Composition portfolio
- Authors: Cooper, Corinne Jane
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Xhosa (African people) -- Music , Musical bow -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape , Sound recordings in ethnomusicology -- South Africa , Dywili, Nofinishi. The bow project , Music -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MMus
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/168338 , vital:41568
- Description: In June 2014, I was introduced to Christine Dixie by a film maker I had worked with on a previous project. Christine was looking for a composer who could arrange a soundtrack around musical themes that she had commissioned from Jared Lang to accompany her video installation To Be King (Dixie 2014. Jared composed five different melodies that I wove into a palette of sounds that comprised the soundtrack. To Be King was exhibited at the National Arts Festival in 2014 as part of the Main Festival. It moved to Cape Town in 2015 and 2017, to Venice and London in 2017, and to Lithuania in 2018. In 2017, Christine approached me to compose a soundtrack for a different work, based again on seventeenth century Spanish artist, Velázquez’ painting ‘Las Meninas’ (1656), but this time, using a series of sculptures representing the different figures in the painting, a reinterpretation with strong Eastern Cape (South Africa) themes and associations. Christine proposed reimagining the figures in the painting by clothing them in Shweshwe 1 material and placing African masks on each of them, masks that she had sought out during her travels around Africa. The use of Shweshwe material, ties the figures very closely to the Eastern Cape, and in particular, close to where I grew up in Alice, just 60 kilometres away from where it is manufactured in King William’s Town. Alice is important in the unfolding of this portfolio as Ntsikana, purportedly the first Xhosa person to be converted to Christianity and a prophet, lived in Peddie (which is about 70 kilometers from Grahamstown and Rhodes University) and Gqora, near the Kat River District which is located in the Amathola District near Alice. (Kumalo 2015, p.26). Alice is steeped in history, and is the town where Lovedale Mission Station was founded in 1824 and later, the Lovedale Press in 1861. Therefore, this project felt close to my roots, hence this interaction between Western and African cultures is very relevant to my world view and has impacted on my scoring of this music. I was initially challenged by the idea that the project would require a deeper understanding of traditional Xhosa music and while I had been exposed to Xhosa culture while growing up in Alice, my formative years were largely shaped by the culture of my Christian parents who immigrated to South Africa from England during the 1960s. During the first decade of the twentieth century, in my capacity as a sound engineer, I was tasked with recording and mastering a double CD called The Bow Project. Various South African composers were invited to transcribe and paraphrase or reimagine traditional Xhosa bow music for the classical string quartet. The uhadi songs 2 of Nofinishi Dywili formed the basis for many of these intercultural explorations, and I recorded and mastered the string quartets as well as 12 individual recordings of Dywili’s music. I spent many hours listening to Dywili’s recordings while I mastered them, but though I was very familiar with how they sounded, I realised, as I started compiling this portfolio, that I was not familiar with their notation and rhythmic structures. I approach sound engineering with a very different ear and sonic perspective to that of a composer. To learn more about uhadi bow music I visited the International Library of African Music (ILAM) which is housed by Rhodes University in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape. Here I consulted with sound engineer and African music specialist, Elijah Madiba, on Xhosa instruments and traditional music-making. With Madiba’s assistance I listened carefully to different bow performances and examined a variety of instruments. After this introduction I loaned a selection of recordings from the ILAM collection and listened to them as carefully as I could. Every time I listened, I seemed to hear something different, both melodically and rhythmically. To gain a deeper understanding of how this music was created I decided to transcribe some of the songs. Following a steep learning curve I completed transcriptions of two songs with my transcriptions including a wealth of vocal parts. As my ears grew accustomed to the sound world I heard additional counter melodies. Notating the rhythms using staff notation was challenging, as this music is created according to a different format, but I am familiar with staff notation and if I was going to use this material while composing then I needed to remain with that which was familiar. I finally settled on notating with shifting time signatures and the first song is scored in bars of 3/4, 4/4, and 2/4 while the other song uses 3/4, 2/4. It was a very worthwhile exercise and after completion I humbly set about composing the eleven pieces that would musically express Dixie’s new work: Worlding the White Spirit Maiden (2019).
