What do we learn from listening back to a decolonial Khoi’npsalms?

Khoi’npsalms is the title of a music theatre production that took place in March 2018, in Stellenbosch, South Africa, and that was presented by a flutist, an organist, and a Khoi memory music instrumentalist. The three musicians in Khoi’npsalms are also the three authors of this article compilation in which we reflect on aspects of our collaboration.1 Our music event was conceptualised over a period of ten months, but then improvised in live performance. The production did not make use of props other than our instruments, made use of occasional dramatic body gestures, and audiences were supplied with programme notes2 that indicated context and sources of the material that we improvised on. The source materials for our improvisation came from (what we call) ‘Khoi memory music’ (music, largely extinct, made by pre-colonial peoples of South Africa) and six Genevan Psalms (16th century psalm tunes and texts still in use in some Reformed church liturgies today).

What do we learn about our collaboration, as we each listen back to a selected clip from a recording made of our performances – performances that we conceptualised as a narrative that explored historical settings of colonial, postcolonial and decolonial tension? To explore this question, and taking impetus from scholars such as Walter Mignolo (2012, 2013, 2018) who explore decolonial art, this essay sketches our conceptualisation to the music event and presents four sound clips, chosen by ourselves and taken from one of our performances. We provide our individual reflections to these sound clips to explore a ‘listening back’. We conclude by commenting on aspects of our collaboration, and these include reflections on decolonial art that delves into aspects of harm to also find sensings of intimacy and trust. Photographs are included to support some of the arguments made.

CONCEPTUALISATION TO KHOI’NPSALMS

Khoi’npsalms translates as ‘Khoi and Psalms’, and is a new word that we coined. The word suggests an impossibility for South African colonial history: the merging, (in one space; in one music-making) of Khoi music and Genevan Psalms, never before sounded together in church spaces. In our live music event, South African Khoi music on bow, saxophone and ‘blik’nsnaar’ (an instrument built from an oil can and strings) was played by Garth Erasmus. His music laced into fragments of Genevan psalm melodies played by Esther Marie Pauw (flute) and Francois Blom (organ).

Historically, Genevan Psalm melodies and psalm texts, translated into Dutch, were brought to South Africa by the ‘Hollanders’ of the Dutch East India Company in 1652. In 1937, Totius – an Afrikaner cultural activist – translated the texts into Afrikaans (and the texts and melodies are still in use today). In our music event there appeared no sustained, worded dialogue, but extracts of the Afrikaans psalm texts were printed in the programme notes. Sonically, the psalm fragments were woven into remnants of Khoi memory music to engage with shared, violent histories, including imperial genocide and violence from apartheid social engineering of people, legislated in 1948 – harms that, in aftermath, continue to persist.

‘THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE CHARGE OF THE AIR’

Our 45-minute travelling production was performed on four occasions on an art festival (the ‘Woordfees’) in Stellenbosch. Each of the four church venues where we played have, over the years, carried particular histories of complex and complicit entwinement of racial history, with colonial and apartheid readings of religion, enmeshed with political power. One of the venues’ complete audio recording is available online.3

The photographs were taken at a rehearsal in the ‘Moederkerk’ (‘Mother church’, one of the Dutch Reformed Church congregations in Stellenbosch) and these show the grandeur of the building. The built structure has prominent white-washed pillars, a cathedral-high ceiling, stained glass windows, three separate galleries, an imposing ‘preekstoel’ (sermon lectern: a two-story high wooden structure with a roof and chamber that is reached by climbing ten stairs), and, at the back, a pipe organ that is considered by some to be the best church organ in Stellenbosch.

 Hildegard Conradie, South to North view, Moederkerk, 2018.

Hildegard Conradie, West to East view, Moederkerk, 2018.

At a rehearsal, a filmmaker, Aryan Kaganof, was present, and he filmed a few sentences spoken by Garth.4 Garth talks about each space being different, and the differences stemming from ‘something in the charge of the air of each church’.

Afterwards, Garth reflects on his words: ‘There is something special about the space where the air we breathe is the air of the Moederkerk.’ He notes that this church has

… a particular charged air that reverberates with the history of sermonic orations amidst a history of specific calender dates from our shared colonial and apartheid timeline. This Dutch Reformed Church represents the chapter and verse of ‘apartheid divine’, as the justifications for apartheid legislation were based on theological arguments emanating from Reformed interpretations and teachings.

