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New Music for New South Africans: The New Music Indabas in South Africa, 2000–02

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Mareli Stolp
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Abstract

This article explores the content, scope and impact of an annual contemporary music festival in South Africa, the first of which was presented in 2000 by New Music South Africa (NMSA), the South African chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). It explores the New Music Indabas of 2000–02 against the background of the political and cultural transformations that characterized South Africa, especially in the aftermath of the end of apartheid. Research into the archive of NMSA provided an entry point into understanding South African cultural, social and political life in the early years of the country's democracy. The ‘separate development’ rhetoric of the totalitarian apartheid regime, in power from 1948 to 1994, prevented cultural exchange and connection between musics and musicians in South Africa for decades; this article explores the ways in which the New Music Indabas attempted to right these historical imbalances, and to forge new directions for South African art-music production and practice.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 143 , Issue 1 , 2018, pp. 211 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 The Royal Musical Association

Introduction

Shortly after the end of the First World War, the British musicologist Edward J. Dent, together with the Austrian composers Rudolf Réti and Egon Wellesz, formed the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). Conceptualized in part as a musical equivalent to political initiatives such as the League of Nations (founded in 1920) and international associations such as the PEN club (an acronym for ‘Poets, Essayists, Novelists’, first formed in 1921),Footnote 1 the ISCM had as its primary goal an attempt at post-war reconciliation through the musical arts. It was envisioned as an institution not aligned with any one nationality or national politics and, at least during the early years of its existence, it remained committed to transcending any overt political or nationalist allegiances. This is not to suggest that the ISCM did not fulfil a political purpose: its objective – that of forging new connections between creative artists from countries very recently still at war with each other – can be read as innately political. In addition, the organization's supposed ‘apolitical’ stance was to change dramatically in the later 1930s, as the political situation in Europe became increasingly fraught.Footnote 2

Membership of the ISCM is today organized through national sections (managed independently of the ISCM) that promote contemporary music in different countries; representatives of these sections annually attend the ISCM General Assembly, and any member of a national section also automatically becomes a member of the ISCM and may send in works that are evaluated for performance at the ISCM World Music Days. In 1948, the year the National Party came to power in South Africa and began enforcing its apartheid policies,Footnote 3 a South African section of the ISCM was established by Erik Chisholm, then the director of the South African College of Music (SACM) at the University of Cape Town.Footnote 4 The members of this section were all white – not surprisingly, bearing in mind that the right-wing National Party, under whose leadership apartheid would be enforced until democracy was achieved in 1994, had come to power only a few months earlier. State-enforced racial segregation was by that time a firm fact of South African life. The South African section of the ISCM continued its activities until 1957, when it was disbanded (mostly because of financial difficulties).Footnote 5

In 1999, five years after the first democratic elections in the country, South Africa once again joined the ranks of the ISCM, this time under the direction of the South African-born composer and pianist Michael Blake and a group of performers, composers and new-music enthusiasts who called themselves New Music South Africa (NMSA). In contrast to the (supposed) non-political ethos that characterized the ISCM in the early years of its establishment, NMSA was envisioned as having a particular political purpose. The group launched a festival in 2000 with the assistance of the Standard Bank National Arts Festival (an annual event held in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape); their intention was to provide a platform for the performance of new music and cultural exchange with international music professionals, and especially to create a space where musicians who had historically been prevented from mutual collaboration and exchange could engage creatively with one another. African choral music (a compositional practice loosely defined as four-voice choral music with roots in Victorian choralism which developed in late nineteenth-century colonial South Africa) was included in the festival programming, even though it did not fit a traditional definition of avant-garde or ‘new’ music. (The reason for this decision is discussed in more detail below.) Called the New Music Indaba, this festival continued annually in Grahamstown until 2006; since 2007 it has been hosted annually by different university music departments across the country. By the 2006 festival, more than 40 works had been commissioned from South African composers for the Indabas (in Western as well as African choral genres), and several hundred South African works had been performed, together with many compositions from the Euro-American contemporary and avant-garde repertory.Footnote 6 During the Indabas of 2000, 2001 and 2002, workshops for developing composers were presented as part of the festival, during which composers from many different spheres of musical creation were invited and financially supported to attend and participate in composition workshops with visiting composers and performers. These meetings were initially referred to as Growing Composers Workshops, although during the 2002 Indaba the workshop was presented under the title International Composers Indaba South Africa (ICISA).

The South African cultural landscape of the early 1990s strongly reflected the National Party's apartheid policies of the previous 40 years. Mixed audiences for Western art music were practically non-existent, exposure to avant-garde contemporary art music was extremely limited (in part because of international sanctions, to be referred to in more detail below), and African choral music (arguably South Africa's most historically rooted serious music genre) was rarely programmed together with canonical Western art music.Footnote 7 Even though attempts were made by civil-society activists and international governments sympathetic to the anti-apartheid struggle to endorse cultural sanctions against South Africa (especially in the 1980s), such sanctions were never officially enforced during apartheid.Footnote 8 Nevertheless, cultural isolation was an actuality, and the political realities of the time enforced sharp divisions between black and white musics. The New Music Indabas, especially in the early years following their establishment, were therefore extraordinary events, not only because they were instrumental in introducing white South African audiences for the first time to the rich and challenging repertory of African choral music, but also because they introduced South African musicians and audiences who had for many years been isolated from the international new-music arena to some of the most prolific avant-garde composers of the twentieth century. The Indabas also created opportunities for South African composers to collaborate with new-music performance ensembles at the forefront of the international contemporary music scene.

Western classical music has often been used to engage with or negotiate social concerns and to act as political mediator in conflict situations.Footnote 9 The New Music Indabas could be read in such a context: in the aftermath of apartheid, much work needed to be done in mediating tensions between South Africans formerly disadvantaged under the National Party regime and white South Africans who had benefited from the apartheid system. The political purpose of these events was, at least in part, to create spaces where musicians and composers who had been forcibly separated under apartheid could interact and engage in a mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and skills. The approach to Western musical modernity that informed these events is particularly interesting in that it focused on Western classical music as a mediating tool, as well as endeavouring to engage black musics formerly practised in isolation from mainstream musical spaces. By presenting African choral-music performances side by side with Western contemporary classical music, the Indabas proactively and symbolically broke down barriers between these musical practices enforced for decades by the strictures of apartheid, and so opened the door to new imaginings of music performance practice in a democratic South Africa. As Brett Pyper put it:

When the New Music Indaba was started at the Grahamstown Festival seven years ago, one of the audacious moves by its organisers was to place the notion of new music up for negotiation in the South African context. They did so by exploring a convergence between two domains that had relatively little to do with one another: the experimental art music scene – oriented towards the Euro-American avant-garde – and the varied world of indigenous South African choral composition.Footnote 10

Blake's conception of ‘new music’ played a significant role in this regard. In an interview with the journalist Gwen Ansell, Blake stated, ‘New music is both music at the cutting edge and music that we've simply never heard before.’Footnote 11 This attitude towards the definition and scope of the concept of ‘new music’ facilitated the inclusion in the Indabas of not only music from the international avant-garde scene, but also black musics that had not been afforded a legitimate place in South African concert culture under apartheid.

