Jacobus Kloppers come to mind.
• There is the matter of old-age as exile from the world, i.e. the discourse of late-style and alienation.
• There is the question of internal and external emigration of young Afrikaners in post-1994 South Africa, i.e. a gradual withdrawal into an inner life with as little contact as possible with the changed world outside. Again, the circumstances are rather unique: an economically empowered group that has lost the protection of political power and is highly visible (white) and politically vulnerable but economically empowered.
• The relationship between artistic identity and musical heritage or the notion of (not) belonging to a tradition.

Exile as a theme or topos will enable ethnomusicologists, musicologists and scholars of popular music to contribute on widely diverse subjects like performance, black choral music, Western art music, traditional Xhosa music, etc. It presupposes the sub-themes of memory and nostalgia, and poses the kinds of questions that South Africans of all races are arguably ideally placed to explore. However, it also invites more universal perspectives on the effect of exile on musical production, perspectives to which non-South Africans could fruitfully contribute.

Written by Stephanus Muller and Mathildie Thom Wium

Exile could be forced or voluntary (or combinations of both), as well as physical and/or spiritual. Composers or performers who have been forced to leave their countries are different to those who leave it voluntarily; musicians who use their music to migrate ‘inwards’ in their art are different to those who use it to remember the places they have left behind. Exile prompts categories like ‘Before the departure’; ‘uprootment’, ‘flight’, ‘arrival’, ‘place’, ‘new beginnings’, ‘nostalgia for home’ and ‘return’. Although these conditions of exile are universal, and potentially enable a geographically and historically wide-ranging discussion, exile can be seen as a topos of South African cultural, and specifically musical, production in a number of ways:

• The peculiar dynamics of the colonial extensions of empire, resulting in white settler populations with a (sometimes only subconscious) nostalgia for ‘home’. In the case of Australia or the USA, this ambivalence is mostly submerged under an overwhelming sense of ‘this is where we belong’ and the dominance of Western values in politics, economics, culture, etc. In South Africa, on the other hand, this ambivalence is always close to the surface. David Hoenigsberg could still write in 2003 of European art music in South Africa as ‘exotic given its locality and provenance’. Thus exile could be read as a topos in cultural production resulting from the specific South African conditions of colonialism.
• Exiled musicians like Friedrich Hartmann, who made South Africa their home.
• The vibrancy of urban black music and the exile from the traditional homesteads and villages induced by industrialization. Here the work by David Coplan and Veit Erlmann is of importance, but also of more traditional ethnomusicologists such as Andrew Tracey and Dave Dargie.
• Internal South African exile caused by separate development. Black people who remained in South Africa but had been evicted from their homes. This introduces the music of Sophia Town, District Six, etc.
• Exile of white and black artists during Apartheid, which has probably had most academic and commercial attention until now. One thinks of Stanley Glasser, John Joubert, David Hoenigsberg, Miriam Makeba, Abdullah Ebrahim, etc. But one could also include performers like Mimi Coertze here. Exile has something to do with her patriotic Wiener programmes and the iconic S. le Roux Marais song ‘Heimwee’. Other performers like Anton Nel, Niel Immelman, Jacobus Kloppers come to mind.
• There is the matter of old-age as exile from the world, i.e. the discourse of late-style and alienation.
• There is the question of internal and external emigration of young Afrikaners in post-1994 South Africa, i.e. a gradual withdrawal into an inner life with as little contact as possible with the changed world outside. Again, the circumstances are rather unique: an economically empowered group that has lost the protection of political power and is highly visible (white) and politically vulnerable but economically empowered.
• The relationship between artistic identity and musical heritage or the notion of (not) belonging to a tradition.

Exile as a theme or topos will enable ethnomusicologists, musicologists and scholars of popular music to contribute on widely diverse subjects like performance, black choral music, Western art music, traditional Xhosa music, etc. It presupposes the sub-themes of memory and nostalgia, and poses the kinds of questions that South Africans of all races are arguably ideally placed to explore. However, it also invites more universal perspectives on the effect of exile on musical production, perspectives to which non-South Africans could fruitfully contribute.

Written by Stephanus Muller and Mathildie Thom Wium

Unless writing music proceeds from knowing that you don’t know anything, it adopts an opinionated register as it tends to fall back on whatever is available in the ideas-closet. Writing music is a matter of tone more than content, and tone can only ever be unpredictable, haphazard, immediate en probing (backwards and forwards). The moment writing music is about content, it becomes writing on something else. So I don’t know if I agree with what Boulez is saying (transposed to writing music). Once music becomes part of history, it is severed from experience anyway. The issue of memory is an issue of curatorship, not performance. And language and music in the present can only ever be engaged in guess work and fore-play - but then it can’t be driven by theory, which immediately consumates the relationship.

stephanus muller

the reverie review text is by mick raubenheimer

Etymology and application of the term, Architecture

The word “architecture” comes from the Latin, “architectura” and ultimately from Greek, “arkitekton”, αρχιτεκτων, an architect, or more precisely “master builder”, from the combination of αρχι a “chief” or “leader” and τεκτων, a “builder” or “carpenter.

While the primary application of the word “architecture” pertains to the built environment, by extension, the term has come to denote the art and discipline of creating an actual, or inferring an implied or apparent plan of any complex object or system. The term can be used to connote the implied architecture of abstract things such as music or mathematics, the apparent architecture of natural things, such as geological formations or the structure of biological cells, or explicitly planned architectures of human-made things such as software, computers, enterprises, and databases, in addition to buildings. In every usage, an architecture may be seen as a subjective mapping from a human perspective (that of the user in the case of abstract or physical artifacts) to the elements or component of some kind of structure or system, which preserves the relationships among the elements or components.

Stephanus Muller
University of Stellenbosch

Twice in his life, Arnold van Wyk used the term ‘Accida’ to describe his melancholy disposition. In the unpublished manuscript of his Common Place Book, discovered a few years ago among his manuscripts by the current writer, he writes: ‘The illness that plagues me is ACCIDA.’ He continues by quoting a description of the condition as being a mixture of ‘deep melancholy and sloth’. A second occurrence of the term is found in one of his small pocket diaries, when he writes on 18 July 1971 – a particularly barren creative year: ‘Got up early, but ACCIDA so intense that I could do practically nothing.’

