MADNESS, CREATIVITY AND THE MUSICAL IMAGINATION

BY

STEPHANUS MULLER

This paper is provided on the express condition that it can only be used for academic purposes with proper acknowledgment of the author and source. Copyright © Stephanus Muller, 2002 http://www.puk.ac.za/music/isam/

Inligtingsentrum vir Information Centre for Suider-Afrikaanse Musiek ISAM Southern African Music Madness, Creativity and the Musical Imagination

BY STEPHANUS MULLER

Paper delivered at the New Music Indaba of the Grahamstown National Arts Festival in honour of the eightieth birthdays of South African composers Stefans Grové and Hubert du Plessis, 2 June 2002.

The practice of grouping creative artists together in “schools” or groups is a generalizing one with all the dangers and benefits of generalization inherent in it. On the one hand, such generalization could smooth over important aesthetic and personal differences, implying a degree of shared meaning between disparate things and the absence of differences of degree or nuances. On the other hand, generalization of some kind is necessary if history is to be more than a mosaic of individual and unconnected loose strands, the one as important as the other and all of them continuing and eventually fizzling out in total and utterly incomprehensible isolation. The important point to make, is that this kind of generalization, with all its pitfalls and benefits, is more or less the result of one or more arbitrary decisions and prioritisations. Thus you have come to listen to a lecture on two composers, grouped together for the purposes of this lecture on the basis that firstly, they are composers and second, that they were both born, give or take a few weeks, exactly eighty years ago in different parts of South Africa. For the organizers of the New Music Indaba, these were the relevant arbitrary reasons for asking me to pay homage to Hubert du Plessis and Stefans Grové. But the historical reality is that these two names have for a very long time co-existed in a certain kind of musicological discourse on South African music for a variety of other, and perhaps less innocent, reasons. Professor William Henry Bell (1873-1946) taught both these composers as young men, and made the remark to Hubert du Plessis that “the future of South African music lies in the hands of you three Afrikaner boys.”1 He was including Arnold van Wyk, who died in 1983, in a triumvirate of pioneer white, male South African, or more to the ethnic point, Afrikaner composers. Composer Rosa Nepgen, who married Dertiger poet W.E.G. Louw whom she met when he was still lecturing here in Grahamstown, subsequently called the three men “the Bell boys,” herewith illustrating the pitfalls of generalization, as Van Wyk, of course, never had any lessons with Bell. Nevertheless, remarks such as these, anecdotes like Du Plessis’ remark attributed to Bell, as well as various photographs taken of the three composers during the late forties and early fifties,

1 Anecdote told by Hubert du Plessis to the author, 27 May 2001.

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 1 Madness, Creativity and the Musical Imagination add to the myth of a “school,” a “movement,” and ultimately an underlying shared value system or aesthetic. The superficial criteria of entry were, not necessarily in order of importance, being white, male and Afrikaans. In the names of these creeds, these composers’ names were connected in an era of Afrikaner nationalism, and the connection has assumed some of the mythical kudos associated with a national or pioneer “school” of composers. In the light of this prevailing situation, and mindful of the coincidence of a shared year of birth that has yet again thrown the two names together, as it were, one needs to reflect shortly on the very substantial reasons that exist for doubting the validity of positing the existence of such a “school.” Although their paths crossed as students at the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch, respectively, Grové never knew Du Plessis that well. Mutual respect for each other’s work existed, but from both personal and creative points of view Grové was an ill-matched third member of Bell’s Afrikaner troika. The three composers did not share the same emotionality, moved in different circles, enjoyed a different sense of humour and had different friends. But more importantly, both Van Wyk and Du Plessis were musical neo-romantics (Du Plessis no longer actively composes), whilst Grové’s complex artistic development can be traced from Debussy and Ravel through to Bartók and the neo-classicism of Hindemith, with passing passions for Messiaen and a more lasting fascination for Bach and early counterpoint. This does not even touch on the all- important point that of the three Stefans Grové was the only one prepared to consider and eventually to develop a rapprochement between his Western craft and his physical, African space. In paying homage to both these composers, I should therefore want to clarify that it is not my intention to contribute to the idea that they somehow have things in common except their year of birth (1922), the historical significance of their white Afrikaner identity at a time when this was an extremely important cultural marker, and perhaps the fact of Porterville, where Du Plessis was born and Grové’s mother, who was a Roode, hails from. Rather, I should like to introduce another perfectly arbitrary point of comparison that could perhaps place their creative achievements not on the kind of plateau suggested by terminology such as “school,” but rather in a dialectical relationship to other interesting if peripheral factors, a relationship in which aspects of their oeuvres could perhaps be continually repositioned in a constellation featuring among many other things the co-ordinates of our theme: madness, creativity and the musical imagination. I call this an arbitrary decision, and it is, but this is not to be confused with mere fickle choice. Foucault’s re-introduction of madness to intellectual discourse in his History of Madness and his pupil Jacques Derrida’s response to it in his book Writing and Difference, have brought to the fore