This article explores the content, scope and impact of the first three New Music Indabas (2000–02) against the background of the political and cultural transformations that characterized South Africa, especially in the immediate aftermath of the end of apartheid. I will make the argument that these Indabas both acted as significant cultural events and fulfilled important political functions, particularly in the context of a transforming social order in the early years of South Africa's democracy. The primary source for this article is the material gathered in the NMSA archive, housed at the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. I am cognizant of the limitations involved in focusing on a single collection of documents in a research article such as this, and I have tried to remain aware of the power dynamics associated with archives generally, and specifically of the dangers inherent in considering the archive to be a ‘neutral repository’.Footnote 12 Throughout this article, I have endeavoured to corroborate statements (especially those made in emails, faxes and letters) where appropriate through secondary sources; in some cases, names have been suppressed in order to avoid unnecessary negative implications for the individuals involved. In spite of its possible limitations, the archive fulfilled a valuable role in the research process, as it represents the only consolidated collection of material pertaining to the New Music Indabas.

NMSA and the New Music Indabas 2000–02

Shortly after his return to South Africa from the United Kingdom in 1998, Blake settled in Grahamstown, where he taught composition part-time at Rhodes University.Footnote 13 Grahamstown is in the Eastern Cape, a province that was officially established in 1994 when the former ‘homelands’ of the Transkei and Ciskei were incorporated with the eastern part of what had previously been the Cape Province.Footnote 14 The Eastern Cape was and remains one of the poorest provinces in the country, and the former ‘homelands’ in particular suffer from severe infrastructure problems and lack of service delivery.Footnote 15 Grahamstown, however, is located in the former Cape Province section of the Eastern Cape, and had in 2000 a comparatively high level of service delivery and municipal functionality.Footnote 16 Rhodes University, founded in 1904, was a designated white university during apartheid, but since the beginning of democracy has transformed dramatically in terms of equity. It remains, though, the smallest university in South Africa.

When Blake arrived at Rhodes University in 1998, the music department was headed by Christine Lucia, a veteran of South African tertiary music education with a distinguished career as a scholar, lecturer and performing artist. Her commitment to cultural and social transformation in the wake of apartheid facilitated much of the work done by Blake and NMSA. Preceding NMSA was another new-music performance group, newmusic@rhodes, a contemporary-music student ensemble which Blake and Lucia had formed early in 1998. This group performed a wide range of contemporary works by composers such as John Cage, Charles Ives, Terry Riley, Kevin Volans and members of the Second Viennese School, as well as student compositions, experimental music, South African works by composers such as Rüdiger Meyer, Graham Newcater, Martin Scherzinger, Arnold van Wyk and Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph, works by black South African composers in the Western art-music tradition (such as Bongani Ndodana-Breen) and works by black choral composers including Phelelani Mnomiya, Michael Moerane and Christian Ngqobe.Footnote 17 NMSA was a continuation of newmusic@rhodes and was established specifically for the purpose of applying to re-enter the ISCM, with the idea that it could function as the South African section of the society.

At the time of the 1999 General Assembly of the ISCM in Bucharest, where Blake made a successful bid for a South African section to be established once again, there were also other South African new-music ensembles in existence, and questions have been raised as to the appropriateness of Blake's proposal to the ISCM, which effectively sidelined these groups.Footnote 18 The most active of these was probably Obelisk Musiek (Obelisk Music), a group founded in 1991 by the composers Johannes van Eeden, Christopher James and Etienne van Rensburg. The group made significant contributions to the furthering of South African art music and new music: during the first ten years of their existence, they staged over 40 concerts, 31 of which were devoted exclusively to music by South African composers, and they gave the South African première performances of 43 compositions.Footnote 19 However (and this was a criticism levelled also by Blake against the group in 1999), the vast majority of South African works premièred and performed were by white, male composers, and neither the group's programming nor their membership demographics created the impression that inclusivity was a priority.Footnote 20 Although Blake invited Obelisk to become members of NMSA (which they subsequently did), he did not enter into consultation with them when the bid was made to the ISCM in 1999. Blake felt that Obelisk had too small a reach (being involved mainly with concert organizing in Johannesburg and Pretoria) and that their programming too often favoured white Afrikaans composers; in Blake's words, ‘The mandate for beginning a new ISCM section in South Africa […] had to be far broader.’Footnote 21

Following Blake's bid at the 1999 General Assembly, a South African chapter of the ISCM once again became operational after an absence of more than four decades. The following year, the first New Music Indaba took place in Grahamstown. Blake had voiced a commitment at the General Assembly that NMSA would be as inclusive as possible of all musics practised in the country, including jazz, popular music and African traditional music; it would also commit to expanding its membership, in order to become representative of the spectrum of South African races, languages and cultural groups.Footnote 22 It is worth noting that six years into South Africa's democracy, the contrived division between so-called ‘art music’ and other music categories was exemplified not only in terms of musical content, but also particularly in terms of racial participation, and change was happening very slowly: black audiences for live performances of Western art music were practically non-existent. Concert halls had not been accessible to black, Indian and coloured South Africans during apartheid. (Several laws made by the apartheid government made specific areas, buildings and public spaces inaccessible to non-white South Africans; the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953 is an example.) Even though by 1999 the law no longer prohibited access to art-music performance for any ethnic group, in reality, concert audiences for Western art music remained overwhelmingly white.Footnote 23 Jazz and popular-music performances had always been more accessible across the colour barrier, but integrated audiences remained rare during the early 2000s; traditional African music and black choral music were seldom performed in historically white concert settings. Blake's commitment to inclusivity, and the potential challenges such a pledge presented, should be read in the context of these social realities.

In spite of significant challenges, commitment to inclusivity was proactively pursued: during the first Indabas, Blake and the members of NMSA invited musicians from the popular and jazz spheres, as well as black and other composers discriminated against under apartheid in particular, to participate in composition workshops; new works were commissioned from these composers and musicians; and jazz, popular music and African choral music were programmed together with Western contemporary classical works. The New Music Indabas served as a meeting place for practitioners of many different types of music, providing opportunities for creative exchange and collaboration not possible under the oppressive regime of the former apartheid government. In this sense, these meetings served cultural and educational purposes as well as having significant political import.

An indaba is defined as an important meeting or gathering, and it is not hyperbolic to state that the first New Music Indaba represented one of the most historically significant gatherings of musicians and composers in South Africa in the country's history. Over the course of one week in July 2000, 23 events with 50 composers and 200 performers from six countries (including South Africa) were presented. These included a massed-choir performance with three black choirs from the Eastern Cape performing works by African composers as well as compositions by Arvo Pärt, Stravinsky and Volans (the last composed a new work specifically for this event) – no mean feat, considering that these choirs did not read Western staff notation and learnt these challenging works from tonic sol-fa notation and by listening to recordings.Footnote 24 Performances by black choirs subsequently became a feature of the New Music Indabas, and the following section of this article discusses this aspect of the Indabas in more detail, alongside consideration of the composers’ workshops and performances by established international new-music ensembles at the 2000, 2001 and 2002 New Music Indabas.