After his death in 1983, Van Wyk’s melancholia become one of the enduring myths of his artistic legacy. Its aspect of reality was provided by the composer’s own pronouncements on the subject during his lifetime and the list of work titles ritually recited by commentators as more empirical proof of Van Wyk’s art as one permeated by sadness. Its status as myth nearly a quarter of a century after his death also derives from the total embargo that has rested on his documents until 2002, when limited and controlled access to his literary estate was granted by his literary executors. As his music languished in the dust and chaos of various South African archives and gradually disappeared from South African stages – after the early fifties Van Wyk’s British and never huge European profile gradually disappeared altogether – the myth of Van Wyk’s melancholia flourished.

Because his life has been very sparsely documented, reasons for assuming this potentially significant connection between a life mostly unknown and music largely forgotten are hard to find in the existing literature. Most colleagues, friends, students and family members remember Van Wyk as essentially ‘lonely’, ‘unhappy’, ‘moody’, physically awkward, extremely self-critical. In short: the quintessential suffering Romantic artist. No doubt Van Wyk inherited parts of this temperament from his mother. The little we know of her paints a picture of a woman who preferred to dwell on life’s misfortunes. To be sure, his earliest letters and diaries indicate a pessimistic nature and one perhaps unusually obsessed with loneliness and death. But his biography, as it emerges from his documents now being ordered, does not make happy reading either. His was not a particularly happy childhood; his mother (the only champion in his family of his musical interests) died when he was only sixteen years old. By that time (in 1932) the family had fallen on hard times and had become tenants on their own farm. The little we know of Van Wyk’s father paints a picture of a dishonest man who continuously abused his wife and children. Later in his life, Van Wyk’s homosexuality would be the source of much guilt, enforced secrecy and unrequited infatuations. Unfulfilled desire is writ large in the diaries and letters. Working as a university lecturer throughout his career – first at the University of Cape Town and later the University of Stellenbosch – Van Wyk was also spectacularly unsuccessful in this capacity. South Africa’s foremost composer in 1978 when he retired from teaching, he nevertheless remained an ordinary lecturer and was never promoted. Added to all the above, life-long tooth-aches and gum-illnesses, fastidiously recorded in the diaries that span 53 of his 67 years, made his life, quite literally, very painful. Had he not been born a melancholic, he certainly had enough reasons to become one.

Van Wyk’s biography also suggests an early sense of musical alienation and struggle. Although he played the piano from an early age, he only learnt to read and write notation by the age of twelve. There is evidence that as a composer he felt hampered by this ‘late start’. Trapped by the Second World War, the eight years he spent in London from 1939-1946 (until 1944 as a Performing Right Scholar at the Royal Academy of Music) would be immeasurably important to his creative development. As his creativity dwindled towards the end of his life, it is easy to see the London years as an infusion of musical and cultural ideas, creativity and support, the effects of which wore off increasingly fast after the early 1960s as his ties to England grew weaker and Apartheid South Africa’s isolation increased. Nevertheless, while in London, he continued to pine for his South African home while being acutely aware of his identity as an Afrikaner and how this made him different. On the other hand, after his return to South Africa in 1946, he felt dislodged from the cultural milieu that he had grown accustomed to in London. He quarreled with family, he initially struggled to get a job, his music was generally not understood or appreciated. On more than one occasion, he considered returning to London permanently and was encouraged in this by friends like Howard Ferguson, Dame Myra Hess and Ursula Vaughn-Williams. It never happened. He remained a man out of place, whether in London or Stellenbosch. In his neo-Romantic idiom of composition in the broader context of twentieth-century modernism, he was also a man out of time.

I do not want to explore further Van Wyk’s melancholia, certainly not in a Freudian or more psychologically or psychoanalytically rigorous way. Rather, I should like to draw a single point from the above. Arnold van Wyk’s melancholic disposition, a complex intertwining of nature and nurture, and the composer’s awareness of this on different levels, provides a compelling if speculative biographical context for some of his musical choices. And while this life-work epistemology is admittedly a cliché; as always it is the specific musical, historical and biographical content thereof, and how these co-ordinates could be seen to relate to each other in dynamic and complicated ways, that makes it an enabling rather than sentimental or limiting point of departure. The specifics in this case then, are as follows: First, musically, a tortuous compositional process as evidenced by Van Wyk’s sketches, diaries and letters and a life-long inability to complete works, resulting in constant revision. Also musically important is his self-conscious stylistic anachronism as a neo-Romantic who wrote, as he once put it, ‘basically common chords and very little above traditional harmony’. Second, historically, Van Wyk’s acute estrangement from place as a musician whose centre of cultural gravity was always thousands of miles removed from his sense of home. Third, biographically, the relatively musically impoverished background of the little boy from Calvinia, his early experience of personal loss and his (to him) problematic sexual orientation in a Calvinist society. The tentative connection that I should like to posit is between the unique structure of the resulting ‘extreme melancholia’ as Van Wyk termed it, and his preference for and use of sonata rhetoric, of which the literal traces is found in sketches and diaries. What follows is not so much a thesis – which would require a far more detailed investigation than I carried out – as a more modest unveiling of a possibility.

How often did Van Wyk use sonata designs or procedures in his music? We find sonata design and procedure in both his symphonies. In the First Symphony in a minor (1943) Van Wyk condenses the traditional four sections of the classical symphony into a single movement. There are traces here of an exposition, a development and a return to initial material. Yet, in reviewing one of the first performances of the work for The Observer on 29 August 1943, William Glock wrote: ‘Van Wyk has not yet managed, in fact, to derive his details from the whole and to make them lead back to it.’ As did Sir John Barbirolli in a letter to Van Wyk, Glock recognized traces of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony in Van Wyk’s First. Yet, unlike the Sibelius Seventh, Van Wyk’s a minor symphony includes no new material after the exposition, making Glock’s observation of an ambiguous return perhaps more interesting. If the ‘leading back to the beginning’ was unemphatic in the case of the First Symphony, the Second Symphony, first performed in 1952, if anything over-compensated. The first of two themes is subjected to strict fugal treatment after what could be called an exposition, resulting in the most emphatic return of an opening theme Van Wyk ever wrote. However, finality seems to have come with a cost: he never liked the work, once quoting with agreement the comment of an English conductor who conducted the work in Cape Town: ‘I can respect this work but I cannot love it.’

