Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS): News 2010

The Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS)

presents a film screening, discussion and musical performance featuring

The Uprising of Hangberg is a film documentary by Dylan Valley and Aryan Kaganof, with original music score by Stellenbosch University music student Natasje van der Westhuizen. The documentary provides shocking footage and eyewitness accounts of the attempts by the Western Cape Provincial Administration and the City of Cape Town to evict residents from their homes in Hangberg, Hout Bay, in September this year (see Kagablog). The Rastafarian community in Hangberg is central to the narrative developed in the film, which also documents Rastafarian Nyabingi chanting and drumming (the traditional music of the Rastafarian religion) from Hangberg. The Uprising of Hangberg is a tour de force of activist documentary film making. It does not only succeed on artistic and technical levels, but also as a political intervention enabling a marginalized community to speak of their oppression and trauma.

In a gesture of support for the plight of the residents of Hangberg, the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) is screening The Uprising of Hangberg in Kayamandi on 2 December 2010. Stellenbosch is home to what is probably the most important community of Rastafari in South Africa, and DOMUS has arranged for the Stellenbosch Rastafarian community from Cloetesville to open proceedings at the screening with a performance of Nyabingi chanting and drumming. The screening will be followed by a question and answer session with the film makers, after which the Hangberg reggae band BLAZE will perform.

Date: 2 December 2010

Time: 18:00
18:00 - Introductory performance of Nyabingi chanting and drumming by the Cloetesville Rastafari community
19:00 - Screening of The Uprising of Hangberg, with question-and-answer session
21:00 - Performance by BLAZE, reggae band from Hangberg

Venue: AmaZink! Eatery, Masithandane Street, Kayamandi, Stellenbosch
From the R304 travelling from Stellenbosch to the N1, turn left toward Makupula Rd (the second road leading into Kayamandi from Stellenbosch), turn left into Makupula Rd, take the third left turn into Masithandane Street. Map

Entrance free

(November 2010)

Music and Mathematics: the Long Shadow of Iannis Xenakis
23 August 2010 (Monday)
12:00-14:00 in C101
This lecture will examine the key opportunities for composers and musicologists in the perspectives opened by Xenakis in the five decades after Musique Formelles. Special emphasis is placed in role of heuristics and on the revolution in mathematics today.

Karlheinz Stockhausen's music archaeology
24 August 2010 (Tuesday)
12:00-14:00 in the Staff Room
This presentation proposes perspectives in which the continuity of Stockhausen’s work and its systematic structure can be understood as exploring the same strata Michel Foucault identifies at the roots of western thought.

Friedrich Kittler: music beyond musicology?
25 August 2010 (Wednesday)
12:00-14:00 in the Staff Room
The lecture introduces the writings of media analyst Kittler and argues that he provides an inescapable challenge to the history of music and to the means we use to think about it.

Dr Jean-Pierre de la Porte is research director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Infrastructure (IASAI/Deloitte).

(August 2010)

In July 2010 DOMUS hosted two internationally renowned musicians at Stellenbosch University’s music department. Raymond Holden and Daniel-Ben Pienaar, both associated with the Royal Academy of Music, participated in the regional conference of the International Musicological Society (IMS), hosted by the South African Society of Research in Music (SASRIM), after which they extended their stay to interact with the music students at the Konservatorium.

Raymond Holden is a distinguished conductor, scholar and writer and is currently Associate Head of Research at the Royal Academy of Music in London. From 19 to 23 July he presented a series of lectures on The Modern Orchestra in which he discussed the establishment of the modern orchestra and the Viennese sound, followed by lectures on orchestras in Germany, Britain and the United States as well as the film orchestra. Holden supplemented his charismatic lectures with PowerPoint presentations that included archival documents (programme booklets, letters between composers and/or performers, etc.), sound recordings and video footage. He criticised ideas regarding ‘authenticity’ and ‘historically informed performance practice’, saying that these ideals are unattainable since it is impossible to replicate the authenticity of the performance hall with its candle lighting and audience idiosyncrasies. This and other unambiguous critiques lured students to engage in lively debate with their lecturer and his version of the orchestra’s history.

Daniel-Ben Pienaar, piano professor and academic lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music, was the keynote speaker during the 2010 IMS/SASRIM regional conference. The title of his presentation was How dare one say it?: A performer’s crisis. During this conference, he also gave a solo recital of works by Bach, Chopin and Schubert. On Wednesday 23 July, he expounded on his keynote address during a lecture at the music department of Stellenbosch. With comparative listening illustrations – various performers’ interpretations of, for instance, Bach’s First Prelude in C major – Pienaar invited attendees to consider alternative performance possibilities that could successfully counter what he calls the ‘international generic’, or the mainstream. In a world where performances of the mainstream repertoire has become ‘globalised’ and in many ways homogenous, he implores performers to evaluate their priorities anew and search for different, creative and enlightened ways of interpretation.

