The Contemporary Beyond Globalization
“In short, geopolitics has its foundations in chronopolitics.” Johannes Fabian[1]
“I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and of my future.” Frantz Fanon[2]
“The ISCM’s first century began in Austria; its second century is beginning in South Africa.” ISCM President Glenda Keam’s opening remark for this centennial World New Music Days (WNMD) draws attention to issues of spatial and temporal distance – and of memory – that form the basis for this reflection. It also implies a change – or an acknowledgement of the need for change. My aim, then, is to tease out from this experience the ways in which contemporary music is changing and how the Society’s practices inhibit or support this. That requires a brief venture into its history and foundation – “the ISCM’s first century began in Austria” – in order to grasp the significance of this present – “its second century is beginning in South Africa” – raising possibilities that the ISCM General Assembly may wish to discuss at its next meeting.
Writing two months and over 9000km from the event, I am keenly aware of the dangers of filtering and refining the felt reality of this event in order to draw generalised lessons. This spatial and temporal distancing is constitutive of ethnographic writing, a point made by Johannes Fabian in noting how fieldwork notes are problematically transformed into anthropological case studies and arguments. In brief, the construction of other peoples as “primitive”, “savage”, “tribal” or “backward” – essential for Western colonialism when contrasted with its own declared “progressive” or “advanced” modernity – depended on erasing the experience of sharing time as con-temporaries with members of the culture being studied. Fabian called this anthropology’s “denial of coevality”. The WNMD’s inaugural presentation on the African continent surely signalled an intent at least to recognise if not to remedy this in relation to Western conceptions of musical progress and contemporaneity.
Fabian observes how the texture of the ethnographer’s experience is winnowed in the process of writing, to distinguish between significant and insignificant details. “No provision seems to be made for the beat of the drums or the blaring of bar music that keeps you awake at night; none for the strange taste and texture of food, or the smells and the stench. How does method deal with the hours of waiting, with maladroitness and gaffes due to confusion or bad timing?”[3] Indeed, this is an underlying argument in his essay “Forgetting Africa”.[4] Anthropologists not only erased the contemporaneity of Others in the published memories of their accounts but had also “forgotten” the significant role that memory played at the very moment of their fieldwork. They had failed both to recognise Others and to acknowledge the re-cognition required in finding what was meaningful in their interactions. In short, seemingly trivial details bear more attention than might be expected for a WNMD reflection, an approach that follows my attempt to invite memory into the writing and reading of this account.
“Co-existing With Inconveniences”
New Music South Africa (NMSA) were warm-hearted and generous hosts. Organising such an ambitious Festival with many international guests was not without its challenges, however. “Load shedding” or scheduled (and sometimes unscheduled) power cuts required back-up generators, and whilst most events passed without difficulty a few were affected. At Johannesburg’s Holocaust & Genocide Memorial Centre, the glitch aesthetics of Yu Oda’s NoiseSample were matched by the interruptions of power failures requiring the firing up of the Centre’s own generator. Trouble with the Goethe Institut’s back-up supply necessitated the rescheduling of a programme of solo instruments with live electronics.
At least two venues cancelled their bookings at the last minute, creating confusion. A hail storm – one of the increasingly common “freak” weather events caused by climate change – caused a roof to collapse at the Festival’s partner hotel just days before musicians and delegates arrived. Communication was sparse – the organisers prioritised finding alternative accommodation – so alongside the power problems there was a pervasive sense of being in the dark.
The artistic director, Lukas Ligeti, broke his leg in an accident mere weeks ahead of the opening. Compelled to hobble on crutches – and needing to reconfigure his drum and marimba set-up for the opening concert – this was clearly a struggle, so it was good to see his spirits lift and his musical capacities more (though not fully) restored by the closing concert. Further incidents included a choir pulling out a week ahead of the premieres of several new works; the Cape Town Camerata and its conductor Leon Starker did a miraculous job of picking up the baton for what became a festival highlight.
As a member of NMSA put it to me, working in the country involves learning to “co-exist with inconveniences”. Other prosaic lapses added unintentional slapstick qualities to the experience. For example, bus drivers got lost, programme orders changed routinely – sometimes announced from the stage but not always – and as programme notes were often unavailable, handed out after a performance had begun or printed in an unreadably minuscule font, it was not always clear what we were listening to.
