As historical documents, Broadway cast recordings preserve the performances of the original singers fresh from the stage, but as record albums they were conceived to be satisfying in purely aural terms. So, while a cast recording may be known to a far larger audience than ever experienced the show in the theatre, what listeners actually hear is, in the vast majority of cases, a paradoxical kind of authenticity: the original cast performing an abridged version of the music, with little or no dialogue, and with numbers sometimes presented in a different order (in the days of long-playing records, a strong ending to side one and beginning to side two were further conditioning factors). Since it is usually the cast album that provides the most lasting and most widely known documentation of a show in its ‘original’ form, it is worth considering the musical alterations made to transform it into a successful recording, and the case of West Side Story provides an unusually well documented ‘personal take’ on a famous example of the genre. Composers of shows are almost always present at recording sessions, but in this case Leonard Bernstein had to be away in Israel, and the happy consequence for later historians is that Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics, provided him with an unusually detailed report of the sessions. Goddard Lieberson – the producer of the album – also wrote to Bernstein, giving his first reactions to the musical before its Broadway opening.

The term ‘record producer’ is the greyest of grey areas. ‘Producers’ have had to deploy a startlingly wide range of skills. They have to play some role in pre-production (assembling the musicians and musical material to be recorded, overseeing rehearsals and sampling sessions, downloading existing tracks from bands' laptops), production (the actual recording of music) and post-production (its editing, mixing and assembly for delivery to the record company). Producers have been (and are) individual entrepreneurs, freelance operators, record label owners and record label employees. They have been people managers, whether Svengalis, artist and repertoire developers, or gifted amateur psychologists able to guide temperamental artists through a recording session. They have been events managers: the possessors of specialist legal knowledge in relation to contract and copyright law, finance and accounting (the producer will often be budget holder and administrator for the entire project of making an album). They have been musical managers: session fixers, composers, arrangers, synthesiser and drum machine programmers, and conductors. And very often they will have started as sound recording engineers, a profession dealt with in this book by Albin Zak. But most importantly they have been listeners, able to decode what happens in the recording and mixing studios in order to represent the eventual listening customer.

At 7.18 pm on 30 November 2006 three hundred people began to dance in a London railway station. Conga lines formed, some danced together while others were engrossed in their own dance steps on the concourse: not a single strain of music was heard by the bemused onlookers.

What took place was a flash mob, a happening organised via mobile phone text messages and email sent from person to person. In this case it was devoted to people dancing to different, individually chosen music that only they could hear on their personal MP3 players. In this brief moment many of the themes of this chapter are encapsulated: the centrality of listening to recordings in our modern relationship to music; how technological innovations have encouraged this; the increasing atomisation of the musical experience coupled, paradoxically, with a yearning for (musical) community; and, most of all, the idea that listening is far from being a passive, receive-only mode of interacting with music. In what follows we provide a sketch of how listening became institutionalised as the prevalent and normative mode of musical appreciation in industrialised locations; how the activity of listening has been variously configured over time and place (in interaction with technology); and how listening needs to be theorised as a form of social practice, even when it takes place in solitude. We set these themes in the context of what listening, as a social activity, has enabled listeners to do, and we examine the symbiosis between recorded music, related industries and the listener.

“THE WARS OF SHAKA,” THE MFECANE, AND BEYOND

This chapter focuses on the nature and causes of the major political transformations that took place in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the region bounded roughly by the Orange River, the Kalahari Desert, and the Indian Ocean. The notion that the years from the 1760s to the 1830s constitute a discrete period in this region’s history, a period defined by the working-out of an identifiable set of transformations, is of very recent origin. Before the 1970s, historians had long been treating the three decades after about 1810 as a period on its own, one defined primarily by the rise and supposedly explosive expansion of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka, the supposedly consequent destabilizing of much of the eastern half of Southern Africa, and the emergence of a number of new kingdoms in this area. With few exceptions, historians paid very little attention to the decades before 1810 except to describe briefly the emergence of Shaka’s supposed precursor, Dingiswayo of the abakwaMthethwa. In the 1970s and 1980s, as historians began to develop new approaches to the study of African pasts, and to tap more widely into the available source material on precolonial Southern Africa, they began to investigate the political and social history of specific African societies of the later eighteenth century in more detail and over a wider area. However, they still tended to see these years as forming a kind of preface to the Zulu expansion and the “wars of Shaka,” or mfecane, as they came to be called from the late 1960s onward.