During their interaction with students and staff at the music department, both these speakers imparted valuable insights regarding performance practice and the academic rethinking of its possibilities.

(Annemie Stimie, July 2010)

Recently DOMUS/Stellenbosch University Music Library acquired publications of music by lutenist/guitarist Dietrich Wagner. Works published by Starcatcher Publications to date, include mostly works for solo guitar (for example, an Intermezzo and Serenade – both dedicated to Nana Wagner). There is also the ensemble work, Musical Interludes: Written for A Very Long Trunkcall, of which Dietrich Wagner composed the interludes for a trilingual children's play written by Nana Wagner. The interludes are for an instrumental ensemble to be performed by children.

Performances for the launch of these works will take place as follows:

Sunday, 18 July 2010
16:00 - University Museum
Guitar Duo: Abri Jordaan and Conrad Calitz
Dietrich Wagner's Serenade as well as A Fantasy, based on a poem by PB Shelley, from the volume Two Pieces will be included in this programme. Works by William Lawes, Luigi Boccherini, Mauro Giulani, Manuel da Falla, Ernesto Nazareth, Maximo Diego Pujol and Radames Gnattali will also be performed.

Sunday, 22 August 2010
16:00 - University Museum
Eon Louw (lute and guitar), former student of Dietrich Wagner
The programme will include German lute music from the Baroque era and Five Pieces for guitar by Dietrich Wagner.

 (Jun 2010)

DOMUS has sponsored the attendance of three academics to take part in two important round table discussions during the IMS/SASRIM conference from 14-17 July 2010. The round table discussion on Music and Exile, chaired by Prof. Jean-Pierre de la Porte (guest of DOMUS), continues a discourse on the subject that was started at the Music and Exile: North-South Narratives Symposium in January 2010 in Johannesburg. The State of the Discipline round table, chaired by Prof. Christopher Ballantine of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, critically considers music scholarship four years after the creation of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM). Of the panellists invited to take part in this discussion, DOMUS has supported the attendance of Lindelwa Dalamba and Dr. Nishlyn Ramanna.

	Nishlyn Ramanna lectures in jazz studies at Rhodes University. A pianist, composer, and musicologist, he has composed music for film, released an album of original material on the UK-based New Canvas Records label and has published work on SA jazz in the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, SAMUS and Social Dynamics.		Jean-Pierre de la Porte studied composition with Klaas van Oostveen while also studying towards a PhD in the philosophy and history of science. He was seconded to teach architecture by the legendary Pancho Guedes. He's been active in architecture as well as in the field of social development and transformation with clients including the SA Government and the WK Kellogg Foundation. He is currently the director for research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Infrastructure . His interests include mathematical modeling of structure-preserving transformations, ethnomathematics and heuristics. He is about to publish a book on South African artist Karel Nel and his newest composition, written on a dare from Mary Rorich, is a string quartet paraphrasing Debussy's Voiles.		Lindelwa Dalamba is a Commonwealth and St. John’s Scholar currently reading for her PhD (Historical Musicology) at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Her dissertation focuses on South African Jazz in England during the apartheid years (1961-1985). It explores how ‘South African jazz’ intersected with discourses on ‘African jazz’ (1960s), free jazz and/or improvised music (1970s) and the turn towards so-called ‘world music’ in the 1980s. It is argued that these frames, which were often imposed, were used in the musicians’ host country expediently to connect this music with anti-apartheid activities, where concepts of ‘freedom’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘South Africanness’ were constantly negotiated. However, South Africa’s jazz music in England also took note of and spoke to its new habitat and as such could comment relevantly on both. The thesis argues that this ‘empire playback’ renders incomplete those studies that would discuss ‘South African’ jazz without considering England as an informing context, whose relationships with South Africa, jazz and its own ‘internal others’ were musically interrogated by the displaced South Africans. Lindelwa graduated from Rhodes University (BA Hons) as an Andrew Mellon Scholar and from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (MA Music) as a recipient of an NRF Prestigious Scholarship. She has been published in SAMUS, and has published review articles and essays in SAMUS, Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa, Popular Music and Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies.
	Further participants include: Mr Mokale Koapeng: Composer, conductor and cultural activist. Pioneer of relations between the choral movement and new music. Dr Stephanus Muller: Musicologist, authority on music policy in the apartheid era. Professor Crain Soudien: Deputy Vice Chancellor, University of Cape Town. South Africa's leading authority on transformation and author of the influential Soudien Report on opportunities and inequalities in higher education. Ms Cara Stacey: Musicologist and civil rights activist. Writer on contemporary African piano music and on rapports between traditional African forms and contemporary music. Dr Federico Settler: Research Director, Institute for Comparative Religions in Southern Africa University of Cape Town, AW Mellon Doctoral Fellow in Humanities. Writer on South African Civil Society and indigeneity.