This is not a review rating for TripAdvisor, however. Distracting as these details were, the experience pointed to a more fundamental issue. In focusing on “musical works” or “the music itself”, guardians of and commentators on new music have tended to assume as “extra-musical” the material conditions of its possibility: concert spaces with good acoustics; a ready supply of musicians trained over decades in its idioms; audiences – or even a large middle class – familiar with its aesthetics, willing and able to travel for performances (public transport being minimal); a reliable power supply; an economy with grants, donations and institutional partners sufficient to guarantee rehearsals and artist fees; and so on. These cannot be assumed everywhere to the same degree. The contingent “noises” of local circumstances cannot be wholly detached from the “purely musical” qualities of performances. Even with Ensemble Modern performing, the experience for this listener felt substantively different than if the same group presented the identical programme in Auckland, Tallinn, Beijing, or Vancouver. It highlighted a general rule that is becoming more pronounced, marking a principle, perhaps, for the ISCM’s second century: the more fixed and specific a composition or repertoire is, the less amenable it is to adaptation, improvisation, and flexible re-arrangement. It risks failing to recognise the contemporaneity and unrepeatability of its own moment. Music that assumes greater degrees of abstraction is more likely to suffer the specificity of its public context. Increasingly, composers are crafting pieces that can be responsive to their environment and in which they can construct a recognisable world in sound. This is a welcome shift. It is also a challenge, perhaps, for programming selections based on conventions of score-based works as fixed musical objects existing somehow independently of the performances in which they are presented.
Three Festivals in One
These were not the only suppositions of “contemporary music” that became apparent. This was evident in the programme strategy. As the Festival is centred around selected pieces from the call for works, with each ISCM section guaranteed at least one piece as well as associated and affiliate members, 53 pieces – each nominally up to 12 minutes long – formed a bulk of the programme. The challenges this presents have long been acknowledged (often in previous WNMD reflections), not least among them that of creating a coherent musical proposition rather than an experience more akin to a conveyor belt with pieces following one another in more-or-less arbitrary sequence. In South Africa, this approach raised a distinctive problem. Rather than the historic concern that each section should be represented, it risked drawing significant attention to those parts of the world that are not members and so not represented. Of the ISCM’s 48 sections, 13 full associate and three allied associate members, only one – NMSA – is African.[5] It would be shameful for a Festival of contemporary music in Africa – the first WNMD on the continent – to include only one “local” work, especially when the Festival hosts are expected to raise the funds and build the partnerships to present this programme. As if to balance the ISCM works, then, a comparable amount of music – even more heterogeneous – was linked with the African continent. Whilst this offered a semblance of equality, it also compounded the inherited difficulties of the format: the practical and financial challenges of presenting an event of this scale; the futility of attempting a truly “representative” sample of all contemporary music practices; and the near-impossibility of curating the programme as a meaningful whole.
There is an English nursery rhyme of an old woman who swallows an inflationary sequence of unlikely creatures in order to address the original problem of having ingested a fly.[6] Having gulped down a spider “to catch the fly” and a bird to catch the spider, a cat for the bird, a dog, a goat, and a cow in turn, her attempt to “swallow” a horse kills her. Whilst NMSA has survived this adventure, the Festival’s third strand – the bird to catch the spider – certainly stretched its modest institutional capacity to breaking point. This comprised events specifically designed to address the glaring problem of how to make the programme musically significant in this context, and so was also the most successful aspect of the programme, at least in terms of quality and coherence. Alongside the supplement of repertoire from the ISCM’s first century, this part of the festival was curated in partnership with others, notably Oluzayo (Zulu for “the way ahead”), a festival also held earlier in Cologne, produced with Thomas Gläßer;[7] the Galician ensemble vertixe sonora;[8] and programmes with Ensemble Modern, also part of Oluzayo, both building on and departing from the programme and experience of their Afro-Modernism in Contemporary Music initiative curated by George Lewis.[9]
At a simple level, such an extraordinary undertaking needed more resources, more organisational capacity, and more time – both to produce and to listen. I’ve attended 100+ performances of new music each year for over 20 years so am used to listening to a lot of new work, but even I felt overwhelmed by the amount of music offered. There simply wasn’t time to process each piece. It was not just the nearly 60 hours of live performance in 10 days that was exhausting, but more specifically a question of form on two levels.
