Prof Chris van Rhyn (Director, MASARA Focus Area, NWU) and Prof Willemien Froneman (NWU alumna and Associate Professor in the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ) at Stellenbosch University) co-authored an article that was published in the International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music in December 2024.
This article looks at how climate change, the legacy of colonialism, and art intersect in South Africa, focusing on two early electronic music pieces by composer Kevin Volans: KwaZulu Summer Landscape and Studies in Zulu History. These pieces, created in the late 1970s during a turbulent time in South African history, explore the relationship between human activity, the environment, and the impact of economic systems. Inspired by the ideas of historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, the article examines how the history of human culture and the history of nature are intertwined. It argues that Volans’s music offers a unique perspective on these issues, prompting us to rethink traditional postcolonial criticisms. Ultimately, this study aims to give Volans’s work a new place in the global music scene and suggests new ways of understanding his music in the context of long-term environmental change, what Chakrabarty calls “geological time.”
Their analysis of Volans’s music involved two steps. First, they tried to connect his field recordings (recordings of sounds from the real world) with the two musical pieces in question. For Summer Landscape, they wanted to figure out which field recordings he used as the foundation for the composition. For Zulu History, they wanted to see if they could find any electronic versions of those field recordings within the piece. To do this, they used a unique computer programmme, similar to the music identification app Shazam, that analyses audio and creates a “fingerprint” of the sounds. This allowed them to compare the field recordings with the music. They used a version of this program within the MATLAB programming environment. Data collection also involved archival research at the Berlin University of the Arts in Germany.
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Acknowledgement: The background in the cover image was partly generated by AI, but none of the faces have been manipulated.
