WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN & STEPHANUS MULLER

In the first book on music published in Afrikaans, Toonkuns^{[1]Willem Gerke, Toonkuns (Pretoria: Van Schaik, 1935). The word “Toonkuns” is related to the German word “Tonkunst”, which is another word for music.} by Willem Gerke,^{[2]J. Pierre Malan, ed., South African Music Encyclopedia (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1982), 78-80. Gerke, a conductor and violinist, was born in 1876 in Amsterdam and died in 1953 in Pretoria. He emigrated to South Africa in 1922. The book was the fourth in a series titled Kuns deur die Eeue (Art Through the Centuries), with the first three publications focusing on “Boukuns” (Architecture), “Skilderkuns” (Painting) and “Beeldhoukuns” (sculpture).} music is explained as a thoroughly racialised form of expression. In the section on jazz (or, “die Jazz”, as Gerke calls it), the author writes that music is prone to influences of white and black magic: the former constituting “good” influences (encouragement to good deeds), and the latter “bad” influences (promptings to evil, lustful passions). Dance and music, Gerke writes, have always exerted powerful influences on people, and each nation (“volk”), each race, has songs exhibiting both the good and the bad.

Writing about the genealogy of jazz, Gerke asserts that the songs of North American negroes consisted of bastardised melodies, characterised by a strong rhythmic character, small ambit and preference for pentatonic (five-tone) pitch organisation, inherited from the original (“oer”) African negroes. The negro, according to Gerke, has always displayed a penchant for gliding from one pitch to another, leading to an overwrought sentimentality in religious singing (negro spirituals), whereas the desire to mimic (“om na te aap”), over time led to the adoption of non-percussive instruments in forms of accompaniment. These instruments were used to produce shrieks and grumbling sounds (“gillende en brommende tone”), as negroes could not sing high or low. Thus was born the “negro orchestra”, in which negroes developed “a kind of virtuosity” in the squeals and quacks (“die gil en kwek”) of the clarinet and trumpet.

At this point, two and a half pages into his narrative on the evolution and character of jazz, Gerke makes a startling cognitive leap. He asserts that this kind of music, which had evolved into a general kind of negro amusement, would never have garnered attention amongst whites (“blankes”), were it not for the study of this music by a great (white) European, the Czech composer, Anton Dvôràk (sic). Attracted by the “strange tunes” of the negroes, Dvořák paid attention to the “simple, often rough” negro tunes and through his use thereof elicited an appetite for these tunes amongst the music-loving public. The negroes were flattered by the attention to their spirituals, and made efforts to advance the cause of this music.

Somehow, through the overwrought, sentimental and gushing performances of the negro baritones H.T. Burleigh and Roland Hayes, this music, to be sure (“sowaar”), managed to find its way into concert halls. And once the negro had appeared in the concert hall, according to Gerke, the negro orchestra followed suit.

This opened the floodgates to the incitement of the lower passions (“laer hartstogte”), and the desire to dance to the delightful, passion-arousing (“heerlike, alle-drifte-opwekkende”) negro orchestras. With the “primal negroes” (“oer-negers”), these dances and feelings represented the feelings of women upon the return of warriors from war, but for whites (“die blankes”), these dances were softened in tempered forms. But as the original dance movements were translated into pure orchestral sounds (presumably in concert halls or jazz clubs), the instrumental sounds of the woodwinds and percussion instruments became ever more bestial. When Europe adopted jazz in the demoralised delirium of two world wars, the art of dancing was trampled underfoot (“vertrap”).

The charming German waltz, the mazurka, the finely wrought French lancier, the Spanish tango and bolero, all had to make way for the Charleston and the “black bottom”, eventually leading to the lamentable outcome that the dance, once the highest form of art, was defiled (“deur die slyk gesleur”).

