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The article focuses on South African popular music history and the Hidden Years Music Archive Project, founded by David Marks in 1991.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeremy Taylor, known for his work as a satirist, songwriter and political commentator in South Africa and England, currently resides in the small rural town of Gizeux, France. Although widely recognised for his song ‘Ag Pleez Deddy’, Taylor is also responsible for composing the original music for the musical revue, Wait a Minim, and various other songs including ‘Piece of Ground’ that was recorded by Miriam Makeba in 1966. Arriving in South Africa in 1959, Taylor has had a unique vantage point from which to view the growth and development of South African folk music. In this interview, we explore Taylor’s musical career and reflect on his life and experiences of apartheid South Africa. The interview has been edited, annotated, and augmented with unpublished material from the Jeremy Taylor collection in the Hidden Years Music Archive.1 This archive is rich in newspaper clippings, texts, music manuscripts and photographs and is held by the Documentation Centre for Music, Stellenbosch University. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article explores how sites marked by loss can be activated and represented through sound, curatorship and mapping. We examine this by looking at a recent exhibition, Lingering Absences: Hearing Landscape Through Memory, that is based on the Eoan Group Archive. The Eoan Group was one of the first to produce full-scale opera productions in South Africa, yet their history remained largely unknown to the general public until 2006, when archival records that detailed the history of the group were uncovered. Drawing on this collection of material, and on an oral history project and book publication inspired by the Eoan Group Archive, the Lingering Absences exhibition worked with ideas of dislocation, absence and discomfort as a way of engaging with traumatic pasts, thereby deliberately avoiding a chronological and teleological reproduction of the Eoan Group's history. Investigating the methodologies that were used to conceptualise and execute the exhibition, this article engages with curatorial sound mapping as a creative research practice through which to explore the intersection of memory, sound, body and place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National memory is continuously contested in South Africa and archives and museums are often called upon to store objects or material remnants of similarly contested pasts or histories. In addition, these institutions may already have collections that could be seen as contentious. If we consider these institutions as places where history is produced, what should be done with these objects and collections in a democratic country? This article provides a critical enquiry into the systems through which these objects are produced/recorded, appraised, catalogued and preserved as one methodology through which we can engage more fully with how these resources can be mobilised in the present. As a case study, the article will look at the International Library of African Music (ILAM), arguably one of the most important music archives in South Africa. The largest portion of ILAM's holdings comprises field recordings collected by Hugh Tracey, a scholar who is both celebrated and contested. This paper proposes that through engaging with the processes and ambivalence inherent in Hugh Tracey's recording and classification methods, ILAM has the capacity to provide critical and nuanced insight into one of the most important collections of music in southern-Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]