Marc Duby
Marc Duby, PhD
Marc Duby was born in Cape Town, South Africa, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy from UCT in 1975. Having begun his professional career as bassist in that city in 1972, Duby returned from overseas to begin musical studies at UCT in 1980, culminating in the award of the first masters’ degree in jazz performance (cum laude) in Durban 1987 with Prof Darius Brubeck as supervisor.
Duby spent the next decade and a half teaching in South African technikons (Technikon Natal and Technikon Pretoria, now Durban Institute of Technology and Tshwane University of Technology respectively) where he was responsible for subjects such as Ensemble, Film Music, Music Technology, and Instrument. Among his most well-known students are Victor Masondo, Concord Nkabinde, Lex Futshane, and Nibs van der Spuy, all household names in South African music.
Appointed in 2001 as the first director of the Standard Bank National Youth Jazz Band, he completed his doctoral thesis in 2007 on the topic of Soundpainting, the New York composer Walter Thompson’s sign language for live composition. Awarded established researcher status in 2010 by the National Research Foundation, Prof Duby has presented academic papers in India, Tenerife, Bologna, New Orleans, Thessaloniki, at Cambridge University and the Universidad de la Rioja (Logroño, Spain), as well as serving as visiting professor at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) and Universidad Veracruzana (Mexico), and locally (UCT 2014).
He has acted as external examiner (undergraduate and postgraduate) for many South African higher education institutions including UCT, the University of Pretoria, Stellenbosch University, UFS, UKZN, and Wits University, and the Elder Conservatory of Music (Adelaide University, Australia) and University of Western Sydney. Duby serves on the editorial committee of the International Journal for Music Education: Practice journal (till 2018) and is editor in chief of the Taylor and Francis journal Muziki. He served as music panellist for the National Arts Council (2007-2010) and as adjudicator for Best Instrumental Music category (SAMA awards 2007 to present day) and SAMRO International Competitions (joint panellist Western art music and Jazz: Performance and Composition).
In 2014 Duby was the recipient of an NRF grant (Competitive Programme for Rated Researchers) and a book-writing grant from ANFASA (Academic and Non-Fiction Authors of South Africa).
Recent performances and collaborations as performer/composer include:
• Karén Devroop Quartet, Koh Samui International Jazz Festival, Thailand (2012)
• Unisa International Jazz School (2012)
• In the clouds (Grahamstown 2009, 2010) (Winner of 2010 Ovation award for best Fringe performance)
• Tim Kliphuis (Netherlands) and Johannesburg Youth Orchestra (Johannesburg 2010, 2011)
• World Sounds of Jazz: with Vigleik Storaas (Norway), Efraïm Trujillo (USA) and Lloyd Martin (SA) (Grahamstown 2011)
• Official accompanist for SAMRO International Singers’ Competition (Johannesburg 2011).
Beginning his fifth decade as professional bassist, Marc Duby has worked with iconic figures of South African music including Barney Rachabane, Nelson Magwaza, Philip Tabane, Winston Mankunku Ngozi, John Fourie, Bruce Cassidy, Darius Brubeck, the Kalahari Surfers, Steve Newman and Tony Cox as well as international artists such as Ernest Khabeer Dawkins (USA), François Jeanneau (France), Pandit Sanjoy Bandophadyaye (India), and Roberto Bonati (Italy).
A founding contributor to the annual Standard Bank National Youth Jazz Festival in Grahamstown, Duby serves on the board of such music organisations as New Music SA and the South African Association of Jazz Educators. A prize-winning composer of film music, he is active as a performer, composer/arranger, and music educator, and in June 2011 joined the University of South Africa as Professor in Musicology in the Department of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology. In 2014 he was appointed as Research Professor in that department, responsible for postgraduate co-ordination and supervision as well as growing staff research outputs. His research interests include improvisation, embodiment, critical theory, jazz studies, and philosophy of mind, as well as semiotics, phenomenology, and the neuroscience of music cognition and perception.
Marc Duby was born in Cape Town, South Africa, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy from UCT in 1975. Having begun his professional career as bassist in that city in 1972, Duby returned from overseas to begin musical studies at UCT in 1980, culminating in the award of the first masters’ degree in jazz performance (cum laude) in Durban 1987 with Prof Darius Brubeck as supervisor.