First, the breadth of “contemporary music” now being created would have been inconceivable to the ISCM’s founders, many linked to the circle around Schoenberg. Even if it was still possible to entertain the notion of a single tradition, the parade of styles, genres, concepts, instrumental practices, technologies, cultural forms, and compositional strategies subsequently adopted would defeat any attempt to treat it as a norm for evaluating particular pieces. Contemporaneity is no longer referenced by idiom or technique alone (or even predominantly).
This was apparent considering the African music alone. Some pieces were internationalist in their experimentalism, or schooled in contemporary Western techniques. In their pleasing harmonies and orchestration, others seemed to be wearing their “Sunday best” and polite behaviour, giving the sense of a “lactified” music – to borrow Frantz Fanon’s term for a black subjectivity constructed by the desire for white approval.[10] Amongst the most compelling, however, were William Chapman Nyaho’s performances of pieces from Fred Onovwerosuoke’s 24 Studies in African Rhythm, reminding those of us who may have forgotten (in Johannes Fabian’s sense) that African music is intensely lyrical and melodic, as well as having rhythmic complexity.[11] These “Africanise” piano idioms; they swing but are not “chamber jazz”.
The festival’s opening night was indicative, both stylistically plural and symbolically rich. The Mzansi National Philharmonic, conducted by Brandon Phillips, opened with two movements from Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph’s Tempus Fugit. Its combination of grand gestures from mid-century modernism and film music were reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein, “energized by driving and sometimes relentless rhythmic patterns” drawn significantly from African musics. The first female South African composer to receive a PhD, following studies in Europe (including György Ligeti), Zaidel-Rudolph is also celebrated for arranging the country’s national anthem and adding its final verse. An ISCM-selected work followed, Veronika Voetmann’s Frostbitten, its spacious and continuous melodic line shaped by spectral harmonics and icy textures, somewhat akin to Giya Kancheli’s writing but resonant of Nordic folk music. The synaesthetic translation of visual art in Colour Sketches by (NMSA delegate) Chesney Palmer ranged from cinematic technicolor to post-Impressionistic gouache of rhythmically-inflected textural blocks. In this company, Michael Moerane’s Fatše La Heso (My Country) didn’t come across as dated as its 1941 composition might imply. The first symphonic poem by a Black South African – and uncle to Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor as President – it channelled folk song within an idiomatic tone poem akin to populist works by Copland. Lukas Ligeti’s Suite for Burkina Electric and Symphony Orchestra (2016) completed this programme (its repeat performance closed the Festival in Cape Town). A heterodyne combination of his “African electronica” band with orchestra, it staged not a contest of wills or battle of traditions – despite the opening movement’s theatrics, in which one of two bravura male dancers “competes” with the conductor for musical control – so much as a repertoire of possibilities for cohabiting – coevally – the same musical space. Effecting a reversal of the call for unity as harmony in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, the Suite seemed to imply that differences should not be erased in a universal ideal but accepted as co-existing, however inconvenient that might appear. Moving on to Untitled Basement for the first Oluzayo Club Night, we were then treated to a stunning solo set of jazz-inflected experimental improvisation by Siya Makuzeni on vocals, trombone and electronics, followed by Nonku Phiri’s band channelling vintage Afropop, avant-garde electronics, and soul.
This thumbnail sketch barely scratches the surface. The issue was not simply the varieties of music presented. Rather, their idioms often demanded different ways of listening, both individually and collectively. They shaped time in incongruent ways, raising the precarious question of compositional form. Cage formulated the problematic already in 1956: “Anything goes. However, not everything is attempted.” I’ve elaborated that elsewhere,[12] but the key is in the second part – when anything is possible, when music as a contemporary art is not bounded by a definition, singular heritage or tradition, the challenge becomes how to find necessity within the limitations (“not everything”) adopted. The art is in finding form within this chaotic abundance.
