Exzentrische Hermeneutik und die Artikulation von Geschichte im kolonialen Klangarchiv
- Authors: Fourie, William
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/484372 , vital:78900 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.14361/zfmw-2024-160208"
- Description: Die Geschichte der Lautarchive ist eng mit dem Kolonialismus verbunden. Die frühesten Lautarchive wurden in Europa vor dem Hintergrund kon-servatorischer Ängste, wie sie typisch sind für eine Anthropologie, die mit dem Aussterben von Völkern rechnet, zu Forschungszwecken eingerichtet und wurden als laborähnliche Institutionen schnell Stützen europäischer Kolonialmissionen.
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No grief without joy
- Authors: Fourie, William
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/484393 , vital:78902 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298223000785"
- Description: How does grief unfold and refold after the death of a loved one? How does it bend and diffract through the prism of loss? What are the possibilities of feeling or even love in the wake of bereavement? These questions linger as I listen to Lise Morrison's No grief without joy, released in July 2023 on Sawyer Editions. The debut portrait album comprises five works written between 2016 and 2019 in a time of feverish artistic growth while she was studying composition at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. Yet, as Morrison writes in the liner notes, this was also a ‘period that echoes, in part, the grief after [her] mother's passing at the end of 2015’.
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Difference in Contact: Early Music, Colonialism and the Archive
- Authors: Fourie, William , Haggett, George K
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/484315 , vital:78895 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2022.18"
- Description: Towards the middle of 2021, the world felt like a shattered place. The fatigue of a little more than a year of social distancing was perhaps at its most acute and resuming a more immediate form of academic exchange seemed all but impossible. It was during this time that we were approached by this Journal’s then newly appointed reviews editor, Amanda Hsieh, to co-author a review article. It was an intriguing request for us both: review articles in the humanities are seldom co-authored and even more seldom by two authors with diverging backgrounds and research interests. George’s work focuses on medievalism and queer theory in contemporary opera, while William works on issues of modernism in post-apartheid South Africa. George is currently at the University of Oxford and William is at Rhodes University in the rural Eastern Cape province of South Africa. We had not written together before and neither of us had ever imagined working together. What were we to make of this request, which would require the reconciliation of so many differences, at a time when establishing the social closeness of thinking together seemed unfathomable?
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Xavier Livermon, Kwaito Bodies: Remastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa
- Authors: Fourie, William
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/484383 , vital:78901 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.7203"
- Description: Bodies in motion, bodies in space, performing bodies, bodies enunciating a new political order: these are the subjects thrown into sharp relief in Xavier Livermon’s Kwaito Bodies: Mastering Space and Subjectivity in Post-Apartheid South Africa. An important contribution in a time when the Black body has (re)gained significant attention across the world, the book provides a visceral investigation into Black youth culture in postapartheid South Africa. In particular, it focuses on kwaito, a genre of music which came to define the early post-apartheid cultural imaginary, as a mediator of the Black body and draws on fifteen years of immersive ethnographic research in the country.
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Morton Feldman-Morton Feldman, Morton Feldman Piano. Philip Thomas
- Authors: Fourie, William
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/484405 , vital:78903 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298220000741"
- Description: ‘The scale of what is actually being represented, whether it be of the whole or of the part, is a phenomenon unto itself.’ Feldman’s words from his famous 1981 essay, ‘Crippled Symmetry’, echoed in my ears as I sat down to listen to Philip Thomas’s monumental new record of the composer’s piano music. It spans over four decades of the composer’s singular creative engagement with the instrument and has a total run-time of nearly six hours. The five-disc box set also contains a rich 52-page essay on Feldman’s piano music, which broaches a wide range of issues ranging from abstract, interpretative ideas regarding touch and decay to more practical discussions around notation.
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Review Tamusuza, Justinian and Blake, Michael (2020). Too Late for the Prayers
- Authors: Fourie, William
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/484420 , vital:78904 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.2989/18121004.2021.2013009"
- Description: In his contribution to The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, Martin Scherzinger (2004:611) writes that African art music of the 1980s and 1990s reclaimed a 'stake in the making of the world's musical history' by recentring the 'complex intercultural negotiations of sound and meaning' eschewed in Western-centred narratives of music. To a certain extent, this still holds true. Much of the scholarship on African music, and especially on the type of intercultural art music to which Scherzinger refers, has emphasised these negotiations in terms of the larger geopolitical and historical frameworks of colonialism (Agawu 2011) and apartheid (Fourie 2019). What gets lost in these larger framings, however, are the smaller, more mundane negotiations of which world histories are aggregates. The new album, Too Late for the Prayers, by the Ugandan composer Justinian Tamusuza and South African Michael Blake presents us with a powerful reason to look to these minor narratives. The composers offer, through this album, an alternative model for the complex intercultural negotiations of African art music which foregrounds not transnational and state apparatuses, but the moving interpersonal exchanges occasioned by friendship.
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Spectral Resistance in Andile Khumalo's Bells Die Out
- Authors: Fourie, William
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/484438 , vital:78906 , xlink:href="10.1353/pnm.2021.0013"
- Description: “It was remarked wittily . . . that the black South African award-winner in the “Serious” Music genre had written Central European intellectual music, while one of the white South African award-winners in the Jazz/Popular Music genre had written Zimbabwean folk-music!”—Mzilikazi Khumalo. Perhaps a witticism but certainly a damning statement on the racialized cultural legacy of the apartheid regime, this remark was made in 2002 when composer Andile Khumalo won a number of awards at the Southern African Music Rights Organization’s Overseas Scholarship Competition. The irony offered by the commentator’s locution has to do with the reversal of expectations: a decade after the end of the apartheid regime, under which such an occurrence would have been impossible, it is still striking that a black composer could win prizes for writing Western art music. During the preceding half-century, after all, this music was seen as the “bounteous heritage of the white people,” and artificial racial-cultural demarcations attempted to prohibit composing across the “racial line.” African music was for Africans, the cultural ideology of separate development decreed, and European music was for whites.
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