Africa Open looks 100 years ahead to launch music platform for the future
SOUTH Africa is characterised by an astounding variety of musical forms and practices. Knowledge about the vast majority of this music exists in the experiences and practices of musicians who are frequently some of the leading artists of their generations, people of local or national and international stature and curators of invaluable traditions.
Often this kind of knowledge is not fully appreciated by academia. It should be a core concern for the study of music in our universities.
One of the ways to respond to this knowledge deficit is by ensuring interaction and exchange between composition, research and performance, an approach that is possible across a range of music that includes varieties of popular music, jazz, boeremusiek, classical music and protest music.
This kind of interdisciplinarity requires careful curation and discursive linkages with contexts outside music: protest, tradition, identity, commercial considerations, literary impulses, visual arts, heritage conservation and history.
Mobility and flexibility in approaches towards musical practices and music in institutional thinking hold great potential for improvement in the quality and quantity of research. It could broaden exponentially what we would like to talk about and are interested in as institutional music people.
It also means that possibilities are created for musicians from outside our institutions and from elsewhere on our continent to take part in these discussions and to take the lead in the reconsideration of the music that our students and academics study at our universities.
This is what Africa Open, an Institute for Music, Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University (SU), wants to achieve.
Established as an independent and interdisciplinary research entity in June 2016, Africa Open is first an institute for music, which includes respecting a knowledge system of which the importance is often underestimated by academic research. But our name also references research and, more specifically, the kind of research that follows from a focus on music but that does not exclude other kinds of knowledge and contexts.
This helps to explain the choice of the words “Africa Open”, which refer respectively to where we position ourselves and how we do things. Naturally, the idea of where our place is also determines how we do things. It is also true that how we do things is strongly inspired by where we find ourselves (physically, intellectually and spiritually).
Both words – separately and in combination – are also problematic, however. Stellenbosch is not Africa; the cultural and musical borders of Africa north of South Africa have been “open” in various ways for decades.
Africa Open is a placeholder for an intellectual and creative approach that draws energy from the student demands to open Stellenbosch in 2015/16, and the anachronism of Stellenbosch in 2018, where Africa has yet to be claimed and openness has yet to be realised as a launching platform for the future.
Africa Open would like to foster interdisciplinarity and advance innovation in creative and intellectual work. In practice, Africa Open is permissively, eagerly curious.
In its first year, the institute explored music over a wide spectrum with discussions, film screenings, performances and publications. These activities are frequently guided by the constant expansion of the Documentation Centre for Music (Domus), the archive project that is central to Africa Open’s historical and intellectual project.
The lives and work of Anton Goosen and Nico Carstens were celebrated, for example; a jazz and poetry solidarity concert for students was organised in the Kruiskerk in Stellenbosch; conversations were struck up and academic discussions were held with students at the University of the Witwatersrand to archive protest songs; and an improvising duo from Switzerland came to work on an opera project by a PhD student.
Then a composer’s workshop was held in Sterkfontein with a Swedish trombone and percussion duo, a new film on the ideology of Western art music in South Africa was released and premiered at the Kurzfilmtage in Oberhausen, Germany. Talks were held on pianistic performance practice and criticism based on a new series of recordings of the piano sonatas of Franz Schubert.
New material was acquired for Domus, among which was the historically important collection of Mountain Records, the record company that coined the term “Cape jazz”.
Africa Open is almost two years old but our planning, with Domus at the core of the academic project, is for the next 100 years. We are going to make new music, new words and new knowledge.
In 2118, SU is going to have the most important music archive in Africa. Researchers, composers and performing musicians will come from all corners to be part of this space.
Intellectual and creative work will set international standards, disciplinary discourse will be reconsidered in the light of our renewal and music will be institutionally central to the way in which we imagine our being human, in a country where music is such a great part of the people.
Africa Open is the engine room of this desire.
Muller is director of Africa Open in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at SU. This is a version of an article that first appeared in SU’s annual magazine Matieland.