The most successful performances in this mode were those that emerged through collaboration with the performing musicians; electroacoustic pieces that propagated a single sound source; choral works that drew on the idiomatic possibilities of unaccompanied voices; and compositions that crafted a time of their own either by reaching for that trembling, precarious line between musical tone and timbre – for example by exploiting thresholds of silence and technique that trouble the production of tone – or by orchestrating a meta-instrument through clustering of sounds that mutate through the movement of parts whilst holding a basic shape. Highlights of the “repertoire” pieces for this listener included: Phillip Nangle’s Chipembere 8/9 (based on mbira patterns); Kayode Ibaiyo’s ìkokò (using interpenetrating modes); Soosan Lolavar’s I am the Spring, You are the Earth (a collaboration with a fantastic pick-up band of South African musicians); Paul SanGregory’s Blue Shimmer; Lee Cheng’s Shanshui; Michael Blake’s Ukukhalisa Umrhube; Juta Pranulyte’s Harmonic Islands; Madli Marje Gildemann’s Osmosis (winner of the Young Composer Award); Andile Khumalo’s Invisible Self; Hans Zender’s Modelle; Ondřej Štochl’s Il sogno fragile; Rufus Isabel Elliott’s A piece of horizon has been arching ur back; Rucsanda Popescu’s Konstellation II; Fabian Svensson’s Nothing Happens; Engelhardt Unaeb’s Onga Johorongo; Christine Onyeji’s Ero Muo; Ana Horvat’s Mi; Deirdre McKay’s Sable qui glisse; Nathan James Dearden’s I Breathe; Matteo Rigotti’s …three constant panic rooms; Pascal Gaigne’s Dialogues pour la nuit (a real standout piece); and Felipe Pinto d’Aguiar’s Ambientes.
The second aspect of form that this epic programme highlighted concerns the temporal envelope of music. Listening to ten pieces with barely a pause between them (largely unprepared by information about works or composers) can be like listening to ten poems, each in a different language. No single piece is afforded air to breathe. To craft a musical world requires more time than the duration of a score’s performance. It needs to resonate in the non-silences around it, to shape and be shaped by listeners’ memories and attention. The selected works were not really granted that opportunity, but much of the third “curated” strand was. They also benefitted from spaces that were accessible to wider audiences, generating that expectant energy in which improvisers take flight. The sets by Siya Makuzeni, Ancient Voices, Nonku Phiri, and Jonathan Crossley’s Inhale project achieved this, breathing airs of enchantment, grooved and polyrhythmic, an acrobatic sense of risk, excess, and suspended time. My personal favourite, however, came at The Centre for the Less Good Idea – a bohemian hub founded by the artist William Kentridge – with Victor Gama’s Tombwa, a video-cum-documentary opera weaving a story of the work and mysterious death of Augusto Zita N’gongwenho, a young Angolan anthropologist. Improvising on his sculpturally-complex, self-made instruments – the Acrux (a multi-layered lamellophone) followed by Toha (totem harp) – Gama provided its live soundtrack, both rhythmically complex and lyrical.
Whilst offering a wealth of musical experiences, then, this WNMD highlighted structural problems with the festival’s composition and assumptions. The notion that a musical work exists separately from its performance implies a bracketing of the latter’s context, a premise that I propose is no longer credible. Rather like the problem of ethnography, it privileges a practice of writing over the time of encounter. Massing works together, it invites competition and comparison according to which piece (and nation) is more progressive and which more conservative. Furthermore, ISCM’s model becomes a victim of its own ambition. If it was truly “international”, with members from all 195 states, the current festival format with works from each section would be impractical. Yet the current membership – stable for decades at c.50 countries – can in no way be considered comprehensive. Can it continue strategically to fail meeting its internationalist goals? Lastly, if the notion of a single tradition is over and a vast ocean of possibilities is now open to composers, how might the ISCM’s second century address this abundance without drowning?
Ways Ahead?
The ISCM has often been compared with the League of Nations or UN and with the Olympic Games. Its founding in 1922-23 occurred not only in the wake of the “Great War” as a more peaceful means of contesting national value, but also within the course of a paradigm of international competition for artistic prestige based on a (contested) “progressive” notion of quality.[13] In this light, the Venice Biennale – also compared with the UN and Olympics – makes a more accurate model for the WNMD in staging internationalism and contemporaneity.[14]
A rapid sketch of its history is instructive. Founded in 1895 (a year before the first modern Olympics), the Biennale provided a platform for the recently-unified Italian state to stake its claim amongst the advanced and “civilised great powers” by hosting an international exhibition. This format was not itself novel, but part of a world shaped for the first time by an international concept of time – agreed at the 1884 Prime Meridian Conference in Washington DC – and by the ability to enforce this modernist invention through colonialism. Italian adventurism took off after annexing the port of Massawa in Eritrea in 1886 (the same year that gold was “discovered” in Johannesburg, catalysing mining interests of both the Boers and English to extract this wealth). This was a race to be the first among unequals.
