The archive and the repertoire have very different connotations in everyday speech: the first of a room containing often-dusty objects and records from the past; the second of a set of actions, gestures, or tools. The first comprises objects, the second actions that produce something in the sense of a repertoire of languages, or of musical works. Within scholarly discourse, these terms have acquired additional meaning as metaphors for systems of knowledge, a point made famous by the so-called ‘archival turn’ in art and exhibition practices in the 1990s.Footnote 1 The contrast between the archive and the repertoire, and the assumptions regarding the different kinds of knowledge they transmit, have animated debate in a variety of fields, yet few scholars have investigated what happens in the space where the physical and metaphorical components of these two categories meet and blur together. One such area is that of musical performance wherein objects such as scores are linked with sounds, gestures, and visual imagery to create a uniquely temporal art form that communicates knowledge in ways that may transcend the boundaries of the archival and repertory categories.
In this article I take the relationship between the archive and the repertoire as the starting point for an investigation of how traumatic experiences may be preserved and shared through music. After an introduction to the categories of the archive and repertoire in the context of the transmission and performance of memory, I move to an exploration of how these issues emerge in the context of artistic responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in post-apartheid South Africa. The locus for this analysis is Philip Miller's 2006 composition REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony, a work which adopts, adapts, and comments on South Africa's traumatic past by attempting to re-embody archival material and thereby return the physical archive to the living world of the repertoire. This investigation lies at the intersection of cultural musicology, performance studies, and conflict transformation studies and I borrow from their principles in order to argue that Miller's collage of testimonial ‘shards’, images, and historic audio recordings in REwind creates an alternative to the official archival knowledge of the TRC: it replaces the Commission's narrative of completion with one comprising deliberately disjointed moments of individual suffering. This alternative history promotes a globalized collective memory of South African trauma that reinforces not only the special place of musical performance in the reconciliation process, but also the potential affective power of the archive in performance.
In this article, the archive is conceived as both a physical and a metaphorical representation of knowledge. In physical terms it is the ‘stuff’ of history, exemplified here by the countless boxes of paper transcripts, video recordings, legal documents, and other items related to the TRC that are housed in the National Archives and Records Service in Pretoria. In thinking of the archive as a metaphor, I draw on the work of Diana Taylor, who has argued that the archive can be understood as a knowledge system based on a particular collection of physical objects. In her model, archival knowledge is a form of cultural memory that ‘works across distance, over time and space’ via ‘documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly resistant to change’.Footnote 2 This general archive is not an archive of something in the sense of being linked to any specific event or person, but rather captures a particular method of approaching the world that relies on an idea of knowledge as object. Here, Taylor follows on from Michel Foucault's conception of the archive as a ‘system of discursivity’, or what Cheryl Simon calls ‘the ordering principle guiding the production of knowledge’,Footnote 3 but insists on tying the ordering principle closely to its origination in physical items. As a system of storing and transmitting knowledge, the archive is a powerful tool that can collect information from many different sources, that preserves traces of things that have passed out of living knowledge, and that facilitates scholarly inquiry by allowing for the easy juxtaposition of different objects. It is also, as Taylor and others have argued, susceptible to co-option into narratives built on power structures; thus, Achille Mbembe proclaims, following Derrida, that ‘the archive is primarily the product of a judgement, the result of an exercise of a specific power and authority’.Footnote 4 Whether the archive is constructed in the limited sense of concrete materials or in the more expansive sense of the systems that decide what concrete materials will count in the archive and how they will be interpreted, it offers a potent means of interpretation.
Archives and archival systems of knowledge are not the only ways of conceptualizing knowledge transfer, and Taylor argues that the repertoire – a term she uses to signify embodied practice – is an effective alternative paradigm. In Taylor's argument, the repertoire consists of knowledge that is transmitted through ‘gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing – in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge’.Footnote 5 This demonstrates once again Taylor's commitment to grounding metaphorical conceptions of knowledge in physical terms: the repertoire is fundamentally an embodied way of knowing that is enacted through performance. As such, it is contingent on performance for its continued existence, and is thereby both highly contextual and closely bound up with a range of cultural practices. The centrality of performance in Taylor's paradigm is demonstrated by her threefold explication of it as object, methodology, and epistemology. In performance, then, ‘the telling is as important as the writing, the doing as central as the recording, the memory passed down through bodies and mnemonic practices’.Footnote 6 Although Taylor approaches this subject from the vantage point of performance studies, and particularly theatre, her argument mirrors the importance of performance in Western art music, which relies on the marriage of physical action and archival object for existence. Thus, although Carol A. Muller argues that ‘song composition provides a mechanism for archival deposit, care, and retrieval’,Footnote 7 a musical archive is one that can only be accessed through performance. The tension between the score's function as, in Nicholas Cook's term, a ‘script’ for action and the necessity for the performer's interpretive creativity to breathe life into such a script animates discussion of musical performance in ways that highlight the importance of the archive and the repertoire across artistic endeavours.
In contrast to the relative stability of the physical archive and the imposed structure of the metaphorical archive, the repertoire is inherently impermanent. Within the specialized discourse of Western classical music, the physical repertoire is often constructed as the music any given person plays or specializes in, with the implication that repertoires expand and shrink as individual works are played or not. The same is true of Taylor's metaphorically conceived repertoire, which demands constant attention from a public in order to propagate knowledge. The emphasis on continuous performance in Taylor's theorization of the repertoire is in part due to the temporal nature of performance and in part due to her insistence that only live performances can be counted as part of the repertoire, whilst the objects that facilitate and disseminate live performance (including, in the case of music, both scores and recordings) are classified as being part of the archive. The irreducibility of performance to archival object means that a study solely of archival knowledge misses a layer of ‘performatic’ meaning.Footnote 8 The dichotomy Taylor draws between the archive and the repertoire is predicated on a divide between material and practice, but despite her acknowledgement that the archive and the repertoire are not commensurate systems, her analysis of the relationship between archival and repertory knowledge may not apply equally across the performing arts. Whilst I accept the importance of the metaphors of archive and repertoire and also the deep entanglement between the metaphorical and non-metaphorical meanings of these terms, I propose that the repertoire can challenge the primacy of the archive in both its physical and metaphorical senses through re-interpreting archival material in performance.