Duby spent the next decade and a half teaching in South African technikons (Technikon Natal and Technikon Pretoria, now Durban Institute of Technology and Tshwane University of Technology respectively) where he was responsible for subjects such as Ensemble, Film Music, Music Technology, and Instrument. Among his most well-known students are Victor Masondo, Concord Nkabinde, Lex Futshane, and Nibs van der Spuy, all household names in South African music.
Appointed in 2001 as the first director of the Standard Bank National Youth Jazz Band, he completed his doctoral thesis in 2007 on the topic of Soundpainting, the New York composer Walter Thompson’s sign language for live composition. Awarded established researcher status in 2010 by the National Research Foundation, Prof Duby has presented academic papers in India, Tenerife, Bologna, New Orleans, Thessaloniki, at Cambridge University and the Universidad de la Rioja (Logroño, Spain), as well as serving as visiting professor at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) and Universidad Veracruzana (Mexico), and locally (UCT 2014).
He has acted as external examiner (undergraduate and postgraduate) for many South African higher education institutions including UCT, the University of Pretoria, Stellenbosch University, UFS, UKZN, and Wits University, and the Elder Conservatory of Music (Adelaide University, Australia) and University of Western Sydney. Duby serves on the editorial committee of the International Journal for Music Education: Practice journal (till 2018) and is editor in chief of the Taylor and Francis journal Muziki. He served as music panellist for the National Arts Council (2007-2010) and as adjudicator for Best Instrumental Music category (SAMA awards 2007 to present day) and SAMRO International Competitions (joint panellist Western art music and Jazz: Performance and Composition).
In 2014 Duby was the recipient of an NRF grant (Competitive Programme for Rated Researchers) and a book-writing grant from ANFASA (Academic and Non-Fiction Authors of South Africa).
Recent performances and collaborations as performer/composer include:
• Karén Devroop Quartet, Koh Samui International Jazz Festival, Thailand (2012)
• Unisa International Jazz School (2012)
• In the clouds (Grahamstown 2009, 2010) (Winner of 2010 Ovation award for best Fringe performance)
• Tim Kliphuis (Netherlands) and Johannesburg Youth Orchestra (Johannesburg 2010, 2011)
• World Sounds of Jazz: with Vigleik Storaas (Norway), Efraïm Trujillo (USA) and Lloyd Martin (SA) (Grahamstown 2011)
• Official accompanist for SAMRO International Singers’ Competition (Johannesburg 2011).
Beginning his fifth decade as professional bassist, Marc Duby has worked with iconic figures of South African music including Barney Rachabane, Nelson Magwaza, Philip Tabane, Winston Mankunku Ngozi, John Fourie, Bruce Cassidy, Darius Brubeck, the Kalahari Surfers, Steve Newman and Tony Cox as well as international artists such as Ernest Khabeer Dawkins (USA), François Jeanneau (France), Pandit Sanjoy Bandophadyaye (India), and Roberto Bonati (Italy).
A founding contributor to the annual Standard Bank National Youth Jazz Festival in Grahamstown, Duby serves on the board of such music organisations as New Music SA and the South African Association of Jazz Educators. A prize-winning composer of film music, he is active as a performer, composer/arranger, and music educator, and in June 2011 joined the University of South Africa as Professor in Musicology in the Department of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology. In 2014 he was appointed as Research Professor in that department, responsible for postgraduate co-ordination and supervision as well as growing staff research outputs. His research interests include improvisation, embodiment, critical theory, jazz studies, and philosophy of mind, as well as semiotics, phenomenology, and the neuroscience of music cognition and perception.
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Books by Marc Duby
This thesis outlines the general principles of Soundpainting as a system for setting into motion spontaneously created music. The author's aim is to describe Soundpainting in relation to the linguistic turn in Thompson's own definition. This opens the way to a sociosemiotic analysis, in which it is susceptible to examination in the light of some theories of language that have emerged in the course of the twentieth century.