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 2 Madness, Creativity and the Musical Imagination many fascinating aspects of psychosis and the writing and intellectualising about it. As the Oscar- winning film A Beautiful Mind testifies, madness is topical, and the relationship between madness and genius, so characteristic of the nineteenth century, is being revisited in the twenty-first. Indeed we seem to be experiencing a revival of a long cultural tradition of relating madness to creative genius,2 a tempting intuitive position given some firm grounding in studies such as those of Arnold Ludwig (published in 1995) and Felix Post (published in 1994) — studies that seemed to confirm an increased risk of psychosis and related disorders in those who become eminent in the creative arts. In music alone, one could retrospectively, and somewhat speculatively, compile a list of composers with psychosis and related disorders that could include the names of Schumann, Beethoven, Berlioz, Bruckner, Chopin, Dowland, Elgar, Handel, Holst, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Rossini, Tchaikovsky and Wagner.3 And even if this is probably enough justification for my choice of theme, I should also like to admit to entertaining a rather dangerous analytical premise fuelling this interest, and to do so by citing from a wonderful passage in Breyten Breytenbach’s prison essays Mouroir, where he reflects on the writing down or writing out of human executions in Sentraal Prison in Pretoria as the actions of a mirror:

Even though something can be inserted easily enough into the mirror, none of us knows precisely how and when it can be taken out again … This is the result: the eye and the hand (the description) embroider the version of an event, the anti-reality without which reality never could exist — description is experiencing — I am part of the ritual. The pen twists the rope. From the pen he is hanged … He hangs in the mirror. But where in reality he is separated — conceivably in spirit or vision and growth of flesh draped over human bone — hanged, taken down, ploughed under — each of these steps remains preserved in the mirror. The mirror mummifies each consecutive instant, apparently never runs over, but ignores as far as we know all decay and knows for sure no time … And the writer just as the reader (because the reader is a mirror to the writer) can seemingly make nothing undone. He cannot reopen the earth, cannot set the snapped neck, cannot stuff the spirit back into the flesh and the light of life in the lustreless eyes full of sand, cannot straighten the mother’s back, cannot raise the assassinated, cannot reduce the man to a seed in the woman’s loins while a hot wind streams over the Coast.4

Put in other words, my interest in madness in its broadest form has something to do with the expectation that one might be able to find, in the musical traces left behind by the extraordinary

2 See Daniel Nettle. 2001. Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity and Human Nature. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 144. 3 Ibid., 146-7. 4 Breyten Breytenbach. 1984. Mouroir: Mirrornotes of a Novel. New York : Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 62-3.

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 3 Madness, Creativity and the Musical Imagination mental lives of composers, musical manifestations of these extraordinary mental lives, that sometimes include madness. That is to say, that madness could explain some things about certain musics that would otherwise be inaccessible to the analyst or historical musicologist. I am therefore subscribing to Ronald Schleifer’s idea that “It is the genius of art to apprehend impersonal phenomena — perhaps even unintentional phenomena — as meaningful,”5 and continuing by saying: it is the task of musicology to mine music as meaning, possibly working its way back to the retrieval of those phenomena. In its functional sense,6 madness or psychosis can point only to one of two diagnoses: bi-polar or unipolar affective psychosis (commonly known as manic-depressiveness or mania or depression respectively), or schizophrenia, a basic distinction that we owe to the work of German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who is somewhat less recognized than his psychoanalyst contemporary Sigmund Freud. Before going on to discuss madness in relation to our two celebrated octogenarians, I should like to state unequivocally that in neither of the two composers these severe mental disorders have been diagnosed at any time, according to the best of my knowledge. I have had to tread carefully around sensitive ethical issues concerning private medical case histories and also by not indulging in the practice, following in the wake of studies such as those of Oskar Pfister, whose Expressionism in Art: Its Psychological and Biological Basis used examples of true psychotics, including Adolf Wölfli, of using clinically diagnosed psychosis as a means of criticizing the work of artists one does not like.7 With regard to the medical case histories of our two birthday boys, I do not have the permission to discuss the kinds of specifics that could, perhaps, make an archaeology of madness and its creative spin-offs an interesting and rewarding task. Instead, I shall work with a simplified view of human emotional states existing along a continuum, a notion that “there is a continuous spectrum between normal mental functioning and psychosis.”8 In the words of Daniel Nettle,

