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The Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) forms part of the Special Collections Division of the Music Library within the Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service and is located in the Music Department. Collections acquired through acquisitions, donations or bequests over more than 50 years form the main holdings and are mostly of South African but also of international significance.
The Documentation Centre for Music, at the Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service, was founded in 2005 by Prof. Stephanus Muller. [1] Having worked from 2002 to order and catalogue the archive of the composer Arnold van Wyk, Muller proposed the creation of DOMUS in order to ensure the preservation of music collections and their unlocking for music research. After obtaining institutional support from the Department of Music and the Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service, Muller appointed Santie de Jongh as DOMUS archivist in the second half of 2005, [2] and functioned as Head of DOMUS from 2005 until 2016, [3] when he unbundled the archival and intellectual functions of DOMUS with the creation of Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (in 2016) and DOMUS formally became a Special Collection of the Music Library, Stellenbosch University.
Between 2005 and 2016, DOMUS embarked on an ambitious programme of archival acquisitions and research-related activities. With its founding in 2005, there were 20 collections in the Music Library. [4] These included the literary estate of internationally celebrated composer and conductor Albert Coates and the music library of bibliophile Michael Scott. [5] At the end of its first decade, the number of collections had grown to 70, including the documentary collections of important South African composers, performing artists, musicologists and music institutions. Significantly, these acquisitions had broadened the diversity of music held in the archive and studied by music researchers and students. Whereas previously the special collections of the Music Library had held only Western art music materials (complementing the focus on such music in the Music Department), [6] DOMUS acquired popular music archives (among others the archives of Anton Goosen and Taliep Petersen, substantial materials on boeremusiek and musicians like Nico Carstens, the archives of record companies like Mountain Records and extensive archival collections documenting unwritten histories of South African music, like David Marks's Hidden Years Music Archive), [7] as well as archives relating to different media in which music played an important role (for example the archive of filmmaker, artist and writer Aryan Kaganof). DOMUS also continued to acquire the archives of important Western art music composers, like Graham Newcater, John Simon, Stefans Grové, Hubert du Plessis, Christopher Langford James and Michael Blake.
Six of the collections in DOMUS are available as digitized collections on open access at These include the collections of Albert Coates (630 items), Christopher James (30 items), Graham Newcater (7 items), John Simon (15 items), South African Jewish Music articles (4964 articles) and Stefans Grové (120 articles).
During this period, Muller funded numerous research-related projects under the aegis of DOMUS. These included: Seminars hosting musicologists Marie Jorritsma and Barbara Titus (2008); a series of conversations and recordings of the isiXhosa bow player Madosini (Latozi Mpahleni) with composer Hans Huyssen (2009); analysis workshops with composer Hannes Taljaard (2009); a simposium to celebrate Kevin Volans's sixtieth birthday (2009) with contributions by pianist Jill Richards, musicologist Christine Lucia, and philosopher Jean-Pierre de la Parte, a performance of Zim Ngqawana and Kyle Shepherd in a scrap yard in Stellenbosch to showcase Aryan Kaganof's film An Exhibition of Vandalizim (2010); lectures by Raymond Holden on 'The Modern Orchestra' (2010); a piano recital by pianist Daniel-Ben Pienaar as part of the joint IMS/SASRIM conference at Stellenbosch University (2010); round table discussions The State of the Discipline (chaired by Christopher Ballantine) and Music and Exile (chaired by Jean-Pierre de la Porte) at the IMS/SASRIM conference in Stellenbosch (2010), lecture series by Jean-Pierre de la Porte entitled 'New Horizons in Composition and Research' (2010); a screening of Aryan Kaganof's and Dylan Valley's film The Uprising of Hangberg in Kayamandi in Stellenbosch and a recording of Hangberg reggae band, Blaze, at Milestone Studio's in Cape Town (2010).
Before its formal establishment as a Special Collection in the Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service in 2016, under the headship of Muller DOMUS functioned as both a music heritage preservation and a research initiative. After the creation of the Africa Open Institute (AOI) in 2016, DOMUS adopted a more conventional archival orientation in its focus on collecting, conserving/preserving, sorting and cataloguing music collections. The archive retains close links with the music research environment at Stellenbosch University, with the Senior Director of Library and Information Services serving in an ex officio capacity on the Board of AOI, and the Collections Acquisitions Committee of DOMUS retaining representation by AOI. Since 2016, AOI has continued to fund and actively mediate in the acquisition of new archives for DOMUS, including the Werner Nel papers (2019), the John Roos/Hennie Joubert archive (2019), the Rupert Mayr papers (2019) and the Pam Devereux Harris archive (2019). The Africa Open Institute has also continued to fund digitization projects in DOMUS through its 'Delinking Encounters' archive project (2016-2020), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
DOMUS houses over 70 collections. These collections that have mostly been acquired by bequest, include (excerpts from collection list): [8]
The South African College of Music, abbreviated as SACM, is a department of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town. It is located on the university's Lower Campus in Rondebosch, Cape Town.
Paul Roos Gymnasium is a leading public dual medium high school for boys in the town of Stellenbosch in the Western Cape province of South Africa, which opened on 1 March 1866 as Stellenbosch Gymnasium. Described as South Africa’s Eton College by novelist Wilbur Smith, it is the 12th oldest school in the country, and its Old Boys have had an important, wide-ranging and notable impact on the history of South Africa.
Zim Ngqawana was a South African flautist and saxophonist. He was later known as Zimology.
Michael Blake is a South African contemporary classical music composer and performer. He studied in Johannesburg in the 1970s and was associated with conceptual art and the emergence of an indigenous experimental music aesthetic. In 1976 he embarked on 'African Journal', a series of pieces for Western instruments that drew on his studies of traditional African music and aesthetics, which continued to expand during two decades in London until he returned to South Africa in 1998. From around 2000 African music becomes less explicit on the surface of his compositions, but elements of rhythm and repetition remain as part of a more postcolonial engagement with material and form. He works in a range of styles including minimalism and collage, and now also forages for source material from the entire musical canon.