Black choral music

It is illuminating to compare the composers featured at the 2000 Indaba with the names included in the first concert series presented by the South African ISCM section in 1949. Between May and November of 1949, three orchestral concerts were presented, including works by composers such as Barber, Bartók, Bloch, Hindemith, Honegger, Rawsthorne and Stravinsky; South African composers programmed included Friedrich Hartmann, John Joubert, Hubert du Plessis, Priaulx Rainier and van Wyk.Footnote 25 Not surprisingly, considering the sociopolitical realities of the time, no African composer is included. In 2000, the South African representation looked rather different: several white South African composers were featured, but they were outnumbered by their African counterparts. Blake, Stefans Grové, Peter Klatzow, David Kosviner, Meyer, Newcater, Scherzinger, Pieter Smit, Volans and van Wyk shared the programme with John Knox Bokwe, Reuben Caluza, Laurence Chonco, Ntsikana Gaba, Shalati Khosa, Alfred Khumalo, Mzilikazi Khumalo, Makhaya Mjana, Mnomiya, Moerane, Joseph Motuba, Bongani Ndodana, Ngqobe, Michael Ngxokolo and Benjamin Tyamzashe.Footnote 26

The organizers of the first Indaba made a decision to devote a large part of the concert offering to works of the black South African choral-music tradition. African choral music, which by the 1990s had developed into ‘the largest participatory form of musicking in the country’,Footnote 27 nevertheless has historically been marginalized in South African academe and concert practice. Scholars such as Veit Erlmann, Lucia and Grant Olwage have argued that African choral music has typically been erroneously classified as either ‘traditional music’ (and therefore the concern of ethnomusicologists) or popular music, effectively relegating it to a position on the margins of South African art music which, especially during the early 2000s, endorsed a view of European compositional identity as mainstream.Footnote 28 During apartheid, black choral music was classified by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and South African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO) as ‘light music’, effectively relegating this broadly encompassing subgenre of South African art music to a position of low-culture entertainment.Footnote 29 As a result, at the time of the first New Music Indaba, black choral music had rarely been staged on South African concert platforms, and white audiences had extremely limited exposure to this part of the South African art-music field. The black composers mentioned above all had by the time of the first Indaba successful careers as composers, conductors and performers in the African choral tradition, and their inclusion in concert programming with a strong focus on South African composition seems in retrospect an obvious choice – even though at the time it was unprecedented.

Olwage argues that black choral music, especially as it developed in the Eastern Cape during the Victorian era, cannot be divorced from the British imperialist and colonial project of the time, nor can it be read outside the context of the imperatives of evangelization and the preaching of the Gospel that exemplified this colonial mission: he concludes that ‘the utility of choralism was its civilising potential’.Footnote 30 The British colonial project – that of ‘educating’ and ‘civilizing’ black South Africans according to Western standards – was intrinsically connected with the spreading of the Christian Gospel, and much of this endeavour was accomplished by musical means. The introduction of tonic sol-fa notation in the late nineteenth century was meant to enable black South Africans to sing religious choral music of Victorian English origin (but at the same time, it has been argued, to prevent them from educating themselves in Western notation techniques such as staff notation).Footnote 31 However, these musics were soon appropriated by black South Africans into their own musical vernacular, and developed into a uniquely African musical form, still connected to its origins in Victorian choralism yet distinctive as African cultural expression. Without, then, engaging fully with the history and development of black African choral music in South Africa, it may be noted that this compositional and performance tradition has a long history, strongly connected to black resistance musics in South Africa; it is a vibrant and vital form of cultural expression, today as during colonial times and throughout apartheid.

Even though the traditions of black choral composition and the avant-garde Western compositions that typically fall under the banner of ‘New Music’ can perhaps be juxtaposed more aptly than merged, posing them side by side in concert programming symbolically challenged the divides between cultures and ethnicities enforced under apartheid. It also made a strong statement in terms of the evaluation of different musics: perhaps for the first time in South Africa's musical history, black music was not relegated to a lower or less significant position than so-called Western art music, but was afforded the same respect and attention as works from the established Western canon. Nor were the black choral performances presented as forms of ‘cultural display’ or as ethnomusicological cultural artefacts – these performances were offered on the same platforms as and on an equal footing to the avant-garde contemporary-music performances included in the rest of the Indaba programming. Performing choral works by Western composers like Pärt, Stravinsky and Volans, together with compositions by black choral composers such as Caluza, Mzilikazi Khumalo, Moerane, Joshua Pulumo Mohapeloa and Tyamzashe showcased the expertise of the performing choirs and established musical connections between compositions created within vastly different contexts.

At the 2000 Indaba, two choral concerts were presented by three choirs from the Eastern Cape – Joy of Africa (conducted by Mjana); Moonlight Youth Choir (conducted by Simon Mpushe); and Masakheke Youth Choir (conducted by Makhi Mka) – performing as a single massed choir. The first concert, entitled Izibongo, included works by Mzilikazi Khumalo, Ligeti, Pärt and Volans; the second performance, Two Centuries of South African Choral Music, showcased works from a range of South African composers, beginning with Gaba's Great Hymn (composed in the early nineteenth century and arranged and notated in tonic sol-fa by Bokwe in 1876) and including contemporary works by Mjana, Mnomiya and Ngqobe.

The 2001 Indaba hosted the Matthews Singers (conducted by Mzwandile Matthews), the Siyakhula Choral Group (conducted by Sizwe Bali) and the Siyaphakama Adult Choir (conducted by Thomas Kolo), again performing as a massed choir under the title Indaba Festival Singers. This group presented an ambitious programme, featuring the South African première of Stanley Glasser's The Chameleon and the Lizard, which requires a full orchestra (the Eastern Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, an ad hoc semi-professional group, participated in this event). This work proved too challenging for the choirs to manage, and a decision was made to remove it from the programme; in spite of that, the Indaba Festival Singers gave convincing performances of works by Percy Grainger and the Swedish composer Arne Melnäss, as well as works by Mjana, Mnomiya and Tyamzashe, and the world première of a new arrangement of Gaba's Great Hymn by Lloyd Prince (who had attended the Growing Composers Workshops in 2000). A second concert, Intyilo – Melodies of the Wise People, featured the talents of the black choir UP Chorale (based at the University of Pretoria and conducted by Mokale Koapeng) and the French group Musicatreize (conducted by Roland Hayrabedian), who sang works by Western composers such as Hans Huyssen, Ligeti and Jean-Christophe Marti, and African choral works by Mzilikazi Khumalo, Koapeng and Mnomiya, as well as Volans's One Day Fine, for which the groups combined.

The choirs participating in the 2002 Indaba were Sounds of the South (conducted by Nomkitha Nxu), the Masakheke Youth Choir (conducted by Radio Mcuba) and the Abancedisi Adult Choir (conducted by Lonwabo Singatha). They presented two concerts: Khutazo! included works by Glasser, Andile Khumalo, Mzilikazi Khumalo, Mnomiya and Tyamzashe (among others), while The Crucifixion showcased two works by composers who had attended the 2000 and 2001 Growing Composers Workshops, Ngqobe and Lihle Biata. Works performed included an oratorio by Ngqobe (The Crucifixion) and two works by Biata, Umlilo and NdimLo. The Joy of Africa choir, led by Mjana, presented a programme of South African anti-apartheid liberation songs.