One of the difficulties in examining performance is in its temporal nature; hence, performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan writes, ‘performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representation’.Footnote 9 The liveness of the repertoire in performance renders it susceptible to change, as is amply evidenced by alterations in performance standards and fashions. Taylor argues that this very mutability is an advantage, because ‘the repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning . . . but even though the embodiment changes, the meaning might very well remain the same’.Footnote 10 In comparison, the archive is self-sufficient – though this is not to say independent – in that physical archives require maintenance and protection, but not continued active engagement in the same sense as the repertoire. In other words, Taylor argues that our relationship to archival knowledge is subject to loss and change over time, but in a more curtailed way than the equivalent repertory knowledge.
Regardless of the medium, the transmission of knowledge about the past is a feature of many artistic endeavours. On the side of the archive are things such as documentaries and photojournalism, while on the side of embodied practice are things such as historical re-enactments and the revival of folk traditions. Both of these are complex phenomena whose various motivations speak to the broader relationship between society and history, but two of the things they share are a concern with fidelity to a perceived historical reality and a resulting implication of unmediated communication of that reality as part of a shared social fabric. Therefore, the archive and the repertoire are both engaged in fundamentally interpretive acts concerned with the construction and dissemination of a particular kind of knowledge about the past. In cases where the past is considered central to a particular identity, this transmitted past can become a kind of collective memory.
Maurice Halbwachs argues that collective memory is contingent upon social frameworks of family, social class, and religion, amongst others, and that these are ‘the instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society’.Footnote 11 Since Halbwachs wrote in the mid-twentieth century, his system of enduring communities has been increasingly under threat in a modern world characterized by the global flow of people and information. Alison Landsberg suggests that the advent of mass cultural technologies has permanently altered the transmission of collective memories by making their content available even to those who ‘inhabit literally and figuratively, different social spaces, practices, and beliefs’. Landsberg calls this kind of transportable memory ‘prosthetic’ and claims it can originate ‘at the interface between a person and a historical narrative’, wherein the person ‘does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live’.Footnote 12 Landsberg's idea of memories as prostheses finds echoes in the work of advocates for ‘active externalism’, including Steven Mithen, who argues for our capacity to download mental contents (including memories) to material objects, and Andy Clark, whose ‘extended mind’ encompasses both cognitive processes and mental states.Footnote 13 The relationship between externalized memories and memorials offers an intriguing perspective on the possibility (explored later on) of REwind as a living memorial that works to create a collective memory of the TRC hearings.
Both the archive and the repertoire have implications for the transmission of cultural memory; in particular, different kinds of knowledge shape cultural identities and beliefs in different ways. The archive's methods of transmission can be linguistic (writing), aural (sound recordings), visual (photographs), or objective (objects), whilst the repertoire takes the same basic means of transmission and places them within specific embodied cultural contexts, whether by telling, singing, or dancing. Thinking of knowledge in terms of the repertoire shifts our focus from knowing in the abstract to knowing as doing, where, in Joseph Roach's words, our actions become ‘mnemonic reserves, including patterned movements made and remembered by bodies, residual movements retained implicitly in images or words (or in the silences between them), and imaginary movements dreamed in minds not prior to language but constitutive of it’.Footnote 14 Likewise implicit in the listing of repertory activities is the suggestion of a social context. The repertoire is thus a social form of memory and performing the repertoire is an activity undertaken in a society, reflecting Paul Connerton's assertion that ‘groups provide individuals with frameworks within which their memories are localised . . . We situate what we recollect within the mental spaces provided by the group. But these mental spaces . . . refer back to material spaces that particular social groups occupy.’Footnote 15 By bringing together communities that might otherwise occupy very different material and mental spaces, the repertoire can create a shared framework of memory.
By virtue of its embodied, performative, and social character, live musical performance seems to be intrinsically a form of repertoire knowledge under Taylor's rubric; at the same time, the archive has proved to be an important source of musical materials. A well-known example is Different Trains (1989), a landmark composition in which Steve Reich combines a tape containing pre-existing verbal testimony with music for string quartet. Although the work is most notable for its introduction of instrumental melodies generated by the contour of vocal recordings (‘speech melody’), it is likewise recognizable for its construction of narratives via the manipulation of recorded testimony and sound. In this case, Reich juxtaposes recordings of his childhood governess and a Pullman train porter talking about American train travel in the 1930s and 1940s with stories told by three Holocaust survivors about their wartime memories – specifically, their train journeys to concentration camps – and the recorded sounds of trains. The temporally overlapping but conceptually and historically distinct train journeys present in the speech fragments not only give the piece its title, but also reflect Reich's own recognition that ‘while the [American train] trips were exciting and romantic at the time I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains’. At the end of his programme notes, Reich alludes to the constructed nature of this juxtapositional narrative, saying, ‘The piece thus presents both a documentary and a musical reality and begins a new musical direction. It is a direction that I expect will lead to a new kind of documentary music video theatre in the not too distant future.’Footnote 16 Despite the implication of fidelity in Reich's calling Different Trains a presentation of documentary reality, Amy Lynn Wlodarski has argued that Reich's use of the archive reveals his strong influence on the presentation of archival material through deliberate omissions, suggestive juxtapositions, and accidental perpetuations of mishearings of the original material.Footnote 17 Nevertheless, the ‘testimonial aesthetic’ that Wlodarski identifies in Different Trains has spread. Other composers have adopted similar techniques: some, like John Adams in On the Transmigration of Souls, choose to incorporate only archival text rather than archival sound; others, including Reich in his later composition, WTC 9/11 for the Kronos Quartet, include both archival and newly recorded material. In his vision of a ‘documentary music video theatre’ that incorporates individual testimony into a wider history, Reich pre-figures the work of other composers, including Philip Miller.
