Nagmusiek [Night Music]

Despite his relative importance within the South African Western art music landscape, van Wyk was not a particularly celebrated composer, nor has his career or music received much scholarly attention since his death in 1983. van Wyk's fictionalised biographer, one Werner Ansbach-the first and most fundamental fiction Muller sets to work in Nagmusiek-acknowledges the supposed mediocrity of his subject as an opportunity to write about those unremarkable figures and works that fill out a cultural heritage and give it volume, if not weight: I think that writing in Afrikaans about an Afrikaans composer, whose music, at first, I have to admit, did not move me intellectually or emotionally, held out the promise of constructing a narrative about the ordinary things that make up a culturally compatible past life in the present (p. 385). The writing of this text in a form of anglicised Afrikaans therefore provides a direct reflection upon the uncomfor table play of alienation and collusion that existed between van Wyk and his Afrikaner community, a play that spent itself in van Wyk's naive complicity in a political system he found repulsive, and in his disillusionment with the lack of recognition bestowed upon him by the academy, his audiences, and his benefactors.