As a cultural practitioner, my work has often entailed choral practices within ensembles and beyond. My interest in the migration of ideas, especially those of a musical nature, has presented the use of Euro-American hymns in South Africa as a viable site for investigation. Focusing on understanding how they have moved from their point of origin to their adaptation when re-located, my study has led me to enriching and insightful encounters with a network of practitioners, scholars and various forms of texts. I premise this study in the realm of artistic research, which inherently enables the integration of scholarly inquiry within practice-related activities and reflections at the levels of input (which has informed the focus of this study on arranging), throughput (which includes moments of actual arranging along with other methods), and output (which entails actual arrangements resulting from reflections). Data collection and its analysis are primarily based on interviews, archives, audio recordings and performances. These are enriched with moments of artistic practice – actual arranging
and an auto-ethnographic account. Findings outline the social (church) history and movement of Euro-American hymns among black Seventh-day Adventists in South Africa, the processes and formal decisions that influenced the compilation and development of local hymnals. I consider congregational and ensemble settings and argue that at all levels of integration, there has been a re-framing of the hymns resulting in various new altered forms. I observe this as a function of arranging, and I draw out a history of its development in ensemble practices between 1950 and 2020. Drawing from the systems model of creativity by social psychologist Csikszentmihalyi (1999), I study arranging as a system that offers interdisciplinary affordances. The study entails a written component and a complementary creative portfolio that reinforces the artistic dimension as output. I illustrate forms of arranging and present several propositions concerning de-colonial ways of dismantling the long-standing and mostly Western, notion of individual genius in musical composition as a central and primary practice associated with generating original works. I argue for the often uncanonised originality and repressed yet unyielding humanity embodied in the localisation of these hymns through various forms of intelligence(s).

Keywords: Creative Systems, Arranging, Choral, Euro-American, Artistic Research, Seventh-day Adventist, Decolonial