 (June 2010)

DOMUS has invited Dr. Raymond Holden, Associate Head of Research at the Royal Academy of Music, to extend his stay at Stellenbosch University after the IMS/SASRIM musicological conference to do a series of lectures on the modern orchestra. This is part of a strategy to explore the possibilities and challenges of discursive academic interaction with performance practice, an imperative created by the Department of Music’s newly adopted integrated PhD. Of particular interest to DOMUS in the work of Holden, is the way in which research, performance and the archive interact.

As a performance historian, Holden specializes in the activities of conductors from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has established a reputation as a leading Strauss scholar.

Holden’s lectures at the Konservatorium in room A214:

Raymond Holden was born in Sydney, Australia. Between 1978 and 1989 he was assistant to Sir John Pritchard, for whom he acted as assistant and associate conductor with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia and the Brussels Opera. In that capacity, he performed at the Proms, the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Winter Season at the Royal Festival Hall, the Salzburg Festival, the Edinburgh Festival and the City of London Festival. As Sir John’s assistant, Holden’s repertoire included multiple performances of Strauss’s tone poems, Mahler’s symphonies, Berlioz’s Requiem, Ives’s Symphony No. 4, Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron, and many new works and operas from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. He is the author of The Virtuoso Conductors (Yale University Press, 2005) and Glorious John (Barbirolli Society, 2007). He is currently writing A Hero’s Life: the Story of Richard Strauss as Conductor (Yale University Press).

(June 2010)

DOMUS has invited South African pianist Daniel-Ben Pienaar to perform and lecture at the IMS/SASRIM conference in 2010. Pienaar is a piano professor and academic lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music, and will be talking about the crisis in piano performance as a crisis of lateness. Later that same day he will also perform J.S. Bach’s Partita no. 6 BWV 830, Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantasy Op. 61, and Franz Schubert’s Sonata D959 – works that resonate with his thinking on music and lateness.

As part of an academic institution that is continually engaged with questions regarding performance as research and the curatorship of music, DOMUS wanted to give students, staff and conference delegates the oppportunity to engage with Pienaar’s playing and research. His recorded performances present an intellectually probing critique on performing traditions, while at the same time re-imagining the music of J.S. Bach, Orlando Gibbons, Mozart, Schubert and Chopin as being radical of our time. Pienaar suggests a mode of engagement with his material that does not succumb to the dichotomy of subjective freedom set against constraints (of the score, of scholarship, of historically informed practices). Of particular interest to DOMUS, is the fact that he has recognized in the past hundred years of recorded musical history a resource of infinite richness. His work suggests that this recorded history represents a fundamental paradigm shift in the way music is understood, what it transmits and how it can be performed and heard. The resulting musicianship is neither one invested in ideas of individual subjectivity, nor tied to performance practice as positivistic scholarship.

Pienaar’s performance and talk will ensure that the conference theme, ‘Echoes of Empires: Musical Encounters after Hegemony’, will also resonate as a topical one in terms of music performance and so-called ‘art music’ repertoire.

(May 2010)

On 1 March 2010, Aryan Kaganof’s new film, The Exhibition of Vandalism, was shown during a colloquium of the Department of Music. The event was attended by the film maker, who afterwards talked about the film and answered questions.

The Exhibition of Vandalism documents a musical ritual performed by the acclaimed musicians Zim Ngqawana and Kyle Shepherd. The film shows how Ngqawana and Shepherd make music in the vandalized space of Ngqawana’s Zimology Institute outside Johannesburg. The musicians use, amongst other things, the broken pianos and building debris, while Kaganof’s camera interprets the events in a virtuoso, musically sensitive epic of grief and loss. Fundamentally the film speaks to the broken and torn fabric of South African society, and the place of music in such a society. It is a defiant answer to Adorno’s question about the role of art in a history that has become utterly dystopian.

The impressions created by the film were so overwhelming, that a group of students (Die Raad) from Stellenbosch University’s Department of Music decided to invite Ngqawana, Shepherd and Kaganof to present a continued interpretation of the Exhibition of Vandalism in Stellenbosch. The performance will take place on 1 May at 18:00 at Star Metals, 27 Tennant Street (From Stellenbosch: take R44 towards Paarl; turn left at first set of traffic lights into Tennantville; turn left again into Tennant Street). The motivation for these students to initiate a Stellenbosch performance was to show solidarity with Ngqawana and to help him generate funds to rebuild the Zimology Institute. Ultimately these young South African musicians and musicologists wanted to demonstrate unanimity with the powerful critique and declaration of hope articulated in the music and film of Ngqawana, Shepherd and Kaganof.