By reconstituting archival sounds through performance, composers actively straddle the dividing line between the archive and the repertoire, yet such works are perhaps better understood as a translation of archival material rather than an embodiment of it. The enacting bodies in Different Trains are the string players who interact with the archival recordings by imitating their contours but who are otherwise engaged in enacting the generalized repertoire of string quartet playing. While this returns these archival narratives to the concert hall, it is a relatively distant relationship. On the Transmigration of Souls and WTC 9/11 likewise rely on archival narratives without overt attempts at embodiment. In the remainder of this article I will explore how Philip Miller's REwind takes the relationship between the archive and the repertoire one step further in its performance of the literal archive of the South African TRC.
The irony of this approach is that in order to engage with REwind as a ‘repertoire-ing’ of the archive I am forced to investigate it from an archival perspective – that is, through scores, photographs, and audio or visual recordings that, according to Taylor, are all firmly archival. This is due to the paucity of live performance afforded to REwind over the course of its history. Far from Miller's original concept of re-tracing the TRC's own journey across South Africa, there have been only three performance occasions in the country to date. After its premiere in Cape Town in 2006, South Africans waited until 2008 for REwind to appear again – this time at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg while the cantata returned to Cape Town to the Baxter Theatre for a three-night showing in 2011.Footnote 18 Between these South African appearances REwind has been abroad, beginning with a developmental workshop at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2006, continuing with appearances at New York City's Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival and at Williams College, Massachusetts, in 2007, and capped off by a short run at London's Southbank Centre in 2010. In the place of further live performances, Miller's work has been disseminated through other media. The 2008 Johannesburg concerts were the inspiration for Liza Key's Rewind: A Documentary, which is described as ‘a bricolage of interviews, news archive and extracts’ that strives to continue REwind’s stories.Footnote 19 In addition, a recording of one of the Market Theatre performances was released as a CD in 2008.Footnote 20 By using the CD and documentary in conjunction with the (unpublished) score and video extracts available on YouTube, I build up an analysis of REwind that includes a discussion of its embodied character. I argue that by externalizing and integrating archival and repertory knowledge, Rewind can breathe new life into the archive even while connecting new audiences to a collective history through performed repertoire.
REwind the news: the archive of apartheid
The history of the last century in South Africa is inevitably shadowed by apartheid, a policy of racial separation that Jacques Derrida famously called ‘the last extremity of racism’.Footnote 21 As part of the transition from white minority rule to democratic government in the early 1990s, political organizations agreed to partake in a transitional justice effort that would simultaneously provide an opportunity for victims of apartheid-era violence to tell their stories and encourage perpetrators of violence to confess their actions in exchange for the possibility of receiving amnesty. The result was the TRC, a monumental transitional justice effort that lasted nearly a decade from 1994 to 2003, investigated almost twenty-two thousand testimonies of victims, and received roughly seven thousand applications for amnesty. Its purpose was to ‘[establish] as complete a picture as possible of the nature, causes and extent of gross violations of human rights’ and by means of this truth effect ‘reconciliation between the people of South Africa and the reconstruction of society’.Footnote 22 Its motto, ‘Truth: The Road to Reconciliation’, proclaimed at once its attachment both to principles of transitional justice and to the Christian ideal embodied in the declaration ‘the truth shall set you free’. Although the success of the TRC in achieving these goals continues to be hotly debated amongst both South Africans and the international community, over the past twenty years it has become a model for other countries implementing transitional efforts.
REwind originated in the TRC's aftermath as a collaborative effort between Miller and the South African poet and journalist Antjie Krog, best known outside South Africa for her searing report-cum-memoir on the TRC hearings entitled Country of My Skull. In addition to expounding on her reporting experiences, Krog uses Country of My Skull to explore questions of identity, belonging, and guilt from her position as a white Afrikaner woman in the new South Africa. The result is a ‘quilt’ of fact and fiction, and her manipulation of victim testimony and events have led to multiple accusations of ethical violations.Footnote 23 Though she has since defended artistic licence, she acknowledges the difficulty at the book's close by admitting ‘I have told many lies in this book about the truth.’Footnote 24 The legacy of Country of My Skull is a pertinent reminder not only that all archives are subject to authorial interpretation, but also that those interpretations can have grave consequences for their subjects.
Country of My Skull appeared while the proceedings of the TRC were ongoing and Krog would later identify a more collective vision for its testimony. Reflecting in 2015 on her motivations for promoting a memorial composition, she writes: ‘it felt crucial in some way to honour these testimonies, to prevent them from disappearing into the exploitative amnesia of a country battling to find itself after centuries of racism’.Footnote 25 She turned to Miller, a lawyer-turned-composer from Cape Town, in part because his work demonstrated an ability to synthesize traditional South African musical styles with a contemporary electro-acoustic sensibility.Footnote 26 As a largely self-taught composer of white British and South African heritage whose work includes albums of choral music from the anti-apartheid struggle movement (Shona Malanga) and South African lullabies (The Thula Project), Miller was captivated by the sonic possibilities Krog's audio recordings of the TRC's hearings offered. Of his experience listening to the cassette tapes he said:
In between the sounds of the fragile tape stretching and spooling, I started to hear . . . a world of vocal shards, sighs, gulps for air, feedback from the microphones, clearing of throats, sips of water during moments when the speakers lost their speech. All these sounds seemed to have their own grammar and created and served as signifiers to me.Footnote 27
Miller's discovery of this ‘world of vocal shards’ gains emotive resonance when placed in the context of limited access to the TRC archives. Although the public hearings of the TRC were highly mediatized through television and radio broadcasts,Footnote 28 these were either not preserved or not made available to the public for some time. In recent years, the South African Broadcasting Corporation and the TRC have uploaded episodes of the weekly televised Special Report and English-language transcripts of public hearings to their respective websites, but even these have limited reach in a country where internet access and English language comprehension are concentrated in certain sectors of the population. As Catherine Cole relates, much of the written evidence collected by the Commission remains inaccessible to journalists, historians, and the general public under the auspices of the Department of Justice.Footnote 29 Thus, for Miller and for his audience, the opportunity to hear the unadulterated recordings in Krog's personal collection represents a powerful connection to the hearings themselves.