This chapter outlines a narrative for precolonial farming societies of the second millennium A.D. in South Africa and highlights several themes. The first is that this is a period when trade relations with the wider world intensified, first with Swahili based in their East African coastal entrepôts and later with the Portuguese, Dutch, and English. The outcomes of these contacts vary, but a second theme draws attention to trade as an important factor in the growth of political complexity and the rise of social hierarchies. Some of these are referred to as state level in their complexity. In reviewing this complexity, however, the essay resists an inclination to reify steeply hierarchical systems over those that contextually combined factors of trade, wealth, and contact in different ways, that, although not monumental in scale, are no less important.

Third, the second millennium is a period when the identities that emerged historically can be identified, traced, and tracked fairly securely by a combination of archaeological, oral, and written sources. It is not a period of historical anonymity. This overlaps with the last theme, which relates to method, emphasizing in particular issues relating to analogy and the unavoidable and complex relationship between ethnographic models and their ampliative role. Ethnographic models extol cultural structure and capture historical context only in the broadest of ways. This characteristic is exacerbated when used in conjunction with structuralist assumptions.

INTRODUCTION

A new and distinctively post-apartheid historiography has yet to find its feet in relation to the period covered by this volume. Since 1994, when the first democratic elections were held in South Africa, there have been significant changes in the nature of public discourses about South Africa’s past. Settlerist and narrow nationalist (notably Afrikaner and Zulu) historical projects have, unsurprisingly, largely lost their impetus. Government efforts led by the African National Congress to invoke a new national past rooted in the black struggle against oppression have focused primarily on the twentieth century. The effort to achieve reconciliation and unity initially moved to deflect public discourse away from attending to the past except as it was manifested in the proceedings of, and the texts that flowed from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in 1995, and in a handful of legacy projects undertaken by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. Concomitantly, the 1990s saw the rapid growth of the particular genre of history commonly known as heritage – celebrating, commemorating, and often commodifying selected aspects of the past. Although heritage and public history courses and research have flourished, universities have experienced a sharp decline in the numbers of students enrolled in mainstream history courses, and the substantial cohorts of graduate students undertaking primary historical research, a feature of the radical history movement of the 1980s, have evaporated.

Small but encouraging signs of things to come are discernible in a variety of areas. Significant challenges lie in how to approach, or augment, the available archive for the period covered by this volume – an archive for the most part powerfully shaped by the colonial and later apartheid eras in which it was established – to facilitate new kinds of research. Key secondary texts that have given definition to how this period is understood themselves require critical review. Likewise, the exclusion of other texts from the historical canon may warrant reassessment.

The period covered by this chapter is marked by the expansion of power exercised by Europeans or their descendants in South Africa. In the Cape Colony, power shifted from a series of military governors to local officials elected under a nonracial, qualified franchise. A more original form of government emerged in Natal, where representatives of the metropolitan government ruled the African population while colonists of European descent exercised only limited political powers. In the interior, Boer settlers built two fragile republics on the basis of a racial franchise limited to white men. The growth and expansion of these very different settler states was conditional upon the conquest of the original inhabitants and the alienation of their land. Wool-farming and plantation agriculture, and later the mining of diamonds in the interior, brought a new urgency to the development of the British colonies and to demands for land and labor. The swell of change was carried far beyond the confines of British rule as people adopted new identities more suitable to their changed situation. Race grew into a primary factor of social classification, belonging, and exclusion and, over time, came to be regarded by many as a scientific means of explanation. The delineation and transcription of languages divided people into ethnic groups that rapidly developed their own values, practices, and histories. During this period, Christianity spread up the coast and into the interior. Many converts adopted the Christian beliefs and practices brought to Africa from Europe whereas others adapted them to local conditions. In some areas class-consciousness grew in importance whereas gender relations, based on the social practices associated with sexual difference, underwent extensive change. As the labor market expanded, many young African men returned home with wages and freedoms that challenged the gerontocratic structure of rural life.