In Gerke’s writing, music provides a vehicle for understanding moral behaviour as racially determined – a premise still implicitly evident in the Sport Science article. His writing also displays many of the crude racial associations embedded more generally in Western discourses about music. These include the idea that African music is simple and primarily rhythmically interesting;^{[3]V. Kofi Agawu, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (New York: Routledge, 2003), 55-70. Agawu has referred to this myth as “The Invention of ‘African Rhythm’”.} that Africans have a different relation to pitch than Westerners; that African music’s bodily appeal is closely aligned to unbridled sexual lasciviousness and perversion; that it is irrational or overly sentimental in its appeal, animal-like in its lack of sophistication; and that it has a powerful capacity to corrupt Western aesthetic ideals. Although music is transparently incidental in Gerke’s discourse – the language used to describe the music is in fact aimed at describing “the black race”: simple, primitive, over-sexualised, irrational, unevolved, animal-like, dangerously corruptive – in a fascinating way there is nothing incidental about it. What Gerke thinks he knows about music aligns in disturbing ways with what we prefer not to know about race.

One of the hidden tenets of racial thinking that emerges so powerfully in writing about music like Gerke’s, is the undertow of desire that belies racial stereotypes. Gerke dismisses black music and black subjects with a zeal that can only be read as pleasurable. In the act of denouncing black music, it seems, the white writer and listener recovers some of these banned qualities for himself, experiencing their danger, exhilaration, and sexual charge vicariously. What is more, the value of white expressive culture becomes inextricably entwined with professing the danger of the black other in these ecstatic terms. In this sense Gerke’s racial musical fantasies constitute morbidly ghoulish attempts at cobbling together a white (not black) musical Frankenstein.

This is a moment of great anxiety almost universally described in Afrikaans writing of the 1930s in a sexual language of rape and defilement of which N.P. van Wyk Louw’s epic poem, Raka, is the iconic example (and one that often sparked the imagination of white composers of Western art music).^{[4]See, in this regard, I.J. Grove, “Die Fyn, Fyn Net van die Woord Verklank: N.P. van Wyk Louw se Raka in Musiek”, Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe 42, no. 3 (2002), where he discusses the work of South African composers Graham Newcater and Stefans Grové and mentions the work of Peter Klatzow.} This heady dynamic of aversion and desire, often framed in mythological and cosmological terms of good and evil, inexorably evolved in the twentieth century into strategies of the white state to curb, entrain, suppress and deny black expressive culture in the name of the good, the noble, the elevated, the universal (and therefore Enlightenment’s “civilising reason”). What started off as an attempt to contain black (sonic) influence, soon turned into the national repression of black expressive culture through attempts to confine it to notions of the unchanging (and therefore primitive) ethnically diverse “traditional music”, and later by draconian measures of state.

Jazz, which so occupied Gerke’s imagination, was a major casualty of these developments, through what Gwen Ansell describes as a four-stage imposition of silencing:

… the closing down of the last spaces for expression; the attempt to replace urban and politically aware discourses with synthetic, conservative, tribal substitutes; the creation of distractions; and – as a result of all the pressures on progressive cultural life – the driving of increasing numbers of artists into exile.^{[5]Gwen Ansell, Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music, and Politics in South Africa (New York: Continuum, 2004), 109. See also Christopher John Ballantine, Marabi Nights: Jazz, “Race” and Society in Early Apartheid South Africa (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012); Jonathan Eato, “A Climbing Vine through Concrete: Jazz in 1960s Apartheid South Africa”, in Jazz and Totalitarianism, ed. Bruce Johnson (London: Routledge, 2016).}

The most sustained enquiry into the way in which music in South Africa has been coded with racial knowledge as part of the apartheid project was done by Carina Venter in a study titled “The Influence of Early Apartheid Intellectualisation on Twentieth-Century Afrikaans Music Historiography”.^{[6]Carina Venter, “The Influence of Early Apartheid Intellectualisation on Twentieth-Century Afrikaans Music Historiography” (MMus thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2009).} Venter surveys the writings of early apartheid intellectuals, including Gerrie Eloff, Geoffrey Cronjé, Hendrik Verwoerd and Piet Meyer, and their use of musical metaphors to elaborate racial theory. Turning to Afrikaans music historiography, she then explores how early Afrikaans music historiography – particularly the writing of Jan Bouws – introduces a circular reasoning of pure musical nature as aligned to song, in particular the art song that concerns itself with the setting of Afrikaans poetry.