Providing space for all the participating countries created problems of available land and costs as the exhibition expanded, prompting the construction of national “pavilions”, each with relative autonomy for what it presented, from 1905. The post-WW2 emergence of large-scale biennials (and quinquennials such as Documenta, from 1955) shifted emphasis from the relative modernism of these national presentations towards a global Zeitgeist defined by curatorial themes. The ensuing tension between curator and nation was provisionally settled only in the 1990s – as the Biennale marked its centenary – with greater collaboration based on the recognition that artist identities were increasingly transnational and that their contemporaneity (and art history itself) was not singular but a product of crossings, migration, and transit “between styles, genres, media, temporalities and diverse cultures”.[15]
The beginning of ISCM’s second century provides the opportunity to address the structural problems I noted in this reflection, echoed in this summary of the Venice Bienniale. The problems of hosting an expanded programme of music – of time, organisational capacity, cost, and coherence – are consequences of situating the “contemporary” within the “international”. Indeed, many commentators have noted a sense of stagnation as the ISCM struggled to respond to its own “Documenta” moment, with the more curatorial models of large international festivals such as Darmstadt.[16] The South African experience showed not only that this model no longer functions effectively, but also touched on possible solutions. First, this necessarily involves rethinking contemporaneity as the articulation of time experienced collectively in the present, referenced neither to an external ideal nor avant-gardist competition. As the South African philosopher Michael Onyebuchi Eze noted of the post-Apartheid period, “restoration of…shared temporality is, in the most minimalist and bizarre simplification, what constitutes justice – the process of reconstituting the broken social order.”[17]
Second, as an ingénue for the ISCM General Assembly, I proposed that the ISCM could consider a “pavilion” structure for future festivals. These would be organised collaboratively and transnationally, sharing expertise, capacity, and costs. The art of this approach would be to compose – or curate – each as a whole and coherent experience, a way of articulating time that is sensitive to context and to the historical moment. It would involve negotiating worlds in which differences are not erased but co-exist (a process that Eze aligns with the African concept of Ubuntu). Who knows, it might even provide a template for the United Nations in an age when the competitive model is threatening the world itself with destruction.
[1] Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983 / 2014, 144.
[2] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, transl. Charles Lam Markmann, London: Pluto Press, 1967, 226.
[3] Fabian, Time and the Other, 108.
[4] Johannes Fabian, “Forgetting Africa”, in Memory Against Culture, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 65-76.
[5] COSIMTE, one of the two affiliated associate members, is technically African, although the Canary Islands are widely understood as historically, economically, politically, and socio-culturally European.
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Was_an_Old_Lady_Who_Swallowed_a_Fly, accessed 15 Feb 2024.
[7] https://www.oluzayo-festival.net, accessed 15 Feb 2024.
[8] https://vertixesonora.gal/vertixe-11/, accessed 15 Feb 2024.
[9] https://www.ensemble-modern.com/en/projects/vielfalt-erleben-202, accessed 15 Feb 2024.
[10] Fanon, Black Skin; and Glenn Holtzman, “The Music Department in South Africa as a Mirror of Racial Tension and Transformative Struggle: A Critical Ethnographic Perspective”, South African Music Studies 40/1 (2020), 515-543.
[11] Kofi Agawu, “The Challenge of African Art Music”, Circuit: Musiques contemporaines 21/2 (2011), 49-64.
[12] Ed McKeon, Heiner Goebbels and Curatorial Composing After Cage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
[13] Sarah Collins, “What Was Contemporary Music? The new, the modern and the contemporary in the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM),” in The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music, ed. Björn Heile and Charles Wilson, Oxford: Routledge 2019, 56-85.
[14] Clarissa Ricci, “From Obsolete to Contemporary: National Pavilions and the Venice Biennale.” Journal of Curatorial Studies 9/1 (2020), 9-39.
[15] Ibid., 24.
[16] Björn Heile, “Institutionalised Internationalism: The International Society for Contemporary Music,” in Musical Modernism in Global Perspective: Entangled Histories on a Shared Planet,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025, 107-49.
[17] Michael Onyebuchi Eze, Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 174.