In recognition of the importance of the Zimology Institute as a space protective of non-commercial music making and the mentorship role Ngqawana played and continues to play for young and cutting-edge South African musicians, the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) decided to sponsor this concert in Stellenbosch. DOMUS’s mission statement makes provision for the strategic support of performances and recording projects to preserve music as an important part of a broad South African heritage. The Exhibition of Vandalism is supported as an exemplary event of what performance as musical curatorship could be.

'Die Raad': Lizabé Lambrechts, Natasje van der Westhuizen, Annemie Stimie,
Mareli Stolp, Aryan Kaganof, Etienne Viviers

(April 2010)

ZIM NGQAWANA CONCERT HELD IN STELLENBOSCH

After the the viewing of Aryan Kaganof's film, An Exhibition of Vandalizim at a departmental colloquium, a number of students at Stellenbosch University arranged a concert with Zim Ngqawana and Kyle Shepherd on 1 May 2010 at Star Metals, Tennantville.

Images of this event can be seen on the South African Music Research Blog.

(May 2010)

The artist Aryan Kaganof has donated four cassette tapes to DOMUS, containing a previously unpublished interview with The Blue Notes double bassist, Johnny Dyani. Kaganof, who was active in the anti- apartheid struggle in the Netherlands (where he earned renown as the award-winning film maker Ian Kerkhof), made the donation during his talk on Dyani at the Music and Exile Symposium in Johannesburg (27-28 January 2010). The Symposium was organized by former Stellenbosch University Masters student and current Unisa lecturer Stephanie Vos, and hosted by the Johannesburg Goethe Institute. Insisting that all recording equipment be switched off during his talk, Kaganof invoked the memory of Dyani (1945-1987) as a brilliant and unconventional musician. He recounted his introduction to Dyani’s music while the latter was living in exile in Sweden, their first contact and subsequent friendship, describing the tour he arranged for Dyani in The Netherlands. In a surprising and unscripted turn of events, Kaganof presented the tapes containing the interview to the head of DOMUS, Stephanus Muller, who was sitting in the audience. Kaganof asked delegates to reflect on what this donation to the historical intellectual home of apartheid revealed about the institutionally precarious state of South Africa’s musical heritage in general, but more specifically about the legacy of exiled musicians like Dyani.

Dyani and Kaganof at the time of the interview (Images supplied by Aryan Kaganof)

The origin of the cassettes containing the interview with musician Johnny Mbizo Dyani, is as follows:

I was 19 years old when I left South Africa to avoid being conscripted into the apartheid army.

My great passion was music and I had for a number of years been the head reviewer of the New Albums page of Scope magazine.

It was only once outside of South Africa however, that I encountered for the first time the music of the jazz exiles, most notably of which, The Blue Notes.

Blue Notes For Mongezi remains, for me, the most excoriating musical document ever produced by South African musicians.

I fell in love with the singing tones of the bass on that album and started to hunt down every recording that I could find by that bass player whose name was Johnny Mbizo Dyani.

By the end of 1985 I had a collection of about 40 albums which featured Johnny as a side man, as well as all of his albums as a leader. It was then that I happened to meet Lefifi Tladi, a South African in exile who had left the country after the student uprisings of 1976. Lefifi shared my passion for Johnny's soulful music and gave me Mbizo's phone number. "Call him", Lefifi said, "he'd appreciate that."

Johnny was living in Malmo, Sweden, at the time, and his subtly melodic, occasionally rasping voice reminded me of his bass playing. We talked for hours on the phone and he ended by saying "Do something man, don't just tell me you like my music, do something!"

I was a very serious, literal-minded young man and so I organised a tour through Holland for Johnny and the Harlem-born percussionist Emmanuel Abdul Rahim, who was then living in Copenhagen. It was called the Radio Freedom Christmas tour and the money raised was used to buy studio equipment for the ANC's Radio Freedom broadcast stations in Tanzania and Zambia.

Johnny was accompanied on the tour by a Ghanaian hi-life band [Kumbi Saleh], the Dutch reggae outfit Revelation Time, and British dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah. The tour was huge success, all the concerts well sold out and a lot of money was raised. Johnny and I decided to put together a group consisting of South African exiles as well as the cream of players still in the country. From the offices of the Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement (where I was working at the time) we phoned Barney Rachabane and Winston Mankunku Ngozi. They were both excited by the prospect of coming out to Europe to tour with Johnny's exile band. Tete Mbambisa would be the piano player. Then Johnny suddenly died onstage in 1987. His liver gave way.

I was devastated.

For 24 years I carried four cassettes around with me which contained an interview that I did with Mbizo on 23 December 1985 in the offices of the Dutch Anti-Apartheid Movement on the Lauriergracht in Amsterdam. My only question to Johnny was "tell me what you think is important." [...]

(Aryan Kaganof, Correspondence, 26 Februarie 2010)

(February 2010)