The inclusion of black choirs in the first Indaba programme, and especially the decision to require them to perform Western works composed in staff notation, presented several significant challenges. The use by most African choirs (especially in the Eastern Cape) of tonic sol-fa rather than Western staff notation meant that when performing works by Western composers such as Pärt, Stravinsky and Volans the scores had to be transcribed. In correspondence with Aygün Lausch, an agent for the music-publishing company Universal Music Edition AG, Blake sought permission to transcribe Pärt's Berliner Messe in tonic sol-fa notation. Following questions from Lausch regarding ‘print run and retail selling price’ of the transcribed music, Blake explained that the transcriptions would not be used for commercial purposes and assured her that the copies provided to the choir members would be destroyed after the performance. He stressed the point that this would constitute a ‘historic performance, in that it will be the first time that a choir of formerly disadvantaged (i.e. Black) South Africans will sing a work by a living European composer at an international festival on the African continent’.Footnote 32 He also explained that ‘because of the history of colonialism and White domination in South Africa, tonic solfa (similar to solfege) became the normal notation for African choirs a century ago. Africans do not read staff notation.’Footnote 33 Lausch responded positively to this information, and permission was granted for the transcription, with the proviso that a copy of the transcribed music would be sent to the publisher. As she put it: ‘Since we never heard about tonic solfa notation for African choirs, we would appreciate to receive one complimentary copy of this print.’Footnote 34 However, not all publishing houses reacted so positively. A performance of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms for choir and small orchestra was nearly derailed when the Boosey & Hawkes copyright department refused permission for a piano four-hands version of the score (arranged by Stravinsky's son, Sviatoslav) to be performed at the Indaba. Despite Blake explaining to the company that Grahamstown had no orchestra, and that the piano version would constitute the only version of the score that could be executed by available performers, Boosey & Hawkes remained adamant that no ‘arranged’ versions of Stravinsky's music could be performed (in spite of the fact that they published the arrangement).Footnote 35

The Indaba organizers had to overcome severe logistical obstacles that year in order for the ‘historic performance’ (as Blake names it) to take place. Negotiating with European agencies with little or no understanding of South African cultural, social or political realities was in itself demanding; transcribing expansive choral works in tonic sol-fa notation, getting choirs to learn these works by listening to taped recordings, managing logistics with choirs that had very little access to basic communication facilities (computers, internet, mobile phones, fax machines) and little or no budget for travel, and then conducting them with few rehearsals in a massed-choir performance seems in retrospect an almost insurmountable task. The organizers also had to deal with significant prejudice from the white musical community. Blake had sought, for example, the assistance of a well-known white South African choral conductor to lead the massed choir in performance. The conductor's response was that he had little faith in black choirs’ ability to sing ‘the type of music you [Blake] suggest […]. Having worked with Black choirs for twenty years, I know the difficulties they have with even fairly straightforward modulations let alone anything more complicated.’Footnote 36 The prejudice expressed in this communication proved to be unfounded. In addition to successful performances of the works by Pärt and Stravinsky, sections from Mzilikazi Khumalo's Ushaka were presented during the 2000 Indaba, and the world première of Volans's One Day Fine – a work in isiXhosa written specifically for the choirs involved and which subsequently became one of the composer's best-known works – was enthusiastically received. After the first Indaba of 2000, the format of these choral concerts was amended and less focus was placed on performance of Western works. Rather, black choirs and conductors showcased African repertory in African languages and in some cases (but not all) favouring works written in tonic sol-fa notation. Large-scale performances by black choirs was a feature of the early Indabas, and in 2000, 2001 and 2002 the choral concerts received significant sponsorship from the Eastern Cape local government's Department of Sport, Arts and Culture, which also supported the choirs’ presentation of the same programmes elsewhere in the Eastern Cape, in larger cities such as Port Elizabeth.Footnote 37 Regrettably, with the New Music Indaba's relocation out of the Eastern Cape (which coincided with the end of Blake's term as chair of NMSA), local-government funding could not again be secured and African choral performances have subsequently ceased to feature on the Indaba programmes.

I posited earlier that the presentation at the New Music Indabas of these choral performances on the same platform as programmes made up of works from the Euro-American avant-garde was done in part to challenge enforced musical hierarchies, and to ensure that the same respect and attention were afforded to the black choirs as to Western art-music performances. There is, however, another angle to consider here. It is possible to read the endeavour as an attempt to ‘Westernize’ these choirs, to induct them into a Western concert practice, potentially at the risk of compromising their innate characters and authentic practices. It is therefore worth noting the extent to which the black choirs who participated in the 2000, 2001 and 2002 Indabas both embraced and resisted the concert culture into which they were for the first time being invited. Feedback from all three Indabas highlights a sense of achievement for the choirs in performing on the main festival programmeFootnote 38 – to large audiences that included a significant white contingent, and in concert venues with good facilities. However, the strong social underpinning of black-choir performances remained a feature especially of the 2001 and 2002 concerts, with audience members (many of whom had travelled to the event from far away specifically to support the choirs) participating in the performances by singing along, loudly cheering, dancing while the performance was in progress and calling for more music long after the event had officially ended – typical practice at most African choral events, but obviously not common in traditional Western concert settings. In their mixing of traditions, cultures and approaches, these choral concerts presented perhaps the best examples of what NMSA was attempting to achieve through the New Music Indabas: to build bridges between the disparate and formerly forcibly segregated peoples and musics of South Africa.

Composer workshops, composers in residence and new-music performers

From the outset, the New Music Indabas were underpinned by a strong commitment to education and outreach. Recognizing the historical disadvantages that black, Indian and coloured South Africans faced under apartheid, NMSA made a concerted effort to develop composition skills and creative capacity particularly among musicians from previously disadvantaged groups. With this in mind, the 2000 Indaba programme included a Growing Composers Workshop, which became a feature of the New Music Indabas and continues today. At the 2000 Indaba, the workshops were mainly structured as open discussion and conversation sessions between the established composers attending the Indaba and the ensembles in residence who performed their works. The six composers who participated in the Growing Composers Workshops in 2000 attended discussion sessions with Volans and the Duke Quartet (the British ensemble that performed the South African premières of his string quartets White Man Sleeps and Hunting: Gathering); a conversation between Volans and the choral composer and conductor Mjana on their approaches to composition; exchanges between the professional composers Peter van Bergen, Huib Emmer, Rüdiger Meyer, Martijn Padding and performing members of the Dutch group Ensemble Loos, for whom these composers had created new works; and a discussion between Volans and the Sisu percussion ensemble from Norway. Perhaps because of the lack of previous exposure to Western avant-garde composition and as a result of limited capacity to provide individual composition lessons, the workshops at this first Indaba seem to have focused on general exposure to approaches to Western art-music composition and the performance of contemporary and avant-garde music. The six composers who attended the 2000 workshops were Andile Khumalo, Xolani Koko, Ngqobe, Leslie Nkuna, Musa Nkuna and Prince. Of these, four were at the time already respected choral-music composers, with Khumalo and Prince having received some prior instruction in staff notation and Western art-music compositional techniques. In 2000, composers worked with two ensembles in residence: the Duke Quartet and Sisu.

