Hearing The Given and The Made in South African Maskanda Music

In this article, I discuss examples of cultural and musical appropriation in and through South African maskanda music, often marketed as “Zulu blues.” These maskanda appropriations (by musicians, listeners, producers and researchers, including myself) have responsive as well as extractivist potential. Maskanda musickers consider songs, styles, techniques or instruments to be “given” and re/make these on their own account. By claiming command over this primary material they exert power, for instance by re/claiming agency over their own (or someone else’s) body or by confirming African cultural authority and normativity on global stages. Rather than discussing the economic implications of cultural appropriation, I focus on the epistemic implications of distinguishing between what is given (that can be resourced, mined and exploited ad infinitum,) and what has been made (acquiring rarity and value through extensive processing). I address how this implied sensorial hierarchy between the given and the made (Ochoa 2014:21) plays out in the realms of music and sound. As the maskanda case shows, in musicking activities it is not so easy to distinguish the making from the remaking and the unmaking. Distinctions between the given (in being taken for granted) and the made (with its madeness being accredited) are porous and changeable. An investigation of the liminal spaces between assumed “aural givens” and “aural mades” may provide us with more insight into the dynamics of unobtrusive creative inventions becoming voracious industrial routines.