Research

This article explicates a sonospheric understanding of apartheid and its pathologies of racial disavowal. Drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, it show how white popular music written for background entertainment cultivated in white ears a warped aesthetic sensibility for disavowing black sonic presence. It argues that this may account for one way in which the madness of apartheid spread through the social body. It did so not by representing racial segregation musically, but by thematising racial intersections in everyday white lives and by performing and embodying the perverted white desires for black bodies that were explicitly prohibited by apartheid laws: all under the cover of background entertainment. 

How does one study the music of racist populations? What are the ethics of musical participation and participant observation in racist environments? Is it possible to represent racism with integrity in ethnomusicological writing? Are some musics best left alone? While there has been a proliferation of theoretical and historical writing on music, race and racism of late, and on contemporary racist appropriations of music, relatively little attention has been paid to the practical and methodological problems of researching music associated with racist agendas. Drawing on the ideas of George Devereux and on my own fieldwork experiences in researching boeremusiek  and on anthropological and sociological literature on researching racism, extremism and far-right movements, I attempt to systematize the intellectual and methodological problems and moral dilemmas of studying racism ethnomusicologically. The article argues that the ethnomusicology of racism may point us productively to uncloaking the racism of ethnomusicology. 

This short ethnography juxtaposes two tales of borehole drilling in the Karoo in order to reflect on the relationship between music, landscape, history, and everyday life. The first narrative is based on British colonial hydraulic engineering in the Karoo, and the second is an ethnographic portrait of borehole driller and concertinist Theo Slabbert. When landscape is considered sonically and volumetrically, a new vocablulary emerges for delving into the unruly, omnidirectional correlation between music and landscape. The article focuses on ‘residue’, ‘grain’, and, when the two narratives collide, ‘reverberation’.

After Fame is an ethnographic account of aging and musical creativity in the everyday life of the then 90-year-old South African accordionist Nico Carstens. It demonstrates the power of sound-based ethnography and cultural geography in understand living/working space and milieu. Based on personal conversations, a micro-geography of Carstens’s living space, analyses of annotated scores, and material from his personal archive, I speculate on his confrontation with the objects in his contained domestic milieu as a process of self-fashioning in old age.

Grounded in Aristotle, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida and Peter Sloterdijk’s reflections on the synesthesia of touch, the haptic sense as “corpus,” and the philosophical possibility of the gestation of a bodily apparatus via the ear, this article takes shape around a thought experiment: that musical practices – boeremusiek, in this case – may incubate a particularly tuned ear-body-sensorium with discreet haptic expectations. I pause at an instructive moment in boeremusiek’s reception history: when, in 1948, a certain Mr Spies touches the concertina again for the first time, 52 years after taking a vow of musical abstinence. This moment explicates the “tactile corpus” being incubated in the music’s psychoacoustic sphere, showing how listening – conceived here as a haptic event – might have shaped a Protestant-Cartesian bodily apparatus, a haptic aesthetic awareness, and a concomitant sense of settler belonging and racial embodiment in South Africa.    

This article considers the implications for viewing a university building obsessively, concerned with air quality and sound conditioning – Stellenbosch University’s Konservatorium – as the expression of a sonic design consciousness embedded in the terror of apartheid thinking. It draws on architectural plans and descriptions, university correspondence, and other archival material relating to its design and construction process, and use as point of departure Peter Sloterdijk’s extended meditation on atmoterrorism as found in the third volume of his Spheres trilogy. The article explicates the atmospheric legacy of the university’s built environment with the view to reconfigure, desegregate and decolonize its atmospheres of learning.  

This article considers the re-composition of J.S. Bach’s six-part ricercar from his Musical Offering by the composer Anton von Webern, as a response to thinking about the term ‘re-composition’ as it pertains to the structural transformation of institutions of higher learning. Webern’s re-composition of Bach’s ricercar, through the technique of Klangfarbenmelodie, results in a distortion of foregrounded voice-leading and counterpoint essential to fugal treatment, but succeeds in illuminating a background of motivic structures in the work that allows for new connections and coherences to be heard. In this regard, Webern’s work constitutes not a destruction of Bach’s model, but a modernist explication thereof. In this process, a three-fold understanding of style comes into play: style as immanent continuity, style as authentic expression, and style as historical awareness. In considering this music as an example of aesthetic processes of re-composition, the article extrapolates semiotic, symbolic and paradigmatic implications for how the University as a public good could be imagined not only from aesthetic considerations relating to musical re-composition, but as a fundamentally aesthetic consideration.