Garth also notes that his comment delves for critical self-awareness, asking questions such as: ‘How will our collaboration be received? Will we be seen to be desecrating the sacred canon of Genevan Psalms? Will our audiences join us as we improvise and perhaps decolonise? The air is fraught…’

When Garth speaks of ‘the charge of the air’ in Moederkerk, he alludes to various aspects about the venue that influence ‘mood, acoustics and timbres of the instruments’. Garth’s comment also alludes to aspects that relate to the socio-political contextual history of the church, as well as the building’s architecture: The building stems from the first colonial church congregation in Stellenbosch, from a church denomination that descends from the Dutch church traditions brought to the Cape in the 1600s, traditions that are still alive. In the aftermath of South Africa’s material-racial privileges of colonialism and apartheid, the Moederkerk congregation is the most well-to-do, and most racially ‘white’, congregation of the four church venues where we performed.

The subsequent film that was made by Aryan Kaganof concludes the section screening Garth’s words by inserting a poetic text written by Garth prior to our music event:

ek onthou my kinderstem skree
maar wie gaan my lippe
verniel met ‘n soen?

This text translates as, ‘I remember my child voice scream, but who will harm my lips with a kiss?’ This text, inserted into the film by the filmmaker, alludes to the bodily, spiritual and psychic injury that emanates from the present-day aftermath of colonialism and apartheid.

LISTENING BACK: WHAT DO WE HEAR?

The sound clips presented here appear in the chronological order that they were improvised on during our music-making. The first and second clips are from the live performance on 8 March 2018, whereas the final clip was recorded during an open rehearsal in the same venue, a week earlier, when passersby were welcome to attend.

LISTENING BACK: DECEIT: ESTHER MARIE’S REFLECTIONS5

After Psalm 47, the flutist exits the ‘preekstoel’ space, and the Khoi musician is left alone, playing a rainfall of teetering sounds, and then speaking into the calabash as he crouches to the floor. The clip that follows depicts this scene.

LISTENING BACK: MY HART, MY TONG: FRANCOIS’S REFLECTIONS7

In the clip from Psalm 45, I hear laments of longing and mourning, audible through the spoken – but structurally broken – words that are recited. Garth recites fragments from the words by a still-living Khoi chief, Chief Margaret: ‘Ons is krom en skewe instrumente’ (We are bent and mangled instruments). He also recites from the Afrikaans psalm’s text ‘My hart, my tong’ (My heart, my tongue) as well as the motto on the South African national coat of arms, ‘’!ke e:/xarra//ke’ (which translates as ‘Diverse people unite’ in a KhoiSan dialect). By using a playback recording and loop pedal, the voice, with flute interjections on single, drooping notes, interact with the organ, and combine into an aurality of intensity and brokenness. Painful subjugation is signified by the flute’s downward-falling notes, in counterpoint with the organ’s hymn and its melismatic tropes of church organ-like improvised passages, while the spoken voice carries the counterpoint as a firming bass. The voice’s broken utterances, the flute calls, and the persistent, variated hymn, all weave as a tapestried outpouring of lament and pain. Towards the end, the organ falls silent, leaving spoken words to resonate forth. ‘My hart, my tong…’

When I listen to my chosen excerpt I remember how I sat playing the organ, attempting to sound a sense of pain: Pain from our individual and collective pasts, both in the story we were referencing, as well as other stories of subjugation, violence, and abuse.

I also hear moments of dissonance in our playing, moving from dissonance to resolution, and sometimes in reverse order. The previous three psalms (42, 8 and 47) had ended on markedly strong claims to consonance (suggesting successful colonial power). However, Psalm 45 became the voice of the subjugated Khoi, speaking form the heart, in broken narratives, and after a while the flute returned (as if to ask, ‘Where is the pain? What is going on?’). The organ then responded by playing the same hymn, celebrating ‘a just king’ (and justice) that may have existed for the Khoi. However, the organ’s insistent trope-like chromatic and melismatic passages perhaps portrayed the irony: ‘a just king’, was not enacted by the colonial powers. The dissonances in sound, I suggest, relay some of these tensions.

Aryan Kaganof, My hart, my tong…, 2018.