The structure and scope of these workshops developed over time through trial and error. In 2000, the workshops were structured around general lectures; group sessions were presented rather than individual lessons, with the primary aim of exposing the participants to compositional techniques beyond those with which they had already become familiar (mostly choral composition employing four-part harmony and scored in tonic sol-fa notation). The general lectures were meant to address the participants’ levels of previous experience in traditional Western compositional techniques, which in most cases were limited. One individual recalls that participants were encouraged to develop new works following discussions on different topics related to composition, but that in many cases (his own included) the amount of new information was too overwhelming for the composers to engage with immediately.Footnote 39 Even though NMSA had attempted to draw emerging composers from all over South Africa to the Indaba, very few composers, composition students and composition teachers responded to the invitation to the first Indaba and to attend the workshops with Volans; this would change in subsequent years, and more composers would participate in the workshops. At the time of the first Indaba, networks were perhaps not yet well enough established to reach a significant number of composers and composition students.Footnote 40

Feedback from the participating composers after the 2000 composers’ workshops was mixed. The four composers who had backgrounds almost exclusively in choral composition found the exposure to additional possibilities in instrumental writing enlightening and encouraging. One composer experimented for the first time with the inclusion of percussion in his work; another began work on a piece inspired by ‘techno’ dance music; while a third commented in particular on his enhanced understanding of the possibilities of rhythm – experiencing the performance of Volans's One Day Fine, studying it and discussing it with the composer encouraged him to think of new approaches to rhythm in his own vocal composition.Footnote 41 However, the composers’ lack of experience in the field of Western art-music composition meant that they had few (if any) completed works in this tradition to present during the workshops, and as a result the composer in residence was not able to offer comprehensive critiques of existing pieces. A significant issue that was raised, not only at the first Growing Composers Workshops but also at subsequent Indabas, was the use of tonic sol-fa notation, the general notation method used by black choral composers. Referring to interactions during the 2001 Indaba, Ansell reports that ‘Those issues that were most explicit in the masterclasses and discussions […] crystallised in a recurring debate around the use of South African choirs of sol-fa notation.’Footnote 42 She explains the historical context for this (also referred to earlier in this article): the use of tonic sol-fa complicated the choirs’ abilities to engage with and perform works from the Western canon, which use staff notation; it also encumbered black choral composers’ potential to create new works that could reach international performers and audiences.Footnote 43 Opinions on this issue were (and arguably remain today) divided: some argued for the acceleration of training in advanced Western techniques (and indeed this was arguably at the centre of the motivation for the Growing Composers Workshops, at least during the early Indabas); others reasoned that musical development is not unidirectional and that broader techniques of musical notation needed to be explored, beyond even that which is currently accepted or common to the Western art-music sphere. While it falls outside the remit of this article to engage fully with such issues, it is worth noting its continued presence in South African musical discourse.

By 2001, the Growing Composers Workshops had developed significantly in their scope and structure. More opportunities were created for participating composers to work on their compositions with the ensembles in residence (which in 2001 were the Fitzwilliam Quartet and vocal ensemble Musicatreize, conducted by Hayrabedian). Ansell reports, ‘Workshops cover basics like bowing technique, emotion for vocal interpreters; meanings of terms; “essential lessons”; and making your intentions as clear as possible to performers.’Footnote 44 Opportunities were created for composers to interact with the extended visiting faculty, which included the South African composers Glasser and Mnomiya (the composers in residence for that year), Blake and Jürgen Bräuninger, as well as Daniel Matej, Mellnäs (the chairperson of the ISCM in 2001) and Alicia Terzian. Blake, in a funding report addressed to Robert Buning at SAMRO, explains that visiting faculty members discussed their works that were being performed at the Indaba, spoke on general aspects related to new-music composition and performance and fielded questions about their work.Footnote 45 At the first workshop session, participants were set a task to compose a short piece for voices and/or piano which developed one new compositional technique that they had encountered at the Indaba. These short works were performed during the last part of the final workshop. Eight of the 15 participants had submitted short pieces in advance of the Indaba; these were played and worked through by one of the ensembles in sessions that included the composer and a faculty member, who could comment and lead discussions on various aspects of the work. Performers also gave instruction on writing for their instruments and introduced the composers to contemporary performance techniques. Showing significant growth, the Growing Composers Workshops consisted of 15 composers in 2001, compared with the six in 2000. The 2001 instalment of the workshops was more representative than its predecessor, achieving a good balance between choral composers and composers working in the Western art-music tradition.Footnote 46

Questionnaires were distributed to participants at the beginning and end of the Indaba, and the results of these reveal a fairly clear picture of the composers’ experiences during the event. It seems that a divide existed between composers interested and proficient in choral-music composition and performance, on the one hand, and composers whose focus was on jazz and Western art music, on the other. Within the choral-music context, composers expressed interest mainly in ways of developing that specific genre, and showed less enthusiasm for contemporary and avant-garde Western compositional techniques and writing for Western instrumental ensembles. It is worth noting that no evidence could be found in the archive of Western-trained composers expressing interest in connecting with or composing for the black choral-music genre – arguably the exposure, in terms of the composition workshops at least, was fairly unidirectional in this regard, a point that will be addressed in more detail in the conclusion to this article.

In 2002, the organizers decided to expand the workshops significantly into a two-week course; this was done with additional funding mainly from the Dutch Gaudeamus Foundation and the Royal Netherlands Embassy. This instalment of the Growing Composers Workshops, entitled ICISA (International Composers Indaba South Africa), was presented in collaboration with Herman van Niekerk and the Music Communication Centre of Southern Africa, and began in the week before the New Music Indaba proper. Several of the participants had attended the 2001 workshop, and the 2002 Indaba again welcomed 15 participants.Footnote 47 The idea of having two parallel courses for composers at intermediate and advanced levels was mooted, but ultimately a decision was reached not to split the participants into separate groups.