Expanding her reading to the work of composer Rosa Nepgen and musicologist Jacques Philip Malan, she argues that these ideals of purity are rooted in Christianism, with the music discourse on the Afrikaans psalms serving to articulate ideas of racial segregation. In a later article elaborating on this work, Venter concludes by charging that Afrikaans congregational singing and the church psalm in particular, provided a musical outlet “for the Afrikaner’s darkest racial pathologies and fantasies”.^{[7]Carina Venter, “A Catalogue of Seepage: Apartheid’s Political Grammar, Afrikaans Music Historiography and Early Afrikaner Nationalism”, SAMUS: South African Music Studies 36/37, no. 1 (2018): 284.} Ultimately, Venter illustrates how the “high art” of Western art music, as exemplified in the nineteenth-century genre of the art song, became “an inflated symbolic legitimation for an unworkable and ideologically flawed system”,^{[8]Venter, “The Influence of Early Apartheid Intellectualisation on Twentieth-Century Afrikaans Music Historiography”, 15.} parasitically nourished by ideas of racial purity and separateness.

Within this white/black matrix of musical petrification, the in-betweenness of “colouredness” served a particular function. It was articulated with respect to Cape Malay music by the poet I.D. du Plessis, who wrote a thesis (later published as a book) on the subject in 1935. For Du Plessis, Cape Malay musical culture was mainly a laboratory for whiteness, a repository for the “raw material” of white historical and anthropological contemplation and musical invention:

These songs live, and can be restored to former glory: from the ashes of a distorted melody and incomprehensible words can arise the phoenix of a newly forged song to soar into the blue Afrikaans sky … The Cape Malay has preserved for us a song treasury. We have the responsibility to accept the cultural invigoration that he offers us.^{[9]Izak David du Plessis, Die Bydrae van die Kaapse Maleier tot die Afrikaanse Volkslied (Kaapstad: Nasionale Pers, 1935), 125.}

Hubert Du Plessis, Slamse Beelde (Malay Scenes) Op. 21, 1. In die Slamse Buurt

Hubert Du Plessis, Slamse Beelde (Malay Scenes) Op. 21, 2. Abassi en Fatima

Hubert Du Plessis, Slamse Beelde (Malay Scenes) Op. 21, 3. Ramadan

If taken more broadly, this conception of the relationship between colouredness and white social and cultural production resonates disturbingly with the flawed reasoning of the Sport Science article. It might even point to how the category of “colouredness” is still being put to work in knowledge production at Stellenbosch University.  To be sure, Du Plessis regarded this musical contribution as distinct from – “culturally elevated” above that of – “die Kaapse Kleurling”, a prejudice shared by the preeminent Afrikaner conductor Anton Hartman, who wrote that “die Kleurling” was a loyal ally of the Afrikaner in the development of an own “volkskultuur”, but that it was above all the “slamaaier”, who through his “great love for song and acceptance of Afrikaans as his mother tongue, made an irrefutable contribution to our [Afrikaner] folk music and could also be expected to do so in the future”.^{[10]Anton Hartman, “Afrikaans in die Wêreld van Musiek”, Handhaaf, 1968, September, 15-17; 35}

Gerke’s Toonkuns, Venter’s research and Du Plessis’s constructs of Malay music confirm that writing and thinking about music in Afrikaans has particular and local early roots in racial discourse, and that this discourse demonstrably evolved from the racial theories and fantasies that nourished apartheid thinking. But Afrikaners and their particular kind of racial thinking are hardly unique when considering how music can be (and is) pressed into the service of racial thinking. Colonialism, more generally, informed music practices and writing that were steeped in racial prejudices of all kinds. Kofi Agawu^{[11]Agawu, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions.} has written compellingly about the manner in which African music carries the burden of the colonial encounter in discursive constructs overwhelmingly informed by racial stereotypes in European and American scholarship. In the South African context – to which Agawu pays little attention – Grant Olwage^{[12]G. Olwage, “Music and (Post) Colonialism: The Dialectics of Choral Culture on a South African Frontier” (PhD thesis, Rhodes University, 2003).} has carefully argued how particular music notational practices served to discipline indigenous agency in the Eastern Cape frontier encounter between missionaries and their converts. South African scholarly encounters with the racial other through music have also had a long and academically endorsed history preceding the febrile hallucinations of apartheid proper.