In fact, it seems that Van Wyk’s use of sonata design or procedures in general has a lot to do with finding ways of ending music; ways of return that are not as emphatic as the fugue of the Second Symphony in its guise as a recapitulation, but not as tentative as the contracted form of the First Symphony (which he later described as ‘too sentimental’). To an extent this is the desire for (his) music to become works. But sonata design, specifically, may also have aided Van Wyk in ending the drawn-out compositional processes underlying these works. After all, his dissatisfaction with and constant revision of even those of his works completed by him, could have increased the attractiveness of sonata rhetoric to him as a more stable, less subjective and therefore more productive register of thematic and tonal possibilities. The piano work Ricordanza (1973) provides one of many examples. On 1 September 1975, after the ‘completion’ of the piece in 1974, Van Wyk writes in his diary: ‘[I] progress 1 cm with the end of the Recap[itulation] of Ricordanza.’ It may be significant that he is rewriting the recapitulation here (which is also the end of the piece); as he had earlier tried to rewrite the last movement of the symphonic suite Primavera, and still earlier the Capriccio (also a movement in sonata form) of the piano work Pastorale e Capriccio. In these works the moment of ending the work becomes indistinguishable from ending the compositional process and it is in this desire for a double ‘closure’ of work and process, I suggest, that sonata procedures – even if problematical and subject to extensive revisions – could provide a sense of an ending.

But there may be another reason for Van Wyk’s attractedness to sonata rhetoric, as suggested by the use of sonata design in the already mentioned Ricordanza. This is a small-scale solo piano meditation on J.S. Bach’s D major Prelude (Book II) stretching over no more than five pages (at the most six minutes). In this case a reading incorporating sonata procedures or design would seem counter-intuitive if one heard or read the music only. Yet the composer’s sketches and diary entries clearly state his thinking along these lines. What is interesting here is the need for the composer in such a small piano work, reminiscent if anything in temperament to an early nineteenth-century character piece, to avail himself of the structural scaffolding of sonata design. There is a hint here, also in the biographical connection of the piece as remembrance of an illicit sexual encounter, of the form providing a trusted Gerüst or core structure for that which flowed freely and licentiously in Van Wyk’s music. The suggestion here is that the composer avails himself of sonata rhetoric not to achieve closure, but to ‘enclose’, or even to ‘closet.

An even better example is Van Wyk’s largest work for piano, Night Music (‘Nagmusiek’). This is a twenty-five minute work for solo piano that was completed in 1955 and first performed in 1956. A revised version was completed in June 1958, after what the composer described in a letter to a friend as ‘one of the bitterest struggles I can remember or imagine’. In 1978 Van Wyk would claim in a letter that ‘Perhaps the biggest work that I have written to date is Night Music for solo piano – in this work I came very close to saying what I set out to say.’ The work is dedicated to the memory of the Australian pianist Noel Mewton-Wood, an intimate friend of the composer during the war years in London; a friendship that only came to an end when Mewton-Wood committed suicide in 1953. As in the case of Ricordanza, the work is laden with the pathos of the love-death narrative, and as is the case with the piano work Tristia where Van Wyk sets the medieval Dutch poem of ‘Egidius’ to a wordless piano texture in the ‘Rondo desolato’, in Night Music he writes an ‘Epilogue’ which is a wordless setting of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem ‘Ernste Stunde’ (‘Wer jetzt weint in der Welt, ohne Grund weint in der Welt, weint über mich’). In all three these cases language and biographical details intermingle with and influence musical choices, aligning the music with narrative purposes of which sonata design (in the case of Ricordanza) and sonata procedures (in the case of Night Music) become the chosen vehicles. In Night Music Van Wyk composes the sixth and main section of this one-movement work in sonata form. In his programme notes he describes this Allegro Agitato e Tempestoso section as follows: ‘This, the main part of the work, is in well-developed sonata form’. And then, after describing how motives previously heard in the work make their reappearance in this section, he concludes:

This integration is very necessary – too much ‘atmosphere’, in the long run, becomes uninteresting. Therefore also the fact that this central part is much tighter in conception and execution.

It is tempting, and, I think, plausible, to read the employment of sonata procedures in Night Music as a sublimated compensation of the atmospheric music characterizing the preceding molto lento introduction and the following four nocturnes, as well as the plaintive Rilke setting of the Epilogue. In this sense, the ‘well-developed sonata form’ (to use Van Wyk’s own words) could be read as a ‘corrective’, a ‘necessary integration’, a ‘normative formalisation’ of the ambiguity of the music that surrounds it. The chronology of the Night Music sketches does not contradict this idea.
The first idea for the piece is found in a sketchbook containing sketches of various other compositions as well. It is not dated, but the composer wrote a note on the cover of the sketchbook in 1968, stating that it contained the first sketches for Night Music.

Figure 1: Opening theme of introduction to Night Music

The first dated sketch of 23 July 1945, shown in Figure 2, expands on the same material. It contains the identical opening theme, here marked as a passacaglia theme.

Figure 2: Sketch of introduction to Night Music, 23 July 1945

Both these sketches are of the beginning of the slow a minor introduction that precedes the eventual four Nocturnes of Night Music. The first dated traces of what would become the ‘main section’ of the work, the ‘well-developed sonata form’, only appear in fair copy in 1956, the year in which the first version of the work was completed. It is also this section with which Van Wyk was dissatisfied and that was extensively revised in 1957 and 1958. From a chronological point of view, we therefore have a trajectory that starts at the introduction and ends in the central sonata form of the sixth section.
Formally, it is clear that Van Wyk did not have this central section in mind when he started out. To be sure, sonata terminology does crop up in connection with the Nocturnes, but only, it seems, in the sense of suggesting a generic three-part formal structure. For instance, a sketch of 26 December 1954 (see Figure 3), made at Howard Ferguson’s London home 106 Wildwood Road, contains material marked ‘after expo[sition]’, even though a sonata structure never resulted from this.