A theoretical framework is developed drawing on the work of such pioneers of semiotics as Saussure and Peirce, as well as the later work in philosophy of language of Wittgenstein, Barthes, Eco, Derrida, and others. The eclectic concerns of Soundpainting suggest situating Thompson's language in the context of current debates in critical theory about tonality, jazz, and improvisation as strategies for constructing identity. Soundpainting, by demonstrating that musical signification can be negotiated through consensus, problematizes the convention of the composer as the sole legitimating authority of the work.
Considering Soundpainting as a processual activity, this dissertation outlines the general principles of Soundpainting as a system for the spontaneous creation of music. Emphasizing the process-based character of Soundpainting (and its affinity with other forms of improvised music) suggests that such categories of musical activity need to be studied from a different vantage point from that of historical musicology.
Papers by Marc Duby
This thesis outlines the general principles of Soundpainting as a system for setting into motion spontaneously created music. The author's aim is to describe Soundpainting in relation to the linguistic turn in Thompson's own definition. This opens the way to a sociosemiotic analysis, in which it is susceptible to examination in the light of some theories of language that have emerged in the course of the twentieth century.
A theoretical framework is developed drawing on the work of such pioneers of semiotics as Saussure and Peirce, as well as the later work in philosophy of language of Wittgenstein, Barthes, Eco, Derrida, and others. The eclectic concerns of Soundpainting suggest situating Thompson's language in the context of current debates in critical theory about tonality, jazz, and improvisation as strategies for constructing identity. Soundpainting, by demonstrating that musical signification can be negotiated through consensus, problematizes the convention of the composer as the sole legitimating authority of the work.
Considering Soundpainting as a processual activity, this dissertation outlines the general principles of Soundpainting as a system for the spontaneous creation of music. Emphasizing the process-based character of Soundpainting (and its affinity with other forms of improvised music) suggests that such categories of musical activity need to be studied from a different vantage point from that of historical musicology.
See more at: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rpms20/current
Discusses recent explorations in analogue electronics w.r.t. Ingold's notion of making
According to recent neuroscientific literature, expert musical performance is one of the most complex and challenging tasks humans undertake and constitutes an important potential area of inquiry into neurocognitive aspects of motor knowledge and brain plasticity, among other concerns (Schlaug 2015; Brown, Zatorre, and Penhune 2015). While there exist a large number of research projects focussing on individual performance, ensemble performance has not altogether garnered the same degree of attention, notwithstanding significant contributions from perspectives such as ecological psychology incorporating notions of affordances under the aegis of what has become loosely known as 4E cognition (Clarke 2005; Windsor 2011; Windsor and de Bezenac 2012; Walton et al. 2015).
This paper aims to explore some opportunities and challenges that arise from a broadly ecological perspective as applied to ensemble performance, arguing that there is a fundamental difference between individuals as soloists and individuals as part of performing ensembles: in short, that the ensuing dynamics within performing groups can not be straightforwardly understood as additive processes (in which individual contributions result in a group outcome in linear fashion). Such an approach, it is argued, cannot do justice to the emergent character of music in performance, when considered as an activity (Small 1998) rather than an object of analysis.
Studies of emergent relationships within ensemble performance (Borgo 2005; Sawyer 2006; Sawyer and DeZutter 2009; Barrett 2014) seem to exhibit a natural kinship with improvisation, whether in theatre or music. The question remains as to the applicability of these various approaches—which incorporate concepts from systems theory as models to account for unpredictable dynamic outcomes of group processes—to performances where the outcomes are constrained by the composer’s authoritative directions (as in the score of a Beethoven symphony, for argument’s sake) or by less specific cultural concerns as to performance etiquette (as in ‘traditional’ jazz improvisation, drawing from the canon of the Great American Songbook).
While systems theory brings the undoubted advantages of taking into account music’s mutable nature and sometimes unpredictable outcomes, it is less certain to what extent its tenets of non-linearity, emergence, and changeability are applicable beyond the genre-boundaries of free improvisation. The mathematical language of ‘hard’ systems theory (complexity and chaos theory, differential equations, non-linear dynamics, and so on) has gained traction in explaining large-scale complex phenomena such as weather systems and epidemics. To what extent these concepts can be scaled down to more intimate processes such as the musical and gestural interactions within a given ensemble also remains an open question, since these interactions will generate altogether different sets of data from natural processes.
