In the first book on music published in Afrikaans, Toonkuns 1 by Willem Gerke, 2 music is explained as a thoroughly racialised form of expression.In the section on jazz (or, "die Jazz", as Gerke calls it), the author writes that music is prone to influences of white and black magic: the former constituting "good" influences (encouragement to good deeds), and the latter "bad" influences (promptings to evil, lustful passions).Dance and music, Gerke writes, have always exerted powerful influences on people, and each nation ("volk"), each race, has songs exhibiting both the good and the bad.Writing about the genealogy of jazz, Gerke asserts that the songs of North American negroes consisted of bastardised melodies, characterised by a strong rhythmic character, small ambit and preference for pentatonic (five-tone) pitch organisation, inherited from the original ("oer") African negroes.The negro, according to Gerke, has always displayed a penchant for gliding from one pitch to another, leading to an overwrought sentimentality in religious singing (negro spirituals), whereas the desire to mimic ("om na te aap"), over time led to the adoption of non-percussive instruments in forms of accompaniment.These instruments were used to produce shrieks and grumbling sounds ("gillende en brommende tone"), as negroes could not sing high or low.Thus was born the "negro orchestra", in which negroes developed "a kind of virtuosity" in the squeals and quacks ("die gil en kwek") of the clarinet and trumpet.At this point, two and a half pages into his narrative on the evolution and character of jazz, Gerke makes a startling cognitive leap.He asserts that this kind of music,
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