Christopher Ballantine
Biographic Data
| ID | 3656820 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher Ballantine |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Ballantine |
| SIGNATURE | BALLANTINE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of KwaZulu-Natal |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7314-5687 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Against Populism
Often described as a social pathology, populism currently finds virulent expression in political movements across the world. Unlike the recognition that involves mutuality and respect, populism is typically founded on misrecognition; it pursues alterity, essentializes identity, offers ‘protection’ against the threat of hostile ‘others’. Often the social consequences are tragic. Music, however, can confirm or disrupt the way populism constructs id…
Opera and the South African Political
Christopher Ballantine’s focus is on timbre, in particular the timbre of the singing voice, and how this combines with the imagination to create meaning. His investigation is largely philosophical; but the growth in popularity of opera in post-apartheid South Africa provides empirical means for Ballantine to indicate this powerful but analytically neglected way of creating meaning in the performance of music. His case study shows how timbre can p…
Edmund “Ntemi” Piliso Jazzing Through Defeat and Triumph
Associated with the local swing style usually described as African jazz, Edmund “Ntemi” Piliso was one of the most highly regarded, frequently recorded, extensively consulted and best known South African musicians of the twentieth century. Renowned for his deep knowledge of the urban black South African popular music of his time, as well as for his reflexively intelligent insights into its relationship with mainstream international jazz, he is pe…
Modernism and Popular Music
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Re-thinking 'whiteness'? Identity, change and 'white' popular music in post-apartheid South Africa
In South Africa, the prospects for social integration were auspicious after the first democratic elections in 1994. As the popular music of the time shows, it was not only blacks who exulted in the new 'rainbow' euphoria: many whites did so too. But for millions of black and white citizens, this moment was short lived. The government's adoption of neo-liberal policies had severe social consequences - which it and the new elite sought to conceal b…
Gender, Migrancy, and South African Popular Music in the Late 1940s and the 1950s
L'A. examine le developpement de la musique populaire en Afrique du Sud dans les annees 1940-1950. Il montre d'abord comment la scene musicale populaire de cette periode a ete fortement marquee par les enjeux de genre, mettant en evidence sa masculinisation et l'etablissement d'une domination masculine totale. Il tente ensuite d'expliquer la deterioration des relations intersexe dans le milieu musical par la contextualisation de l'histoire socio-…
Looking to the USA
In South Africa of the 1950s, night-clubs frequented by blacks were dangerous places. Fights, shootings and stabbings were commonplace, and some shows even ended in riots. Gangsters were an important catalyst for such events: they terrorised musicians and patrons alike. Miriam Makeba, whose singing career began in the 1950s, remembers what it was like:[T]hese men come in, sit in front, and pull out their bottles. They put these before them on the…
Fact, ideology and paradox
Thereâ€TMs much else that could be said; but for our purposes, there are two things to stress. The first is that it was here, in the institution known as “Concert and Dance†, that South African jazz culture was incubated. And the second is that this institution derived its repertoire from two principal sources - the one mainly American, the other mainly local. In a paper at a previous Symposium (the Seventh), I talked about the former - the Ameri…
Joseph Shabalala
Ethnomusicologists generally have laboured under the ideology that the music they studied belonged to societies that were culturally homogeneous. Music has been treated as a kind of mystical outpouring of a folk collective, and the diversity of singular, creative individuals has tended to be ignored. In the case of Africa, this has largely led to the presumption of a continent full of music but empty of composers. Against this ideology, this pape…
So who are we, and what are we doing? Critical reflections on the annual Symposium on Ethnomusicology , 1980–1993
John Blacking
John Blacking was sixty one when he died on 24 January, 1990. I knew him for the last twenty five of those years: first as one of my teachers, soon as a loyal friend, fmally as a colleague. The boundaries between these were never rigid - not even when I was an undergraduate and he a lecturer (and then Professor of Social Anthropology) at the U Diversity of the Witwatersrand
Music and emancipation