This paper aims to discuss the opportunities and challenges at play when aspects of ecological psychology and systems theory are applied to ensemble performance.
Key words: dynamics, ensemble, improvisation, performance, systems theory
As it stands, this place (near Hamburg in the Eastern Cape) bears witness in its ruined state to the process of time and the encroachment of nature which returns to reclaim human constructions whether buildings, farms, houses, or whole villages. By contrast, on the way up the Sani Pass between South Africa and Lesotho exists a no man’s land which belongs to neither country. One wonders how philosophers of place like Ed Casey and Jeff Malpas might respond to the paradoxical existence of this untenanted place.
On crossing into Lesotho, the visitor is greeted by a band of musicians with home-made instruments. Although still early March it is cold at midday and the weather in the mountains is fickle, so they need to dress in accordance with the dictates of nature.
In this paper I undertake an imaginary journey to explore some aspects of place-worlds and life-worlds and how the ideas of home, identity, and place are lived out largely unnoticed by broader sociological understandings. The fields of human geography (Casey 1993, 1998, 2001; Entrikin 1991; Malpas 1999, 2006; Relph 1976, 1981, 1987) and sensory ethnography (Bachelard 1994; Dufrenne 1973; Pink 2009) restore to such inquiries a sense of felt life and emplacedness, of the rough ordinary fabric of everyday life.
To the uninformed listener, the hallmark of what is ‘African’ about African music is the exotic sound of drum ensembles employing so-called African rhythm, a highly complex and sophisticated set of practices in places where music is at the centre of many social activities (Agawu, 1995; Chernoff, 1979; Nketia, 1992). In this paper, I aim to deconstruct concepts such as rhythm, syncopation, and temperament originating from Western musicological perspectives. In so doing, I consider the residual heritage of the aesthetic of disinterested contemplation which understands music as product rather than process, an approach nowadays perceived as highly problematic following the insights of what was formerly known as the new musicology.
The privileging of insider knowledge carries with it a new set of challenges which requires a certain amount of critical distance so as to maintain a balance between contested ethnomusicological perspectives. While the roots of these contestations arise in the colonial period, it seems to me that claiming privileged access to knowledge is in itself problematic and deserves careful scrutiny to expose its underlying assumptions.
and poststructuralism, I consider some of the ways in which musicians may be said to signif(y), how they engage with John Corbett’s three arbiters: firstly, the body of the performer/instrument (the musician as the embodied agent in time and space), secondly, how the performer acquires a vocabulary, and, finally, the performance context (intra-performer and intra-audience relationships).
[T]he Leader’s anger done, grant me the right to die in my native country. Ovid, Tristia
In this paper, I consider the roles of place, landscape, and memory in some South African accounts of exile. I focus on recordings, photographs, personal narratives, and auto-ethnographic perspectives that tell musical stories of both “exiles” and “residents,” often classified simply as those who left or those who stayed behind (Devroop and Walton 2007, Devroop 2011).
To my mind, this unexamined binary precludes the possibility of a third ground: “those who wish to be elsewhere.” For a certain class of residents, “elsewhere” may involve an imaginary Europe, to which these individuals were tied by virtue of cultural links to a close or distant ancestry (Stolp 2012). For exiles, the homesickness and sense of being a foreigner in a strange land would lead them to wish to be home even under the dire circumstances of apartheid (Muller 2008, Muller and Benjamin 2011). I explore this notion of a third ground by drawing on the work of Jeff Malpas (1999, 2006) and Ed Casey (1993, 1998, 2000) who theorise place, respectively, as critically constitutive of identity and entirely subjugated to the philosophical concept of space.
In addition, I share some more personal thoughts on my early experiences as a musician in Cape Town as well as during a later period spent in Europe at the end of the 1970s. Through these various narrative accounts the uniting thread is the relationship between place, landscape, and memory as lived out in the personal and musical biographies of participants in a particularly turbulent time in South African history.
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