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
- Authors: Cooper, Corinne Jane
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Xhosa (African people) -- Music , Musical bow -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape , Sound recordings in ethnomusicology -- South Africa , Dywili, Nofinishi. The bow project , Music -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MMus
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/168338 , vital:41568
- Description: In June 2014, I was introduced to Christine Dixie by a film maker I had worked with on a previous project. Christine was looking for a composer who could arrange a soundtrack around musical themes that she had commissioned from Jared Lang to accompany her video installation To Be King (Dixie 2014. Jared composed five different melodies that I wove into a palette of sounds that comprised the soundtrack. To Be King was exhibited at the National Arts Festival in 2014 as part of the Main Festival. It moved to Cape Town in 2015 and 2017, to Venice and London in 2017, and to Lithuania in 2018. In 2017, Christine approached me to compose a soundtrack for a different work, based again on seventeenth century Spanish artist, Velázquez’ painting ‘Las Meninas’ (1656), but this time, using a series of sculptures representing the different figures in the painting, a reinterpretation with strong Eastern Cape (South Africa) themes and associations. Christine proposed reimagining the figures in the painting by clothing them in Shweshwe 1 material and placing African masks on each of them, masks that she had sought out during her travels around Africa. The use of Shweshwe material, ties the figures very closely to the Eastern Cape, and in particular, close to where I grew up in Alice, just 60 kilometres away from where it is manufactured in King William’s Town. Alice is important in the unfolding of this portfolio as Ntsikana, purportedly the first Xhosa person to be converted to Christianity and a prophet, lived in Peddie (which is about 70 kilometers from Grahamstown and Rhodes University) and Gqora, near the Kat River District which is located in the Amathola District near Alice. (Kumalo 2015, p.26). Alice is steeped in history, and is the town where Lovedale Mission Station was founded in 1824 and later, the Lovedale Press in 1861. Therefore, this project felt close to my roots, hence this interaction between Western and African cultures is very relevant to my world view and has impacted on my scoring of this music. I was initially challenged by the idea that the project would require a deeper understanding of traditional Xhosa music and while I had been exposed to Xhosa culture while growing up in Alice, my formative years were largely shaped by the culture of my Christian parents who immigrated to South Africa from England during the 1960s. During the first decade of the twentieth century, in my capacity as a sound engineer, I was tasked with recording and mastering a double CD called The Bow Project. Various South African composers were invited to transcribe and paraphrase or reimagine traditional Xhosa bow music for the classical string quartet. The uhadi songs 2 of Nofinishi Dywili formed the basis for many of these intercultural explorations, and I recorded and mastered the string quartets as well as 12 individual recordings of Dywili’s music. I spent many hours listening to Dywili’s recordings while I mastered them, but though I was very familiar with how they sounded, I realised, as I started compiling this portfolio, that I was not familiar with their notation and rhythmic structures. I approach sound engineering with a very different ear and sonic perspective to that of a composer. To learn more about uhadi bow music I visited the International Library of African Music (ILAM) which is housed by Rhodes University in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape. Here I consulted with sound engineer and African music specialist, Elijah Madiba, on Xhosa instruments and traditional music-making. With Madiba’s assistance I listened carefully to different bow performances and examined a variety of instruments. After this introduction I loaned a selection of recordings from the ILAM collection and listened to them as carefully as I could. Every time I listened, I seemed to hear something different, both melodically and rhythmically. To gain a deeper understanding of how this music was created I decided to transcribe some of the songs. Following a steep learning curve I completed transcriptions of two songs with my transcriptions including a wealth of vocal parts. As my ears grew accustomed to the sound world I heard additional counter melodies. Notating the rhythms using staff notation was challenging, as this music is created according to a different format, but I am familiar with staff notation and if I was going to use this material while composing then I needed to remain with that which was familiar. I finally settled on notating with shifting time signatures and the first song is scored in bars of 3/4, 4/4, and 2/4 while the other song uses 3/4, 2/4. It was a very worthwhile exercise and after completion I humbly set about composing the eleven pieces that would musically express Dixie’s new work: Worlding the White Spirit Maiden (2019).