there are milder precursors of mania and depression, in elation and sadness, and milder precursors of schizophrenic thought, in unorthodox and divergent thinking. Indeed, the more extreme positions on the spectrum of mental life are … typical not just of malfunction — mental illness — but of the best in

5 Cited in “The Poetics of Tourette Syndrome: Language, Neurobiology, and Poetry.” New Literary History, 32(3):563- 84, esp. 567. I am grateful to Martina Viljoen for drawing my attention to this article. 6 As opposed to “organic” psychosis. 7 See “Psychoanalysis and the Study of Psychotic Art” in John M. McGregor. 1989. The Discovery of the Art of the Insane. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 245-70, esp. 247, as well as “The World of Adolf Wölfli”, Ibid., 206-21. 8 See Nettle, Strong Imagination, 25 & 34.

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 4 Madness, Creativity and the Musical Imagination

mental functioning — inspiration and creativity — too … The fact that where the line is drawn [between normal mental variation and madness] is somewhat arbitrary and culturally determined does not mean that the line should not be drawn at all.9

I am therefore going to accept for the purposes of this talk a broad definition of madness where society’s role in determining “normality” is recognized. This will also inhibit, to a large extent, a close reading of the musical texts that I will be referring to, not as a matter of principle, but as a matter of practicality. It is according to this broad definition that it can be accepted that Hubert du Plessis, when he was treated in Groote Schuur Hospital’s Psychiatric ward in 1974, a year that he describes as his most productive year as a composer, was falling outside the ambit of what would pass as “normal.”10

THE WRITING OF MADNESS

Du Plessis has written about this experience as follows:

Indeed, the creative ability is sometimes inexplicable, and varies from individual to individual. When my mind was clouded, the act of composing was to me an absolute reality; in this direction I could think wonderfully clearly and critically; I hardly ever had to grope for ideas — they simply emerged from my hyper-emotional state.11

During this year Du Plessis wrote his Drie Liefdesliedere (Op. 37) his Requiem aeternam (Op. 39) and his Second Piano Sonata (Op. 40). The latter work is in three movements, each respectively entitled “Captivity,” “Insanity” and “Liberty”. It is also dedicated to the Russian mystic composer Alexander Scriabin, who of course had a history of mental illness. Indeed the work shows many traces of Scriabin, most probably a result of Du Plessis’ intense interest in this composer for at least two years preceding the composition of the sonata. On a symbolic level the connection made to Russian music inaugurates the theme of “the other” or “marginalized,” as Richard Taruskin writes of Russian music in his Defining Russia Musically.12 In the case of Scriabin this otherness is also infused with the stigma of mental delusions and we have the double symbolic value of an “other,”

9 Ibid., 34-5. 10 See Peter Klatzow (ed.), Composers in South Africa Today. Cape Town : Oxford University Press, 35. 11 Ibid., 35. 12 See Richard Taruskin. 1997. “Others: a Mythology and a Demurrer (by Way of a Preface).” In: Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays. Princeton : Princeton University Press, xi-xxxii.

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 5 Madness, Creativity and the Musical Imagination the opposite of “normality” that is, in Gary Tomlinson’s words, silenced, effaced or absorbed in the formalist understandings of the work.13 I find this is a fascinating work, and in my opinion it is also one of Du Plessis’ best compositions, and like all good art, a work that raises many questions. We have time for only one, and a general one at that, brought to the fore by Breytenbach’s mirror metaphor, the composer’s sanctioned reading of the work by Edward Aitchison and Derrida’s qualms about Foucault’s great enterprise in writing his History of Madness. Following Breytenbach, we expect to find in a work, the meaning of which is closely tied to its subject also by being a product of the presence of that subject in the composer’s state of mind (in the case of the Second Sonata this subject is “madness”), to arrest the instant, to “mummify” the fleeting expression, to enable a retrospective archaeology of the work that will yield expression of that subject. If we read Du Plessis’ sanctioned analysis of the Second Piano Sonata, we are presented with the following kind of text:

