Epiphanies of Postcolonial Radiance

Abstract

This chapter considers the musical epiphany as a narrative technique in the ego documents of Jo Fourie, South Africa’s first woman ethnomusicologist. Between the 1930s and 1960s, Fourie crisscrossed South Africa in search of boeremusiek. A Dutch immigrant who arrived in the country in 1910, Fourie recounts in her diaries, letters, and memoirs a series of epiphanies on how she overcame her initial visceral dislike to become a strong apologist for the music, advocating for the concertina as (white) South Africa’s national instrument. I discuss her visionary moments as modernist technologies of ethnomusicological writing whereby Fourie enmeshed her own complicated life story and aesthetic (dis)education with what Philip Bohlman has called the “national journey” of folk music. I then show how her epiphanic vision for boeremusiek influenced boeremusiek’s reception and performance practice, creating an aesthetic where live performance was devalued in favor of an ever-retreating ideal past when boeremusiek was supposedly “pure” and “uncontaminated.” Despite numerous attempts, this ideal past was never successfully invented in sound. I argue this to constitute boeremusiek’s failed modernism.