The becoming of an archive: perspectives on a music archive and the limits of institutionality

ABSTRACT

The call on South African music departments to critically engage with their curricula in order to reflect the broader music landscape wherein they function has been ongoing for the past 40 years. While some departments did engage in strategies to transform their curricula, various scholars have pointed out that most of these institutions have to some extent remained fixed within conservative syllabi and ideological practices conceived to serve the previous dispensation. It is within this field of discursive engagement and political actions directed towards change that archives can play an important role in decolonising higher education institutions. While recognising that archives work to a slower historical beat than what is currently (often militantly) demanded in debates on decolonisation in South African universities, this article wishes to argue that this temporal differential is important in terms of long-term institutional and curricular reform. This article will consider these questions with particular reference to the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS), an archive-centred music research project in the Music Department at the University of Stellenbosch. This article will posit that DOMUS’s collection practices and projects may serve as examples of active and radical strategies with the potential to affect change within conservative institutional spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Music archive
• curriculum change
• archival institutions
• decolonisation
• documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. See for example the work of Stolp (2016); Pooley (2011); Lucia (2005); and King (2018).

2. For some examples see for example Taylor (1988); Brothman (1993); Harris (1996, 2002, 2007); Cook (2001); Hamilton et al. (2002); and Cook and Schwartz (2002).

3. It must be noted that this is not an uncommon or a particularly South African problem. This situation also existed before South Africa’s transition to democracy. See for example De Jongh (2011).

4. For more information on this archive, the Hidden Years Music Archive, and research project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, please visit: https://aoinstitute.ac.za/hidden-years/.

5. During the process, the name DOMUS remained unchanged, although what the name referred to, was constantly evolving. In other words, DOMUS started out as a particular kind of archival endeavour in 2005, while its current status is that of a Special Collections division within the Library and Information Services of Stellenbosch University, also incorporated into the research institute Africa Open, established in 2016.

6. Santie de Jongh.

7. This film by Aryan Kaganof documents eyewitness accounts of the attempts by the Western Cape Provincial Administration and the City of Cape Town to evict residents from their homes in Hangberg, a township outside of Hout Baai.

8. For more information about some of these projects, see DOMUS Projects (2015).

9. See the South African Music Collections Database compiled by Santie de Jongh, Special Collections Librarian at DOMUS (De Jongh 2009).

10. See footnote 2, as well as Ann Laura Stoler (2002) and Lizabé Lambrechts (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lizabé Lambrechts

Lizabé Lambrechts is a Senior Volkswagen Foundation Research Fellow at the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She is the project leader for the Hidden Years Music Archive and Principal Investigator for the project entitled, “Music and memory: Discovering the postapartheid through popular music archives” (2018–2021).