Description
Book SynopsisComposing Apartheid is the first book ever to chart the musical world of a notorious period in world history, apartheid South Africa. It explores how music was produced through, and was productive of, key features of apartheid's social and political topography.The collection of essays is intentionally broad, and the contributors include historians, sociologists and anthropologists, as well as ethnomusicologists, music theorists and historical musicologists.The essays focus on a variety of musics (jazz, music in the Western art tradition, popular music) and on major composers (such as Kevin Volans) and works (Handel's Messiah). Musical institutions and previously little-researched performers (such as the African National Congress' troupe-in-exile Amandla) are explored.The writers (from South Africa, the UK and US) move well beyond their subject matter, intervening in debates on race, historiography and postcolonial epistemologies and pedagogies.
Trade ReviewThis is one of the best books to have emerged from South African musicology in the last decade... It opens up a new level of discourse about music during the apartheid era: a level on which the theoretical, the ethical, the historical and the aesthetic play against each other in newly meaningful ways. Roger Parker, Cambridge University, UK
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Grant Olwage Chapter 1: Back to the Future? Idioms of ‘displaced time’ in South African composition Christine Lucia Chapter 2: Apartheid’s Musical Signs: Reflections on black choralism, modernity and race-ethnicity in the segregation era Grant Olwage Chapter 3: Discomposing Apartheid’s Story: Who owns Handel? Christopher Cockburn Chapter 4: Kwela’s White Audiences: The politics of pleasure and identification in the early apartheid period Lara Allen Chapter 5: Popular Music and Negotiating Whiteness in Apartheid South Africa Gary Baines Chapter 6: Packaging Desires: Album covers and the presentation of apartheid Michael Drewett Chapter 7: Musical Echoes: Composing a past in/for South African jazz Carol A. Muller Chapter 8: Singing Against Apartheid: ANC cultural groups and the international anti-apartheid struggle Shirli Gilbert Chapter 9: ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’: Stories of an African anthem David Coplan and Bennetta Jules-Rosette Chapter 10: Whose ‘White Man Sleeps’ Aesthetics? and politics in the early work of Kevin Volans Martin Scherzinger Chapter 11: State of Contention: Recomposing apartheid at Pretoria’s State Theatre, 1990-1994. A personal recollection Brett Pyper Chapter 12: Decomposing Apartheid: Things come together Ingrid Byerly Chapter 13: Arnold van Wyk’s Hands Stephanus Muller