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Deconstructing “the South African jazz feel”: roots, rhythms and features of South African jazz
- Authors: Thorpe, Christopher John
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Jazz -- History and criticism , Jazz -- African influences , Jazz -- Africa --History and criticism , Jazz -- South Africa --History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MMus
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/76649 , vital:30612
- Description: South African jazz has established itself as a distinct and influential genre in modern popular music that merges musical elements from traditional South African musics with influences from U.S.-American jazz. Formed during a time of extreme social inequality in a divided country, South African jazz became the soundtrack of the struggle against social injustice and racial oppression, and was brought to international attention by artists such as Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, and Abdullah Ibrahim who gave poignant musical expression to the hardships of the time. South African jazz is celebrated for its unique sound, original catalogue and all-important “feel”. To many listeners, performers and musicologists, it is this concept of feel that makes South African jazz so distinctive and inimitable. To date, however, much of the scholarly and popular literature on South African jazz has centred on the historical, social and political aspects of the music, with less attention given to close musical-textual analysis. A few studies have considered the melodic and harmonic language of iconic saxophonists and bass players but there are – to date – no close studies of rhythm and feel in South African jazz. Beginning to address this gap in the literature, this study uncovers some of the elements that constitute the South African jazz feel through close rhythmic and more general musical analyses of a selection of South African jazz recordings.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
- Authors: Thorpe, Christopher John
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Jazz -- History and criticism , Jazz -- African influences , Jazz -- Africa --History and criticism , Jazz -- South Africa --History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MMus
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/76649 , vital:30612
- Description: South African jazz has established itself as a distinct and influential genre in modern popular music that merges musical elements from traditional South African musics with influences from U.S.-American jazz. Formed during a time of extreme social inequality in a divided country, South African jazz became the soundtrack of the struggle against social injustice and racial oppression, and was brought to international attention by artists such as Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, and Abdullah Ibrahim who gave poignant musical expression to the hardships of the time. South African jazz is celebrated for its unique sound, original catalogue and all-important “feel”. To many listeners, performers and musicologists, it is this concept of feel that makes South African jazz so distinctive and inimitable. To date, however, much of the scholarly and popular literature on South African jazz has centred on the historical, social and political aspects of the music, with less attention given to close musical-textual analysis. A few studies have considered the melodic and harmonic language of iconic saxophonists and bass players but there are – to date – no close studies of rhythm and feel in South African jazz. Beginning to address this gap in the literature, this study uncovers some of the elements that constitute the South African jazz feel through close rhythmic and more general musical analyses of a selection of South African jazz recordings.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Music listening and its cognitive effect on learning
- Authors: Freer, Angela Elizabeth
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Music -- Psychological aspects , Music therapy Cognitive learning Music appreciation
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MMus
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10948/39807 , vital:35462
- Description: This experimental study focuses on the activity of music-listening and its effect on students’ learning and memory. This is particularly relevant today given the ‘sound-consuming culture’ which results from advanced multimedia technologies. To determine music-listening’s effect on students, we examined the cognitive effect that music-listening had on their memory and learning. A non-probability convenience sampling technique was employed to recruit a limited population of 227 male and female participants from three Port Elizabeth high schools between the Grades of 8 and 9. A ‘two group design’ was used with 189 students (54 males; 123 females) completing a word-recall test and reading comprehension test. During the first round of testing all participants completed both tests under the first music treatment condition: silence. During the second round of testing, a second set of tests was provided with the experimental group placed under a treatment condition of self-selected background music while the control group remained under the condition of silence. Independent sample t-tests were used to analyse the data of this study. The results showed that listening to self-selected background music had a negative cognitive effect on students’ memory and learning during the completion of the word-recall tests. However, no significant effect was found in students’ ability to complete a reading comprehension. In addition, this study also showed that female students seemed to have significant negative cognitive effect during the word-recall test. The findings of this study therefore showed that, depending on the task, word-recall tests (but not reading comprehension tests) were cognitively affected by music-listening.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
- Authors: Freer, Angela Elizabeth
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Music -- Psychological aspects , Music therapy Cognitive learning Music appreciation