In discussions of the process of listening to Krog's tapes, Miller consistently picks out the testimony of Eunice Tshepiso Miya. Miya's son Jabulani was one of the Gugulethu Seven, a group of young activists ambushed and killed by South African security forces in 1986. In her testimony before the TRC, Miya recalled the horror of discovering via television news that her son had been killed and exclaimed: ‘I prayed I said oh no Lord! I wish this news could just rewind.’Footnote 30 The combination of that evocative fragment of testimony with the mechanical sound of rewinding and fast-forwarding Krog's cassette tapes inspired Miller to begin building on the idea of what it means to say and unsay the past. From these few seconds of testimony came REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony, a large-scale work in seventeen movements that lasts about seventy minutes in performance and involves between eighty and a hundred onstage performers.
Although REwind combines mixed choir, vocal soloists, and string ensemble with recorded sounds and visual imagery, it is dominated both sonically and metaphorically by the voice. Given that the term ‘cantata’ implies a vocal genre, it is perhaps surprising that Miller singles out the voice yet again in his subtitle, but when positioned as a distinct actor alongside tape and testimony, the emphasis given to the voice highlights the confluence of the historical expectations of the cantata genre and the rich South African heritage of vocal music. Within REwind, the human voice is heard in multiple different contexts as the vocalizations of the large choir and the four vocal soloists are placed alongside and interact with the mechanically captured and disembodied voices of tape and testimony. Apart from the obvious connection between the subtitle and a musical tradition that emphasizes singing, the voice of REwind can thus be understood in metaphorical terms as a signifier of humanity and individuality.
It is the stories told by the voice – and by extension, the individuals those voices represent – that draw us here to listen. Accordingly, the very first recording heard in REwind asks a question: ‘You can hear everything? You can hear my voice?’; only after receiving the affirmative response from the deponent on the tape does Miller introduce the live vocalists. The first two movements of REwind set the scene by depicting the legal set-up of a public hearing in ‘The Oath’ and reflecting on the protests that led to the dismantling of white minority rule in ‘Siyaya’ (‘We are moving/going’), but nearly all of the cantata's remaining fifteen movements are dedicated to presenting testimonies (see Figure 1). Miller weaves these testimonial stories into REwind in several different ways: although the taped recordings of the TRC hearings contain the preponderance of testimony, both the choir and the soloists take on the role of testifier at various times. This is most obvious in the middle section of the cantata encompassing the movements from ‘Rewind’ to ‘Mrs. Plaatjies’. Here, five movements for taped testimony and accompaniment (denoted by each title beginning with the word ‘Rewind’) alternate with movements in which the testimony is divided between the tape and one or more vocal soloists. The resulting oscillation between the two types can be seen as a nod to the traditional Bachian cantata structure of alternating recitative and aria, but it also allows Miller to incorporate a range of testimonies. This multiplicity is of key importance as Miller mixes the words of people who might otherwise be classified as either black or white, victims or perpetrators, English speakers or those whose testimony is translated into English, women or men. By devoting the largest portion of the cantata to this litany of testimony from all walks of South African life Miller's composition reflects what the TRC itself acknowledged: ‘our country is soaked in the blood of her children of all races and of all political persuasions’.Footnote 31
Movements of REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony.Footnote 32
REwind is both technically and metaphorically intricate: a multifaceted work that mirrors the complexities inherent in participating in any large-scale reconciliation effort. Although the resulting narrative richness offers a fascinating series of glimpses into individual stories from the TRC, questions of how and why we listen to them must give us pause. In the sections that follow I investigate REwind’s relationship to its archival materials before suggesting ways it reconstructs its originating materials into a new kind of living memorial.
Mediation and testimony
In Country of My Skull, Krog recalls the experience of choosing twenty-second fragments of the TRC hearings that would encapsulate the hearings’ force without transgressing public radio broadcasting codes. Even as she laments the destructive nature of such editing (‘How quickly our own language changes – fantastic testimony, sexy subject, nice audible crying’), there is elation when she turns on the radio to hear ‘the voice of an ordinary cleaning woman is the headline on the one o'clock news’.Footnote 33 This experience reflects the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's aim of allowing people from all walks of life to share their stories, but it also highlights the inescapably mediated nature of the TRC testimony. By the time someone appeared in a public deposition, he or she had already told their story (perhaps multiple times) to the TRC researchers whose job it was to choose the roughly 10 per cent of testimonies that would feature at the public hearings in a given area. From that point, the winnowing of testimony continued through broadcasting choices, special reports, and selective accounts. This same process, with the violence it does to individual people's experiences, operates within REwind.
