Music archives promote sociocultural understanding

Since DOMUS was started in 2005, it has grown exponentially, accumulating a varied range of music collections. Are there additions to DOMUS that you are particularly glad are housed there, and why?

Every single collection that arrived at SU during the time I headed up DOMUS, and now that I no longer do so, means something deeply personal to me: a victory against forgetting, a defiant affirmation of the importance of art in the university, and a stand taken in the cultural entropy inimical to the fragile, the vulnerable, the transient, the beautiful, the marginal and the joy of the non-utilitarian. Having said that, there are collections that are symbolically of major importance to SU in terms of transforming its image from that of a custodian of white supremacist culture to an institution that values the cultures of all South Africans. These collections include the Eoan Group Archive, the Taliep Petersen Archive and the Surendran Reddy Archive, which will arrive in 2023. By taking in these archives and looking after them, we are saying that SU has changed, that it no longer exclusively values the musical culture that used to be called ‘European’, and that we are investing resources into this form of transformation.

The AOI and SU’s Department of Music play an important role in procuring collections. What is the role of DOMUS today in terms of collating special collections at a university level? How does DOMUS tie in with the larger landscape of music archives in South Africa and elsewhere?

I think it is reasonable to say that DOMUS is the largest university-based music archive in the country, and possibly on the continent. As continually proven by research (most recently Dr Paula Fourie’s magnificent book on Taliep Petersen), it also presents a model for scholarly involvement and engagement with archives that, if allowed to flourish by institutional structures, will change the scholarly and archival landscapes of our and other disciplines beyond recognition in the next few decades.

What are current research focuses and trends pertaining to the DOMUS collections? How involved do you remain with DOMUS?

When DOMUS became a Special Collections Section of the SU Library in 2016, a decade after its founding, I relinquished control over acquisitions, processing, strategy and planning. It was very difficult for me, as DOMUS was a scholarly project in which I had invested 10 years of my academic career. Today, however, I am still involved in DOMUS via the AOI, which continues to pursue research that leads to new DOMUS acquisitions, and develop research foci in the materials already at SU. For example, the Hidden Years Music Archive (HYMA), acquired and funded for many years by Prof Lizabé Lambrechts, is the subject of her ongoing research into the Free Peoples’ Concerts. Prof Willemien Froneman and I are working on materials associated with the South African music avant-garde, and Dr Hilde Roos will be publishing, along with two colleagues, (contained in the Eoan Group Archive) in 2023.

Is it important that the DOMUS collections be digitised in their entirety? What are the criteria whereby artefacts should be made available digitally?

Digitalising all DOMUS collections would be impossible with the resource constraints that pertain to this kind of work here but also elsewhere in the world in better-resourced contexts. Two factors are important: Preservation of materials and directed creation of access to scholarship. With regard to the former, it stands to reason that materials that are constantly deteriorating (like sound recordings in old formats, or compromised photo negatives) should be digitised as a matter of priority. As regards the latter, scholarly interest is a good way to both determine priorities and obtain funding from research or other funding streams to assist in archival functions. This requires teamwork and collaboration between as many institutional and extra-institutional stakeholders as possible. We have to look upon this work as the shared interest of South Africans, not as the special interest of scholars, librarians or a single university isolated from the broader cultural ecosystem in which we exist.

Internationally, across tertiary institutions, the digital humanities have come to the fore, bringing with it new ways of unlocking and cross-referencing collection items. What influence do the digital humanities have on the archival work and practices at DOMUS?

DOMUS digitises collections, which are then housed by the SU Library and Information Service. But the AOI is experimenting with differently curated forms of digital archival work in advance of the digital humanities agenda through our online enriched-media archive and provocative e-journal herri, and through other projects like the Genadendal Music Archive .

The work done at DOMUS reveals the inherently inter- and transdisciplinary character of music, as well as changes in academia and society’s ways of thinking through and about music. What have been the major trends in how music is researched since DOMUS was started, and how do they reflect the ways in which special collections form part of a larger discussion about and in society?

That is a very perceptive comment. I think the best current example of this kind of work from within our institute is the research of Prof Willemien Froneman. Her work, which started out as a scholarly investigation of boeremusiek (South African folk music), led to the acquisition of a large archive of this music type, which is now part of the DOMUS collections. Froneman’s work is archivally based – I think, for example, of her writings on Jo Fourie – but music research has become for her a pen with which to write in a radical, post-disciplinary way about whiteness and affect. Her monograph on the subject will appear in 2023 and represents, in my estimation, a brilliant refining of and advance on thinking about race as constituted in and through aesthetics and affect, so influentially articulated by the author JM Coetzee in the 1980s. So, in light of the recent Khampepe report on racism at SU, I can think of no more relevant research, suggestive not only of an aesthetic or social analysis but of a transformation agenda.