Figure 3: Sketch of Night Music, 26 December 1954

A formal plan for Night Music – the apellation Van Wyk attached to his ‘Nocturnes’ as early as 1948 – that is dated 15 September 1954 gives no indication of a planned sonata form (see Figure 4). The scheme sets out a four-movement work – the four nocturnes preceding the later central sonata movement – and an Epilogue. The order of appearance of the themes is worked out in order for the last Nocturne to function as a recapitulation of the first.

Figure 4: Sketch of Night Music, 15 September 1954

Another very faint structural outline occurs at the bottom of an abortive sketch of the development section of the sixth movement sonata form, possibly from 1957 (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Sketch of Night Music with structural outline, c. 1957

Here we see how the slow introductory movement becomes a three-part structure preceding the four nocturnes. The relative weight of the central sonata structure is apparent, as is the implication that the closing material consists of three independent strands. Also significant is the small slur that Van Wyk inserted above the fourth nocturne in the direction of the central sonata form.
A more expanded version of this sketch exists in a set of rather cryptic undated lecture notes that Van Wyk prepared in Afrikaans on various of his pieces (see Figure 6). We see here that he now describes the improvisatory A minor introduction of Night Music, which contains all the thematic DNA of the work, as a ‘text’. We see also the formal plan of the four nocturnes – based, in Van Wyk’s words, on motives of the ‘text’ – move tonally from C minor/major to A flat major to the tonally indeterminate canonical third Nocturne (actually a Scherzo) to the E flat major of the last nocturne: Lento non troppo, teneramente. Also apparent is the connection between the fourth nocturne and the main section.

Figure 6: Arnold van Wyk lecture notes on the structure of Night Music

Eight bars before the end of this nocturne, Van Wyk introduces a soft E natural pedal point in a 4/2 chord that resolves to the A minor – ambiguously coloured with a C sharp – in the first theme of the climactic sonata form ‘sixth section’. Clearly, if we look at Van Wyk’s structural plan, he saw the last Nocturne as distinct from the sonata form, but clearly preparatory in function. Once the transition to the main section has been made, we are not only back in A minor/major, but the thematic material, placed in the top voice of the accented chords, is that of the first theme – or ‘motive’ as Van Wyk would have it. In effect then, we have a double return here where the exposition of the sonata form also becomes the recapitulation of the introductory material.

To conclude: we find here a structural reinforcement of material previously stated and developed in a structurally more flexible way. And the entire sonata form, rather than only the recapitulation, is employed to closure this ‘text’, to bound, to limit, to secure material that – twelve years previously – started out as an improvisatory Nocturne. It seems, therefore, that the ‘well-developed sonata form’ – even though it was to become the central part of the work – was a late creative intervention to rescue the work from its ‘atmospheric’ surroundings. The meanings of ‘closure’ or ‘enclosement’ that underlie my reading of Van Wyk’s employment of sonata design and procedures are of course metaphorical. That is: the effects of closure and enclosement enabled by sonata rhetoric with regard to musical material are implied to function not as conscious compositional intention but as metaphor for the neo-Romantic composer’s claim to a universality equal to the claims of modernism, or for the colonial composer’s desire to belong to an unambiguous sense of musical tradition, or for the gay composer to protect his vulnerability in a homophobic society. Nevertheless, as a reading of the motivation underlying structural choices connected to Van Wyk’s peculiar form of melancholy, it may also suggest a meaning-generative way of approaching the principles of construction in his music generally. And if it is no more than a metaphor, it is also no less: a search for a better understanding of the thing in itself by invoking an appropriate context.

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.

II

When I returned from my studies in England, I started researching the project which has been occupying me for the past three years, and which is likely to occupy me for at least as long in the future: the life of Arnold van Wyk. Why exactly I turned to biography I cannot justify or explain. Some sort of inner compulsion drove me away from the fraught scholarly involvement with my past, intimately connected with Apartheid and the reckoning made with Apartheid by South African society. I now read the material I wrote during that period with a feeling of near revulsion, a circumstance which has led me to experience what seems like an insurmountable estrangement from my past academic work. I think that biography held out the promise of a more solid and neutral historical activity. An intellectual cliché, I know. Perhaps, taking my Calvinist bent into account, I could venture the description more ‘honest’. But more importantly, I think that I always realized – and this is a feeling to which my years of residency abroad lent depth and persistence – that once my individual demons had been confronted, I would still need to find my ‘home ground’, to invent a narrative of myself as a ‘member’ of some kind of ‘society’. I think that writing in Afrikaans about an Afrikaans composer, whose music, at first, I have to admit, did not move me intellectually or emotionally, held out the promise of constructing a narrative about the ordinary things that make up a culturally compatible past life in the present: the places, the memories of people, the books, the letters, the diaries and from the musical perspective the recordings, the reviews, the manuscripts, the sketches. Of course the choice of this particular life, the life of Arnold van Wyk, was not an arbitrary choice, but one which was similar to my own in crucial historical and personal respects, making him sympathetic to the tenor of my historical enquiry. Eventually my active involvement with my subject’s estate led to my not only embarking upon the project of researching and writing his biography, but also ordering his literary estate and compiling extensive catalogues thereof. I found myself in the dual role of archivist and biographer, of neutral observer and interpreter, of list maker and listless and somewhat desperate grappler with a history always bursting out of the narrative constraints I devise. And I am still having to negotiate this dual role as I speak here, as well as the anxieties and accumulative fatigue of a project that seems to grow larger and less manageable the more time and effort I devote to it.

It was during one of the morning sessions that I usually spend working on the piles of documents taking up ever more space in the Special Collections section of the J.S. Gericke Library in Stellenbosch, that I discovered a grey envelope with no letter included, containing five photographs. The envelope was in a plastic bag, among other photographs, and had recently been sent to Stellenbosch on permanent loan by the Nasionale Afrikaanse Letterkundige Museum en Navorsingsentrum (NALN) in Bloemfontein, where a large part of my subject’s literary estate had languished in boxes for many years. The envelope bore the date stamp of 1954 and was posted in Johannesburg to 38 Charles Street, Pretoria, the address of Harry and Freda Baron, where Arnold van Wyk was on holiday at the time. He often visited the Barons, whom he had met during his frequent holidays in De Rust in the Klein Karoo as a teenager in the early 1930s and who had played an important role in his development as a composer. The photographs are black and white images of different positions of a pianist’s hands – Arnold van Wyk’s hands, as it unsurprisingly turned out to be – on a Steinway grand piano. They were all taken from the right hand side, from a position slightly behind the pianist. One is taken from a point higher than the pianist’s own head, two from a vantage point one could assume almost level with the pianist’s head, and two from a lower vantage point, more level to the figure seated at the piano than behind him. The photographer, whose stamp appears on the envelope and at the back of each photograph, is Derik Worman from Johannesburg, and the respective photographs sent to my subject are clearly marked on the images as ‘Proofs/Proewe’.

