South African Music: A Century of Traditions in Transformation (review)

This book is part of ABC-CLIO's new World Music Series, according to series editor Michael Bakan, designed to make available "accessible yet substantive introductory text[s] on a specific world music region or area" (xi). To the South African-born author this mandate entailed shaping the volume in large part via her "personal experiences and intellectual interest in Africa and its music" (xxxi). Aside from an introductory chapter in which Muller offers an overview of "A Century of Traditions in Transformation," and chapter two in which she examines Paul Simon's seminal Graceland album as "a contested musical collaboration," the book offers original material indeed based on the author's numerous research projects. Thus, chapter three is a finely etched portrayal of Sathima Bea Benjamin, one of South Africa's more prominent jazz vocalists and a major figure in the Cape Town jazz scene of the 1950s and 1960s. Muller here deftly interweaves her account of Benjamin with a discussion of the vibrant musical scene in Cape Town until its destruction by the apartheid regime (which forced Benjamin and her husband, Abdulla Ibrahim, into exile), along the way offering personal reflections on the experience of exile and dislocation (Benjamin and Muller spent many years living in New York).

Chapter five, "Music and Migrancy," similarly draws on Muller's fieldwork and musical involvement with a group of Durban-based maskanda musicians and gumboot dancers. In chapter five, in turn, Muller returns to what is arguably her main contribution to South African ethnomusicology. Entitled "The Hymns of Nazaretha," the chapter explores the ritual practices and music of the ibandla lamaNazaretha, one of the most influential and in many ways most "traditional" black churches in and around Durban. Chapter six, finally, offers what Muller calls "Final Reflections," a series of brief—well, too brief, really—snapshots on issues as diverse as "Colonial History," "The Body," and "The Peculiarity of the Hybrid." There are also five appendices: one on "A Music of Encounters" in which Muller reviews a mix of European historical sources on a broad range of African musics from South Africa all the way to Nigeria and Morocco. Another appendix lists "Key Dates in South African History," while the remaining three appendices offer the reader glimpses of topics as diverse as "Selected Websites," "Themes Common to the Study of African Music," and, most usefully, a "Discussion of Musical Examples on Compact Disc."

This clearly is a lot of material, and some readers may find it hard to see the common thread in it all. But then, Muller's main concern in writing this book just may have been the opposite: to show that there is very little holding the many musical traditions of South Africa together other than the fact that they are all expressions of disconnectedness, migration, and transformation, or—as Muller calls it—travel.