The extended time frame for the composition workshops meant that there was more scope for the development of new works. Sponsorship from the Netherlands made it possible to host the Dutch new-music group Insomnio as ensemble in residence in 2002; participants were required to write short pieces before the beginning of the course for any instruments included in this ensemble (strings, woodwind, brass, piano, percussion and plucked instruments such as mandolin, harp and guitar), and these were workshopped by members of Insomnio, faculty and the composers during the first week. During the second week, participants were asked to write a new work for members of the ensemble (to write for the full group was not a requirement), to be performed on the last day of the workshop; these pieces were to be short (two to three minutes at most) and fairly easy to assimilate in a short space of time. This second piece by each participant, conceived and created within the workshop environment with guidance from the performers and faculty members, could showcase the techniques and skills acquired by the composers over the two weeks of the course. In addition, each participant had access to the performances of contemporary music and black choral music presented as part of the New Music Indaba offering and the National Arts Festival. Thirteen of the participants created works for Insomnio, and the programme on the final day consisted of the following pieces: Insomnia by Prince; Cry, Why? by Celebration Ntungwa; The Water Is Wide by Sibusiso Njeza; Kwandwe by Johan Rautenbach; The Spell of a Lion by Julia Raynham; Military Marching Song by Ngqobe; Sweet Memories by Njeza; The Harder They Come by Fredrik Ed; Jan Taks soek jou geld by Francois de Villiers; Waking Up Graham by Jim Pywell; Vonkviool II by Braam du Toit; Umqondisoka Mosis by Thobile Ncanywa; and XII Symphonies from the Garden of Eden by Timon Wapenaar.

Participants worked not only with Insomnio, but also with other visiting ensembles including the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet; the improvisation ensemble AMM in workshops led by Eddie Prévost; the electronic-music specialist Keith Rowe (also a member of AMM); and the pianist and specialist in composition for amateur and young performers Thalia Myers. The official composition faculty consisted of Blake, Theo Loevendie, John McGuire and Padding. The daily schedule during the first week was made up of individual meetings with faculty members, seminars on writing for specific instruments, general discussions relating to composition, presentations by participants and faculty on their own oeuvres and workshop sessions with Insomnio. The second week coincided with the beginning of the Standard Bank National Arts Festival and the New Music Indaba, and participants were encouraged to attend as many performances as possible; complimentary tickets to some performances were provided as incentive.

Feedback on ICISA, as on the 2001 workshops, was generated by means of questionnaires. Generally the feeling was that individual lessons had the greatest impact; the workshop sessions with Insomnio were also very positively perceived, and the participants commented on the grace, enthusiasm and professionalism with which Insomnio interacted with them all. The presentations by faculty and participants – composers with varying levels of experience, in other words – on their own work allowed for positive interactions and exchanges of ideas (although it was suggested that the more experienced composers should perhaps be allotted more time to discuss their work than the less experienced). Several composers commented on the lack of adequate time to work on the new pieces created for performance at the end of the workshop.

Participants in the composers’ workshops were, especially during the early Indabas, identified and sought out by the NMSA board through existing music networks (choir contacts, composition teachers at universities) and by word of mouth. For the 2000 Indaba, and subsequently every year up to 2004, the Eastern Cape government funded a number of choral composers from the province to attend the festivals and workshops; Biata, Mjana, Ngqobe and Njeza attended the Indabas several times. Other participants joined the event from universities around the country (Raynham, du Toit and Wapenaar are examples). The NMSA executive committee, and Blake specifically, were active in identifying and approaching composers to participate in these workshops: they sought out individuals who had little or no training in composition skills (mainly because of historical circumstances) and encouraged and enabled them to participate in these workshops with internationally respected composers and composition teachers as well as professional ensembles. This strong effort to address proactively historical disadvantages and injustices that had negatively influenced the potential of South African composers was an innately political act, one that had a significant impact on the South African music landscape. Several of the participants in these workshops have subsequently made names for themselves as composers in the Western art-music tradition, while remaining active also in the black choral-music scene. As a result of the 2000 Growing Composers Workshops with the Duke Quartet, Leslie Nkuna composed a string quartet entitled Forgotten Fantasies, which was premièred in Geneva in 2001; Njeza, a regular attender of the workshops, has gained significant status as a composer of opera in recent years, with a large-scale work, Madiba the African Opera, and a shorter composition, The Blood Is Mine, to his credit; Biata was commissioned in 2005 by the Dutch composer Loevendie for an opera project in the Netherlands; and Andile Khumalo received a Ph.D. in composition from Columbia University in New York, after studying with Helmut Lachenmann, Tristan Murail and Salvatore Sciarrino. Du Toit has a successful career as a composer in South Africa, having completed scores for several large-scale theatre productions and one opera, Die Poskantoor, which was staged in 2014; Raynham, a successful rock musician, began composing in the Western art-music tradition following her experiences at the New Music Indaba, and remains active in this field.

Feedback from the three Growing Composers Workshops consistently reveals that one of the major positive aspects of these workshops was the opportunity for composers to engage, work with and be exposed to international new-music performers. For many developing composers, the ensembles and soloists involved with the New Music Indabas presented the first opportunity to hear live performances of music at the cutting edge of the international avant-garde; in addition to aural exposure, the opportunity to interact with these performers had a major impact on all involved. At the time of the first Indaba, performances of avant-garde and contemporary classical music were rare occurrences in South Africa (a status quo that persists, although to a lesser extent, today). Several reasons for this have been suggested: informal cultural boycotts against South Africa under apartheid (such as the one endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly resolution on 10 December 1985)Footnote 48 which discouraged international artists from performing in the country; South Africa's geographical position, far from Europe and the USA (the accepted ‘centres’ of avant-garde art-music composition and performance); and generally parochial attitudes towards music practice which exemplify South African concert culture, favouring works from the nineteenth-century European canon above avant-garde and contemporary music.Footnote 49 The early New Music Indabas made significant contributions to rejuvenating the South African art-music scene, particularly in terms of the exposure of composers and audiences to the contemporary Euro-American avant-garde. They also created opportunities for South African performers to present concerts of new music and South African compositions: the pianist Jill Richards, a contemporary-music specialist, was a frequently invited participant, as were the Sontonga Quartet (formed in 2002 for the purpose of performing in Volans and William Kentridge's opera project with the Handspring Puppet Company, Confessions of Zeno, and for many years after one of the most prolific new-music ensembles in South Africa). In 2002 the Indaba hosted a series of ‘Young Performers’ concerts, where student performers presented works from the twentieth century. This significant initiative served to encourage emerging South African performers to engage with and perform contemporary music outside the borders of the generally accepted canon of Western works. The extensive list of performances presented at the 2000, 2001 and 2002 New Music Indabas confirms the significant scope and impact of these festivals of new music at a time in South Africa's history when art-music practice was certainly in need of rejuvenation.

Conclusion

There is a snapshot, taken at the 2002 Indaba, of Ngqobe (an attender of the composer workshops that year) conducting the Dutch instrumental group Insomnio together with the Modern Artists Vocal Association, a black choir, in the Rhodes University chapel. A few years previously, it would have been unthinkable that a Western instrumental ensemble of all white performers would have shared the stage with a black choir and a black conductor, performing music by a black composer for a racially mixed audience. The work being performed, The Crucifixion, was originally for choir only. According to Ansell (who reviewed the performance for the National Arts Festival newspaper Cue), it ‘draws on sources as varied as plainchant, operatic aria, European chorales and the jagged syncopations and call and response patterns of Xhosa tradition. There is swaying dance, ecclesiastical declamation and even, at one point, audience participation; linking the worship of the present with the passion of the past.’Footnote 50 The music, as she describes it, is a kind of summary of Ngqobe's life – the choral music with its roots in Victorian-era England that he had sung from childhood; the Xhosa traditional music sung in the rural Eastern Cape villages where he had grown up; and (a recent addition) Western instrumental music for a ten-piece ensemble, not juxtaposed with the African elements of his own compositional palette but woven into the fabric of his creative voice. As little as five years earlier, the composition would have been as unthinkable as the picture of the multiracial, non-segregated performance captured in the Rhodes chapel.