I was oddly touched when I held these images in my hands, and sat at my overcrowded library desk for a very long time staring at them. It was clear that the hand positions, close together, had been chosen to show the hands to their best effect. It was also clear, the longer I looked at them, that the hands were depressing keys that had no logical, that is syntactical or linear, sense. The hands on the pictures were merely contracted or expanded to provide better angles, or indicate the size and reach of each hand. Thinking of the textures of much of Van Wyk’s piano music, it is clear that the physiology of these hands is a clear explanation for the nearly unplayable textures of this music. It also dawned on me that in order for the photographs to be taken in these musically illogical positions, the hands would have had to be extremely still, that is placed into position and kept there until the photograph had been taken.

What moved me in these images, I think, was not the undoubted elegance of the hands as they appear suspended in a seemingly natural state in the habitat of the keyboard, or their composed positions, their oddly disembodied air and iconographic, de-socialized quality, but the fact that my subject, whom I had got to know quite well over the course of the last three years, was prepared for these photographs to be taken. Almost involuntarily I recalled an apocryphal story of how, when Arnold van Wyk had died, a musicological colleague and Beethoven scholar had tried to get access to the body to have a death mask made in the style of the Beethoven mask by the painter Joseph Danhauser. The suggestion was indignantly rejected by the close friend of the composer, I believe because the feeling was – rightly so, if I take into account what I have learned from my subject over the years – that he would have found the idea revolting. Due to liver failure, Van Wyk’s face had also become uncharacteristically bloated in his final days. Of course, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this story.

The reason for agreeing to the photographs, whatever their purpose, could not be vainglory or pretensions of fame. By the way, the actual purpose of their existence later proved to be a cover page for ‘Die SAUK Weekblad, Jaargang 2 Nr. 22, 20-26 Feb. 1954’, where a single, blown-up photograph appears with the following description on the inside of the cover: ‘This striking photograph of the composer Arnold Van Wyk’s hands was taken when he recently performed with the SABC-orchestra in Johannesburg’. On a copy of this cover page included in a letter to Howard Ferguson dated 26 April 1954, Van Wyk had written ‘Fame at last! The Starfish send love to Falstaff Gorsebush’. ‘Starfish’ was the affectionate nickname Myra Hess had given Van Wyk’s hands when they became good friends during his war-time stay in London (1938-1946), and ‘Falstaff’ and ‘Gorsebush’ were two (seldomly combined) nicknames Van Wyk used to refer to Howard Ferguson. ‘Long awaited fame’ aside then, it is undeniable that the photographs signify the kind of Romantic – with a capital ‘R’ – adulation of an individual as something special, perhaps even genius, that the Beethoven death mask also communicates to us 180 years after it was made. I think that the subject of Arnold van Wyk’s Romanticism is convincingly ushered in by these photographs. I have said before that there was a congruence between the ideologies underlying Apartheid and the idea of Western art music as a medium of expression for white South African composers, but I think that a case could also be made for a more specific consonance between the kind of Romantic that Arnold van Wyk was and the basic tenets of white superiority. The area of greatest consonance is, I believe, the typically Romantic preoccupation with the unique, the peculiar, the idiosyncratic and the fostering of diversity. Certainly Van Wyk’s music can be said to embody a strange mixture of the ideals of beauty characterizing the early nineteenth-century musical aesthetic and the philosophical-prophetic Weltanschauungsmusik of the latter part of the century: a tension between the delicate and beautiful on the one hand and the meaningfully new and original on the other.

Even though Van Wyk was not a political animal, as all who knew him testify, he did have the occasional brush with politics. One such occasion was reported in the Somerset Budget of 29 July 1959 under the title: ‘A bomb thrown at S.A. culture’:

Cape Town – The Afrikaans composer Arnold van Wyk has thrown a bombshell into the annual conference of the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie at Stellenbosch. He said in the Stellenbosch newspaper Eikestad Nuus that a Nationalist M.P. had asked him ‘to end his perversity and compose boeremusiek.’ Mr. Van Wyk said that as composer of serious music he lived in a cultural desert among his own people.

Referring to Afrikaans audiences at the ‘Wonder of Afrikaans’ festivities in the Cape Town City Hall, he said Afrikaners reacted only to speeches and popular ditties. Serious music meant nothing to them. Mr. Van Wyk said Silas Marner, the first full-length opera by a South African composer (John Joubert) will be staged in Britain – not South Africa. (The Festival of Union Committee concerned with the selection of music rejected the opera as unsuitable.) ‘Now that our Akademie is 50 years old and the Union will soon reach its half-century, it is a suitable time to say that the South African composer lives in a desert,’ says Van Wyk. The little oases are ‘even scarcer than those for the painter and author.’

That Van Wyk was not entirely indifferent to matters pertaining to politics and music, is clear from two broadcasts he did for the Afrikaans Service of the BBC from London on Friday 25 May 1945 and 1 June 1945 respectively. Entitled ‘The Music of the Future’, Van Wyk spoke about the responsibility of the creative artist in the battle for self preservation in the light of the imperative for reconstruction and healing (‘to prevent humanity from destroying itself’) in the wake of the Second World War:

Now, I know that artists today – or those of them who matter in my opinion – are not in touch with normal people; and there are moments when Mozart against machine guns is about as effective as a kleilat against tanks – nevertheless it remains a fact that the creative artist has a mighty weapon with which to join battle – regardless of what the disbelievers might say. It was Einstein (if I remember correctly) who said: ‘How can we despair of humanity when we remember that Mozart was human?’ And here I can also recount Sir Thomas Beecham’s strong faith – the faith that the world’s many problems could be solved by simply forcing every soul to listen – for half an hour every day – to the works of Mozart.