With the notable exception of the original television and radio broadcasts, the TRC archive is usually approached as a written record that culminates in the massive seven-volume Final Report produced between 1998 and 2003. In the face of this torrent of written language, Catherine Cole praises REwind for re-introducing the aural qualities of TRC deponents to the public.Footnote 34 Cole's implication that this creates an authentic visceral experience bears closer examination, as even the most emotionally raw moments of archival material are subject to multiple layers of mediation. The most apparent intervening mechanism is the selection of testimonies in terms of both to whom audiences are exposed and how much (or little) of their testimony is heard. The material found in REwind is necessarily only a tiny sliver of the extant evidence, but in a country where race, language, and accent are still powerful social signifiers, Miller's curatorial choices are laden with meaning. His description of the seemingly random collection process reveals the hidden difficulties in selecting representative samples of testimony: ‘I began to get caught or almost snagged by a word or a phrase from the testifier and consequently I would rewind and listen again.’ Hours of testimony are thereby splintered into seconds and then rearranged or put into new interpretive contexts within the cantata. Miller insists that ‘there was no scientific method employed’ in the choice of excerpt, asking: ‘How could one person's pain be more significant than another's?’Footnote 35 Despite Miller's prioritizing sonic content over fleshed-out narratives, he realized his first selection contained only the testimonies of black victims, and ‘even though I wasn't trying to tell the whole story I still had to be careful not to skew it completely’.Footnote 36 Ironically, his solution to this inadvertently racialized initial selection was to choose further testimonies on the basis of the victim's race.
Miller's repeated insistence on the use of archival material reveals his obsession with fidelity to the narratives presented to the TRC. This could be interpreted as a mark of respect for the people whose worst experiences are thereby laid out in front of the audience, but although the aural texture of taped and sung testimony has obvious advantages over a written source, even the most faithful transcription and performance is inescapably incomplete when it comes to non-verbal communication. Missing from the aural record are facial expressions and gestures – though both of these may be partially interpreted in live performance – as well as the reactions of commissioners and other witnesses that influence live interpretation. Less obvious are the ways in which the archive itself mediates our understanding of its contents, particularly when it comes to questions of race, gender, and cultural background. The TRC hearings provided deponents the opportunity to give evidence in their native languages as well as providing simultaneous translation into South Africa's eleven official languages. However, the official archive uses English, which leads Bhakizizwe Peterson to suggest that the dominance of English in the TRC is ‘complicated rather than undermined by the use of translators’ and that this ‘ha[s] often served to undermine rather than validate the testimonies of lower-class people and those who are not proficient in English’.Footnote 37 In REwind this dominance is only partially challenged, for even though the vocalists sing in multiple languages, the tapes often prioritize the sound of the English-language translator over that of the deponent. The multiplicity of voices means that one of REwind’s salient, and occasionally disorienting, characteristics is the presence of overlapping layers of voices and languages. At times this is confined to the testimonial tapes wherein it is possible to hear both the deponent and the translator, but at other moments a taped testimony containing one or more voices is combined with one or more vocalists to produce a dense, interlocking, and multilingual vocal texture.
The tension between the compelling rawness of the material and the layers of interpretation runs throughout the work, particularly in the relationship of the sounds and their visual accompaniment, the latter created by Gerhard and Maja Marx.Footnote 38 Throughout, the English text of the testimonies are projected on a screen that separates the choir from the rest of the stage, often scrolling across or appearing and disappearing in time with the music. From a practical standpoint, this clarifies testimony that might otherwise be too fragmented, emotionally laden, or strongly accented to be immediately grasped by audiences. Nevertheless, it can also be a distracting feature, and tends to elevate the denotative visual and verbal planes of meaning over the connotative realms of the aural and emotive.
Compounding the interpretive complexity are the images – unique to each movement – that underlie the text. For instance, Yvette Hutchison points out the similarity between the images accompanying ‘Edward Juqu’ and ‘Rewind: The Bed’ – respectively, a chair which is slowly stripped of its cover and has its stuffing pulled out, and a neatly made bed which is first rumpled, as though someone invisible is searching it, then stripped of pillow and sheets to reveal a bare mattress. She notes ‘a bed is a very personal place, often related to safety and intimacy, but here it is a mnemonic for the violent deaths and absence of the loved ones’.Footnote 39 Likewise, the chair is a sign for the domesticity of family and its violation mirrors that of the family and of South African society. These mundane subjects contrast so strongly with the extra-mundane events being described that they throw the verbal narrative into even higher relief. This leads Jessica Dubow to suggest that ‘Like the content of a traumatic dream, the literalness of [Marx's] photographic images, their nonsymbolic insistence . . . don't so much align the visual sign to the traumatic event, but question of the nature of what this (curative) alignment might be.’Footnote 40 In this way, Marx and Miller preserve the disjointed nature of REwind’s fractured testimony.
The juxtaposition of dissimilar material is not limited to the aural and the visual realms: jarring combinations of musical and textual fragments are likewise characteristic. Among the strongest contrasts are those found in ‘Hamba Kahle: The Bag’ and ‘Offering of the Birds’. The first of these is a slow, aria-like movement featuring the tenor soloist singing the protest song ‘Hamba Kahle’ (‘Go Well’) in praise of the armed wing of the African National Congress, uMkhonto weSizwe. In between the tenor's long-breathed melodic lines, security policeman Jeffrey Benzien is heard on tape explaining his infamous ‘wet bag’ torture technique; as he describes twisting the bag shut around the neck ‘in that way cutting off the air supply’, a sharp intake of breath is heard.Footnote 41 It is unclear from the context whether or not the gasp we hear is part of the original recording from Benzien's hearing or an added effect, but it nonetheless contributes an aural exclamation point to the experience of listening to methodical descriptions of torture in combination with the song's mournful farewell.
