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Wiser Seminar May 2021 Fostering Decoloniality in Music

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Wiser Seminar May 2021 Fostering Decoloniality in Music [Not for general circulation] WiSER Seminar May 2021 Fostering Decoloniality in Music: From Local Archives to Global Dialogue What could decoloniality sound like? Philip Burnett Twelve years ago I attended a church service at St Matthew’s, Keiskammahoek, in the Eastern Cape. At the time I was living in Makhanda, or Grahamstown, a place which had provided me with a springboard from which to explore the Eastern Cape. St Matthew’s had been established in 1854 as a mission station, one of several planted in the region with the intention of establishing Anglican Christianity in Xhosa society. The service I attended was ‘INkonzo yoMthandazo waKusasa’ known in English as ‘Morning Prayer’, and then ‘IYukariste eNgcwele’ of ‘Holy Eucharist’, the service that recalls the Last Supper. There was a pattern of psalms, canticles, sung prayers, and because I knew some isiXhosa, and was familiar with the English versions of the services that took place, I knew roughly what was going on. I could recognise the melodies and harmonies of the sung parts, because oy my own Anglican background, but while everything was very familiar, it was also very different. The language, of course, was one factor influencing this because I was used to singing the music in English, whereas here it was inflected by the tonal patterns of isiXhosa. What was also striking was that a liturgical form of religious practice forged in Britain during the English reformation of the 14th and 15th centuries had become a part of this place, and expressed an identity that seemed to be indelibly linked with the setting. What I heard can best be described as a new local language—both religious and musical—, a sound, that reflected the history and experience of that place.1 1 Marie Jorritsma provides a fascinating analysis of how hymn singing, for example, reflects a community’s history. See Sonic spaces of the Karoo: the sacred music of a South African Coloured community (Temple, 2011). 1 Reflecting back on that experience today, I feel a resonance with Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh’s challenge to think with rather than about the peoples, struggles, knowledges, and thought we encounter as we try to understand the colonial past in order to give attention to our own ‘inner eyes […] that put limits on how we can see, know, and act on with respect to the local, national, global order’.2 What does it mean to think, or indeed listen, with rather than about the complex elements and history that surrounded and shaped that sound, and to unravel the layers of complexity that surrounded how a musical language functioned in that mission context. The first part of my reaction to that day was a research project, largely driven by curiosity, that was historical, and involved completing a research project that analysed the different elements— both indigenous and European—that went into creating a musical tradition amongst Xhosa Anglicans in the Eastern Cape. I looked at and analysed historical sources, explored the input of individuals, and tried to explain using available evidence the reception of new musical styles. A striking aspect of this historical investigation was the longevity of the musical practices, many of which could be traced back 154 years to the early days of the mission’s foundation. The arrival of Christianity to the Eastern Cape took place over a long period and I am not going to trace our outline that process here, expect to say that the length of time draws attention to the complexity of that process. In 1854, Anglican missions were state sponsored, and part of a new dispensation that followed a succession of devastating and dehumanising colonial wars. The music was part of a package of Christianity which itself was a problem, as was its impact and the responses of people to it. It was not simply a question of converting to a new religion and faith, and learning the tunes that accompanied it. Christianity was part of a project to disturb, and that it did so by dividing communities, villages, and families into “converted” and “unconverted” or “blanketed” and “unblanketed”, and this project had a sonic element. As William Mpofu and Melissa Steyn have recently argued, missionaries formed part of the shape of conquest, ‘dominating the minds and hearts 2 Mignolo and Walsh, On decoloniality: concepts, analytics, praxis (Duke, 2018), p. 17. 