Marc Duby

• BA, MMus, PhD
• Professor Extraordinarius at University of South Africa

South African jazz historiography has tended to regard Cape Town and Johannesburg as the principal axes of musical practice within the country’s borders. This discourse tends to marginalize such practice in Durban as the most obviously “British colonial” of South Africa’s big cities. While Durban’s history has shaped its unique population, its uniq...

The last three decades of work in cognitive science have challenged the idea that thinking occurs entirely in the head, claiming instead that cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive. The claims of 4E cognition challenge the dominance of computational approaches to cognition, and music scholars have explored Gibson's notion of afford...

The music and sounds of video games have become an inescapable part of our world. Not only do these sonic elements profoundly shape the experiences of billions of players every day, but also the soundscapes of games have stretched out from our living rooms to encompass spaces as diverse as pinball arcades, concert halls, museums, and classrooms acr...

Editor's note: This volume presents diverse views on the nature and status of the body in relation to a variety of artforms, including music, film, advertisements, painting, video works, installations, typography, photographs and performance. My sincere thanks to all the contributors for their input and patience throughout the editorial process. I...

A presentation to colleagues at UFS dealing with creative output applications.

Marc Duby is an internationally recognised musician and researcher who began his professional career as an electric and acoustic bassist in Cape Town in 1972. Awarded the first Masters' degree in jazz performance (cum laude) in 1987 under the supervision of Prof. Darius Brubeck, he completed his PhD thesis at the University of Pretoria in 2007 on t...

The purpose of this chapter is to examine Merleau-Ponty’s references to music in his classic text Phenomenology of Perception. This procedure reveals four major themes related to music, namely notions of motor space and tacit knowledge, the unity of music and sound, music and the tradition, and intersubjectivity and contestation. Recent work in neu...

An account of my recent foray into constructing electronic noise-making projects

Artistic research has in recent years concerned itself with the nature of practice and how this may be framed as research. These debates may have blinded us to a more fundamental concern: territorial claims to the research space made by other forces. Competition for access to material and human resources, funds, space, and infrastructural support,...

The main aim of this article is to argue the case for understanding improvising as a real-time emergent process grounded in collaborative action, while noting that talking about improvisation, bluntly put, is not the same as improvising. The ways in which improvisers respond and adapt to changing circumstances in the moment and over time, it is arg...

Aristotle in his book Nicomachean Ethics defined three major intellectual virtues, episteme, techne, and phronesis. This has been expounded on by various authors among them (Flyvbjerg, 2001b; Saugstad, 2002; Kinsella & Pitman, 2012. With episteme grounded in what Flyvbjerg calls 'general analytical rationality' and defined as 'scientific, universal...

Banning Eyre. 2015. Lion Songs: Thomas Mapfumo and the Music that Made Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 339pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-5908-1 (hbk)

The organism-environment system is not a system consisting of the organism and the environment, which could be treated as subsystems, but the organism-environment system is rather a methodological principle. This methodological principle entails that, instead of looking at simple linear causal relations (e.g., the events from the stimulus to the re...

This particular line of inquiry begins by invoking Agawu's challenge (2004) to musicology, namely to take on the imaginative task of framing a new musical aesthetics grounded in African ways of being – what might be understood as a context-driven African musicology. After considering some salient aspects of drumming as a practice contributing to a...

While everyday activities that generate ideas of home, identity and place are lived out largely unnoticed by broader sociological understandings, I argue that an ecological orientation restores to our inquiries a sense of felt life and “emplacedness”, an awareness of the rough ordinary fabric of everyday life. For instance, time has reduced the aba...

This particular line of inquiry begins by invoking Agawu's challenge (2004) to musicology, namely to take on the imaginative task of framing a new musical aesthetics grounded in African ways of being – what might be understood as a context-driven African musicology. After considering some salient aspects of drumming as a practice contributing to a...

The year 2013 marks the 150th anniversary of the song Daar kom die Alibama, inspired by the 1863 visit of CSS Alabama to Table Bay. In this paper I discuss Robbie Jansen's 2003 version of this song with reference to the original song's iconic status in South African culture, its origin as a product of indigenous knowledge and finally some of the mu...

In this article I consider how various aspects of pattern play out in various genres of western art music, both within the common practice period and thereafter. In this discussion I adopt a mostly ecological stance, understood as considering the organism's relationship with the environment as a point of departure. The argument contains two interlu...

Inspired by Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the volcano, Jack Bruce and Pete Brown's 1971 song, The Consul at sunset, forms the central focus of this paper, in which I examine aspects of the historical origins of the song and how the music and lyrics may be said to represent attitudes to Mexico in the imagination of these songwriters. Using a semiotic...

Please note that this is the final draft of this article made freely available by arrangement with the editors of SAMUS. The official version (with correct pagination and including Rafs Mayet's photographs) is available for purchase online at: http://www.ajol.info/index.php/samus. The composer Paul Hanmer, interviewed by Gwen Ansell in Soweto Blues...

The Department of Music at Rhodes University inaugurated the International Spring Music Festival in 2009. One of the central educational goals of this festival is to provide a platform for student performers to interact with local and international music professionals and to exchange knowledge about performance practice through making music togethe...

Bruce Cassidy’s Body Electric appeared briefly in the 1990s in Johannesburg to perform a number of concerts there, including two concerts at the University of the Witwatersrand. Led by the Canadian-born Cassidy and formed as a “healing band”, the free improvising Body Electric drew on the experience and attitudes of musicians from fairly eclect...