When I listen to this clip, I learn that our collaboration was a sonic weaving of strands. Throughout Khoi’npsalms, I sense that we played amidst various aspects of being-different, re-imagining through sound how to perhaps pull together the unravelled strings of our past into a sonic understanding of the present South African political and human tapestry. Khoi’npsalms was the result of a collaboration by three individual musicians, each identifying with their own pain, but also strengths, spiritual awareness, musical input, cultural roots, placements and identity within present-day society. Our music exploration possibly gave a re-interpretation of the South African motto by symbolically uniting us (and perhaps our audiences included) into a multi-stranded improvisational music essay that relays South African history through sonic collaboration of improvisation, innovation and imagination.

LISTENING BACK: A WALL PUSHED OVER: GARTH’S REFLECTIONS8

The clip that I’ve selected is taken from the rehearsal at Moederkerk, a few days prior to the series of concert events. Before Khoi’npsalms, I was ignorant of the socio-historical significance of this church, but as we rehearsed there, and I experienced the space, I wanted to comment, in sound, on our collaboration as a form of ‘heightened awareness’ in response to that space.

We had arrived on a day when there was noisy activity in the church: tourists casually passing through, as well as a maintenance team at work. In the recording, these sounds are distinctly audible while we are rehearsing – up until the point at which I have chosen my clip. In the clip, the extraneous sounds fall completely silent.

In the moments before this clip begins, Esther Marie had been playing a brief, delicate flute solo with high-pitched notes that I had not heard her play before. Instinctively, I wanted to emulate these sounds on the saxophone to begin a conversation.

The sounds are a free interplay between the flute and saxophone, with both exploring their highest pitch ranges. There are moments where I cannot distinguish the flute sound from the saxophone’s sounds. The organ enters to provide the altissimo sounds with a foundation so that the music acquires a forward-moving momentum with a sense of (what I call) inevitability. Having started, there is no turning back: For the first time all three of us are ‘together’, sounding the same mood, and the same story. Our togetherness, sounding brokenness, ‘a wall that has been pushed over’, is retained throughout the remainder of the piece.

Up until this music rendition, our playing had been exploratory and tentative, as we were becoming musically acquainted with one another while grappling with the sonic and symbolic material of Khoi’npsalms. Our improvised collaboration of ‘togetherness’ forced us out of exposed self-awareness and perhaps taught us to be collectively brave. We increasingly relied on being sonically involved to build a collective installation around the material of this psalm.

Collaboration is perhaps about surrendering individuality for the well-being of the collective, but not at the expense of individuality. Instead, when the music improvisation is at its most intense level (as is sounded in the clip that I chose) there is a sense of the affirmation of individuality and equality.

What I also learn from this collaboration is that (what I call) ‘application-involvement’ is even more important than technical facility, because application is a key to taking part, being involved, and being committed. In our country of separate histories with regard to geographical spaces, racial sociality and separated musics, our collaboration is perhaps a metaphorical template that offers a way of dealing with our troubled past: What better reason has one for existing other than to be involved with what is being created in one’s particular time and space, and with one’s particular creative capacities? Collaboration is perhaps an antidote to forced separation and to idle standing-by – as if watching from the outside. Collaboration demands involvement.

THINKING BACK COLLECTIVELY: WHAT DO WE LEARN ABOUT COLLABORATION?

In the quagmire of being sonically human – in and out and between cultures, beliefs and ways of doing – there lies the tension of the sounds that Khoi’npsalms brought to the fore, playing through fragments of six Genevan Psalms, with Khoi memory music, to tell the story.

In the processes of individual listening back (to the clips we had each selected), we learn that collaboration with one another as musicians, and collaboration around a history of harm, combine to make us vulnerable, and create music that is fragile, unsettling, despite (and maybe as a result of) the appearances of triumphant psalms (Psalms 8 and 47) that marked the first half of the music production. (These psalms were sonically so violent, that they served to unsettle us for their sheer force.) After Psalm 45 our emotional-sensing was alerted to agonies perhaps too harmful ‘to play about’, except for the capacity of allowing ourselves ‘to play into’ these harms through the creative space that art offers. We now collectively know that we cannot heal the past, or slip into easy ‘reconciliation’, but we have also learned that we are able to tell the stories as we hear them from our source materials in the interpretative space that art and music theatre offers. Fragility comes with our medium: improvisation, but fragility also comes with the harsh harmed topic that we are speaking to: a shared history that still infests and infects our ways of living and music-making.