In ethnomusicological work dating back to the early 1920s and sponsored by the Union Government of South Africa, Percival Robson Kirby,^{[13]Percival R. Kirby, Wits End: An Unconventional Autobiography (Cape Town: Timmins, 1967), in which Kirby documents his academic work and many of his assumptions.} for instance, published ambitious claims about the origins and development of music underpinned by racially essentialist and derogatory assumptions steeped in a social-evolutionist paradigm, whereas Paulette Coetzee has argued that the pioneering ethnomusicological work of Hugh Tracey (founder of the International Library of African Music, or ILAM), operated within a colonial field of power that “reserved the status of expertise for whiteness and denied the ability of Africans fully to understand and protect the value of their own art”.^{[14]Paulette Coetzee, “Hugh Tracey, African Music and Colonial Power: Correspondence with Government Officials in the 1950s”, SAMUS: South African Music Studies 36/37, no. 1 (2018).}

Race, as it finds expression in music, is not only a phenomenon connected to the strategies of Western racism. Outside of the grand ideological projects of colonialism and apartheid, there is also a commonly experienced and lived knowledge of music and race. As Radano and Bohlman^{[15]Ronald Michael Radano and Philip Vilas Bohlman, Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).}  have shown, race is embedded in music and related expressive practices, such as dance, in powerful ways.

Music marks race, and reproduces traces of race, thereby perpetuating the racial imagination itself.^{[16]Ibid., 43} 

According to Radano and Bohlman, music and the racial imagination share an ontology and a metaphysics.^{[17]Ibid., 7.}  As we have seen in Gerke’s writing, racial concepts fundamentally inform the basic concepts used to describe music, just as musical concepts shape the vocabulary of race. But importantly, music also has the ability to represent metaphysical values about race, identity and belonging outside of language. Music easily maps onto ideas about what belongs to “us” and what belongs to “them”, without it having to be articulated in precisely these terms. Despite the understanding that race is a biological myth and a social construct, various constituencies nonetheless seem to identify or be identified through music as “white”, “black” or “coloured”.

One way of making sense of this disjuncture between what we know scientifically about race and the ways in which race operates in the world is the recognition that racial knowledge also passes through the ear.

It is as much constituted aurally as visually, making music and sound a powerful proxy for communicating essentialist ideas that have been debunked in visual and narrative discourses. Eduardo Mendieta puts it like this:

Race is the name for a technology of embodiment for which sight is just one of the elements to be policed, domesticated, surveyed, and made obedient and docile. In fact, racism dissimulates its insidiousness by foregrounding sight and the visual; but it is relentlessly attuned to every physical clue: how we walk, how we dance, how we smell, how our hair feels, and of course, how we sound. We can hear race around a corner, before we even see it.

Race is as much, if not more,
in the voice than in the skin colour.^{[18]Eduardo Mendieta, “The Sound of Race: The Prosody of Affect”, Radical Philosophy Review 17, no. 1 (2014),}

This is also the point made by Nina Sun Eidsheim in her book, The Race of Sound.^{[19]Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).} She approaches the shared ontology and metaphysics of race and music by focusing on vocal timbre – the quality or tone colour attributed to certain sounds.

When hearing someone speak or sing with a specific intonation, accent, or timbre, she argues, we have come to expect to learn something essential about their identity, including – fundamentally – their racial identity. This has led to a pervasive racial discrimination based on sound that is yet to be critically interrogated.

Another way of thinking about the mapping of music onto race is in terms of what has earlier been referred to as the undertow of desire and pleasure in racial stereotyping. Although Gerke’s writing is rooted in the Afrikaner anxieties of 1930s, it clearly draws on tropes wrought by the first global music industry: blackface minstrelsy. The practice of white musicians and actors performing with blackened faces in burlesque skits and degrading lampoons dates back to the early nineteenth century, when white American entertainers started staging shows impersonating black slaves of African descent. These shows were an instant hit with the white American public, spread rapidly across the globe, and fundamentally shaped white views of black music, black bodies, and black culture.

