“There is a history of silence in South Africa. I felt compelled to open the conversation,” said Carina Venter of the Department of Music, Stellenbosch University, about her current project at STIAS, which documents histories of trauma and abuse in South African music-pedagogical and professional spaces. “My goal is to listen, write, surface narratives and put pressure on conversations that are and are not happening.”
Her current STIAS project formed one part of her presentation in which she spoke under the more general theme of music, trauma and violence — specifically how she has thought about these broader themes in her current and earlier work. Venter outlined three “Elaborations,” each dealing differently with music and violence: the sonic policing of nightlife in Stellenbosch; Philip Miller’s composition, REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony, as a site for close reading/listening; and her above-mentioned STIAS project.
For the first elaboration she traced recent events in the nightlife of Stellenbosch; a town, she said, that indexes South African pasts and the present in very particular ways. Amapiano, a South African music genre with roots in kwaito, Afrohouse, jazz and bubblegum, emerged from Johannesburg and Pretoria townships in the early 2010s. Its rise in South Africa and abroad has been meteoric. Amapiano reached 14 million streams on Spotify in 2023. “It caused a disruption and catapulted South Africa to the forefront of global music,” said Venter. But, despite global acclaim, there is something of an informal ban in a number of Stellenbosch clubs and bars, of which Venter became aware quite coincidentally. What she has subsequently learned, is that the removal of amapiano from playlists is largely due to an uptake of violence on amapiano nights, including shootings and stabbings.
“This association between amapiano and violence is surprising,” she continued. “Unlike some other genres, Amapiano lyrics and aesthetics don’t index violence. They are aspirational, essentially South African, hopeful even, and about black success.” Her work in this project has just started, and is ongoing but she concluded with some compelling observations: “In South Africa,” she pointed out, “the long afterlife of spatial segregation metastasizes through sound and recasts the post-apartheid present into the warped patterns of the past. Vibes and genres follow the contours of spatial segregation that harden into lived perceptions filtered through violence.”
Venter also addressed another angle of the story narrated by the bouncers at nightclubs whose job it is to watch for and ‘eject’ violence. “Most are not South African, most are from the Democratic Republic of Congo, as I learned.” This left Venter with another question she now wants to pursue: “What does it mean to have fled from conflict into a low-earning position, where the sole responsibility is to keep violence outside?”
Reproducing the past
Moving to her second elaboration, Venter presented an in-depth reading of Philip Miller’s REwind Cantata, composed in 2006 for the 10th anniversary of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The composition includes snatches of testimony from the TRC archives, a string ensemble, choir and soloists.
REwind is more restaging of a TRC hearing, and less a response in sound to those hearings. “REwind treats the music not as a medium in which to engage testimony creatively, but as medium of replication through sound of TRC hearings,” she said. “But what about the present in which the cantata is heard? It’s frozen in a past re-enactment. And what does such a past re-enactment mean in the present?”
She specifically noted Miller’s use of a descending semitone or minor second – called pianto – throughout the cantata, but especially in relation to the title track, which includes testimony from a weeping mother, Mrs Eunice Miya, who learned about the death of her son on the evening news. The pianto, she pointed out with recourse to topic theory, “has been used in the history of Western music to signify weeping, sorrow and lamentation”.
“This makes some of the composed music clichéd and derivative,” especially in relation to Mrs Miya’s testimony. Venter wondered how to understand this proliferation of the pianto, which she argued was a proliferation of cliché. The work of literary theorist Timothy Bewes, provided her with some suggestions. In his book The Event of Postcolonial Shame, Bewes grapples with the ethical and aesthetic challenges faced by writers and artists, pointing out that art is irrevocably changed by the violent devastation of the 20th century and that aesthetics cannot adequately meet the ethical requirements of the post-colonial, post-apartheid world. “Bewes and others emphasise shame and incommensurability – having something to say, having the tools to say it, but still having nothing to say.” She understood the proliferation of musical cliché in REwind as symptomatic of this inevitable condition of postcolonial art: marking an incommensurability between the capacity for signification and the reality that one has nothing to say in the face of such devastation.
Some TRC witnesses who had lost husbands or sons at the hands of apartheid violence, heard in Miller’s cantata hope for future generations, who would be able to remember what they didn’t live through. This, Venter suggested, was not symbolic reparation of victims, as some commentators have argued. Rather, she read the emphasis on future generations as a painful comment on the present: “These responses articulate the experience of those who find themselves exiled from the present, those for whom, to quote Bewes, ’ontology has not cleared a space’.”
Histories of trauma in music pedagogy
Venter’s final elaboration focused on her STIAS project which examines selected accounts of abuse in South African Western art music pedagogy and practice. “These accounts, spanning a period of around three decades, I read against psycho-social circuits of trauma exacerbated by the South African past and present,” she explained. “I situate this research project in the collision of overlapping histories: of apartheid, colonialism and music pedagogy in South Africa.” (See https://stias.ac.za/2023/05/on-madness-and-eros-tentative-thoughts-on-an-arrested-present/)
Venter shared accounts of emotional abuse and sexual harassment that involved men: pedagogues, students and youths. She started by reading a poem a student who identified as ‘brown and queer’ wrote shortly before they quit studying music at university. The poem strikingly compares the music faculty to “a prison, asylum, laboratory of experimentation, and parading ground for the most successful”.
Taking a longer historical view, she focused on a certain kind of apartheid-era pedagogue, whom she described as “powerful gay men who had a controlling stake in the artistic life of apartheid South Africa”.
These men and their circles, she explained, constituted a difficult paradox:
“They were gay men. They embodied in part what the apartheid imagination understood as the ‘folk devil’: homosexual men who demonstrated the vast cracks in apartheid ideology by living a version of masculinity that did not rhyme with hegemonic patriarchy.” And yet they were tolerated, “more than tolerated,” Venter pointed out: they were revered, respected, and to her knowledge not acted against for any contravention of the Immorality Act that, since 1968, in part criminalised homosexuality. “Many, of course, would have gone through harassment or abuse themselves.”
Venter wondered how to tell the stories: “Of the boys who wouldn’t speak. Of those who speak vaguely, off the record. Of those who are spoken about. Of the abusive pedagogues? Most difficult of all, of the abused boys turned abusive pedagogues?”
She also questioned the role of those who know about such abuse and don’t act against it, asking: “What are the stories we tell ourselves in order not to see or act?”
“I’m listening to and telling stories, trying to understand the past and present of a chapter that’s not been told,” she said.
Asked whether the three elaborations opened comparative perspectives that might be useful in a larger book project, Venter noted that she hadn’t initially thought about such a possibility, but that it was an interesting suggestion: “There are reversals and paradoxes throughout the three elaborations. I guess one could be thinking through the damaging reversals and how they land differently on different bodies,” she continued. “I’m trying to listen with nuance, not bifurcate accounts and materials simplistically, but to understand the degrees. All are differently impacted. It’s important to write the different granularities of the project.”
Michelle Galloway: Part-time media officer at STIAS
Photograph: Ignus Dreyer