The archive, disciplinarity and renewal: the DOMUS perspective

The archive, disciplinarity and renewal: the DOMUS perspective1 Paper presented at the Second International Symposium 'n Ethnomusicology in Uganda, Makerere University, 20-12 October 2011 Stephanus Muller I should like to start this paper by acknowledging the work and intellectual contributions of DOMUS archivist Santie de Jongh and my PhD student Lizabé Lambrechts, both of whose ongoing work in and research on the music archive have significantly developed my thinking about the Documentation Centre for Music in Stellenbosch. I should also like to thank Prof. Sylvia NannyongaTamusuza for the invitation to present a paper at Makerere and follow up on the fruitful conversations we have had on archival and scholarly collaboration earlier this year in Stellenbosch. I start on a personal note. After having finished my doctoral studies in Oxford in 2000, I returned with my family to South Africa in 2001. I spent a year doing occasional guest lectures at the University of Pretoria at the invitation of Prof. Chris Walton, before accepting a contract position, teaching musicology, at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. During all of this time, my family was based in Cape Town, as this was where my wife was based at the medical school of the University of Cape Town. It was also during these years of frequent travel that I started working on a biography of the South African composer Arnold van Wyk. It did not take me long to discover that Van Wyk’s documents – scores, autograph scores, letters, diaries, photographs, programmes, etc. – had been dispersed after his death in 1983 to different private and institutional locations. Without setting out with this intent, the first three years of my work on this book turned into a quest to recover and bring together this archive of one of South Africa’s greatest early composers. Without occupying a permanent institutional position, or even being physically based in a music department anywhere, I managed to do this at the University of Stellenbosch (Van Wyk’s last institutional home) in 2004. The point of this short autobiographical excursion An earlier version of this paper was presented at as an invited talk at the 5th Annual General and 19th Panel Meeting of the ISMN at the National Library in Pretoria on 13 September 2011. 1 1 was to illustrate how DOMUS had its roots in my early career experiences as a disciplinary insider but an institutional outsider. The significance of this distinction between discipline and institution will become clearer later in this paper. In 2005 I was appointed in a contract position, again teaching musicology, in the music department of the University of Stellenbosch. With the advice of Chris Walton, who had had ten years of experience in running the music department in the central library in Zurich, I immediately set about creating the Documentation Centre for Music, or DOMUS as I will henceforth refer to it. Informed by my experience of trying to research Van Wyk’s life and work, I realized that the fate of his archive was probably the rule rather than the exception in South Africa. As a historical musicologist, I also knew that this was a state of affairs that affected the core of my discipline. Simply put: if every South African graduate student or researcher first had to spend as much time as I had done collecting, ordering and cataloguing the archive of his or her subject, provided it was a subject constituted to some extent by an archive, research would either not happen (as has frequently been the case in South Africa) or would be discouragingly and unproductively slow. Furthermore, I had become acutely aware that South Africa, like many societies eager to move beyond a traumatic past, was less than meticulous in looking after the documentary residue of her composers, performers and artists. The reasons were financial, to be sure, but also political and ideological. South Africa was keen to re-invent itself, and for the time being it seemed permissible to do so partly by erasing the past we were trying to put behind us. Not only were archives not systematically collected and looked after; rumours abounded that they were being neglected and even actively destroyed across the country and in many institutions. The picture of neglect has largely been affirmed by the research of De Jongh and Lambrechts over many years now. Their work has contributed considerably towards building up a national picture of the fate and state of music archives in South Africa. No proof has emerged, however, that the rumours pertaining to the destruction of music archives are anything but rumours fed by the apocalyptic thinking that had white South Africans hoarding tinned food and powdered milk before the first democratic elections in 1994. 2 DOMUS was therefore created from a personal diagnosis of institutional and disciplinary crisis. In Stellenbosch this crisis had a very particular character. The oldest music department in the country was also part of an Afrikaans university with unambiguous connections to the previous political regime. The crisis within the department was how to position a primarily Western teaching curriculum and artistic agenda in an ascendant and belligerent African environment. Although not unique, many other music departments experienced the crisis of academe in post-1994 South Africa somewhat differently, namely in terms of the withdrawal of unconditional institutional support and subsequent diminished funding, changing demographics and musical and academic literacy levels of students, the challenges of university mergers and the creation of new and more inclusive music programmes. DOMUS’s focus on conservation, and directed by