In South Africa, the arrival of the Christy Minstrels in August 1862 in Cape Town, sparked what Denis-Constant Martin has called “a little revolution”.^{[20]Denis-Constant Martin, Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town, Past to Present (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999), 78.} Not only were whites “thrilled by the minstrels”, but “Africans were also fascinated by the performances, and eventually included elements of minstrelsy in isicathamiya, in the gumboot dances as well as in jazz and vaudeville acts”.^{[21]Ibid., 79.} But it was above all “Coloured  Capetonians” that would be “fascinated to the extent that the aesthetic of the New Year festival was going to be deeply transformed by the infusion of minstrelsy”.^{[22]Martin, Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town, Past to Present.}  

A large part of Martin’s life’s work has been dedicated to the documentation of this fascination and its hybridised musical expression in contemporary Christmas Choirs, the Cape Town New Year Carnival, the Coons and the Malay choirs,^{[23]Apart from Coon Carnival (1999), see also Denis Martin, Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa (Cape Town: African Minds, 2013) and Armelle Gaulier & Denis-Constant Martin, Cape Town Harmonies: Memory, Humour & Resilience (Cape Town: African Minds, 2017).} and much of this work argues that there is more to the phenomenon of a clearly embraced blackface minstrelsy than racial discrimination. Martin’s concerns with identity, memory and resilience in South African traditions of minstrelsy connect to Eric Lott’s persuasive arguments about nineteenth-century blackface performance as the “racial unconscious” of white America. What passed as white entertainment in America, writes Lott, involved a complicated and ambivalent relationship between “love” and “theft” of black expressive culture.^{[24]Eric Lott, “Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy”, Representations 39, no. 1 (1992),; Eric Lott and Greil Marcus, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2013).} In the blackface minstrel show, he argues, we witness a racial “dynamic of mastery” that was “both the genesis and the very name of pleasure”.^{[25]Lott, “Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy”, 36.}

Race and racialisation continues to serve as a pleasure principle in contemporary popular music in South Africa. Sometimes – but not always – this occurs within a matrix of white domination, amplified by a global (rather than only local) white racial imaginary. Perhaps the most interesting and high-profile example that has been the subject of critical enquiry has been the music of Die Antwoord.

Adam Haupt points out that one of the group’s founding members, Waddy Jones, is “neither ‘coloured’ nor white Afrikaanse working class”, and continues to assert that Die Antwoord’s music amounts “to cultural appropriation given that ‘coloured’ subjects themselves have not been able to convert their cultural expressions into symbolic capital”.^{[26]Adam Haupt, “Part IV: Is Die Antwoord Blackface?”, Safundi 13, no. 3-4 (2012): 421, See also Adam Haupt, Static: Race and Representation in Post‑apartheid Music, Media And Film (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2012), chap.3.} He reads the music of Die Antwoord as an unambiguous performance of blackface in the group’s appropriation of coloured tropes, an instructive case of how “neo-colonial thinking on racial and gendered identities has local and global appeal” that connects in powerful ways to Web 2.0 marketing of culture.^{[27]Haupt, “Part IV: Is Die Antwoord Blackface?”, 422.}

Blackface is something of a prototype for theoretical constructs about the entanglement of music and race. But the implication of the argument stated earlier, namely that music and racial thinking share an ontology and metaphysics, means that race is embedded in musical expressions on a level more fundamental than can be adduced by particular historical or contemporary instances of, for example, blackface. In the words of John Mowitt, music is “ideological through and through”.^{[28]John Mowitt, Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 57,} With reference to Althusser’s theory of interpellation, he argues that music is “not merely tendentious” but “involved in producing the very bearer of an identity” and, thus, in the “subjection of human agency”. This means that music creates raced subjects by calling or hailing people into raced subject positions. As Geoff Mann^{[29]Geoff Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia”, Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 1 (2008): 84,}  notes, this significantly changes how one regards the power of music to construct and embody race. This power finds unique conduits of transmission where and when music is institutionalised, for example in the military, in government departments, concert agencies, arts councils, orchestras, choirs and educational environments like schools and universities.

