South African Music Encyclopedia

[7] Planning and work initially took place under the auspices of the National Bureau for Educational and Social Research and an advisory committee consisting of Anton Hartman (Chairman), F.C.L.

[9] Work on SAME was predominantly driven by Malan, assisted by an administrative secretary and a small group of informally-appointed sub-editors including Lily Wolpowitz, Percival Kirby, George Jackson, John Blacking and Jan Bouws.

[14] As a result, contributions were often sought from a wide range of individuals, including amateur scholars, music enthusiasts, as well as musicians and their family members.

[18] In addition to Malan, other well-known music scholars and writers who contributed numerous entries include Percival Kirby, Frits Stegmann and Dr GG Cillié.

Whilst work was started on entries for the important historical centres Stellenbosch, Paarl and Cape Town, these were never completed due to a variety of challenges.

[24] Only five black composers received individual entries: Reuben Caluza, Benjamin Tyamzashe, Michael Mosoeu Moerane, John Knox Bokwe and Joshua Pulumo Mohapeloa.

[29] Arthur Wegelin noted, in turn, that the publication of SAME would ultimately assist researchers in their efforts to make South African music studies as influential and respected as its European counterparts.

[30] In his review of the first volume, Arthur Wegelin, noted that it connected previously thought to be unconnected aspects of South African musical life.

[34] In his review of Volume II, Veit Erlmann remarked that "... the general bias of the encyclopedia is unmistakably towards Western music, thereby reflecting the dominant 'white' culture and the way in which it wishes to present itself".

[37] Also critiquing the mere "perfunctory mention" of coloured and Black jazz and popular musicians, composer John Joubert also noted the seemingly arbitrary choice of towns covered, the omission of important information due to too early cut-off points for gathering information and the need for consistency across the photographic illustrations and music examples.

[43] For Muller, SAME should not be considered as part of the "discursive realm of [Afrikaner nationalist] political activism", but rather as simply "ideologically complicit scholarship" filled with "the complacencies of the apartheid assumptions".

[44] Winfried Lüdemann has also problematised many of the earlier "perhaps unfair" critiques of SAME, and argues that SAME "reflect[s] the kind of scholarship that [wa]s available at the time of its compilation".

[46] The limitations of the "field and disciplinary structures of the time" that Struwig identifies in this way are: "significant blind spots in terms of popular music (Black and white); a general lack of scholarship on African music (particularly in terms of its aesthetic rather than ethnographic value); a certain characteristic domesticity surrounding the discipline, its participants and its endeavours; an unequal educational system that fractured Black intellectual life (effecting Malan's ability to obtain information from Black scholars); a recurrent European orientation (in the inclusion of European musicians and composers who were only marginally relevant to South Africa), as well as a depoliticised and ethnographically unmoored form of music historiography that enabled a general (white) South African nationalism to be normatively expressed" .

[48] Whilst Western art music in South Africa already "represented a convenient shared identity and heritage for white South Africans" because of its origins in "a confluence of various Western European traditions", SAME harnessed the power of this shared heritage further through "eschew[ing] all political aspects of these traditions" in its the approach to historiography in the encyclopedia.