Without awareness of the picture's historical context it is possible simply to see it as a snapshot of a performance with choir and ensemble. In context, however, its content bears witness to the enormous impact of the New Music Indabas on the cultural fabric of South Africa in the formative years of the country's democracy. Composers who under apartheid had been prohibited from engaging in any structured manner with music from the Western canon – especially the Euro-American avant-garde – were invited through the Indabas into a setting where the exchange of ideas, exposure to new music and collaboration with performers and composers could happen in an environment as supportive as it was challenging. Yet with the benefit of hindsight one could argue that much of the Indabas’ educational project was somewhat unidirectional: although the Indabas preached ‘mutual exchange of ideas’, archival evidence suggests that black composers were encouraged to engage with Western compositional techniques and to create works in the Western art-music tradition, while white composers seldom engaged with black choralism or tonic sol-fa notation in comparable ways. If an exchange of ideas did take place, it is revealed more in the development of black composers’ skills in engaging with Western techniques than in the engagement on the part of Western-trained composers with black choralism.

In the present, amid urgent calls for decolonization (of curricula, teaching methods, literature, even performance traditions), we have become sensitive to the persistence of the West as the accepted standard or measuring rod in intellectual, political and cultural matters. The ‘West is Best’ idea is no longer an accepted status quo, and it is likely that had the New Music Indabas been staged today, they would have been scrutinized and critiqued accordingly. It is hard to imagine, for example, that music literacy would be defined as narrowly today as was evidently the case in 2001, when arguments were made for Western notation methods as being the ideal tools for musical creation, to be preferred above other methods such as tonic sol-fa (already commonly used by many black composers at the time). Intellectual debates in the South African new-music scene increasingly occur in broader and more inclusive contexts (although of course exceptions remain).Footnote 51 Arguably, the sense of urgency that permeated the earlier Indabas – to provide restitution, increased access to music education and more performance opportunities for South Africans discriminated against under apartheid – no longer drives the majority of current debates (although whether this is necessarily a positive development or not is debatable).

It is important to recognize that under apartheid nothing prohibited white composers and musicians from engaging with black musics. There were no education limitations for white music students; restrictions in terms of access and encounter were imposed on black South Africans only. And so, if the efforts made at the early Indabas were focused more on provision of access to black composers, formerly excluded from all aspects of Western art-music practice, this should perhaps be read as an example of proactive restitution of the harms done by apartheid, especially as these manifested in music education. Indeed, already by the third Indaba of 2002 the focus seems to have shifted somewhat, to showcasing black choirs singing repertory by African composers, rather than trying to have these groups engage with Western repertory – an indication that already in its earliest years the Indaba organizers recognized the shifts and developments in South Africa's cultural sphere and attempted to adapt the scope and content of the Indabas accordingly.

The New Music Indabas, especially in their early manifestations, brought together composers, performers, conductors, academics and music lovers with a common interest in South Africa's musical heritage and futures in ways unprecedented at the time. Their explicit political purpose was to present challenges and actual musical alternatives to the segregation of cultures, and inequality in exposure and access, which had personified the South African political and cultural landscape not only during the decades of apartheid but also during 300 years of colonial rule. Part of their lasting legacy is a body of young composers who produce operas, symphonies, piano concertos and large- and smaller-scale African choral compositions using staff notation and tonic sol-fa – both in South Africa (and for South Africans) and on (and for) the world stage. In presenting radical challenges to what may be considered ‘art’, ‘art music’ or even ‘new’ music, the New Music Indabas in the early years of South African democracy redefined the sonic content of South Africa's cultural landscape. Their impact remains clearly audible today.

Footnotes

I am grateful to William Fourie, chair of New Music South Africa (NMSA) in 2015–16, for allowing me access to the NMSA archive, and for the assistance of Santie de Jongh, chief archivist at the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) at Stellenbosch University, for her assistance in the archival research conducted for this article. I also wish to thank Gwen Ansell, Annemie Behr, Michael Blake, George King and Clare Loveday for their valuable input during the writing of the article.

References

1 Annegret Fauser, ‘The Scholar behind the Medal: Edward J. Dent (1876–1957) and the Politics of Music History’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 139 (2014), 235–60.

2 Ibid.; Anne C. Shreffler, ‘The International Society for Contemporary Music and its Political Context (Prague 1935)’, Music and International History in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 58–90.

3 ‘Apartheid’, an Afrikaans word that means ‘separateness’, was a system of racial segregation enforced by the all-white National Party government, which ruled South Africa from 1948 until the first democratic elections in 1994. Under this policy, black South Africans (including Indian and coloured) suffered many injustices and human rights abuses. For more on apartheid, see Sampie Terreblanche, A History of Inequality in South Africa, 1652–2002 (Durban: University of Natal Press, 2003), and Michael Morris, Apartheid: An Illustrated History (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2012).

4 Michael Blake, ‘South African Composers on the World Stage: The ISCM in South Africa’, Fontes artis musicae, 54 (2007), 359–73.

5 Ibid. Blake covers the activities of the first South African section of the ISCM extensively in this article, and this information will therefore not be dealt with in detail again here.

6 Ibid.

7 Gwen Ansell, ‘A Rich Vision’, Cue, 1 July 2002. Stellenbosch University, Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS), New Music South Africa archive (hereafter NMSA archive), Box 31, Folder 60.

8 Catherine Barnes, ‘International Isolation and Pressure for Change in South Africa’, Accord, 19 (2008), 36–9; Brooks Spector, ‘Sanctions and Cultural Boycotts – The Next Frontier?’, Daily Maverick, 4 September 2012 (<http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-09-04-sanctions-and-cultural-boycotts-the-next-frontier/#.V-i_qYh96Uk>, accessed 14 November 2017).

9 See, for example, Rachel Beckles Willson, ‘The Parallax Worlds of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 134 (2009), 319–47; Olivier Urbain, Music and Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015); and Adham Hamed, ‘Music in Conflict Transformation’, Speaking the Unspeakable: Sounds of the Middle East Conflict (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016), 53–9.

10 Brett Pyper, ‘Mozart in African Colour’, The Weekender, 8–9 July 2006. NMSA archive, Box 31, Folder 60.

11 Gwen Ansell, ‘Uncaged’, Cue, 30 June 2000. NMSA archive, Box 31, Folder 60.

12 See, for example, Lizabe Lambrechts, ‘Ethnography and the Archive: Power and Politics in Five South African Music Archives’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Stellenbosch University, 2012).

13 Stephanus Muller, ‘Michael Blake 50’, Musicus, 30 (2002), 119–26.

14 The ‘homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’ established by the apartheid government were areas to which the majority of the black population were forcibly moved in order to prevent majority black presence in urban areas preferred by white South Africans.