In contrast with the commonly experienced and lived knowledge of music and race, music occupies a strange place within the university. Music in its institutionalised form at the university is generally thought of as floating above political concerns, referring – in the first instance – to itself. As an art rather than a science (in the ancient sense of a “branch of knowledge”), music is heard and academically domesticated as entertainment, artistic practice, discipline, aesthetic and physiological skill. This view is closely connected to the idea of the music school or conservatoire that Martina Viljoen describes as “a locus of musical production that is rarely subjected to social critique”.^{[30]Martina Viljoen, “A Critique of the Music School As a Conservative System of Music Production”, Muziki 11, no. 2 (2014): 116,} In other words, music conservatoires at universities still privilege admission for students based on assessment of their musical “talent” rather than their intellectual or critical abilities, and generally teach “concrete values” not only “through practical instruction, but also through the presentation of a quasi-religious system”.^{[31]Ibid., 121.} Although many of these institutions at our universities are called “music departments” rather than “conservatories”, the ideals of the conservatory system pervade teaching in a manner starkly incongruous with “the intellectual objectives that function as its academic backdrop”.^{[32]Ibid., 129.}

How does this structuring of music function racially at the university? In the South African government’s Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Performing Arts,^{[33]Republic of South Africa, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Performing Arts (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1978).} published in August 1977, the Commission discusses organisational structures of music nationally. University music departments are discussed in Chapter 7,^{[34]Ibid., 47. Substantial space is devoted to the views of the then-Head of Music at Pretoria University, Prof. Jacques Pierre Malan, who makes a special case for the separation of conservatoires from music departments, with the former positioned outside universities and the latter assuming the function of musicological research.} but the racial significance of the discussion is only revealed towards the end of the report, where the penultimate chapter promises information on “The Performing Arts and the Black, Coloured and Indian Population Groups of South Africa”, and where five pages out of a total of one hundred and twenty-two are strictly divided into the subheadings: “Black Population Group”, “Coloured Population Group”, “Indian Population Group” and “Recommendations”.^{[35]Ibid., v.} The Commission’s report, in other words, assumed performing arts institutional stakeholders, including universities, were white; or, in the language of the report, concerned “the cultural needs of the two language groups concerned”^{[36]Ibid., vii.} (i.e. Afrikaners and English-speaking white South Africans).

The fact that race has historically been embedded in this discursive elision about institutionalised music in South Africa is highly significant precisely because of what Viljoen pinpoints as the heavy investment “in the principle of autonomy”^{[37]Viljoen, “A Critique of the Music School As a Conservative System of Music Production”, 129.} that prevails in the leading South African music training institutions. In other words, the unstated, assumed and desired whiteness of the South African music conservatoire that haunts the 1977 government report on the performing arts finds an ideal form of expression in an art form that has, since the nineteenth century, eschewed “a critical mediation between music and society” in a celebration of unstated, assumed and desired universal aesthetic value that just happens to derive historically exclusively from Europe.^{[38]Viljoen, “A Critique of the Music School As a Conservative System of Music Production”.}

The principle of autonomy as a marker of whiteness operates in insidious ways in post-apartheid tertiary music education. It gains an unexpected impetus from the neoliberal rhetoric of colour-blindness and deracination – a rhetoric Christi van der Westhuizen has termed, in a different context, “whitewashing the blackout”.^{[39]Christi van der Westhuizen, Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2017), 84,}

In such arguments it is, ironically, the very rejection of a genetic basis for racial difference that serves to deny the presence of continued structural inequalities. “It says a lot about our state of mind”, writes Winfried Lüdemann in a 2015 article significantly titled “Why Culture, Not Race, Determines Tastes In Music”, “that we have become used to linking matters to race even if they don’t have a racial basis … We should take delight because in respect of music, there is only one race: the human race”.^{[40]Winfried Lüdemann, “Why Culture, Not Race, Determines Tastes in Music”, , 3 September 2015, At the time of writing, Lüdemann was Chair of the Music Department and Vice-Dean: Arts, at Stellenbosch University. His argument is made from a definition of race “as a genetically determined phenomenon”. For a more thorough exposition of his thinking, see Winfried Lüdemann, “Musiek, Kulturele Diversiteit, Menswaardigheid en Demokrasie in Suid-Afrika”. Inaugural lecture, Stellenbosch University, 21 April 2009. The implications of Lüdemann’s postapartheid investment in notions of “cultural difference” have been subjected to extended critique in Etienne Viviers, “A Critique of the Survival Anxieties That Inform South African Discourses about Western Art Music” (PhD thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2016).}  Divorced from political concerns, historical record and disciplinary research on music and race, this assumption finds its validation in the colonial matrix of power that has a very particular mechanism for articulating value: the prevalence of a repertoire, or canon.