Our collaboration ended with a psalm that references rain, crops and harvest, and as the flutist walks out, and the organ quietens, the Khoi memory musician is left alone at the front of the church playing the ‘blik’nsnaar’. The symbol of a pre-colonial person becomes the last person (standing) that bears witness to a complex story. However, there is more: the Khoi music is what ‘holds’ our complex stories, as if to say, in sound, ‘I am here, I hold you; I hold us, whether I play bow, or calabash, or sax, or blik’nsnaar.’ Khoi ‘belongs here’, ‘knows how to live here’, and, as a ‘firming bass’, takes us with: we all are here, together, making newly imagined music.

As a form of decolonial art that speaks from the global South and engages aspects of a harmed past that emanates from colonial encounter, our music theatre used aspects of mimicry and symbolic representation. However, what we were mimicking and representing were also our real and perceived ourselves: we are familiar with the Genevan psalms; with ‘imported religion’; with a South African nation of many heritages; with the harms that emanate from ruthless racial classification; with the perceptions of superiority of certain person-types and of some music-types. A film press release described the musicians in Khoi’npsalms as a flutist and organist – ‘two Dutch descendants – and a Khoi descendant’ (International Encounters Documentary Film Festival and film premiere, June 2018). Together with the visible racial classification that our bodies showed to be decolonising (music-making together), it is perhaps our music instruments that were the strongest decolonizing tools – a church organ telling Khoi history; a transverse Western flute sounding notes of lament into a calabash, and a blik’nsnaar, built by Garth from an oil can and strings – that weave us together. These all signify decolonial, new ways of being and sonic storytelling. The capacity of Khoi memory music to perhaps ‘hold us’, is the strongest trace of art that is ‘decolonial’, speaking with a voice that comes from this place, at this time; music playing from a place of harm and sounding into options for a better, caring, more respectful pluriversal world.

DECOLONIAL ART AS INTIMACY

Our storytelling in 2018, metonymic of the historical meeting of cultures, set out to explore some of the violences and erasures that occurred in our past. However, as we worked together, driven by the dramatic energy of live performance, we found that the bringing together of historically impossible relationships of music-making (and friendship) helped us to re-imagine not only trauma, but also aspects of intimacies, care and conflict management amidst remembering.

As we each listened back to our individual clips, we noted, to one another in discussion, some moments of dis-ease with one another: the flutist noted that the organ’s melismatic tropes, at quiet, sensitive times (in Psalms 42, 45) when the stage could perhaps have ‘belonged to’ the Khoi musician, were present; and the Khoi musician noted times when the flutist had become overly prominent (Psalms 47, 62). The organist, in return, noted that there were moments when the two musicians ‘at the front’ seemingly excluded the organist ‘at the back’ (Psalm 65).

We suggest that intimacies, and tensions that are allowed-for in the space of intimacy, lie at the heart of decolonial arts projects that move through troubling history to traverse into archaeological, improvisatory and unexpected engagements with the present.9 We therefore found that, through listening to music-making, we were drawn into a collaboration of companion-ing honesty and of taking pleasure in our music. We found that we were surprised and delighted by the improvised sounds that emitted between us, and showed us inroads to our human natures. We also found that we were challenged existentially, as the production of sounds of horror and anguish, and a meandering into realms of history that senses ghosts not lain to rest, are physically and sensorically and emotionally taxing; emptying. As we listen back, we realise that our collaboration drove us into spaces of openness in our relationships, so that aspects of care, as well as moments of disillusionment with one another, arose. Our performances, and our experiences of ‘re-performance’ (as we listened back to the recording), impacted on our-selves and on our ways of music-making. We found that collaboration, and listening back to collaboration, changed us – in the act, on stage – and enabled us to reflect critically – afterwards, listening back.

Aryan Kaganof, Decolonial intimacy, 2018.

