Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song

Muller, Carol

doi:10.2307/852717

Cited by 16 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Music is also an archive. Carol Muller (2002) demonstrates how music can become "a mechanism for archival deposit, care, and retrieval in contexts of immanent loss" (409). She describes MARLAS 4(2), 2020, DOI: 10.23870/marlas.341 how Shemba hymnody in South Africa deliberately preserved "Africanness" in the face of liturgical influence from European missionization throughout the twentieth century.…”

Section: Music As Archivementioning

confidence: 99%

Music as Sound, Music as Archive: Performing Creolization in Trinidad

Ballengee

2020

MARLAS

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This article positions performance as a key concept in understanding creolization. In doing so, it situates music as both sound and archive in analyses of Trinidadian tassa drumming, soca, and chutney-soca. Musical analysis provides useful insights into the processes of creolization, while revealing colonial and postcolonial relationships between groups of people that give shape and meaning to the music, past and present. I draw on notions of music as sound to further analyze the forces that work to control the Trinidadian soundscape by promoting or marginalizing musical styles in an effort to shape musical production according to the ideal of creole culture. I conclude by suggesting that the conventional notion of the archive has from its very beginnings been connected with elite desires to enumerate and historicize positions of power. In this context, musical performances analyzed in this study emerge as subaltern archival practices that run alongside mainstream archives and popular interpretations of history. In listening to Trinidadian music as sound and archive, I trace present and potential social structures while providing new ways of thinking about creolization as performance.

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Section: Music As Archivementioning

confidence: 99%

Music as Sound, Music as Archive: Performing Creolization in Trinidad

Ballengee

2020

MARLAS

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“…In her discussion of David Fanshawe's African Sanctus, Muller suggests that the entanglement of music and colonialism means that it 'can only operate as a musical space for the display of personalized souvenirs' or 'as a vehicle of idealized reflection' . 50 In his review for South Africa's Mail and Guardian, Percy Zvomuya nods to the Western musical dominance within REwind by calling it 'a sort of postmodern Wagnerian opera minus the libretto' and a 'postmodern mélange' of African and European elements. 51 This raises important questions of the cultural force of Western art music.…”

Section: Mediation and Testimonymentioning

confidence: 99%

Performing the South African Archive inREwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony

Phillips-Hutton¹

2018

Twentieth-Century Music

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Abstract‘You can hear everything? You can hear my voice?’ The scratchy recording that opens REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony prefigures the questions of memory and performance that underlie Philip Miller's multimedia exploration of testimony from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In this article, I adapt Diana Taylor's concepts of the archive and the repertoire to questions of musical communication. I posit that Miller's collage of testimonial ‘shards’, images, and historic audio recordings disrupts the TRC's official narrative by replacing the archive's narrative of completion with one comprising deliberately disjointed moments of individual suffering. The result is an audiovisual creation that sutures together disparate elements to reflect the complexity of the South African truth-telling process. I suggest that in performance, Miller's work re-animates the TRC archive, bringing it into the contemporary repertoire where it re-inscribes the experiences of TRC testifiers for contemporary audiences.

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“…This article uses a theoretical framework developed by merging two theoretical concepts: archive (Muller 2002;Derrida 1995) and pharmakon (Stiegler 2013;Derrida 1981). For this reason, the article begins by explicating these theoretical concepts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Archiving of Siti Binti Saad and her Engagement with the Music Industry in Shaaban Robert’sWasifu wa Siti Binti Saad

Sanga

2016

Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies

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Archiving Africanness in Sacred Song

Cited by 16 publications

References 17 publications

Music as Sound, Music as Archive: Performing Creolization in Trinidad

Music as Sound, Music as Archive: Performing Creolization in Trinidad

Performing the South African Archive inREwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony

The Archiving of Siti Binti Saad and her Engagement with the Music Industry in Shaaban Robert’sWasifu wa Siti Binti Saad

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