Writing about the function of the canon in a different context, Bill Readings^{[41]Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996).}makes the point that universities trying to maintain European (literary) culture outside Europe rely on a shift away from an emphasis on tradition to the importance of the canon and that this shift is a prerequisite for such culture to exist. He also writes that “the canon has also stressed value rather than ethnicity – although racism is always one of the discourses protected by the discourse of value”.^{[42]Ibid., 85.} A common narrative of development posits the university as successively propelled by “the Kantian concept of reason, the Humboldtian idea of culture, and now the techno-bureaucratic notion of excellence”.^{[43]Ibid., 14} Within this trajectory, it is important to keep in mind the racial foundations of musico-cultural diversity in South Africa – especially when “race” is substituted by “culture” and/or “excellence” as a less contaminated justification for the distribution of power (and resources) in musical institutions.

Contrary to Lüdemann’s argument, the work performed by “race” is important in understanding how music exists in postapartheid universities. Such an understanding could be structured as follows: Institutionalised music at South African universities historically assumes white cultural interests as normative; the ideological implications of this assumption are papered over by a discourse of artistic autonomy that demonstrably flourishes in conservatoire environments; and the resulting embrace of a canon and its constituent ethnocentric and non-representative practices results in a field of study that is “neither practical nor ethically defensible”.^{[44]Ibid., 85} Music’s “non-political neutrality” in its university context, is therefore nothing less than the flaunting of cultural white supremacy.

When institutionalised music studies at Stellenbosch University celebrated a century of its existence in 2005 with a book significantly titled Konservatorium 1905‑2005,^{[45]I.J. Grové, ed., Konservatorium 1905‑2005: Die Departement Musiek en die Konservatorium aan die Universiteit van Stellenbosch by Geleentheid van die Eeufees 1905‑2005 (Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, 2005).} one that did not mention apartheid once, it was exactly this remarkable fact that struck the reviewer Chris Walton:

If someone were to read this book who had no idea that South African whites form only some ten percent of the population, then one could  forgive him for assuming that the numerical relationship of white to black was in fact the exact opposite … to ignore completely the simple, single fact that for over forty years, this institution – and many like it – served the interests of a fascist state whose premise was the big White Lie of racial supremacy, is to compound that lie with a new one.^{[46]Chris Walton, “Konservatorium 1905-2005. Die Departement Musiek en die Konservatorium aan die Universiteit Stellenbosch by geleentheid van die Eeufees 1905-2005 (review)”, Notes 64, no. 2 (2007): 318-20,}

However, although the view that music in its university context is embedded in ways of knowing – and in fundamentally racial/racialised ways of knowing – is ostensibly dismissed by the embrace of music as an exemplary non-signifying, apolitical and universal expressive force, a contradictory process finds expression in strategies that make use of music to achieve clearly political ends. In this regard, music can be regarded as suitable for “upliftment” through “outreach” or “bridging programmes”, or can celebrate some or other version of “the common good” by staging cohesion in choral singing or orchestral playing, for example. The underlying logic here upholds the aesthetic autonomy of a canon, but supplements it with discrete and tacitly recognised musical racial imaginaries that allow symbolic interactions to the benefit of institutional programmes.

In the centenary publication, Stellenbosch University 100 (1918‑2018), the Music Department of the University is described thus:

While the emphasis in the department is traditionally on art music in the Western tradition, there are lively discussions in and around the department regarding the placement of these traditions within a culturally diverse and socioeconomically unequal society. As part  of its community interaction, the department annually presents the International Chamber Music Festival  and offers an extensive bridging programme, in addition to supporting prominent ensembles, choirs and performances.^{[47]A.M. Grundlingh, Hans Oosthuizen and Marietjie Delport, Stellenbosch University 100: 1918‑2018 (Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University, 2018), 258.}

“Community interaction”, a postapartheid rhetorical device that references racial awareness and restitution, is offered here as a practical alternative to a “traditional” (and therefore apolitical and seemingly racially innocent) focus on Western art music. Its deployment in this manner and in this context is further marked by the terms “culturally diverse” and “socio-economically unequal”, with “diversity” and “inequality” (like “tradition”)  functioning  as  placeholders for a racial awareness that dare not speak its name.