The first movement of the Sonata may convey the impression of a fantasia, perhaps even an improvisation, but a study of it reveals a terse content with elements of sonata form. The composer regards the introduction-like opening as the first subject, and the desolate phrase in bar 5 as an important motive because of its later frequent recurrence. The second subject commences with linked, rising minor thirds accompanied by triplets, and leads into a third subject (Allegro). This is actually the principal subject, and according to the composer was conceived first in the compositional process; he derived the opening three bars from it, and then worked towards it … A sense of captivity pervades this movement: like a prisoner in his cell, the composer could not escape from his emotional imprisonment in 1974.14

Of the second movement, entitled “Insanity,” he writes:

I composed this weird, disturbing music in a state of delirium, and practically at one sitting — at the piano, as I have always composed all my music. The chordal accompaniment gave me no trouble: my fingers just found the acrid dissonances this hyper-emotional piece required — and also the occasional “common chords” symbolizing lucidity.15

This discourse of superimposed order on mental disorder, of (possibly retrospective) musical order being imposed in musical disorder (for instance the adding of introductions to the first two movements and the introduction of his “life,” “death” and “acceptance of death” chords of the seventh prelude of the Seven Preludes for Piano, Op. 18), leads us to Derrida’s qualms about

13 Cited in Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, xx. 14 Klatzow, Composers in South Africa Today, 65. 15 Ibid., 66.

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 6 Madness, Creativity and the Musical Imagination

Foucault’s writing of madness. The general thrust of Derrida’s accusation against Foucault is that the latter “denounces order within order,” i.e. the accusation of a discourse positioning itself outside the “order” of “normality” by nevertheless availing itself of the forces of ordered language.16 Anticipating this problem, Foucault is forced to admit not to writing the history of madness, but rather to practicing the archaeology of silence, which he then defines as the history of madness. The problem is, of course, that if madness is the silence of the work, as Foucault says and in the Derridean reading of Descartes seems to be what Descartes says as well, that the relationship of madness to musical creativity is of a non-linear, non-causal order. It is present as a sign, but as a silent one. If logos (and in music we can translate logos for whatever we think is the most basic unit of musical syntax) in its most primitive form is reason, then this sign is inscribed in the absences in the text, in the fundamental “lack” that can be traced to a forced exclusion. Implied then is that “madness” is not to be looked for in the richness of the material or the detail of the fantasy of, in this case, the Second Piano Sonata, but in the dead spots, the blind spots, the enforced silences.17 We thus arrive at the question: Can madness be written about in rational terms as Du Plessis does (and I am trying to do), or composed in such the kind of coherent process clearly present in the Second Piano Sonata? Is Du Plessis’ Second Piano Sonata an instance of a work produced by a chaotic mental state, or a descriptive or programmatic work providing a retrospective impression of a turbulent time in the composer’s history? Also the question that could conceivably undercut all the others: Can we accept the author’s voice in this instance as an authentic one? How can one avoid believing what is a fascinating but ultimately extremely problematic and dictatorial authorial voice in striving for an understanding of the governing principles of his work?

DREAMING THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

It is the same problem that seemingly engages us in a consideration of some of Stefans Grové’s compositions like Skisofrenie, also entitled Tweespalt. A left-hand study inspired by a short story the composer wrote about a woman in a psychiatric ward, the music again aims at providing us with a description of an aspect of psychosis. The success or not of the description does not concern us

16 See Jacques Derrida. 1978. “Cogito and the History of Madness.” In: Writing and Difference (trans. Alan Bass). Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 31-63, esp. 31-4. 17 As Thomas McCaskerville remarks in Iris Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice: “Mad people are quite unlike poets; their fantasies are detailed and ingenious, but somehow dead.”; 65.

