Several South African art music composers during the late apartheid period (1980-1994) turned to an “Africanist” idiom, prompting charged political debates and institutional power struggles. While “reconciliatory” composers like Kevin Volans were ostracized, establishment composers who employed an exoticist “new Africanism” saw continued support from the apartheid state while securing the prestige of art music for the post-apartheid era. The imposition of sanctions on South African in the 1980s led to a significant reduction in institutional support for art music. While the complicity of individual composers in apartheid is a complex issue, art music institutions upheld the Eurocentrism and segregation of apartheid cultural policy. Volans’s African Paraphrases, a series of compositions written between 1980 and 1986 and based on his study of Zulu and Swazi royal music, directly challenged apartheid doctrine by validating black African music, leading to rejection from the South African music establishment. Stefans Grové’s “Music from Africa” series, a series of more than 30 works starting with Sonata on African Motives (1984-85), takes a more conservative approach, keeping characteristics of European modernism at the forefront. Hans Roosenschoon’s Timbala represents an attempt at a cross-cultural collaboration with a group of Chopi musicians, but it too embodies the paternalistic attitude of apartheid ideology by sidelining the collaborators in favor of the composer. Grové, Roosenschoon, and others supported by South African music institutions did not embrace the idealism found in contemporary popular music; instead they embraced a pragmatic “Africanist” aesthetic to secure their prestige.

Works: Kevin Volans: Mbira (51); Hans Roosenschoon: Makietie (56), Timbala (58)

Sources: Traditional, transcribed by Andrew Tracey: Nyamaropa (51); Traditional: Uqongqothwane (56), Frère Jacques (58)

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Matthew Van Vleet