Clapping the natives in irons to enforce a strict diet of divertimenti is hardly a programme with which to ignite the African uhuru, I concede, but it is also too generally humanistic and universal a vision to be easily incorporated into a narrow Afrikaner nationalist, at times fascist, ideology. According to Nicol Viljoen, erstwhile student and life-long friend of Van Wyk, Arnold was the kind of person who got on extremely well with all people on a personal level, but who was extremely naïve politically and largely oblivious to the injustices of Apartheid that surrounded him. Viljoen never heard him speak negatively of the National Party’s leaders, and is convinced that he would have voted for the National Party as the political structure that could maintain the kind of order he felt was necessary to guarantee the space for great music to act as a ‘civilizing force’ for the advancement of the whole of society – the vision he formulated in his two BBC broadcasts. I have become convinced that Viljoen is wrong about this. Van Wyk had little patience or sympathy for Afrikaner Nationalism, his attitude to Nationalism being shaped in war-ravaged London. Scathing remarks about the National Party government abound in his correspondence to his life-long friend Freda Baron, who, as a Jew forced to flee with her family from the rural anti-semitism of De Rust, was a safe ear for Van Wyk’s criticisms. In one such a letter from London, Van Wyk writes:

I wish it could be possible for you to stay on at De Rust, but nothing would please me more than to hear that you have managed to escape to another place where there is more tolerance & less pig-headed Nationalism. We are having a thoroughly unpleasant time in London, but I don’t think I’d very readily exchange the dangers of present-day London for the ‘serenity’ of De Rust for instance. As a matter of fact, I do not feel that I want to come back to South Africa at all now. At least people in England have enough sense to recognize a serious threat to freedom & to do all in their power to neutralize that threat. But when a responsible body of churchmen like the Synod of the O.F.S. D.R.C. [Orange Free State Dutch Reformed Church] declares that Hitler is fighting for Christianity & a Minister profanes his cloth & pitilessly exposes the quality of his mind by saying that Mein Kampf ought to be regarded as the Bible of South Africans and read as such, I feel stifled and outraged. It is no exaggeration to say that after reading some of the Nationalist S. African papers, my first impulse is to go and have a Lysol bath!!

More evidence of a strong antipathy with regard to the Afrikaner political establishment is found in a letter of 29 May 1961, when Van Wyk writes to Freda Baron about the impending declaration of a Republic:

I haven’t much to complain of, either, always excepting the terrible times we live in and that we are only two days from our glorious republic … Anyway, there is nothing I can do but carry on: nothing that is except saying a word here and there to shake complacent Nats. But it is like talking to a wall. Anton [Hartman] expects a period of ‘ongekende bloei’ – an unfortunate word, since as you know, it can also mean bleading.

However, the more public criticisms expressed by Van Wyk in documents and letters against the government or government structures are related to the meagre opportunities and inadequate support for South African composers and do not involve direct political comment. In a letter to a certain Mrs Field, President of the South African Federation of Business and Professional Women, Van Wyk writes on 25 February 1957:

The State has thusfar (sic) not spent one single farthing to help a SA composer to get a work printed. If it has, it must be in some indirect way: for instance, an organisation which receives State support may have, on occasion, used some of the money to help with printing. But I know of no instances. It is safe to say, I think, that as far as the State is concerned, the South African composer just does not exist.

One might have thought that things would have changed under the stewardship and patronage of Van Wyk’s friend and Broederbond member Anton Hartman at the SABC from 1961 on. But little more than a year before he died on 27 May 1983, Van Wyk wrote a letter to Mrs Jacobs of the SABC, in which he said:

I (and, I can assure you, all South African composers) feel convinced that the SABC and especially SATV are not really interested in us and that it is meaningless to try to change the situation. And should there be sense in trying again, I am bitterly upset that I have to devote precious time and energy at this late stage of my life to the unpleasant necessity of writing this (very difficult) letter. The strongest feeling that I have at the moment is that I wish to inform you that I should in future choose to have nothing to do with the SABC – especially because the disparagement and humiliation that one has to endure from the Corporation is not worth the few stale crumbs it throws one. Or let my put it like this: if I look back to the near half-century that I have had dealings with the SABC, I see more unpleasantness and disparagement than anything else. In the last ten years things have worsened, and in the last four years especially the SABC has made abundantly clear what it thinks of me. I now feel very strongly that I never really managed to be successful at the SABC, that I will never be able to be successful there and that I don’t want to try, because if I look at some of the people that enjoy your favour I feel rather proud that I am not one of them.

Naturally one need not take Van Wyk’s word for the treatment supposedly meted out to him, which many today would feel was quite royal. Also, the last sentence of his letter to Jacobs could suggest patronage of a political kind and a certain resentfulness that he was excluded from this. Certainly the idea that an artist could work within Apartheid structures, and even perpetuate Apartheid thinking while believing himself to stand outside such structures, is not inconceivable. Certainly, if one looks at the more private hands of Arnold van Wyk the composer (not the public display of the performer), it becomes more difficult to theorize his detachment from the society he lived in. ‘One need only look at Matthew Arnold or Carlyle,’ writes Edward Said, ‘to see the use that was made of culture to camouflage and disguise the inhumane goings-on in the colonies (specifically India, Ireland and Jamaica in Arnold’s case, as he droned on about culture and sweetness and light). Said continues:

while empire was never straightforward, and entailed suffering on all sides, it required an abiding consent among its English adherents. And that consent was always based on the subordination of the native and the colony to the English, individually and collectively. No undertaking as far-flung as the British Empire … could have been sustained without the willing and perhaps often implicit approval of the English ‘senso commune’.