In ‘Offering of the Birds’, Miller creates contrast through musical setting rather than taped testimony. The titular reference is to the Jewish tradition of animal sacrifice as atonement for sin, confirmed by the movement's opening with a quotation from Leviticus 5. The fragment – the only direct biblical quotation in the cantata – outlines how those who were too poor to afford to sacrifice a sheep should bring to the Temple two turtledoves or two pigeons as a sin offering. The aria-like movement for soprano soloist, choir, and strings combines this biblical command with two strikingly different testimonies: the first from infamous security policeman Jacques Hechter and the second from Bayeni Ennie Silinda.Footnote 42 Thematically speaking, these testimonies are linked by references to birds, with Hechter remembering the presence of guinea fowl whilst on an assassination mission and Silinda describing her son, who had been badly burnt by a group of young men on suspicion of being a police informer, as ‘open[ing] his burnt mouth like a bird’.Footnote 43 Two further avian references in the movement are not textual but aural, in the form of bird-call samples of a dove and guinea fowl, and each is used as a scene-setting device that prefaces the selection from Leviticus and Hechter's testimony, respectively.
The movement as a whole falls into a clear three-part structure with slow, sparsely textured sections underscoring both the Levitical quotation and Silinda's testimony and surrounding the faster-paced, restless compilation of Hechter's testimony. Through this textural framing and a shared melodic contour, Miller identifies Silinda's testimony with the biblical sacrifice, while driving string rhythms that generate a feeling of tension and unease underlie Hechter's fragmented testimony. On display in the latter text (sung by the soprano soloist and echoed by the choir) is one of the most troubling facets of the TRC; namely, the policeman's failure, whether real or feigned, to remember all of the details of apartheid atrocities. The ‘white chalky road . . . the guinea fowl, the gate’ all feature in memory, but, embodying Hechter, the soloist maintains that ‘the worse deeds, the killing – those I do not remember’.Footnote 44 The contrast between this and Silinda's searing account of holding her mortally wounded son is an uncomfortable reminder of the limitations of truth. As in ‘Hamba Kahle: The Bag’, ‘Offering of the Birds’ contains discontinuous fragments, adding another layer of intertextuality courtesy of the Levitical quotation. But in this movement, the relationship between Silinda, Hechter, and the sacrificial narrative of Leviticus is left open to interpretation.
Thus far, my discussion of meaning in REwind has implied a performance that is not only vocally dominated but also verbally dominated. Nevertheless, words are not the only locus for interpretation, as demonstrated by the final selection of REwind: entitled ‘The Cry of Nomonde Calata’, it opens as a long-breathed, wordless aria for the female soloists. The title's reference is to an iconic moment from the early days of the TRC when Calata collapsed during her testimony with what commissioner Alex Boraine called a ‘primeval and spontaneous wail from the depths of her soul . . . it was that cry from the soul that transformed the hearings from a litany of suffering and pain to an even deeper level’.Footnote 45 Krog, describing that cry through the words of the (fictional) Professor Kondlo, suggests that this moment ‘is the beginning of the Truth Commission – the signature tune, the definitive moment, the ultimate sound of what the process is about . . . [T]o witness that cry was to witness the destruction of language.’Footnote 46 In REwind, Miller re-embodies that cry and, by doing so, reinterprets it as both a point of deep individual pain and a collective expression of anguish. For the first ninety seconds of the aria the mezzo-soprano and soprano soloists trade widely spaced melodic fragments with the strings that are echoed by a recording of a woman's sobbing cry. Calata's groan thus reverberates through different voices and timbres, increasing in depth and explanatory power as it gains collective voice.
Emerging from the haunting sounds of Calata's cry are fragments of taped testimony that continue the process of incorporating her exclamation – as embodied by the singers – into a wider fabric of testimony. From its origin in sound, this testimony initially focuses on the theme of sight, but it quickly dissolves into a mélange of other fragments that are presented shorn of narrative context, resisting our desire to form them into coherent structures. Out of this confusion, the strings take up a driving rhythm that brings in the lower three soloists on the South African hymn ‘Thula Sizwe’ (‘Be Still, Nation’). Slowly, the music coalesces into a single chord played by the strings and overlaid by a woman's halting declaration: ‘but we are doing this because we believe that if, if people repeat again all – and they are hurt that they had – as they repeat the stories again, as they repeat the stories again, as they repeat the stories again’.Footnote 47 We never hear the end of this statement, but with the return to the concern for telling (and hearing) the stories that have caused so much pain, the cantata comes full circle.
The echoing repetition of the woman's words opens up the question of repetition on a broader scale; namely, what does it mean for anyone – and perhaps especially for Miller as a white South African man – to repeat these stories? On the one hand, there is a danger that such a performance replicates trauma: as reviewer Johann Smith recounts, at least one audience member had to be escorted out of the Baxter Theatre in 2011.Footnote 48 Just as salient is the concern that REwind is implicated in the racial power structures that continue to underpin South African society. From the beginning, Miller has been sensitive to the charge that his work might both symbolize and enact entrenched hierarchies, and he has taken steps to redress the balance of power, from seeking permission from deponents to use their voices to offering them an honorarium and publicly acknowledging them.Footnote 49
In addition to the ethical questions latent in the use of archival texts of personal suffering, some have suggested a form of musical hegemony lurks deep in musical structures. In her discussion of David Fanshawe's African Sanctus, Muller suggests that the entanglement of music and colonialism means that it ‘can only operate as a musical space for the display of personalized souvenirs’ or ‘as a vehicle of idealized reflection’.Footnote 50 In his review for South Africa's Mail and Guardian, Percy Zvomuya nods to the Western musical dominance within REwind by calling it ‘a sort of postmodern Wagnerian opera minus the libretto’ and a ‘postmodern mélange’ of African and European elements.Footnote 51 This raises important questions of the cultural force of Western art music. As a white man occupying a privileged societal position in South Africa and trained in European musical styles, is Miller – to borrow Kofi Agawu's analogy – simply using local ‘dress’ when he incorporates African musics?