In the last years of the fifteenth century, Southern Africa’s contacts with the world outside the South African subcontinent took on new forms. No longer was maritime trade maintained only on the shores of the Indian Ocean. In this chapter the first results of that change are discussed, primarily with regard to the period after the establishment of a Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope. This was a period that saw the destruction of Khoesan independence through most of the region to the south of the Gariep River and simultaneously, in close relation to this, the establishment of colonial society within the same space. That system was a relatively minor part of the empire of the Vereenigde Oost-indische Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company, or VOC, but it increasingly developed its own dynamics based on the land of the dispossessed Khoesan, and on the labor in part of the Khoesan but primarily of imported slaves and employees of the company.

Initially, the historiography of this period celebrated European colonization and was concerned with the details of colonial rule and settlement. As might be expected, the revitalization of the historiography came in the first instance through discussions of the Khoesan, of slave society, and of the historical geography of colonial farming and pastoralism. Much of this work came together in the two editions of The Shaping of South African Society. Nevertheless, neither these works nor the subjects with which they deal can be considered distinct from each other.

About 2,000 years ago domestic animals, first sheep and later cattle, and domestic plants, principally sorghum and millet, spread to Southern Africa from areas to the north where they were originally domesticated some thousands of years earlier. The retrieval of the remains of these domesticates has allowed archaeologists to develop narratives that describe the social events responsible for the material traces excavated. For historical reasons these events are referred to as “stone age” in the West or “iron age” in the East, depending on the absence or presence of traces of iron use and smelting as associated practices. There is a broad correspondence between this distinction and between the winter (and year-round) and summer rainfall zones of Southern Africa. Here we address the geographic and historical contexts under which people adopted some or other mix of domestic plants and animals, transforming hunter–gatherers into either farmers or herders. We follow Mitchell and others in using the term herder for the (economic) practice of keeping domestic stock and pastoralist and farmer for the (cognitive) practice of developing a world view around mobile stock ownership and sedentary mixed agriculture, respectively.

THE NATURE OF ARCHAEOLOGY AS HISTORY

To explain the appearance of food production in Southern Africa, to document the arrival of domestic plants and animals, and to understand the addition of food production alongside hunting and gathering in certain areas and the replacement of hunting and gathering in others, it is necessary to establish in broad outline the nature of archaeology as history and the comparative relationship between the two.

In the first half of the nineteenth century the Cape Colony became not merely a colony of European settlement based on coerced black labor but one capable of expelling the agricultural amaXhosa from their land, annexing it, and driving them into the colony for work. In 1795 the colony, characterized by slavery and near slavery (of the indigenous pastoral Khoekhoen), as well as racial hierarchy, was ruled by the senescent mercantilist VOC, its furthest frontier of cattle, and sheep farmers recently having encountered resistance from San and amaXhosa in the East. VOC rule was replaced by the rising industrial power of Britain. Britain initially occupied the Cape in 1795 as a strategic wartime naval base in the Napoleonic wars. In 1803 the Cape reverted temporarily to the Batavian Republic but was retaken by the British in 1806 and permanently ceded in 1814.

In global terms, these shifts in the position of the Cape derived from the Napoleonic wars, themselves the consequence of political revolutions in France and America – which also triggered off a successful slave revolt in Haiti. This “age of democratic revolution” gave rise to new universalist ideas about freedom. The same era saw industrial capitalism emerge from a new factory system, chiefly in Britain. The new, “autocratically ruled yet uncentralised” British Empire had as its premise the central role of overseas markets in sustaining industrial development. India was the central market, and China the huge, untapped market to be aspired to. “Free trade” was projected as the way for the British to dominate the world. Within this, the Cape was taken over above all as a way station on the route to the east.

This chapter considers changes in the way South Africans understood themselves, the world and their places in it, over almost the whole of the nineteenth century. As the rest of this volume shows, this was the formative century for South African society, entailing its bloodiest wars, its profoundest heterogeneity, the extension of colonial rule, and the reduction of most people to semiproletarian subjection. People’s sense of who they were and what they were about changed during this time, giving rise to identities and affiliations in forms that are still recognizable today.