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 7 Madness, Creativity and the Musical Imagination here. We note the similarity between the two agendas of Stefans Grové’s small miniature and Hubert du Plessis’ Second Piano Sonata, but also a significant difference, namely the belief of one composer that his work has resulted from a psychotic state, whereas the other believes in the possibility of treating madness as a distant and viable artistic subject. This is not the point I should like to develop here. Rather, being inhibited again by ethical considerations I should like to draw attention to only one aspect of interest with regard to my chosen theme and the music of Stefans Grové. This concerns the dreams and fables that enshroud his African series that resulted from his musical epiphany in 1982. A typical example concerns the creation of the Afrika Hymnus II, in connection with which the composer describes the following scene:

You know, I have a sturmfreie Bude in my back yard. It is a large studio with a very high ceiling … a large room that was open to the front and I inserted sliding doors and windows that look out over Groenkloof. It is my place of creation. When I worked on the second part, I dreamt that I heard the sliding doors open. And as I said, it is sturmfrei, nobody is allowed in there. And I looked up and there stood a beautiful lady with blue eyes and a very tempting mouth. And she comes up to my table and says, “Look, the first part is so successful, you have to apply the same stringency of thought here.” I have forgotten if there is a citation, I haven’t seen the work in a while, if there is a citation of the first part in the second, but in any case, after the second part I wrote the fourth part and then I wondered how the third part would begin. I couldn’t hear it at all. Then I dreamt she appeared and said, “Look, I will let you hear the first page, otherwise you won’t have enough work to do yourself.” And then she let me hear it. During her first appearance she gave me a kiss, and I think, if I remember correctly, the second appearance had no kiss.18

This is how Grové related the story of the composition of the Afrika Hymnus II to me during an interview in December last year, but a few years before he had told me the same story, omitting the small but significant detail of the narrative being a dream and leaving me rather confused and concerned for his mental health, especially as he was in bed with his wife when this beautiful siren came to him a second time — no doubt the reason she refrained from kissing him again. Derrida’s reading of Descartes in response to Foucault’s History of Madness makes the rather startling claim that the dreams and fantasies of so-called “normal” people are more universal instances of that which madness indicates only perfunctorily and in a limited way.19 The implication

18 Freely translated excerpt from an unpublished interview in Afrikaans with the author on 10 December 2001. 19 “What must be grasped here is that from this point of view the sleeper, or the dreamer, is madder than the madman. Or, at least, the dreamer, insofar as concerns the problem of knowledge which interests Descartes here, is further from true perception than the madman. It is in the case of sleep, and not in that of insanity, that the absolute totality of ideas of sensory origin becomes suspect, is stripped of ‘objective value’ as M. Guéroult puts it.” “Cogito …,” 51.

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 8 Madness, Creativity and the Musical Imagination is that the doubt cast over reason and sensory, empirical, truth by the dreams of “normal” people, question the possibility of truth more fundamentally than madness ever could. If this is taken at face value, the occurrences of dreams and myth and fable in Stefans Grové’s later work could be read as an intensification of the creative alternative that accompanies normality, a less severe but more significant movement from the “normal” to the “abnormal” than Hubert du Plessis’ spell of institutionalisation. What is important here and what I should like to stress is the establishment of the relationship between the world of dreams and the world of madness, a relationship that has been present all through the history of the discovery of the art of the insane. Consider for instance Hans Sedlmayr’s description of Goya’s art in his 1948 book, Art in Crisis:

The new element in his art has no connection with the public sphere, but derives from a completely subjective province of experience, from the dream. For the first time an artist, taking refuge neither in disguise nor pretext, gives visible form to the irrational … 20

And then, extremely significant I think with regard to Stefans Grové’s use of extended African narratives and titles in his post-1982 work (I think here especially of a work like the 1995 String Quartet, Song of the African Spirits, where the narratives and African titles are totally without meaning and function as appendages to a clear instance of absolute music), the following:

The original titles were for the most part probably unintelligible to Goya himself, and were doubtless based on associations or “disguises” of the dream world which so often prove meaningless to the waking mind.21

I have stated elsewhere that Grové’s recourse to dreams helps him to achieve a liberatory nonposition.22 His habitation of an enfabled dream-world, mediated by sounds inspired by nightly visitations of ghostly apparitions, makes his position vis-à-vis society one of ek-stasis, of being outside reason and beside himself. Grové’s music, by availing itself of dreams and fables, finds itself in a position that does not know or imagine itself to be a position of truth. Thus analysis, or even critique of this position is undermined. As is the case with Grové’s conversion to an African-inspired idiom late in his life, this recourse to the dream may be a strategic choice. With regard to the “conversion” itself I have

20 Cited in MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, 245. 21 Ibid., 247. 22 See Stephanus Muller. 2000. Sounding Margins: Musical Representations of White South Africa. (Ph.D. diss., Oxford), 167-69.