Race has maintained a presence in this confabulated post-apartheid institutional music discourse in two ways: First, the impulse to integrate “diversity” and those “socio-economically unequal” members of society into the central (“universal”, “apolitical”, “autonomous”) “tradition” of Western art music. This has typically happened by foregrounding and celebrating demographically diverse events or structures (like choirs or orchestras), embedded in Western (“white”) normativity, as symbols of a sociopolitical utopia to be realised at some distant time in the future (but musically readily available). Second, the creation of a second-tier structure accommodating musical difference in a manner that does not displace or affect institutional commitments to the Western art music tradition. Both these continued functions of race could be described as “strategic”.

With regard to the first, Geoffrey Baker’s^{[48]Geoffrey Baker, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela‘s Youth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).} trenchant critique of the Venezuelan youth orchestra programme known as “El Sistema”, behoves a careful consideration of how essentially undemocratic Western structures of musicianship function as social engineering in impoverished communities where they are promoted as structures of “upliftment” or “transformation”. Pointing to a “focus on culture as spectacle”,^{[49]Ibid., 30.} “a resolute avoidance of political discussion”,^{[50]Ibid., 35.} “a generalized lack of critical reflection and debate”,^{[51]Ibid., 74.}  “a suppression of dissent”, and the enlistment of a code of ethics as “a dramaturgical device”,^{[52]Ibid., 90.} Baker traces the roots of these kinds of interventions to early colonial accounts that “demonstrate a belief that the skilful performance of European music signified civilisation”,^{[53]Ibid., 67.} replete with its language of rescue and salvation intended to justify race-based cultural ethnocides.

But it is perhaps the position of jazz, an expression with a quintessential Western Cape character, as expressed by its most iconic practitioners, like Abdullah Ibrahim, Basil Coetzee and Robbie Jansen (and more recently, Kyle Shepherd, Ibrahim Khalil Shihab and Ramon Alexander), that continues to indicate the persistence of race in strategic institutional approaches to music at Stellenbosch University. This manifests not in the way Gerke’s crude racial imagination constructed it in the 1930s, but in a particularly characteristic post-apartheid rhetoric of racialisation.

At Stellenbosch University, jazz has only had an institutional presence since 2009, with the establishment of the Certificate Jazz Band (now the Stellenbosch University Jazz Band early in that year. As the name indicates, the ensemble was created as an off-shoot of the Certificate Programme, established in 1999, initially to change student demographics at the Conservatoire by admitting “previously disadvantaged individuals” who had no opportunity to receive formal music tuition. Jazz, it is clear, was viewed as the “natural” musical corollary to racial assumptions about music education and the University curriculum. Unable to offer a fully-fledged jazz programme, due to the substantial resources required to offer a Western art music curriculum, the Conservatoire has viewed its Diploma  Programme (i.e. the academic offering adopted in 2011 to provide increased university access to Certificate Programme students) as the most suitable avenue to offer students an opportunity to study jazz.

Taking the above into consideration, failing to make the connections between assumptions about racial constructs on the one hand, and assumptions about musical preferences, music value systems and resource allocation on the other, seems more like a decision than an oversight. The inherent contradiction of viewing music simultaneously as autonomous and apolitical (Western art music) and as strategic in addressing issues of political transformation (jazz), has to be understood not as a function of music (and its own contradictions), but rather as the displacement and maintaining of race knowledge within a symbolic system metaphorically charged with creating “harmony” and institutionally expected to fulfil functions of entertainment and corporate branding (rather than knowledge generation). In other words, the naïve or conscious understanding of music as not firmly implicated in the creation and continuation of race knowledge flourishes in particular ways in institutional environments that continue to embrace forms of collective “expressive identity or transactional consensus”,^{[54]Readings, The University in Ruins, 192.} approaches valued particularly highly by the post-apartheid University of Excellence.

First published in FAULT LINES: A PRIMER ON RACE, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY edited by Jonathan Jansen & Cyril Walters, African Sun Media, Stellenbosch, 2020.

Re-published here with kind permission of the authors and editors and the publisher, Wikus van Zyl at African Sun Media, Stellenbosch. You can download the original PDF here.