That South Africans’ consciousness changed may be so, but what can usefully be said about the process is a more confounding question. For instance, although Marx and Freud both put great stock in the idea of “making conscious,” both also saw consciousness as an ephemera. Neither man thought a useful history could be written about ideology seen apart from the material apparatuses that give rise to it. Nietzsche depicted consciousness as a kind of side effect of life, with no agency; it was “the last and weakest of the senses.” There are also philosophers who view consciousness as an yet-undiscovered physicochemical system in the brain. In this chapter, habits are also of interest, what Pierre Bourdieu called praxis, the acting-through of ordinary life. Clearly, praxis is mostly not conscious. Wittgenstein pointed out that living always comes before rules: that, as he puts it, one learns to calculate by calculating. Social science rules are second-order principles, formed from descriptions of people who just “know their way around.”

John Millington Synge's first two performed plays, The Shadow of the Glen (1903) and Riders to the Sea (1904), marked a significant point of departure for both Synge's own writing and, more broadly, for the Irish theatre. In discovering that he could quite literally grant voice to the people he had long observed, Synge found his forte. With these two strikingly original one-act dramas the budding playwright lent considerable impetus to the early experiments of the Abbey Theatre movement, indicated the directions his future work would take, and created a focus for the divisive nationalisms that would later rile audiences of The Playboy of the Western World. The Irish Literary Theatre, established by Lady Augusta Gregory, W. B. Yeats and George Martyn in 1899, set out a clear statement of intent: “We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all of the political questions that divide us.” / Aiming instead to provide a forum for home-grown drama that expressed the subtleties of Irish life, this experimental theatre movement actively contributed to the political dynamics of its moment. Since his work veered away from mawkish sentimentality and offered instead a performance of 'the deeper thoughts and emotions' that the founders of the movement had hoped for, Synge can be credited with providing the embryonic Abbey Theatre with its first robust articulation of an innovative national drama.

The declaration by W. B. Yeats that Synge 'seemed by nature unfitted to think a political thought' and 'long understood nothing . . . of the political thoughts of men' for many years went unquestioned by scholars, producers and audiences. Appearing in an essay originally intended as a Preface for Synge's Collected Works but withdrawn when Yeats lost the battle to prevent the inclusion of Synge's 'Connemara' articles, Yeats's statement reflects his own withdrawal from a particular kind of nationalist politics rather than Synge's. It can also be seen as an attempt to counterbalance the political emphasis generated by Irish nationalist reactions to The Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western World. Jack B. Yeats, who accompanied Synge on his tour of Connemara, described him as 'an ardent Home Ruler and Nationalist'. Synge's series of twelve articles on Connemara published in the Manchester Guardian in 1905 make Synge's socialist and anti-colonialist politics unmistakable. In the final article ('Possible Remedies'), after suggesting various economic and social reforms, Synge concludes: “Most Irish politicians scorn all merely economic or agricultural reforms . . . if Home Rule would not of itself make a national life it would do more to make such a life possible than half a million creameries. With renewed life in the country many changes of the methods of government, and the holding of property, would inevitably take place, which would tend to make life less difficult even in the bad years and in the worst districts of Mayo and Connemara.” (CW II, 341-3)

“'On Those That Hated The Playboy Of The Western World, 1907'” / “Once, when midnight smote the air, / Eunuchs ran through Hell and met / On every crowded street to stare / Upon great Juan riding by: / Even like these to rail and sweat / Staring upon his sinewy thigh.” W. B. Yeats. / In setting The Playboy of the Western World 'near a village, on a wild coast of Mayo' (CW IV, 55), Synge appeared to conform to the Literary Revival's preference for an idealised west-of-Ireland location, whose distance from the anglicised east had preserved Irish authenticity, and so enabled the embryonic nation-state to 'draw its vitality from that hidden spring'. However, while many of his contemporaries maintained a 'double focus on past and peasant', Synge's play was resolutely present-orientated. As signalled by the speculation that Christy had been 'fighting bloody wars for Kruger and the freedom of the Boers' (71), the world of Mayo might have been geographically distant from Dublin's Abbey Theatre in which the play was first performed on 26 January 1907, but they shared the same fraught historical moment. The Boer War ended in May 1902, but the well-known exploits of the Irish Transvaal Brigade raised by Major John MacBride to support the Boers' fight against the British Empire, and the pro-Boer enthusiasm of the future-founder of Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffith, and MacBride's wife-to-be, Maud Gonne, ensured that The Playboy's audiences would grasp that what was being staged was Ireland's recent and rebellious reality.