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 9 Madness, Creativity and the Musical Imagination speculated that generic African melody may be providing Grové with the basic materials of a kind of late-style, whereas in the case of his dreams the strategy may be allied to immunizing his art from certain kinds of post-colonial critiques or even to reinforce his aesthetic claim of “authenticity.” One should not forget that the art of the insane has never been located far from other kinds of marginalized art, as this description of Henri Rousseau’s influence by Dora Vallier testifies:

Rousseau symbolizes a turning point in history, and thanks to his gifts, all our notions of primitive art today derive from his prodigious example. There were primitive painters before him, just as there have been primitive painters since, but it was his example alone … that restored this other tradition to our consciousness … Thanks to him, the doors of art were flung open once and for all. The art of children and madmen no longer falls outside our aesthetic concepts, and no primitive painter ever again need feel awkward at his lack of formal training.23

One sees quite clearly how the dream aesthetic, elsewhere in this talk aligned to an aesthetic of the insane via Derrida and Descartes, aligns itself here to an aesthetic of authenticity, simplicity, and primitivism — all concerns in the late-music of Stefans Grové.

SANE PEOPLE, MAD CONTEXTS

I have one further, and rather controversial point that I should like to make with regard to my chosen theme. In Iris Murdoch’s 1985 novel, The Good Apprentice, a certain Mr. Blinnet is a patient of the very successful and quite famous psychiatrist Thomas McCaskerville. Mr. Blinnet has a delusion that he murdered his wife, buried her and that she has grown into a laburnum tree. The delusion also includes an old schoolmaster in Manchester who sends out steel wires which enter into Mr. Blinnet’s head and convey slogans like “Eat more cheese.” Mr. Blinnet is bored by the slogans. Some of the wires are steel and some are made of gold. The gold ones produce small fires inside Mr. Blinnet’s head, the effects of which are sometimes visible as flames resting on his hair. At some point Thomas McCaskerville finds out that Mr. Blinnet had actually committed a serious crime, and that the more detailed part of his story of mental aberration was fictitious. Suddenly he could see that his erstwhile patient was an entirely different person, someone clever and determined

23 Ibid., 4.

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 10 Madness, Creativity and the Musical Imagination enough to succeed in simulating mental disorder as a refined elaboration of a legal defence to be used should his crime ever came to light. In an essay devoted to Apartheid academic Geoffrey Cronjé, J.M. Coetzee writes that

the notion I will explore here is that the men who invented and installed apartheid — or at least some of the men, some of the time — were possessed by demons. Pinning the blame for apartheid on demons is, I realize, pinning it nowhere at all. Nevertheless, if madness has a place in life, it has a place in history too. The indifference of South African historiography to the question of madness and the tacit consensus in the social sciences that while madness … may be conceded to have a place in society, this is ontologically a place apart, a nonplace that does not entitle madness to a part in history, should arouse nothing but mistrust, and make us redouble rather than abate our efforts to call up and interrogate the demons of the past.24

While we should celebrate the lives and works of our two octogenarians, giving them credit for their undoubted artistic achievements, congratulating them on their longevity and honouring them for artistic vision and courage (their pioneer status is, after all, not entirely mythical), we should also be aware that theirs is a creative legacy that came to be and continues to exist as so-called “normal” a-political high art in an “abnormal” society. In the case of Iris Murdoch’s Mr. Blinnet, his sane fantasy of insanity was so wholehearted that it had become a compulsive addiction, and in this sense he did, eventually, become a bit mad. In the case of Stefans Grové and Hubert du Plessis, the puzzling and inexplicable indifference of creative sensibility to the madness that surrounded them is so complete, utterly consensual, and totally disengaged from their immediate contexts, that we may also see in this sane fantasy of the “normality” of their artistic practice a compulsivity, an inscription of madness. This we have to say when recognizing not only the cultural importance of their texts, but also the existence of their South African contexts. And so it may be, after all, that madness, creativity and the musical imagination is an appropriate theme for celebrating the lives and works of two remarkable South African artists, without which the artistic and cultural life of our country would have been so much the poorer.

24 J.M. Coetzee. 1996. Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 164.

INFORMATION CENTRE FOR SOUTHERN AFRICAN MUSIC 11