Within the specified sub‐culture, a number of beliefs existed about music's role. On the one side, were a set of beliefs that were essentially liberal and individualistic in character — in part a consequence of the petit‐bourgeois outlook and practice of (especially) the African National Congress at the time. On the other side, more radical views and practices existed, on the basis of which music might lend assistance to efforts for more fundamen…
Concert and Dance
The explosive development of a jazz-band tradition in South African cities from the 1920s - closely allied to the equally rapid maturation of a vaudeville tradition which has been in existence at least since the First World War - is one of the most astonishing features of urban-black culture in that country in the first half of the century. Surrounded by myriad other musics - styles forged by migrant workers; traditional styles transplanted from …
A brief history of South African popular music
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Symphony Idea
Re-thinking 'whiteness'? Identity, change and 'white' popular music in post-apartheid South Africa
In South Africa, the prospects for social integration were auspicious after the first democratic elections in 1994. As the popular music of the time shows, it was not only blacks who exulted in the new 'rainbow' euphoria: many whites did so too. But for millions of black and white citizens, this moment was short lived. The government's adoption of neo-liberal policies had severe social consequences - which it and the new elite sought to conceal b…
Looking to the USA
In South Africa of the 1950s, night-clubs frequented by blacks were dangerous places. Fights, shootings and stabbings were commonplace, and some shows even ended in riots. Gangsters were an important catalyst for such events: they terrorised musicians and patrons alike. Miriam Makeba, whose singing career began in the 1950s, remembers what it was like:[T]hese men come in, sit in front, and pull out their bottles. They put these before them on the…
A brief history of South African popular music
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Gender, Migrancy, and South African Popular Music in the Late 1940s and the 1950s
L'A. examine le developpement de la musique populaire en Afrique du Sud dans les annees 1940-1950. Il montre d'abord comment la scene musicale populaire de cette periode a ete fortement marquee par les enjeux de genre, mettant en evidence sa masculinisation et l'etablissement d'une domination masculine totale. Il tente ensuite d'expliquer la deterioration des relations intersexe dans le milieu musical par la contextualisation de l'histoire socio-…
Music and emancipation
Within the specified sub‐culture, a number of beliefs existed about music's role. On the one side, were a set of beliefs that were essentially liberal and individualistic in character — in part a consequence of the petit‐bourgeois outlook and practice of (especially) the African National Congress at the time. On the other side, more radical views and practices existed, on the basis of which music might lend assistance to efforts for more fundamen…
Joseph Shabalala
Ethnomusicologists generally have laboured under the ideology that the music they studied belonged to societies that were culturally homogeneous. Music has been treated as a kind of mystical outpouring of a folk collective, and the diversity of singular, creative individuals has tended to be ignored. In the case of Africa, this has largely led to the presumption of a continent full of music but empty of composers. Against this ideology, this pape…
Concert and Dance
The explosive development of a jazz-band tradition in South African cities from the 1920s - closely allied to the equally rapid maturation of a vaudeville tradition which has been in existence at least since the First World War - is one of the most astonishing features of urban-black culture in that country in the first half of the century. Surrounded by myriad other musics - styles forged by migrant workers; traditional styles transplanted from …
The Symphony Idea
A brief history of South African popular music
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Music and emancipation
Within the specified sub‐culture, a number of beliefs existed about music's role. On the one side, were a set of beliefs that were essentially liberal and individualistic in character — in part a consequence of the petit‐bourgeois outlook and practice of (especially) the African National Congress at the time. On the other side, more radical views and practices existed, on the basis of which music might lend assistance to efforts for more fundamen…
Concert and Dance
The explosive development of a jazz-band tradition in South African cities from the 1920s - closely allied to the equally rapid maturation of a vaudeville tradition which has been in existence at least since the First World War - is one of the most astonishing features of urban-black culture in that country in the first half of the century. Surrounded by myriad other musics - styles forged by migrant workers; traditional styles transplanted from …