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MMus
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10948/39807 , vital:35462
- Description: This experimental study focuses on the activity of music-listening and its effect on students’ learning and memory. This is particularly relevant today given the ‘sound-consuming culture’ which results from advanced multimedia technologies. To determine music-listening’s effect on students, we examined the cognitive effect that music-listening had on their memory and learning. A non-probability convenience sampling technique was employed to recruit a limited population of 227 male and female participants from three Port Elizabeth high schools between the Grades of 8 and 9. A ‘two group design’ was used with 189 students (54 males; 123 females) completing a word-recall test and reading comprehension test. During the first round of testing all participants completed both tests under the first music treatment condition: silence. During the second round of testing, a second set of tests was provided with the experimental group placed under a treatment condition of self-selected background music while the control group remained under the condition of silence. Independent sample t-tests were used to analyse the data of this study. The results showed that listening to self-selected background music had a negative cognitive effect on students’ memory and learning during the completion of the word-recall tests. However, no significant effect was found in students’ ability to complete a reading comprehension. In addition, this study also showed that female students seemed to have significant negative cognitive effect during the word-recall test. The findings of this study therefore showed that, depending on the task, word-recall tests (but not reading comprehension tests) were cognitively affected by music-listening.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Repatriating Xhosa music recordings archived at the International Library of African Music (ILAM) and reviving interest in traditional Xhosa music among the youth in Grahamstown
- Authors: Madiba, Elijah Moleseng
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: International Library of African Music , Xhosa (African people) -- Music , Sound recordings in ethnomusicology -- South Africa , Ethnomusicology -- South Africa -- Makhanda , Cultural property -- Repatriation -- South Africa -- Makhanda , Rap musicians -- South Africa -- Makhanda
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MMus
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/76599 , vital:30611
- Description: This research looks at the feasibility of using repatriation as a tool for the revitalisation of indigenous music within a contemporary South African musical context. Using tracks from the International Library of African Music (ILAM), this investigation presents isiXhosa traditional and indigenous music to a group of musicians from a hip-hop background that would never have had access to this type of music before. The thesis then traces their creative use of the music within their own genres. Speaking to the legacy of the Hugh Tracey collection at ILAM and criticisms that have surfaced, this research also attempts to validate the efforts made by Hugh Tracey in collecting and documenting African music. Themes ranging from understanding the term “tradition” are addressed, as well as other technical terms in the vernacular while also exploring and analysing the results of the repatriation project. Practical issues regarding the sampling of indigenous music were interrogated carefully due to the fact that the complexity of African music was foreign to most of the participants. Their familiarity with the music, or lack thereof, either motivated or ended the musicians’ participation in the research project. An in-depth analysis of the results of the musicians’ interaction with the music is presented where this study finds, at the heart of this research, that the musicians performed as agents who easily took to revitalising the music.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
- Authors: Madiba, Elijah Moleseng
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: International Library of African Music , Xhosa (African people) -- Music , Sound recordings in ethnomusicology -- South Africa , Ethnomusicology -- South Africa -- Makhanda , Cultural property -- Repatriation -- South Africa -- Makhanda , Rap musicians -- South Africa -- Makhanda
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MMus
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/76599 , vital:30611
- Description: This research looks at the feasibility of using repatriation as a tool for the revitalisation of indigenous music within a contemporary South African musical context. Using tracks from the International Library of African Music (ILAM), this investigation presents isiXhosa traditional and indigenous music to a group of musicians from a hip-hop background that would never have had access to this type of music before. The thesis then traces their creative use of the music within their own genres. Speaking to the legacy of the Hugh Tracey collection at ILAM and criticisms that have surfaced, this research also attempts to validate the efforts made by Hugh Tracey in collecting and documenting African music. Themes ranging from understanding the term “tradition” are addressed, as well as other technical terms in the vernacular while also exploring and analysing the results of the repatriation project. Practical issues regarding the sampling of indigenous music were interrogated carefully due to the fact that the complexity of African music was foreign to most of the participants. Their familiarity with the music, or lack thereof, either motivated or ended the musicians’ participation in the research project. An in-depth analysis of the results of the musicians’ interaction with the music is presented where this study finds, at the heart of this research, that the musicians performed as agents who easily took to revitalising the music.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
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