South Africa is a country that is defined by, and continues to live in the shadow of, its past. The set of discriminatory policies collectively known as apartheid—literally, “apartness”—were designed to forcibly segregate people by race, with Europeans being given exclusive access to political and economic power. Four and a half decades of apartheid served to compound the socially destructive effects of three centuries of systematic colonialism. Thirty years after the first democratic elections in the country, the legacy of race-based politics is still etched onto the face of political, economic, and social life.
Some of the most painful aspects of apartheid were related to space—racial segregation of public areas, urban planning that systematically disadvantaged people of color, labor practices that wrenched men from their rural families, and the forced relocation of entire communities. South Africa has a long history of migration, and very little of it has been aspirational in nature.
Bongani Ndodana-Breen was born in 1975 in Queenstown (today officially known as Komani), near to the “homeland” of the Ciskei. His Safika: Three Tales on African Migration was commissioned by the Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival in 2012, and is a personal reflection on geographical displacement in South Africa. Three dimensions of unhappy migration are reflected in the work. First, the economic pressures of both colonialism and apartheid led to waves of migratory laborers descending on urban mining areas, with formerly rural mineworkers living in cramped male-only hostels. The exploitation of male labor from the countryside had the effect of tearing husbands from wives and fathers from children, destroying centuries of rural family tradition.
The second dimension was the creation of so-called “homelands” or “Bantustans,” which were in reality puppet states of the South African government. Their purpose was to give the international community the illusion of functioning “apartness,” but essentially served as rural reservations with little in the lines of governance or public services. Many city-dwelling Black families found themselves forced into the homelands. Finally, the third aspect of migration highlighted in this work is exile: Political and social activists, persecuted and hounded by the state security apparatus, fled the land of their birth for other countries.
For Ndodana-Breen, the unifying aspect of these three migratory experiences is memory. When communities are split asunder, memory of community remains; when cultures are destroyed, the memory of cultural practice persists; and when dislocation and exile are imposed, the memory of home lingers on. This is reflected in the musical tapestry of Safika, where the traditional music that Ndodana-Breen grew up with is intermingled with the techniques, procedures, and formal strictures of Western art music. As with many of the composer’s works, the theme is socio-political in nature. Yet as much as the work reflects South Africa’s painful past, it also considers the present and looks to the future: The title Safika is the isiXhosa word for “we arrived.”
Andile Khumalo is only three years the junior of Ndodana-Breen but represents a dramatically different form of aesthetic engagement with South Africa’s present. He was born in the heart of the KwaZulu Natal province, in the township of Umlazi near Durban. (The South African township is yet another spatial legacy of apartheid-era urban planning and social engineering.) It was through doctoral studies at Columbia University that Khumalo was exposed to formalist trends in art music composition, in particular a style known as spectralism.
Spectralism in music is a modern approach that focuses on the exploration of sound itself, especially the way it is built from its component frequencies. Instead of restricting themselves to traditional harmony, melody, and rhythm, composers in this style examine the natural spectrum of sounds, analyzing how different tones combine and interact to create complex textures. By manipulating these sound spectra and translating them into tangible musical material, spectral composers create music that often has a shimmering, evolving quality.
Cry Out, first performed in 2009 at the Takefu Music Festival in Japan, is a classic example of Khumalo’s own brand of spectralism. While Khumalo was influenced in this style by his Columbia University mentor Tristan Murail, he has looked toward the soundscapes of southern African traditional music for his core materials. This is not a case of pure abstract formalism, however. As with Ndodana-Breen, Khumalo’s interrogation of South Africa as an aesthetic site of composition draws deeply on socio-political context. There is much to be said about the fact that Khumalo turns his back on the tonality that dominates much contemporary South African composition. Is this a case of a composer refusing the simple classification of his music as “African” in some sense, as if refusing to play by the rules dictated by the narratives of opposition one finds in so much post-colonial music criticism? And how is it that two composers who grew up in the same (admittedly diverse and tumultuous) country at the same time could endorse such strikingly different conceptions of music?
The afternoon’s performance concludes with one of the core works of the Romantic chamber music repertoire: the Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 81, by Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák. This work was completed in 1887, roughly 90 years before the births of Ndodana-Breen and Khumalo. It may seem that there is an immeasurable gulf between these composers, but there are some strong similarities in terms of their respective senses of place. This is because Dvořák looked not only to the past—to the works of Beethoven, Schubert, and Robert Schumann—nor only outward, to his contemporary Brahms. He also looked inward and considered his sense of place in the world. And, just as Ndodana-Breen and Khumalo are inextricably linked to the music of South Africa, this examination led Dvořák to Czech folk music.
Take the second movement, for instance. It is labeled dumka, a Slavic song genre literally meaning “thought.” This movement draws directly from the dumka folk music that Dvořák heard as a child. The movement features a beautiful, lilting folk theme, sharply punctuated by faster interludes. However, Dvořák required a mold into which he could pour this folk-musical material, and that mold had to produce something his audiences would recognize. The movement is therefore cast as a rondo, forcing the contrasting tempers of the dumka into a Romantic form. Similarly, Dvořák captures the Bohemian furiant folk style in the form of a traditional third-movement scherzo and trio. Therefore, as with Ndodana-Breen and Khumalo, we find that the structures and norms of a dominant Western musical style are brought to bear on music that is local to a composer.
The quintet represents Dvořák at the height of his powers. It stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the great Romantic quintets of Robert Schumann and Brahms, as well as the monumental contributions to the genre written by Schubert. It undoubtedly shows the influence of Beethoven’s quartets, including a frequent tendency to organicism (where material is developed from a germ-like core motive). Like Beethoven, Dvořák spent considerable time sketching and reworking material. The quintet actually began life as an attempt to rewrite an abandoned early quintet project in A major, but after reworking failed, Dvořák scrapped all the material and began over.
Dvořák’s use of folk music was nothing new, nor was it something unique to him. Indeed, many late Romantic composers, from the Russian nationalists to Sibelius and Grieg, were exploring the folk music of their native countries. As a matter of fact, several years later Dvořák would go a step further and sample another country’s folk music in his famous “New World” Symphony, with what he imagined to be African American spirituals and the folk music of native Americans. A generation later, Bartók would use the materials and techniques of central European folk music to create one of the most influential forms of modernist music in the 20th century. For composers who find themselves as the Other—as strangers to the cultural norms of art music—it is often to the folk music of their own lands that their thoughts are turned. And it is this golden thread that unites Ndodana-Breen, Khumalo, and Dvořák across time and place.
—Barry Ross