1 The authors wish to thank Mario Pissarra (Director: Africa South Art Initiative, University of Cape Town), and Antoinette Theron (musician and artistic researcher, Amsterdam) for their comments made on a draft version of this article.
2 Programme notes can be viewed in the section on concept in the article at <http://www.ellipses.org.za/project/khoinpsalms/>. Erasmus, Garth, Francois Blom, Marietjie Pauw & Andrea Hayes. 2020. ‘Improvising Khoi’npsalms’ in Ellipses journal <http://www.ellipses.org.za>, Issue Three http://www.ellipses.org.za/project/khoinpsalms/. An adapted version of the article (with visual editing by Aryan Kaganof) is available at: Erasmus, Garth, Francois Blom, Marietjie Pauw. 2020. ‘Improvising Khoi’npsalms’. Ellipses article adapted and republished in Herri journal, Issue no 4. Article shortened & Addendum added <https://herri.org.za/4/marietjie-pauw-garth-erasmus-francois-blom/>.
3 Blom, Francois, Garth Erasmus & Marietjie Pauw. 2018. Khoi’npsalms (45-minute sound recording of final performance of Khoi’npsalms (8/3/2018, Stellenbosch). <https://soundcloud.com/francois_69/khoinpsalms>.
4 The film can be accessed at https://vimeo.com/260032997, as well as on the Ellipses online journal <http://www.ellipses.org.za/project/khoinpsalms/> and Herri online journal
<https://herri.org.za/4/marietjie-pauw-gartherasmus-francois-blom/>. The film is titled Nege fragmente uit ses khoi’npsalms (‘Nine fragments from six Khoi’npsalms’), and it is a 21-minute film made by Aryan Kaganof (2018). The film makes use of material shot at the four improvised performances and the one rehearsal in the Moederkerk. The section in the film we are referring to takes place at 03’56”-04’23”. Duration of clip: 0’27”.
5 The programme note reads:
Khoi, wind, water / Psalm 42: Khoi music on bow reminds us of the first peoples who lived at the Cape. These people saw foreign ships with sailors come to land, brought to the tip of Africa by winds from the north and the east. Sailors were shown where fresh water was to be found. Psalm 42 (Bourgeois, 1551) reminds of the thirst for water: Like an antelope in arid stretches of land, my soul thirsts for water, for quiet […] (Totius, 1937, translated freely).
6 The programme note reads: VOC Song of triumph / Psalm 47: Jan van Riebeeck delivered a prayer that was scripted by the VOC when he arrived at the Cape in 1652. The prayer conflates religious justification for land, commerce, power of the VOC, and the subjugation of ‘these wild and barbaric peoples’. The VOC began an imperial reign at the Cape. Psalm 47 (Bourgeois, 1551) claims the Imperial God as the highest King over all peoples: Rejoice, oh nations, rejoice! Clap your hands and testify […] to the Lord your joy […] He is King of the heathen […] He is the highest, He is exalted (Totius, 1937, translated freely).
7 The programme note reads:
Khoi Song for highest justice / Psalm 45: Khoi music became quiet, erased. For human survival, Khoi persons learnt new languages and new skills. Psalm 45, a love psalm in the Judaic texts, sings of a ‘just’ king, as also scripted by Totius. When the text becomes the poetry of a Khoi speaker, he longs for ‘highest righteousness’. Flute and organ sense an outpouring of emotion, and are drawn to accompany the Khoi narrative:
My heart, moved by sensing, will sing intimately, strongly, of a King. My tongue, moved by poetic fire, is like a pen that writes with artistic skill […] Clothe yourself with weapons for a victorious battle, oh Hero, so that Your Majesty may ride in all glamour and triumph to find highest righteousness […] From your house of ivory there sounds a wonder-filling stirring of calming string music (Totius, 1937, translated freely).
8 The programme note reads:
Song of anguish / Psalm 62: Khoi musicians learnt to play new instruments—to adapt. The saxophone (with flute and organ) sounds a song of mourning that becomes a song of anguish. The song wails of a wall that has already been destructed, ‘pushed over’, as in the words of Psalm 62 (Franc, 1542):For how long, still, do you seek the downfall and injustice done to a man who is deeply in need, oh cruel tormentors? […] You seek the destruction of a stone wall that has already been pushed over (Totius, 1937, translated freely).
9 In an article published in the Ellipses journal <http://www.ellipses.org.za> we discuss how the film that Aryan Kaganof made revealed to us aspects of intimacy and care that emerged amidst large-scale themes of addressing genocide, colonialism and racial prejudice. See the article by Erasmus, Blom, Pauw and Hayes titled ‘Improvising Khoi’npsalms’ in Issue 3 of Ellipses at http://www.ellipses.org.za/project/khoinpsalms/. The article was republished, with an Addendum, on <http://www.ellipses.org.za/project/khoinpsalms/>.