Miller objects to the accusation on the grounds that even if his heritage implicates him in apartheid, he is nonetheless a local. In one of his frequent first-person plural assessments, he claims, ‘this is part of our public domain, our oral history’.Footnote 52 Although Miller's ethical commitment to his work is notable, a sense of discomfort nonetheless lingers. Both Mbembe and Peterson launch blistering attacks on any use of the TRC archive as a talisman or a strategy of containment, with the former claiming ‘the talisman softens the anger, shame, guilt, or resentment which the archive tends, if not to incite, then at least to maintain . . . the desire for revenge is removed just as the duty of repentance, justice and reparation is withdrawn’.Footnote 53 Yet, REwind’s narrative does not offer easy resolution: the message of the penultimate movement ‘Tshwarelo’ (‘Forgiveness’) is interrupted by Andrew van Wyk proclaiming, ‘I am not able to forgive a faceless person.’ Likewise, in an interview with Liza Key given after the cantata's first performance, Nomonde Calata muses that ‘maybe because of being a human being [forgiveness] will happen by itself in my heart, but I'm still feeling that I have been robbed of my husband by people who just didn't care at that moment’.Footnote 54 As Lindelwa Dalamba warns, music ‘may not be as comfortingly conciliatory as guardians of the national biography would wish’Footnote 55 and simple answers are accordingly difficult to come by in a musical work, which, like South Africa itself, must develop a moral space that includes victim and perpetrator alike.
The discontinuous nature of REwind thus operates on multiple levels: within individual testimonies as they are broken apart; between incongruous juxtapositions of different types of testimony; in the interaction of aural and visual realms; and in the relationship between sound, speech, and song. REwind thus distinguishes itself from the monolithic nature of the official TRC archive. It is a collection of partial stories, half-heard through the static of time. In this, it follows the proclamation of South African poet Ingrid de Kok:
Nobody believes that the TRC will or can produce the full ‘truth’, in all its detail, for all time. It is in the multiplicity of partial versions and experiences, composed and recomposed within sight of each other, that truth ‘as a thing of this world’, in Foucault's phrase, will emerge. In this mobile current individuals and communities will make and remake their meanings.Footnote 56
We now turn to the question of how REwind’s audience is to ‘make and remake’ its meaning in contemporary South Africa and beyond.
Living memorials
One of the most common questions the TRC commissioners asked was what the deponents hoped the Commission would do for them. Miller includes Eunice Miya's response in ‘Rewind: A Memorial’: lamenting the lack of memorial services honouring her son immediately after his murder, Miya asks for ‘something . . . a crèche or a building or a school’ to be named for the Gugulethu Seven. In this way, the memory of these victims of apartheid could be preserved for the nation as well as for their families. Of course, not all means of remembering require edifices or the re-naming of streets. In South Africa, as in other post-conflict areas, memory is embodied in what former TRC commissioner Albie Sachs calls ‘living memorials of reconstruction’, such as the notorious Robben Island Prison, which is open for public tours given by former inmates. Sachs’ argument in favour of living memorials is based on his belief that ‘the liveliest, the most important memorial is not out there; it is in our heads, conveyed through words and images, songs, and gestures’.Footnote 57 By performing extracts from the TRC archive, Miller creates in REwind a living memorial that preserves more than just the names of those who died: it embodies the memories of its participants and deponents through body, language, and sound.
The interest in bringing the record of the TRC into contemporary consciousness is not unique to Miller and REwind: South African artists have created works that touch on the truth and reconciliation process for the theatre (Ubu and the Truth Commission, The Story I Am About to Tell, Truth in Translation), film screen (Long Night's Journey into the Day, Forgiveness, Nothing but the Truth), and opera stage (Winnie), amongst other media. Each of these media brings out different aspects, but Cole asserts that ‘to receive TRC testimony through the medium of music – which so potently registers emotions, transcends language, and mitigates the often-repellent nature of the stories of atrocity by refracting them through the realm of the aesthetic – can foster and cultivate collective memory in unique and complicated ways’.Footnote 58 Her claim for music's transcultural properties may be overstated, but it nonetheless establishes music as a distinctive means of allowing audiences to come to grips with the overwhelming nature of the events REwind describes.
Implicit in these is the drive to communicate something of the traumatic experience to an external collective; hence, Rachel Bennett suggests that the artistic staging of traumatic histories ‘offer[s] an opportunity, by translating experience . . . for the audiences to become witnesses’.Footnote 59 This resonates with Yvette Hutchison's claim, in her examination of artistic representations of the TRC, that ‘the move from a theatrical to a musical engagement with the TRC is significant, because it represents a shift from the individual speaking voice to multiple singing voices, exploring dialogue between individual soloists and the choir, and thus offering us ways of experiencing layers of witnessing and engaging with memory, both from the Commission and our own repertoires’.Footnote 60 Even though the idea of witness-creation is not an explicit aim of REwind, with the assistance of the historical archive Miller participates in the continual temporalizing of TRC testimony and thereby invokes archival memories as breathing, sounding experiences for new audiences. His fragmented, at times chaotic, take on the TRC hearings disrupts the singular narrative embedded in the historical framing of the TRC archive. Thus, promotional material for REwind’s run at London's Southbank Centre emphasizes its transitional stance, proclaiming: ‘REwind is a work with no real parallel: both an extraordinary piece of music and digital art and a historical document with tremendous topical relevance.’Footnote 61 The opposition of art and history made explicit here demands that audiences continually question whose vision of the TRC is being presented.