By replacing the ‘British Empire’ with ‘Apartheid South Africa’, it is not difficult to recognize that ‘consent’ and ‘implicit approval’ can be connected to that agency holding the pen, forming the notes. Having said this, the facile notion of some latter-day propagandists of the existence of a comfortable and mutually profitable relationship between the ‘Apartheid regime’ and ‘white composers’ in general, is hereby qualified to an extent. More research into this murky area is palpably needed.
However, even if it is historically more or less true that Arnold van Wyk was not a willing participant in the projects or ideologies of Afrikaner Nationalism, particularly Apartheid, and that his Romantic eschewing of hierarchy and class distinction, his egalitarianism and his formalist abhorrence of art in service of language and by implication politics could be construed as markers of an anti-establishment position, we should be careful to note that the exact opposite is in fact more probable. When Van Wyk made statements about the philistinism of his own people, as he did when that Nationalist MP berated him for his musical perversity with the advice to start composing boeremusiek, this criticism was of course absorbed by the establishment as the paradoxical affirmation of a centuries-old Western conception of the artist as a lonely and idiosyncratic genius. As Leonard Meyer wrote about the nineteenth-century artist: ‘Artists wanted to be different and special, and their claims to singularity were supported both by the mysteries of musical creation and by the mythic opposition of the Philistines. Yet even as they scorned and mocked the middle class, the artists of the nineteenth century created for it, representing subjects, symbolizing beliefs, and advocating values consonant with those of the elite egalitarians.’ And there is little doubt that Arnold van Wyk was in many respects a nineteenth-century composer in the twentieth century in a colonial society embracing many nineteenth-century values, not the least of which was of course a virulent nationalism. So perhaps my musicological colleague did not, after all, have the wrong end of the stick when he tried (and failed) to preserve in plaster Arnoldus Christiaan Vlok Van Wyk’s sad features for posterity.

III

Looking at the photographed hands on the day I found them, the thing that disturbed my archival complacency, that grabbed my thoughts and would not let go for days and weeks until I started writing about them, was the thought that these photographs in their coagulated state was about communicating something to the future, my present, that was of some deep and not entirely intelligible significance. In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur writes with regard to his third category of mimesis, which he calls mimesis3, that aesthetic reception of something cannot take up the problem of communication without also taking up that of reference. ‘What is communicated,’ Ricoeur continues to say, ‘in the final analysis, is, beyond the sense of a work, the world it projects and that constitutes its horizon. In this sense, the listeners or readers receive it according to their own receptive capacity, which itself is defined by a situation that is both limited and open to the world’s horizon.’

A situation both limited and open to the world’s horizon.

I think that this explains to an extent not the ‘what’ or the ‘why’, but the ‘how’ of the emotional appeal these photographs made on me in their prenarrative quality of experience that hints at the existence of music. For all their extreme alienation to the reality of an historical world in which they ‘composed’ and ‘played’ – a world of social engineering, desperate poverty, broken lives and ruined futures – extreme alienation is still a case of intersection. I think that the acontextualism of these hands, firstly with respect to their distance from real performed music and secondly with respect to the space of their Steinway keyboard and its obvious ‘remove’ from society, convey only the particular modality of the intersection with the society where the hands and piano ‘lived’. That which could be construed as indifference toward society is in fact a Romantic – again with a capital ‘R’ – engagement with it. An engagement that set itself apart from the same society validating its existence by espousing all the symptoms of Romanticism: the unimportance of context, the mistrust of language, the aspiration to emulate the truth and elegance of nature, the prizing of the unique person and the diversity implied by this, the ideological scaffolding of a formalist point of view proclaiming the possibility, nay, the imperative of complete meaning in the work of art stripped of its context. Ricoeur speaks of the intersections contained in a work being both limited and open to the world’s horizon, and I think he intends this to be read as intersections that exist synchronically. However, I sense that today, when we speak to a title like ‘Composing ApARTheid’, we are still inhabiting the old world to such an extent that we cannot address the subject as if it were some historical event, or series of events. We – I – have to treat it in the sense that I am now, at this present and in this discourse, composing Apartheid or a version thereof that I can live with. We have to stretch Ricoeur’s meaning to encompass the limited historical context and the ever expanding horizon of time intersecting with it. It is a more complicated view of Apartheid than is allowed for in granting it a beginning and an end, and the narratives we devise to tell our story might not most profitably be confined to ones with happy endings/beginnings at Victor Verster or diachronic listings mostly confined to tracing the Marxist faultlines of social structures and cultural production, however sophisticated we make these perspectives. My wish would be for narratives about Apartheid that recognize both our need to tell, and our humble and honest recognition that we can never tell it all. Fundamentally, it is a wish that depends on Ricoeur’s insight that ‘time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal existence’. Following from his reading of Augustine’s Confessions (Book II), Ricoeur realizes that the conversion of time (‘the past’, for my purpose) into narrative does not solve aporia’s, but only resolves them poetically (and not theoretically). ‘The question of the relationship between time and narrative culminates in this dialectic between an aporetics and a poetics.’ The past is accessible as a modality of the present in which the writer and the reader, anchored in the world of action (the present) interacts with the world poetically mediated by narrative (the past). Central to this transaction is the refiguration that takes place through Ricoeur’s constructed categories of mimesis1, mimesis2 and mimesis3. It exposes a notion of historical complexity that is indispensible to South African stories. ‘This South African word,’ writes Graham Pechey on Apartheid in the context of the migrancy of South African words, ‘has a lot more travelling to do.’

In this spirit I think that these photographed hands indicate an action – the motionlessness should not be confused with a lack of action, of motivation to pose – that points to a place and time other than its own present. A place and time where, of course, it is not and will not be, as it was not then as a prior side to narrative, ethically neutral. But an infinitely extended moment of intersection where the hands signal the sensual – for the fingers, and the pads of the fingers are for pianists sensual endings or extensions of the keys – points of contact between what is inside and what is allowed to flow to the outside. What is referenced as ‘flowing’ in these photographs is of course music. These photographs of Arnold van Wyk’s hands constitute an iconic visual preservation of an articulated gesture of aesthetic transmission in something refusing words and pointing to a meeting of private and public space. It asserts the primacy of its agent and his music intersecting with our world – my world – in a manner that, I maintain, I cannot approximate under a subject potentially assuming so much historically as ‘Composing ApARTheid’; a set of circumstances that assumes conclusions so confidently that it induces paralysis in those whose stories do not coincide with the endings imposed by the historical cut-off dates, or who wish to arrive at different conclusions. There exist things from the past, sometimes incomprehensible and inexplicably significant, that cannot become part of the story this book wishes to tell, and in this, constitute a crucial, discordant part of its plot.

