CAPE TOWN HARMONIES, memory, humour & resilience

337pp., illus., map, paperback, Cape Town, 2017.

"Cape Town’s public cultures can only be fully appreciated through recognition of its deep and diverse soundscape. We have to listen to what has made and makes a city. The ear is an integral part of the ‘research tools’ one needs to get a sense of any city. We have to listen to the sounds that made and make the expansive ‘mother city’. Various of its constituent parts sound different from each other, just as Cape Town may sound different to, say, Johannesburg ... This work by Denis-Constant Martin and Armelle Gaulier ... is a critical sociological reflection of the place of these songs and their performers in the context that have given rise to them and sustains their relevance. It is a necessary work and is a very important scholarly intervention about a rather neglected aspect of the history and present production of music in the city." from the foreword by Shamil Jeppie, Associate Professor, Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town

Armelle Gaulier is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Bordeaux Institute of Political Studies. She conducted research on the musics of the Kaapse Klopse and the Malay Choirs in 2006 and 2008 and was granted two masters degrees from the University of Paris 8-Saint Denis for dissertations based on her fieldwork in Cape Town.

Denis-Constant Martin was an Outstanding Research Fellow of the French National Foundation for Political Science and a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies at Stellenbosch University. His books include Coon Carnival, New Year in Cape Town, past and present and Sounding the Cape: music, identity and politics in South Africa.