Although the widespread desire for memorialization of apartheid victims on the part of their family members is understandable, it relies on an engagement with the past that seems to conflict with views amongst the wider South African population. Cole cites the results of the 2006 South African Reconciliation Barometer in which 80.6 per cent of the 3,500 respondents agreed with the statement ‘I want to forget about the past and get on with my life’ as evidence that the recent past is something many South Africans want to leave behind.Footnote 62 This echoes the question a radio journalist put to Miller just before REwind’s 2006 premiere of why so many artists were obsessed with the ‘bad old days of apartheid’: ‘shouldn't we start fast-forwarding instead?’Footnote 63
One component in this impatience with retrospection may be the relative youth of South Africa's population. Between 2000 and 2001, when James Gibson conducted his large-scale survey of South African public opinions about reconciliation, 40 per cent of the black population was under thirty, meaning that at that time ‘upward of one-half of the black population in South Africa most likely [had] never experienced apartheid directly, at least not as adults, the age when the full force of apartheid was felt’.Footnote 64 This trend has accelerated: in the 2011 census, the median age for a black South African was a mere twenty-one, and more than three-quarters of the black population (and two-thirds of the overall population) were under the age of eighteen when the laws undergirding apartheid were dismantled. Once again, this has a surprising corollary for music performance: Miller has spoken more than once about the shock of having to explain the context of REwind to the ‘born frees’ – choristers and musicians too young to have listened to TRC testimony in its original form.Footnote 65 The slippage between memories of individual experience and the reiteration of memories as collective history is a crucial point in a society. As Cole wrote in 2009, ‘there will come a turning point in South African history when collective memory will no longer be so informed by living witnesses of the apartheid past’;Footnote 66 that time is coming soon.
Throughout its seventy minutes, REwind straddles the boundaries of multiple genres. Its combination of music, dance, pre-recorded material, and visual art draws on traditions from toyi-toyi to isicathamiya to modern theatrical praxis and the compositions of Philip Glass.Footnote 67 REwind’s complexity makes applying Taylor's terms of archive and repertoire to it difficult. In a literal sense, REwind preserves the aural traces of the TRC through the use of taped testimony, but as I have already argued, this can be seen as a translation of the archive into a different medium rather than an embodied activity. In contrast, the enactment of testimony through the vocalists’ role-playing initially seems closer to the idea of the repertoire, but the very individuality of testimony divides even its re-embodiment on REwind’s stage from Taylor's transmission of collective cultural memory. Hutchison offers a third option when she draws on Taylor's language to suggest that Miller's use of traditional African musical styles – whether hymns, protest songs, or toyi-toyi – ‘trigger memories that individuals and groups carry within their bodies . . . Miller's cantata draws on these repertoires, but also makes them strange and new through the multiple layering of the performance’.Footnote 68 I suggest that this difficulty in mapping ideas about the archive and the repertoire onto REwind stem not from inherent difficulties within the concepts but from the way in which REwind confuses the categories of archive and repertoire. After all, REwind performs the archives, thereby moving archival elements into the realm of the repertoire.Footnote 69 Once there, the cultural memories thus embodied can be transmitted to and internalized by new audiences, thereby preparing for a time when apartheid's original witnesses are no longer present.
Conclusion
Mbembe suggests that ‘the final destination of the archive is therefore always situated outside its own materiality, in the story it makes possible’.Footnote 70 Although REwind is far from the last word on the TRC, it nonetheless confronts the legacy of apartheid in South Africa by taking archival material from the TRC in the form of recordings and testimony and re-embodying and re-vocalizing them onstage. This reintroduces archival material to the public consciousness with a sense of immediacy and emotive communication that the physical archive itself lacks. In this way it creates a bridge between the subset of listeners for whom the material is already part of their collective remembered experience, and younger members of society who lack direct knowledge of the TRC or the apartheid past it chronicles. For both groups, REwind re-inscribes the experiences of TRC testifiers as part of a collective history, thereby fulfilling what James Young suggests is a key function of public monuments: ‘not solely to displace memory and remake it in one's image: [but] also to invite the collaboration of the community in acts of remembrance’.Footnote 71
This collaborative aspect is perhaps why REwind has been understood not only as a means of reconciling South Africans to their collective history, but also as an important evocation of the horrors of racial violence for other audiences. Typical of those who enthusiastically embrace REwind is Cole, who writes that ‘what Miller's REwind cantata suggests is the potential and potency of the TRC's performative archive and repertoire to process shards from the past in ways that are productive, complex, and relevant to the present’.Footnote 72 South African journalist Anthea Buys offers a more restrained outlook: although she finds REwind moving, the piece reminds us that ‘the sheer enormity of the suffering caused under apartheid could never be adequately soothed by any artwork, piece of writing and perhaps even by . . . the TRC hearings’.Footnote 73 Yet, the possibility for REwind to ‘perform its own kind of restorative justice [as] the tonal and devotional features [of the TRC hearings] that were inevitably silenced . . . [are] once again presented for public consumption’Footnote 74 is a worthy goal even as it seems ever more elusive. Public consumption of REwind remains intermittent: in a lecture delivered at the University of the Free State in April 2015, Miller admitted that he has no plans to stage a revival.Footnote 75 Experiencing REwind as lived repertoire will require an increased appetite and funding for artistic endeavours either in South Africa or abroad. Until then, one is left with only a glimpse of the possibilities that a performance might reveal: ‘the ghosts, the tropes, the scenarios that structure our individual and collective life’.Footnote 76 The traces of REwind as performance thereby preserved suggest that this archive of the archive is potentially a powerful tool for wider engagement with South Africa's past.
The incorporation of fragmented testimony into musical works might have a relatively compact history, but compositions such as Different Trains have proven to be the progenitors of a significant tradition. Interactions with archival sounds continue to be a salient part of the compositional sound world, particularly in the field of commemorative musical works. Here, the status of musical performances as mnemonic cultural objects lends still greater urgency to the narratives such a combination of archival and repertory forms of knowledge creates. In the context of tragic pasts, whether in South Africa or elsewhere, performing the archives reinterprets the experiences and memories of others for new audiences. By offering a means of enacting the archive in performance, living memorials such as REwind allow for a greater variety of narratives to be heard and, perhaps, acknowledged.
