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Subjunctive pleasure: the odd hour in the boeremusiek museum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2014

Willemien Froneman
Willemien Froneman*
Affiliation:
Department of Music, Stellenbosch University, Private Bag X1, Matieland 7602, South Africa E-mail: willemien.froneman@gmail.com
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Abstract

This paper introduces the subjunctive as a modality of engaging in musical life, in this instance the contemporary white folk music scene of boeremusiek in South Africa. The genre has repeatedly been portrayed as forever vanishing – a discourse that still characterises contemporary events put up by the largest boeremusiek organisation in South Africa, the Boeremusiekgilde (Boeremusiek Guild). The aim of the paper is to analyse the effects of discourses of nostalgia and salvage on participants' experiences of liveness in the present. It is shown how a deep dissatisfaction for live performance developed throughout the genre's 20th-century history. The repeated framing of present enjoyment in terms of past models of nationalist duty cast the actual actions of participants in the mode of subjunctive possibility, it is argued. As rituals of mourning, boeremusiek events bemoan personal histories fundamentally tainted by political transgression: the loss of intimate spaces of white innocence.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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