Browsing by Author "Stolp, Mareli"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Contemporary performance practice of art music in South Africa : a practice-based research enquiry
    (2012-12) Stolp, Mareli; Muller, Stephanus; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Department of Music.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this dissertation, I examine contemporary South African art music performance practice and the social function it fulfils. Performance practice is understood in this study to mean an art practice or cultural item constituted by three types of 'role-players': performers of art music, composers of works in the art music genre and audiences that assimilate and respond to these works when performed. My own position as a performing artist in South Africa has suggested most of the research questions and problems dealt with in this dissertation, which was approached as a practice-based research study. Practice-based research, an emergent kind of research which aims at integrating practical and scholarly work, is becoming increasingly prevalent in academe internationally, although the present study is one of the first examples of such an approach in South Africa. Drawing on contemporary interpretations of the theories of phenomenology articulated by Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, my position as a performer of art music in South Africa and the personal experiences I have had as a practitioner within this art practice are interrogated. While I was involved in a variety of practical engagements during the course of this study, all of which have contributed on some level to the final research product, the research design comprised five 'performance projects' that were designed to interrogate specific issues in contemporary art music performance practice in South Africa. The knowledge gained through these performance projects are presented together with theoretical work in this dissertation. An attempt is made to explicate these subjective experiences gained through practice and interrogate them through the application of social theory, ultimately translating them into an objective research outcome which is presented discursively. In this sense, the research project is approached according to a two-pronged strategy: subjective experiences generated through practice are examined through the use of social theory, ultimately resulting in a discursively articulated research outcome. I suggest in this dissertation that art music practice in contemporary South Africa has been and has remained a cultural territory largely inhabited by white South Africans. I further argue that this practice has shown little transformation since the end of apartheid in South Africa, in spite of the political, social and cultural transformation that has characterized the country since the beginning of democracy in 1994. Drawing on the theories of Homi Bhabha and Regula Qureshi, I posit that contemporary art music performance practice is providing an ideological counter-environment to predominant socio-cultural realities in post-apartheid South Africa. Qureshi suggests that the art music practice of a society 'constitutes a meaningful, cultural world for those who inhabit it'(Qureshi 2000: 26). Such a 'world within a society' is here interpreted as providing a counter-environment within which white South African identity can be articulated, negotiated and propagated.