my interest in Van Wyk, specifically on the conservation of Western art music in South Africa, appealed to the department and the university. The creation of the Centre was eventually approved with very limited funding and in the second half of 2005 I was able to appoint Santie de Jongh as a subject-specific archivist to DOMUS. In 2008 she completed a national electronic database of South African music archives and special music collections for her MMus degree, and in the same year she was appointed permanently to DOMUS by the Faculty. Continually advised by Chris Walton, who had tried unsuccessfully to create a similar institution at the University of Pretoria during his all too brief headship, DOMUS embarked on an ordering process of the collected archives the department had built up over the century of its existence (including the internationally important collections of the bibliophile Michael Scott and the conductor Albert Coates), coupled with a pro-active policy to acquire new collections. The first substantial new acquisition was that of the Johannesburgbased twelve-tone composer Graham Newcater in 2007, followed by the manuscripts of Pretoria-based composer Stefans Grové, arguably the most important South African composer of the early and middle twentieth century. The fact that DOMUS was receiving collections from individuals unconnected to our university and within the geographical proximity of other universities and archives, confirmed to us the indifference and/or incapacity of institutions 3 nationwide to recognize the urgent disciplinary imperatives driving DOMUS. Meanwhile these imperatives, as I had viewed them in 2005, were fast expanding. When DOMUS negotiated the permanent loan agreement for the EOAN Group archive in 2008, this set off an extended community engagement and oral history project. Our archival activities were becoming something more than document collection or the creation of catalogues. South African music history, we realized, could not be written without actively engaging and aiming to overcome the legacy of separation that would otherwise condemn all history emanating from Stellenbosch to the limitations of ‘white history’. Archives such as those of EOAN could assist us in breaking through these white narratives, but that presupposed the re-establishment of a relationship of trust with the community to which this cultural capital belonged. The potential of the archive to make a difference could only be operationalized if we departed from a renewed social contract, and so DOMUS set about building the required trust as a precondition to obtaining the archive in order to preserve it. The resulting process has resulted in a book project and film that has probed in significant ways core understandings of how music history is written. The path was therefore one of a renewed social contract, acknowledgement of the imperatives of preservation pertaining to the archive and ultimate disciplinary consequences. When Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies Fellow, the composer Hans Huyssen (now also a PhD student at Stellenbosch), requested institutional space to work with the Xhosa musician Latozi Mpahleni (Madosini), DOMUS was able to drive this project as a curatorship of Madosini’s art. It had by this time become abundantly clear that a vigorous archival engagement with South African composition and performance could not happen in isolation from the extended musical contexts of our time and place. Because adequate provision for such engagements was not made in formal teaching or performance spaces – an abrogation of disciplinary responsibility – the archive now also became a space of experimentation and renewal. Sadly, DOMUS had seed funding to do so only on a pilot project basis, and failed subsequently to convince various funding agencies to fund the medium to longer term continuation of this engagement.2 DOMUS made applications to the National Heritage Council and twice to the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the Vice-Rector (Research) of Stellenbosch University, who had provided 2 4 Nevertheless, DOMUS had, unwittingly, become a kind of archive that responded to the institutional limbo between a vanishing past and a continually postponed future. As this was happening, I experienced an increasing passive resistance in my department regarding the project (I was, after all, supposed to be making catalogues and not to be holding community meetings or hosting composers or performers), and an increase in university support at higher levels. As a scholar whose work was located in the centre of the archive, I found myself described as all sorts of contradictory things: a disciplinary reactionary because I was heading up a project looking after the documentary heritage of apartheid-era composers; an interdisciplinary iconoclast because I was implementing an acquisitions policy and project development that was radically redefining the discipline; a traditional musicological empiricist concerned with ‘works’ and biography; a member of a the so-called culture-police trying to impose a politically correct agenda on composers’ creative choices. DOMUS was alternately not being funded for being deemed too progressive or for being deemed too reactionary. We received funding from people concerned with urgent reform and different funding from people concerned with preserving the status quo. Collections poured in from the full gamut ranging from social and political cultural anarchists to musical traditionalists. By 2011 the Documentation Centre for Music had, to my considerable amazement, become a pivot between competing ideologies of conservative nostalgia and radical reform. Earlier in the paper I had said that the creation of DOMUS proceeded from a diagnosis of institutional and disciplinary crisis. My subsequent description of how DOMUS became a pivot in this context of crisis implies not only that the diagnosis was correct, but also that the crisis has not disappeared. In its recent Consensus Study on the State of the Humanities in South Africa, the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) indeed confirmed that ‘there is a crisis in the Humanities’ and that ‘the Humanities within institutions of higher learning are in a state of intellectual stagnation and, singular innovations notwithstanding, have remained in this moribund condition for more than 15 years.’ This crisis, I hold, is truer for university music departments than most other humanities the initial seed funding to host Madosini in Stellenbosch. 5 departments in South Africa. Within the context of radically reduced job opportunities for university-trained musicians and scholars in the country and the generally acknowledged prohibitively high costs of maintaining such departments, music departments are suffering from lowered quality and quantity intakes of students, a critically depleted cohort of teaching academics of international quality and high level teaching and publication experience and legitimate questions of social importance and institutional relevance. While historically, music departments at South African universities depended on the symbolic capital of their subject for the continued support of Eurocentric university authorities, this symbolic capital suffered serious deflation after the political transition of 1994. Moreover, due to the increasing managerialization of universities and concomitant emphasis on research outputs, characteristically high-cost/low-yield music departments, now also stripped of symbolic kudos, were exposed as ineffective and unproductive. It is only recently, when reading and discussing with my weekly postgraduate seminar group the two volumes of Critical Enquiry’s 2007 focus on the Fate of the Disciplines, that I realized to what extent the historically contingent set of imperatives to reform South African universities (or, viewed differently, the imperatives to protect universities from transformation) discursively fed seamlessly into a much larger crisis of disciplinarity in the humanities internationally, or at least in North American universities. In South Africa we are not unaware of this international debate. At a recent national music research conference, for example, a musicological colleague from Bloemfontein asked the perplexing question: ‘Is interdisciplinarity enough?’. This suggested not only that people holding such views actually exist, but that they were taken seriously in the Free State and were responsible for a significant level of disciplinary distress. In my own department I have had constant confused debates about the introduction of performance-based research (PBR) and the supposed ‘lowering of standards’ (de-skilling and professional erosion) this is supposed to lead to. But what became clear to me, especially from the work of Lambrechts and the rigorous debates on the matter of disciplinarity in my postgraduate seminar, was that this universal debate centred on guaranteeing the integrity of music as a 6 university discipline, was in our context also functioning as a proxy for the maintenance of an indisputably ineffective, costly, conservative and politically unreformed third tier music studies sector. In other words, when local academics adopt rigid positions defending empirical historical work disciplinarily as a bulwark against the relativizing tides of cultural criticism, it is difficult to see how they are not also defending the apartheid empiricism that led to the creation of the infamous South African Music Encyclopedia; when local art music composers defend the immanent autonomy of their music as protection against social critique, it is difficult to see how they are not supporting the aesthetic conditions that made producing uncritical work under apartheid possible; when performers defend performance practice at universities as sufficient in and of itself as an intellectual activity, it is difficult to see how this does not justify the cliched colonial rituals of kitsch that entrenched a bogus ‘high’ and ‘low’ as the differential between ‘white’ and ‘black’. I am not saying that this is intentionally happening, nor that these positions are not also valid disciplinary positions. I also don’t underestimate the importance of strong disciplines as prerequisites for interdisciplinary work or, in developing countries like South Africa, as proven drivers of empowerment. But I am saying that these positions, much in the same way that disciplinary debates in the USA inevitably reference careers and institutional concerns, in the South African context reference a stand vis-à-vis the discourse of change and transformation after 1994. I am therefore also saying that, given the violent and still very recent confluence of culture, race and history that was structurally so deeply implanted in the South African intellectual, social and psychological fabric, there is no such thing as a disciplinary position that can claim to be naïve or innocent of these questions facing the rest of South African society on different levels. Concern for the integrity of the discipline therefore has to engage with the question: how do stances of disciplinary defense or transformation undo the normativity of apartheid, of whiteness and of colonial domination as expressed in institutional cultures and norms? In the light of this crisis, it has become clear to me that these circumstances endow DOMUS, an archive located in a music department at the centre of lively 7 research activity in history, analysis, performance and composition a pivotal role in maintaining the intellectual integrity of music as an academic discipline on the one hand, and stimulating radical disciplinary reform within the context of crisis on the other. Quoting South African archivist Verne Harris’s remark that ‘instead of fixing meaning, archival endeavor as a whole should be about the releasing of meaning’ (Harris 2002 RTA:71), Lizabé Lambrechts has asked the question: ‘Is it not time to dismantle and destroy the institutional archive as we got to know, nurture and trust it, for a more vibrant, living and breathing structure – a dynamic alternative, an “Other”-archive?’ I would argue that this ‘Other’-archive is what DOMUS has become. Precisely because the archive (especially the archive located in an academic environment) is built on the notion of bringing together that which has been produced – not exclusively but also – by institutions and disciplinary activity, it recognizes disciplinary integrity in the sense of ‘a body of knowledge but also … a set of practices by which that knowledge is acquired, confirmed, implemented, preserved and reproduced’ (Robert Post, 751). The archive is therefore ideally placed to take up the challenge of disciplinary crisis, or what Thomas Kuhn called ‘paradigm shift’. Acquisitions policy in DOMUS has a disciplinary dimension, but crucially it is a less fraught relationship with the discipline than the relationship between the curriculum and the discipline. Apart from disciplinary considerations, archives are accepted on considerations of funding, strategic positioning, kudos, need, redress, research opportunities, graduate interests – to name but a few. One can make two points about this balance of archival considerations that simultaneously maintain and push at the boundaries of the discipline. First, it serves to maintain the discipline almost by default, because it develops from a continually expanding but uninterrupted notion of disciplinary consensus and material production. Second, this development does not threaten or undermine disciplinarity because it has no direct relation to the curriculum, i.e. that which is taught at an undergraduate level. Compared to the curriculum, the archive is neither an institutionally necessary nor a sufficient precondition for the existence and maintenance of the discipline. It is therefore potentially more disciplinarily strategic precisely because it is not perceived by either university managements or most practicing academics as constituting an institutional sine quo non. Seen in this way, the 8 contradiction outlined above between ostensible reactionary and progressive agendas embedded in the core of the archive is better explained as an insistence on what W.J.T. Mitchell has called ‘the right of the arts and the humanities to be just as experimental and rigorous as the sciences, just as open to the shifting character of archives of human history as the scientists are to new evidence and new methods of producing evidence’ (1031). Within the context of humanities and arts disciplines’ penchant for canonization as valedictory strategy of framing competing hermeneutics in the absence of more solid truth claims, and the specific South African angst accompanying accelerated political and cultural transformation, the archive could give content to the right of which Mitchell speaks. Renewal thus conceptualized (or ‘experimentalism’, using Mitchell’s words, or ‘transformation’ in South African political-speak), is not premised on destruction (de-skilling, abandonment) and subsequent replacement, as Lambrechts would have it, but on the disciplinary self-confidence emanating initially from a body of material containing exactly the kinds of properties necessary for the recognition of a discipline. In this way the archive potentially becomes the one institutionally valid but not co-opted space in which the so-called ideological contradiction between conservative and radical approaches dissolves. This is where the distinction between institutionality and disciplinarity, outlined in an autobiographical context at the beginning of this paper, becomes meaningful. When I started, I explained that I created DOMUS from the position as a disciplinary insider and an institutional outsider. I implied that I managed to do this in spite of the looseness of my institutional affiliation at the time. The argument made above challenges that view by suggesting that DOMUS was created not in spite of the uncertainty of my institutional position, but because of it. The disciplinary imperatives as I saw them in 2005 were better served by not being run together, in my mind at least, with institutional imperatives. As a disciplinary insider and an institutional outsider in a university environment struggling with social and political change, DOMUS became my answer as to how a historical politically distorted institutional practice posing as disciplinary normativity is challenged and changed to the ultimate benefit of the discipline. 9 The archive allows us to do this, but unlike the institution of which it can only be an incidental part, refuses to do so in the name of the discipline. The ability for archives to function in this way and to this degree, I hold, is perhaps unique to countries like South Africa where so much of what masquerades as ‘the discipline’ is ossified mimicry protected by fallacious institutional identification between disciplinary and institutional interests. South Africa has missed its revolution. Whether one thinks this is a good or a bad thing, is unimportant. The only thing that matters is that in the context of elaborate institutional rituals of playing at music, the archive propels of a vision of the postponed revolution. 10