Anton Goosen is a South African musician and songwriter. He became a pivotal figure in Afrikaans music and is generally regarded as the father of Afrikaans Rock.
Stefans Grové was a South African composer. Before his death the following assessment was made of him: "He is regarded by many as Africa's greatest living composer, possesses one of the most distinctive compositional voices of our time".
NewMusicSA is a non-profit arts advocacy organisation that promotes the creation, performance, and enjoyment of South African new music. Founded in 1999 and operating formally since 2003, NewMusicSA is the South African section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM).
Graham Newcater is a South African composer known for his use of serialism and the twelve-tone technique. His music draws heavily from European modernist traditions, making him a significant figure in South African classical music. While he employed twelve-tone sets, inspired by composers like Anton Webern, Newcater’s distinctive use of intervals—especially minor seconds and thirds—created a unique sound that set his works apart. Some of his most notable compositions include the ballet Raka, the String Quartet No. 1, and solo piano works. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Newcater abstained from engaging directly with South African cultural or musical identity, focusing on the abstract possibilities of serialism.
Arnoldus Christiaan Vlok van Wyk was a South African art music composer, one of the first notable generation of such composers along with Hubert du Plessis and Stefans Grové. Despite the strict laws imposed by the Apartheid government during his lifetime, van Wyk's homosexuality was ignored by the authorities throughout his career due to the nationalistic nature of his music.
The Bow Project is a double album of studio recordings by the Nightingale String Quartet of Denmark, and historic field recordings of uhadi songs by Nofinishi Dywili from Ngqoko, released in 2010. Each of the twelve string quartets, by a different composer, is based on a song by Dywili.
Anton Carlisle Hartman (1918–1982) was a South African conductor. He was head of music and principal conductor at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and head of music at the University of the Witwatersrand. He became a central figure in art music in South Africa during the mid 20th century.
Oral History of American Music (OHAM), founded in 1969, is an oral history project and archive of audio and video recordings consisting mainly of interviews with American classical and jazz musicians. It is a special collection of the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University and housed within the Sterling Memorial Library building in New Haven, Connecticut. It currently holds approximately 3,000 interviews with more than 900 subjects and is considered the definitive collection of its kind.
Stephanus Muller is a South African music scholar and writer who has written about South African twentieth-century composition, exile, archiving, language politics, music and apartheid and university institutional transformation. As the last chairman of the Musicological Society of Southern Africa, he was a founding member of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM) in 2006. He also founded the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) in 2005 at Stellenbosch University, and the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (AOI) at the same university in 2016. He received his BMus (performance) from Pretoria University in 1992, MMus (musicology) from the University of South Africa in 1998, and DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2001. Having studied with the writer Marlene van Niekerk, he also holds a MA in Creative Afrikaans writing from Stellenbosch University (2007).
The Hidden Years Music Archive is an archive and interdisciplinary research project dedicated to the preservation and study of alternative and popular South African music. Established by David Marks in 1990, the archive holds a collection of around 175 000 items, which includes sound recordings, photographs, posters, programs, documents, press cuttings, notebooks, and diaries... The Hidden Years is a repository of urban folk tunes, township jazz expressions, country rock music, choir works, maskanda, and various traditional musics. In 2013 the archive was donated to the Documentation Centre for Music at Stellenbosch University and has since been managed by Dr Lizabé Lambrechts as the principal researcher and project leader. From 2017 the project has been hosted by the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University.
The Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (AOI) at Stellenbosch University is an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to music studies. Founded in 2016 by the music scholar and writer Stephanus Muller, the institute provides supervision to postgraduate fellows from a variety of disciplines and functions as an independent research hub in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Its mission is to create an institutional space for scholars and artists that encourages experimentation and risk taking. AOI's community include postgraduate and postdoctoral fellows, extraordinary professors, research associates, composers, performers, sonic residents, archival and heritage practitioners and international partners.
The South African Music Encyclopedia is an encyclopedia of South(ern) African musicians and music. Its four volumes were published in 1979, 1982, 1984, and 1986 under the editorship of Afrikaans music scholar Jacques Philip Malan in both English and Afrikaans. Commissioned by the South African Music Council in 1960, the work was ultimately overseen by the Human Sciences Research Council and published by Oxford University Press.
Jan Bouws (1902-1978) was a Dutch-born musicologist and folk music scholar, renowned for his significant contributions to the study and preservation of South African folk music. He was instrumental in the establishment and development of South African musicology through both his work as educator and researcher, often being described as “one of the pioneers of South African musicology”.
Poerpasledam for flute and piano is a work by South African composer Arnold van Wyk (1916–1983), known for its emotional depth and harmonic complexity. The work was originally written for piano duet in 1944 during World War II, but Van Wyk revisited the piece in 1981, adapting it for flute and piano. The work is now considered an example of Van Wyk's approach to balancing seriousness with playfulness amidst the dire circumstances of war and his longing for his homeland. It is regarded as an important piece in South Africa’s classical flute repertoire. The title Poerpasledam is a corrupted form of the Afrikaans phrase that translates from the French pour passer le temps, meaning "to pass the time".
Africa Open Improvising is a South African music collective that explores the capacities of free improvisational music to impact musicians, audiences, and sonic atmospheres of a university campus. Affiliated with Stellenbosch University’s Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation, the collective is known for its unique blend of free improvisational music that fosters collaboration among artists from diverse traditions and disciplines, driving innovation in both musical performance and interdisciplinary research.