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Music SA Music URBAN SOUTH AFRICAN MUSIC Listed below are some terms and their definitions which are useful in the study of South African urban music styles. Thereafter follows a list of references and recommended reading. Ceri Moelwyn-Hughes St Mary’s School, Waverley March 2016 KEY WORDS AND DEFINITIONS Please note: urban South African music styles/genres stipulated in the IEB Grade 12 syllabus are highlighted. A few particularly important key words are given lengthier explanations. In addition, some general musical terms and others more associated with ‘traditional’ South African music are also included. Such musical characteristics can be present in urban and popular musical forms. a cappella sung without instrumental accompaniment acculturation explains the process of cultural change that results following the meeting of cultures This term is primarily used to describe the adjustments and adaptations made by minority groups such as immigrants, refugees and indigenous peoples in response to their contact with the dominant majority group. ‘Americanisation’ the post-World War II period in South Africa was a time in which South African culture was strongly shaped by American music, film, and other forms of entertainment, spread largely through the mass media apartheid system of laws that forced people of different cultural and language backgrounds to live in separate places, and be treated unequally and often unjustly before the law in South Africa (1948-1990) appropriate an important concept in the study of world music—pronounced in one way and used as an adjective, it means something done in accordance with expectation; used as a verb it means the opposite—something taken without permission (Muller 2008: 69) boeremusiek traditional music of the ‘farmers’ or Afrikaans conservatives, mostly but not exclusively White, that derives from European folk/dance tradition—schottishe, the waltz, the two-step—often tied to social dancing, though it also developed as a form of music for television (ibid.: 49) Carol Muller has also defined boeremusiek as ‘piano accordion music with a drum kit, bass, guitar, and singer, strongly influenced by the sounds of east European folk music translated into local idiom and language (ibid). bombing ‘The most traditionally-orientated form of Zulu-Swazi urban proletarian choral music (ingoma ebusuku), favoured by migrants and the least Westernised urbanites during the 1940s and ‘50s. Performances featured explosive choral yells compared by participants to the sound of bombs dropped by aircraft in the Second World War (seen in cinema newsreels)’ (Coplan 1985: 265). call and response musical structure in which a leader sings a melodic phrase (the call) and a group of singers repeats the call as response. Often the line sung by the group starts before the line sung by the leader is complete, resulting in overlapping musical phrases (ibid.: 19). close-harmony singers a popular style in which single-sex voices harmonise their parts in four or more parts; barbershop quartets are a good example of this style (ibid.) contrapuntal two or more independent melodic lines that sound out against each other in a single musical texture, common to Baroque keyboard styles for example creolisation often what happened in the early years of South African colonial occupation—a blending together of different cultural ways to create forms that were peculiar to the local environment (ibid.: 30) Sarah Nuttall’s book Entanglement as well as Marie Jorritsma and Carol Muller’s research into Coloured music and are good starting points for background reading. cross-over is a term used by the music industry to talk about a song or recording originally classified in one marketing category—classical music, for example—that unexpectedly or intentionally sells large quantities in another category—like ‘world’ or ‘popular’. It takes on a particular meaning in South Africa—when it is used in racial terms—where a black singer, like Margaret Singana for example, sells high numbers of recordings to white consumers (ibid.: 19). It can be considered the musical equivalent of the ‘all-encompassing nationalism’ which celebrated racial and cultural ‘diversity as wealth’, a ‘highly inter-textual mélange that attempted to do the work of racial integration’ (Allen 2004: 82). Johnny Clegg and Sipho Mchunu’s band Juluka and the band Mango Goove were particularly associated with this term in the 1980s. As artists their intentions were genuinely motivated by interest in other cultures and music, and an ideal of a non-racial South Africa. The term ‘cross-over’, however, is more negatively associated with the White-dominated South African music industry’s imagined concept of cross-over, which raises issues of negative cultural appropriation. To the international music industry, the term refers to movement across marketing categories, such as religious to popular, or rock to rap, being used to local ends. A very useful article to read for a more in-depth understanding of the term ‘cross-over’ with regards to the South African music industry, is Lara Allen’s piece on kwaito (see References). cultural boycott a ban imposed on South Africa by several countries, whereby their citizens were forbidden to travel to, or sell their performance in or to South Africa (Muller 2008: 49) Paul Simon famously infringed the cultural boycott in the recording and subsequent tour of his international hit album Graceland (1986). Foreign artists acquiesced with the cultural boycott in anti-apartheid stance, so Graceland raised heated debate about issues of cultural appropriation and political sensitivity. Paul Simon collaborated with various South African artists in the recording of this album in South Africa, apparently in violation of the UNESCO cultural boycott. While it sold in excess of 6 000 000 copies, the Graceland’s cross-cultural content provoked a highly politicised debate concerning the cultural boycott and issues of cultural imperialism. When the United Nations publically absolved Paul Simon of any breach of the cultural boycott, anti-apartheid groups in Britain were not placated. Indeed, the Graceland tour would not have been possible without the implied endorsement of two South African exiles of long-standing international recognition who featured in the tour, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba (who had been a major force behind the establishment of the cultural boycott in 1963). Paul Simon was accused of being a carpetbagger, indulging in a colonialist plundering of another musical culture. He was slated for being disrespectful of anti-apartheid politics and accused of cultural imperialism (an idea of the left that developed to describe the cultural analogue of international political domination). Yet as Garofalo has contended: ‘Graceland cannot be neatly contained within a formulation like cultural imperialism. On balance, its effect has been progressive’ (1992: 4). While Graceland may have been governed by commercial interests and Paul Simon can be legitimately criticised for reserving the copyrights, the creative process behind Graceland appears to have involved willing cross-cultural collaboration. In a BBC documentary at the time, South African guitarist Ray Phiri (of Stimela fame) described Simon as ‘honest and sincere about the whole thing.’ Phiri made this comment with regards to the furore that Graceland sparked: ‘I was also breaking the cultural boycott by working with Paul Simon and getting out of South Africa, but I don’t regret that. Because even the cultural boycott wouldn’t have been properly addressed if Graceland didn’t take place. So it … gave us a chance to re-address the cultural boycott and start understanding … all I was doing was just to address a serious issue by asking: “how can you victimise a victim twice?”’ (ibid.) In the same BBC interview, Paul Simon defended allegations of cultural theft and imperialism by saying: ‘It’s as if people think that I go into a place and find people who really are absolutely unaware of what they’re doing and I capture them in some way that they don’t know, as opposed to people who are really good at their job! … As if they’d had no experience in business, as if they had no experience recording, as if they didn’t have lawyers and agents, and an agenda that they wanted to follow for their careers, and a sense of curiosity about what my project was! … It’s just very paternalistic thinking that only we Europeans are sophisticated and they’re Africans, so they’re not sophisticated and therefore I must be taking advantage.’ cyclical structure a musical form that repeats endlessly, without clearly articulated structural points of beginning and ending. It is a form that doesn’t move from point A to point B, but seems to continuously return and start all over again (Muller 2008: 49) diaspora the dispersion of communities of people, languages, and cultures that were previously located in a single place; there is often a narrative of suffering and dislocation that accompanies the process of dispersion (ibid.: 50) forced removal many communities were destroyed by government decreed forced removals, sometimes to clear racially mixed slum areas, and other times to purge white neighbourhoods of ‘other’ racial groups (ibid.: 30) four-part harmony a style emerging out of the Back Chorale tradition, where voices are divided by function and register in soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, a structure modified and indigenised in twentieth-century South Africa, e.g., in isicathamiya performance (ibid.: 19) Gallo until 2006 when Warner International bought the company and its archives, Gallo Music was the most important recording enterprise in South Africa Grand Apartheid the period from the 1960s, when the laws established in the 1950s began to be enforced in South Africa harmonic cycle a chord structure that repeats over and over homeland in attempt to keep all ‘non-Europeans’ out of White space—83% of the total land mass of South Africa—the apartheid government created a series of ‘Independent Homelands’ also called Bantustans, which were intended to be the ‘homes’ of all Black South Africans according to language, culture and so forth.
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