John Blacking
John Blacking was sixty one when he died on 24 January, 1990. I knew him for the last twenty five of those years: first as one of my teachers, soon as a loyal friend, fmally as a colleague. The boundaries between these were never rigid - not even when I was an undergraduate and he a lecturer (and then Professor of Social Anthropology) at the U Diversity of the Witwatersrand
So who are we, and what are we doing? Critical reflections on the annual Symposium on Ethnomusicology , 1980–1993
Fact, ideology and paradox
Thereâ€TMs much else that could be said; but for our purposes, there are two things to stress. The first is that it was here, in the institution known as “Concert and Dance†, that South African jazz culture was incubated. And the second is that this institution derived its repertoire from two principal sources - the one mainly American, the other mainly local. In a paper at a previous Symposium (the Seventh), I talked about the former - the Ameri…
Joseph Shabalala
Ethnomusicologists generally have laboured under the ideology that the music they studied belonged to societies that were culturally homogeneous. Music has been treated as a kind of mystical outpouring of a folk collective, and the diversity of singular, creative individuals has tended to be ignored. In the case of Africa, this has largely led to the presumption of a continent full of music but empty of composers. Against this ideology, this pape…
Looking to the USA
In South Africa of the 1950s, night-clubs frequented by blacks were dangerous places. Fights, shootings and stabbings were commonplace, and some shows even ended in riots. Gangsters were an important catalyst for such events: they terrorised musicians and patrons alike. Miriam Makeba, whose singing career began in the 1950s, remembers what it was like:[T]hese men come in, sit in front, and pull out their bottles. They put these before them on the…
Gender, Migrancy, and South African Popular Music in the Late 1940s and the 1950s
L'A. examine le developpement de la musique populaire en Afrique du Sud dans les annees 1940-1950. Il montre d'abord comment la scene musicale populaire de cette periode a ete fortement marquee par les enjeux de genre, mettant en evidence sa masculinisation et l'etablissement d'une domination masculine totale. Il tente ensuite d'expliquer la deterioration des relations intersexe dans le milieu musical par la contextualisation de l'histoire socio-…
Re-thinking 'whiteness'? Identity, change and 'white' popular music in post-apartheid South Africa
In South Africa, the prospects for social integration were auspicious after the first democratic elections in 1994. As the popular music of the time shows, it was not only blacks who exulted in the new 'rainbow' euphoria: many whites did so too. But for millions of black and white citizens, this moment was short lived. The government's adoption of neo-liberal policies had severe social consequences - which it and the new elite sought to conceal b…
Modernism and Popular Music
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Edmund “Ntemi” Piliso Jazzing Through Defeat and Triumph
Associated with the local swing style usually described as African jazz, Edmund “Ntemi” Piliso was one of the most highly regarded, frequently recorded, extensively consulted and best known South African musicians of the twentieth century. Renowned for his deep knowledge of the urban black South African popular music of his time, as well as for his reflexively intelligent insights into its relationship with mainstream international jazz, he is pe…
Opera and the South African Political
Christopher Ballantine’s focus is on timbre, in particular the timbre of the singing voice, and how this combines with the imagination to create meaning. His investigation is largely philosophical; but the growth in popularity of opera in post-apartheid South Africa provides empirical means for Ballantine to indicate this powerful but analytically neglected way of creating meaning in the performance of music. His case study shows how timbre can p…
Against Populism
Often described as a social pathology, populism currently finds virulent expression in political movements across the world. Unlike the recognition that involves mutuality and respect, populism is typically founded on misrecognition; it pursues alterity, essentializes identity, offers ‘protection’ against the threat of hostile ‘others’. Often the social consequences are tragic. Music, however, can confirm or disrupt the way populism constructs id…
Art (14 works) · Music History and Culture (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Musicology and Musical Analysis (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Musical (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · South African History and Culture (7 works)