CHRISTIAAN BOONZAAIER

Aryan, congratulations on a stellar platform. I really enjoyed scrolling through the very interactive sixth issue of herri, learning a lot about Graham Newcater in the process. Also looking forward to working my way through issues one to five!

About Graham:

Christiaan Boonzaaier: What inspired the dedication of herri’s sixth issue to Newcater? Does it have something to do with his 80^th birthday in September?

Aryan Kaganof: The trend in South Africa is to wait until artists are dead before heaping hypocritical praise on them at their funerals. We wanted to buck that trend. Luckily, Professor Stephanus Muller had shown the foresight already in 2008 to interview Newcater extensively and make sure that his entire archive of scores, recordings and memorabilia was archived at DOMUS, the Documentation Centre for Music at the Stellenbosch University Music Library where Dr. Santie De Jongh takes good care of it all. Thanks to her very proactive assistance I was able to curate the Newcater Theme which includes his meticulously detailed scores which are an example of Augenmusik, where the visual impact of the score itself transcends its mere blueprint functionality to become an object we could accurately describe as “art”. These scores are presented in herri 6 in full and can be enjoyed by musicians and non-musicians alike.

CB: I’d wager that the general public doesn’t know much – or anything – about Newcater, and we basically never get to hear his music. He seems quite… forgotten. Is the goal of this issue to remind audiences about him and his music, to create an online space where Newcater and his music can live?

AK: You’ve put that very well thank you Christiaan. In a nutshell, yes. I was given an insight into the philistinism of the South African arts establishment when our funding request for the Newcater Themed issue of herri was turned down by the Rupert Foundation, ostensibly the country’s most important supporters of what used to be called “classical music”,  now referred to increasingly as “Western Art Music”, of which composer this country has produced no finer example than Newcater. The Rupert Foundation board members that rejected Newcater will go down in history as being at the same level of incompetence as Richard Rowe who famously did not sign up The Beatles.

CB: On that note: Why is/was Newcater and his music so “absent”? You wouldn’t think it of someone who is described (in the clipping on the page where you chronicle your daughter’s first concert) as one of South Africa’s most famous composers.

AK: Let me quote the musicologist Mareli Stolp here, who has written at length about Graham: “Newcater’s career reached its apex during the 1960s and 1970s, the decade of ‘high’ apartheid. Whatever the reasons may have been for the shift in Newcater’s fortunes, history seems to suggest that he had always stood apart from his contemporaries.” Prof Muller goes as far as to describe Newcater as “an island”, hermetically sealed off from the vagaries of musical fashion. Newcater’s predilection for composing in the twelve-tone method gave his sound world a distinctly un-South African, non-user-friendly character, utterly devoid of cliché and the cheap couleur locale that has been the distinguishing feature of so much of the kitsch that has passed for “Western Art Music” in the post-1994 period. For exactly this reason I believe interest in his ouevre has declined. It is the times that are at fault, not Newcater’s music.

CB: What exactly makes Newcater one of our best? What is/was his greatest contribution(s)?

AK: The problem in answering your question is the word “our”. “We” do not exist yet as a cohesive nation to speak of an “our” about a music as outspokenly, unabashedly disinterested in “us” as Newcater’s is. Perhaps this is, in fact, what makes the music so important, it sounds like it comes from a place beyond the manufacture of a “South Africa”. It does not partake in the rhetoric of “our”. To do so, to resist one’s times, to resist the flavours of fashion, requires great fortitude, and to continue to do so for decades, speaks of an inner world that will continue to flourish long after the political world has, inevitably, declined. Mareli Stolp has put this far more beautifully than I ever could: “For Newcater the twelve-tone method was enabling of the sound world to which he always felt closest. The strict parameters, limitations and rules of the serialist system are not what primarily entice Newcater; his committed loyalty to a ‘democracy of tones’ as he describes it, rather seems to confirm his individuality, setting him apart from the ideological parameters of any existing school of thought.”

CB: Is there perhaps a photograph of Newcater I could use in the article?

About herri:

Christiaan Boonzaaier: Can you tell me a bit about herri. When did it start – and why (and by whom) was it created/published?

Aryan Kaganof: In early 2019 I put together a team of designers comprising Andrea Rolfes, Jurgen Meekel and Martijn Pantlin, with the ambition of creating a web-based vehicle that took its inspiration from cinema and games rather than from the traditional print media. We did not want to emulate a print magazine on the web – which is what 98% of the sites do. What is the point of that? Our idea was to precisely foreground the nature of the site as a screen medium. This means that text doesn’t always trump image. That images are in fact regarded as text and the more they move the merrier.

CB: Is herri an academic journal? What is its aim?

AK: Best here is to quote for you our “About” page slogan. Here it is:

CB: Just checking: Is herri short for heritage? I wondered whether it’s coincidental that herri is similar to the Afrikaans word herrie, meaning an uproar, a racket, disorder, a hullabaloo, shaking things up?

AK: Thank you for asking this question Christiaan. herri has a multiplicity of meanings. On one level it is the name of Autshumao, the first anti-colonial political prisoner who was incarcerated on Robben Island. Known as “herri die strandloper” by the Dutch, we love herri because he actually escaped from Robben Island. Let the symbolism of that sink in for a moment. There is a wonderful article by Patric Tariq Mellet about herri in the first issue of the publication, please read it here. Furthermore herri is a decolonized spelling of the Dutch/Afrikaans word “herrie” which indeed means cacophony. Salient to point out here that the colonizers everywhere called the sophisticated indigenous music systems they encountered mere “herrie”. We embrace the term. We bring the noise. herri.

CB: Could you talk a bit about the focus of the platform. I assumed it’s music, but I also see contributions that focus on theatre, literature, film… Is it space for all of the arts?

AK: When one starts thinking seriously about “decolonizing” one needs to focus on the basic deep-seated tenets of taxonomy. So for example the notion that “music” is a “discipline” distinct in itself, that it could exist, formally, free-floating somehow outside of a broader, reinforcing culture, is purely colonial, it has no basis in the indigenous practices and philosophies of this territory that we call “South Africa”. So herri challenges the inherited notions of these artistic silos, rather choosing for a porous approach to taxonomy, allowing for writing about culture to bleed through the imaginary walls that separate, walls that were constructed with deliberate ideological intentions. herri is also, obviously, deeply informed and inspired by the important work of social theorist Jaques Attali whose book Noise: The Political Economy of Music makes the claim that music has a premonitory possibility in any given culture, that it can augur “historical developments, to foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way” (Frederic Jameson). The borborygmus section of herri is where we select and focus on those tummy rumblings of sound that we believe are predicting the variegated multiplicity of futures just around the corner.

CB: And also checking: It is completely free? Anyone can access all of the information

AK: Absolutely free. In a country with a history like ours, where access to education was systematically denied to millions of people for decades it is unethical that Universities ring fence access to their archives. herri wants to open the gates of access to the archive to everybody who has access to the internet (in itself only accessible to those with enough money to afford data unfortunately).

CB: How do I credit you? Editor of the platform? Filmmaker? Please let me know.

AK: Publisher and Curator of herri. Also filmmaker, poet, and novelist.

This interview was first published in Afrikaans here.