15 Department of Economic Development, Environmental Affairs, <http://www.dedea.gov.za/research/Research/Eastern%20Cape%20Socio-Economic%20Review%20and%20Outlook%202013.pdf> (accessed 14 November 2017).

16 Infrastructure and service delivery has, however, deteriorated rapidly over the last decade, with severe water shortages, unsatisfactory road maintenance and regular electricity outages now common occurrences in the town.

17 Programmes for concerts of 20 May 1999, 5 August 1999, 24 August 1999 and 17 August 2000, and programme for Graduation 99 Concerts. NMSA archive, Box 31, Folder 60.

18 Stephanus Muller, ‘“Quo vadis, Obelisk?” SA musiek trek swaar’, Die Burger, 13 June 2001, 33; Blake, ‘South African Composers’.

19 Muller, ‘“Quo vadis, Obelisk?”’.

20 Composers programmed by Obelisk include John Coulter, Andrew Cruickshank, Christopher James, Hubert du Plessis, Etienne van Rensburg and Arnold van Wyk. These names are collected from a short survey of Obelisk concert programmes. NMSA archive, Box 31, Folder 60.

21 Blake, ‘South African Composers’, 368.

22 Ibid.

23 Brett Pyper, ‘State of Contention: Recomposing Apartheid at Pretoria‘s State Theatre’, Composing Apartheid: Music For and Against Apartheid, ed. Grant Olwage (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008), 237–44; Mareli Stolp, ‘Contemporary Performance Practice of Art Music in South Africa: A Practice-Based Research Inquiry’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Stellenbosch University, 2012).

24 Email from Sheila Jones to Michael Blake, 7 March 2001 (NMSA archive, Box 4, Folder 6); Blake, ‘South African Composers’.

25 Blake, ‘South African Composers’, 362.

26 Report from Michael Blake to the board of the South African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO), 10 September 2000. NMSA archive, Box 1, Folder 2.

27 Grant Olwage, ‘Scriptions of the Choral: The Historiography of Black South African Choralism’, South African Journal of Musicology, 22 (2002), 29–45 (p. 29).

28 Veit Erlmann, Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); idem, ‘“Spectatorial Lust”: The African Choir in England, 1891–1893’, Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, ed. Bernth Linfors (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 107–34; Christine Lucia, ‘Travesty or Prophecy? Views of South African Black Choral Composition’, Music and Identity: Transformation and Negotiation, ed. Eric Akrofi, Maria Smit and Stig-Magnus Thorsén (Stellenbosch: Sun Press, 2007), 161–80; Olwage, ‘Scriptions of the Choral’; idem, ‘Music and (Post)colonialism: The Dialectics of Choral Culture on a South African Frontier’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, 2003). Lucia notes: ‘As choral music in tonic sol-fa notation became automatically considered inferior to Western music composed in staff notation, so through general attitudes by White musicians to composers of choral music was this sense of inferiority preserved. This in turn made it more likely that an ethnomusicological perspective would be used to study choral music, and that Western musicology's formalist modes of analysis would find such music wanting’ (‘Travesty or Prophecy?’, 165).

29 Olwage, ‘Music and (Post)colonialism’, 78.

30 Grant Olwage, ‘Discipline and Choralism: The Birth of Musical Colonialism’, Music, Power and Politics, ed. Annie J. Randall (London: Routledge, 2005), 25–46 (p. 26).

31 Christine Lucia highlights the fact that, in the South African context of racialized imperialism, tonic sol-fa notation became the predominantly ‘native’ notation, and staff notation became mostly associated with whiteness (‘Travesty or Prophecy?’, 164). For more on the history of tonic sol-fa notation in South Africa and Victorian England, see Olwage, ‘Music and (Post)colonialism’; Robin Stevens, ‘Tonic Sol-fa: An Exogenous Aspect of South African Musical Identity’, Music and Identity, ed. Akrofi, Smit and Thorsén, 37–52; and Lucia, ‘Travesty or Prophecy?’.

32 Correspondence, 17 February 2000. NMSA archive, Box 5, Folder 8.

33 This statement was, of course, hyperbolic, even in the year 2000. I would suggest, though, that Blake's tactic here – in trying to convince a bureaucratic entity of the necessity of transcribing Western art music for use by African choirs – is understandable.

34 Correspondence, 17 February 2000. NMSA archive, Box 5, Folder 8.

35 Correspondence, 2 June 2000. NMSA archive, Box 5, Folder 8.

36 Correspondence, 15 February 2000. NMSA archive, Box 1, Folder 2.

37 In 2004, only one choir could be accommodated (the Eastern Cape government, which had provided sponsorship for the choirs for the first four festivals, had by then withdrawn their financial support), and in 2005 no choirs could be funded. The 2006 Indaba once again featured three black choirs, facilitated mostly by a significant grant from the South African Department of Arts and Culture; they performed works by Mozart (the festival theme that year was ‘Reimagining Mozart’, in honour of the 250th commemoration of the composer's birth) as well as giving premières of three choral compositions, by Lihle Biata, Teenage Mahlangeni and Sibusiso Njeza.

38 The Standard Bank National Arts Festival, which hosted the New Music Indabas from 2000 to 2006, is made up of main and fringe festival programmes; works included in the former typically receive more financial and logistical support, and are considered more prestigious, than smaller productions on the fringe programme.

39 Personal correspondence with Andile Khumalo, 7 July 2016.

40 Committee feedback. NMSA archive, Box 1, Folder 2.

41 Ibid.

42 Gwen Ansell, ‘Gwen Ansell on New Music Indaba 2001 “Spaces and Odysseys”’, New Music SA Bulletin, 1 (2001), 11.

43 Ibid.

44 Gwen Ansell, ‘Diamonds in the Dust’, Cue, 4 July 2001.

45 Correspondence, 25 July 2001. NMSA archive, Box 7, Folder 10.

46 The participants were Lihle Biata, Andile Khumalo, Mokale Koapeng, Sicelo Mkhize, Thobile Ncanywa, Mandisa Nguza, Sibusiso Njeza, Mbulelo Nzo, Lloyd Prince, Simphiwe Sekute, Braam du Toit, Ben Turner, Timon Wapenaar, Cassidy Webb and Emily Williams.

47 Participating composers were Lihle Biata, Fredrik Ed, Thobile Ncanywa, Christian Ngqobe, Sibusiso Njeza, Celebration Ntungwa, Mbulelo Nzo, Lloyd Prince, Jim Pywell, Johan Rautenbach, Julia Raynham, Braam du Toit, Francois de Villiers, Timon Wapenaar and Cassidy Webb.

48 United Nations, General Assembly 10 December 1985: Policies of Apartheid of the Government of South Africa: Comprehensive Sanctions against the Racist Regime of South Africa (1985), <http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/40/a40r064.htm> (accessed 14 November 2017).

49 Blake, ‘South African Composers’; Stolp, ‘Contemporary Performance Practice’.

50 Ansell, ‘A Rich Vision’.

51 A useful resource for overviews of current debates in South African music is the conference programmes of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM), accessible online at <www.sasrim.ac.za>. The journal South African Music Studies (SAMUS) is a further informative resource.