BibBliography

‘A bomb thrown at S.A. culture’. 1959. Somerset Budget, 29 July.Hönigsberg, David. 1999. ‘Chamber Symphony 1998’. Current Musicology, 67-68, pp. 139-56.Muller, Stephanus. 2000. ‘Sounding Margins: Musical Representations of White South Africa’. D.Phil. diss., University of Oxford._. 2002. ‘Letter to the Editor’. Current Musicology, 74, pp. 250-54.Meyer, Leonard B. 1989. ‘Toward a Theory of Style’. In Style and Music: Theory, History and Ideology. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, pp. 3-37.Pechey, Graham. 2004. ‘On Trek’. The Times Literary Supplement, 30 April, p. 15.Ricoeur, Paul. 1990 [1983]. Time and Narrative (trans. Kathleen McLaughlin & David Pellauer). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.Said, Edward. 2001. Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta.
comAp book.indd 311 13/9/07 10:44:39
3 12 C o mM p osS i ng Aa p artheidSebald, WG. 2002. Austerlitz (trans. Anthea Bell). New York: Modern Library.Walton, Chris. 2004. ‘Bond of Brothers: Anton Hartman and Music in an Apartheid State’. Musical Times, 145(1887), pp. 63-74.EendnotesSa � IammuchindebtedtoSebald’swritinginconstructinganarrativevoiceforthisI am much indebted to Sebald’s writing in constructing a narrative voice for this article, including his evocative use of photographs.

b TherestofthisparagraphalsomakesuseofMeyer’sconceptualframework.The rest of this paragraph also makes use of Meyer’s conceptual framework.c DiscussingtheproseofNaguibMahfouz,EdwardSaidcontrastsittoprosebyDiscussing the prose of Naguib Mahfouz, Edward Said contrasts it to prose by Palestinian novelists Ghassan Kanafani and Emile Habibi (within the collective of ‘Arab writing’) by drawing parallels between the differences in geographical and political instability in Egypt on the one hand and Palestine and Lebanon on the other. The point that the subjects in the latter two countries are ‘urgently political and its concerns radically existential’ compared to that of Mahfouz has something to do with the different relationality of prose production in the three situations (2001: 317-26). I think that a similar understanding needs to be cultivated in heuristic constructions of South African culture, where the ‘one nation’ idea is an anachronistic and political imposition on the divided realities of South African cultural production and differentiated relationality to politics and ideology. I suspect, for instance, that Afrikaner cultural production is now, for the first time since the early decades of the twentieth century, again becoming more and more existentially explorative.d VanWyk’sliteraryestatewasonlyofficiallydonatedtotheUniversityofVan Wyk’s literary estate was only officially donated to the University of Stellenbosch by his executors (Jan du Toit and James May) on 16 September 2002. Substantial documentary material from Van Wyk’s estate (including letters, diaries, photographs, and lectures) was held by NALN in Bloemfontein. As part of a permanent loan agreement between the two institutions it was transferred to the University of Stellenbosch in March 2004 to be integrated with the rest of the Van Wyk collection.

e VanWykleftforPretoriaon28December1953.Hetravelled,ashefrequentlyVan Wyk left for Pretoria on 28 December 1953. He travelled, as he frequently did, on the famous Blue Train. Van Wyk stayed with the Barons for six weeks, only travelling back to Cape Town on 11 February, after having received the news on 18 January that his song cycle Van Liefde en Verlatenheid had been selected for performance at that year’s International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Haifa, Israel.

f Unlessstatedotherwise,allletters,photographs, andotherdocumentaryUnless stated otherwise, all letters, and other documentary material used in this article are held in the Arnold van Wyk collection (no 320) in the Special Collections section of the JS Gericke Library at the University of Stellenbosch. These documents have not yet been catalogued and therefore do not possess reference numbers. All material is published with permission.

g � TheactualsizeofVanWyk’slefthandisillustratedinalettertohissister,MinnieThe actual size of Van Wyk’s left hand is illustrated in a letter to his sister, Minnie Hahn (nicknamed ‘Mintel’), dated 29 August 1939. On the first page of this letter Van Wyk traces the outline of his left hand, revealing not only a large hand but also a wider than average stretch between the fingers.

h TheperformancewasarecordingofMozart’sK.449pianoconcertowiththeThe performance was a recording of Mozart’s K. 449 piano concerto with the SABC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Anton Hartman. The recording was made on 18 January 1954.

i Thereisanironyhere.Asearlyas1939,VanWykhadwrittento‘Oom’CharlieThere is an irony here. As early as 1939, Van Wyk had written to ‘Oom’ Charlie Weich about a planned concert of South African music in South Africa House in London, ending his plans with the sentence: ‘Ons moet die Rooinekke wys dat ons die “Vat-jou-goed-en-trek-Fereira”-stadium al verby is’. (‘We have to show the Rednecks that we have progressed beyond the “Vat-jou-goed-en-trek-Fereira” [a popular Afrikaans folk tune] stage.’); see letter to Charles Weich, 27 February 1939, Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS), Music Library, University of Stellenbosch.j LettertoFredaBaron,18October1940.TheBaronsleftDeRustfortheirLetter to Freda Baron, 18 October 1940. The Barons left De Rust for their new address in Baileys Muckleneuk, Pretoria, in 1941. This is the address (38 Charles Street) to which the photographs of Van Wyk’s hands were sent. The reason for the relocation was local Afrikaner anti-semitism; this was confirmed to me in a conversation with Charlotte Perold, Freda Baron’s daughter. In a letter of 6 June 1941, Freda Baron wrote to Van Wyk in London: ‘Yes, dear, at last the incredible has happened, and we are going to live in Pretoria. We are actually going to leave De Rust – a place I am vaguely attached to for I have spent many happy years here but the memory of these was often wiped out by the last few years of hell. I wonder whether I’ll be able to forget it or even whether my soul will ever straighten out again completely.’ Van Wyk replied in a letter of 20 July 1940: ‘… did not the greatest thing in my life – meeting you and Mr. Baron – happen there?’.k FormoreonHartman,seeWalton(2004).
For more on Hartman, see Walton (comAp book.indd 313 13/9/07 10:44:39

this paper was first published in composing apartheid, music for and against apartheid, edited by grant olwage and published by wits university press. the article is posted here with kind permission of the author and publisher.