2 of the subjects with gospels and hymns.’3 Musical sounds, many of which would have been known since the cradle, were taught to be recognised as heathen. Like missions and missionaries throughout the British Empire, the position of St Matthew’s and the music that expressed its existence was complicated. Missionaries were not solely the humanitarian and religious representatives of the metropole: they transmitted and implanted cultural values, technologies, and a way of life into the local indigenous population. While missionaries may have at times been complicit in colonial and imperial projects, they also often resisted these policies. They brought atrocities committed by colonial administrations to the attention of the public in the metropole, and were fierce critics of imperial and colonial policies. It helps to understand what singing the new Christian song meant on a personal level, and on the level of relations in Xhosa society, for it shows how disturbing the sonic arrival of these missions was. Primarily, it challenged the structures of homestead and family, by attempting to supplant rites of passage at various stages of life from childhood to adulthood, and matrimony, and death, all of which had music and musical practices closely associated with them. It challenged family and friendship in the way that music was made communally, both in secular and religious ways. Many converts continued to live in their traditional locales, enabling missionaries with a means to implant systematically, Christianity by encouraging converts to practice their “new” Christian ways within converts’ societal structures when they returned from mission station to traditional life. This led to situations where only some family members or kin were singing hymns. Conversion required not just singing hymns and psalms, but also rejecting traditional leadership structures, polygamy, circumcision, structures of time, all of which were deeply embedded in the consciousness of those who suddenly saw and heard mission stations in their midst. Music, particularly styles introduced by the missionaries such as hymns were reliant on structure not just in form but melody and harmony as well. The symmetrical structure of a hymn’s text and harmony was reflected in the buildings that missionaries put up on the landscape. For 3 Mpofu and Steyn, ‘The Trouble with the Human’, in Decolonising the human: reflections from Africa on difference and oppression (Wits, 2021). 3 missionaries, buildings provided landmarks, and sounds provided points of reference, which could be termed soundscapes. But often—frequently—missions were burned. The structures in which music sounded and which were built for music to sound in were regularly destroyed, either by acts of nature or in the course of war, or arson. A music which relied on structure came to be structureless, or at least was often heard in different and new physical structures, or out in the open, as accounts from missionaries and contemporary images confirm. We might ask what the implications of this change of structure is for thinking about a hymn in a decolonial way might be. A hymn, for instance, has a very precise and definite structure which was forged in the precise and symmetrical structures of the global north, and indeed, relied on a building for its aesthetics. What happened to these aesthetics when they were transposed, to use a musical metaphor, or recontextualised, where often the physical structure in which the musical form echoed, and which itself echoed the physical structure, was not there? Why did people sing these new songs, involves asking why did they convert, and how did these new songs emerge from the experience of conversion? This involves thinking with rather than about. Conversion was, and remains, a highly personal choice in which the individual, existing as part of a community, carried the sum of their being, into a new framework of existence, and expressed this in music which itself became converted sound. There were of course, multiple reasons behind why people converted—the opportunity of a better life, political and group pressure, and so on. Such considerations require us to confront the features of religious conversion in its local context— something that is difficult to square with the terms of reference and values of a largely secular academy, itself trying to grapple with the challenges of decoloniality and decolonisation in the present. 4 Roe-Min Kok/ WISER seminar May 2021 (Not for General Circulation) Ever since Ruth Finnegan placed the spotlight on a local music culture, scholars have been turning to oral sources in their own backyard.1 I, too, have discovered a “backyard.” Teaching in a university, I am surrounded by sources of oral history – a rich “local archive” of students and colleagues. Today I present one example from this archive: a student’s unusually frank account about studying piano in 21st-century China. While I am aware of facts that are frequently repeated – millions of young Chinese students, victories in prestigious competitions, and international stars such as Yuja Wang, Yundi, and Lang Lang2 – I had heard little about the personal experiences of individuals striving for pianistic renown. Lang’s autobiography details the many hardships he overcame.3 Overall, however, his and other accounts reinforce what appears to be the dominant discourse about Chinese achievements in western music, which aligns with the Chinese government’s credo that mastery of western practices is evidence of the country’s rapid, successful modernization.4 My student Xiao-Han offered another side to this story.
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