Esther Marié Pauw is an artistic researcher with Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (AOI) at Stellenbosch University (South Africa), where she coordinates the AOI Sonic Residencies programme. She is a recipient of a 2020 Stellenbosch University postdoctoral award for excellence in research.

Her PhD in artistic research (2015) examined perspectives on interventionist curating in classical flute music concert practice, using geo-political aspects of landscape as lens for curations. Her subsequent work engaged mapping practices and site-specific aspects of music-making as interventionist curating amidst publics, institutions, art, history and music-making. She has published articles in Ellipses (online journal), Herri #1 (online journal), Herri #4, Acta Academica, LitNet Akademies, Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa, South African Music Studies, NewMusicSA Bulletin, Perspectives of New Music (forthcoming) and Oxford Artistic Research (forthcoming). During 2020 she was a visiting scholar and artist in residence at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS), as part of the Xnau-Xnau duo research project with sonic and visual Khoi artivist Garth Erasmus. Their music, as a seminar presentation to cohorts, can be heard on https://youtu.be/FjLbppR19Kc.

Since 2015 her improvisatory work with Garth Erasmus has explored openings into decolonial aestheSis. The documentary films Kreun, (Aryan Kaganof, 2016), Khoisan ghost kreun (Kaganof, 2016), Nege fragmente uit ses Khoi’npsalms (Kaganof, 2018), Suiwer in Blauw (Kaganof, 2018), Sewe, Joubert Straat (Kaganof, 2019) and Invocation (Kaganof, 2020) and Smeekbede (Kaganof, 2020) comment critically and respond artistically to her and Garth’s music-making. Through collaborating in improvisatory sonic events, the duo explores aspects of socio-politics, music, and technology amidst contingent contexts. Audio pieces of their sonic collaboration can be heard on Greg de Cuir Jr’s online exhibition for Media City Film Festival (Detroit-Windsor), www.mediacityfilmfestival.com/dark-dark-gallery/ and, playing with a wider circle of colleagues, on Africa Open Improvising, www.soundcloud.com/user-610733588.

Esther Marié maintains a private flute coaching studio in Stellenbosch. She curates the Éva Tamássy Flute Collection of music, arguably the largest privately compiled flute score collection in Africa, and she curates the Tamássy Flute Hour of flute and chamber music playing. She has commissioned and premièred many South African flute compositions and sound installations, and performed on national festivals. With musicians Ilse Speck, and Barbara Highton Williams, she has presented recitals in Ulm, Germany, and Princeton, USA, and with local musicians she has played extensively, as well as acted as co-founder of several chamber music ensembles over the past three decades. Several compact disc compilations of solo, duo and chamber music have been recorded by her. Current flute projects soon to be released include Under my fingers: Busking album, as well as Infecting Blavet / Affecting Varèse (forthcoming 2021).

Born in London, Christine Lucia immigrated to South Africa in 1974 and from the late 1970s to early 1990s taught music at Diocesan School for Girls, Rhodes University, Natal University, and the University of Durban-Westville (UDW). She was active as a concert pianist throughout this period, an SABC recording artist, and concerto soloist with the Kwa-Zulu Natal Philharmonic Orchestra. She was Head of Music at UDW 1989-95, Rhodes 1997-2002 and Wits 2002-3, managing change in degree programmes and curricula. Aside from academic publications, she has published four short stories and is a member of the London Writers’ Café. Christine Lucia received an NRF grant in 2006-7 for a ‘Theorizing the Global South’ project at Wits, was Overseas Visiting Scholar at St. John’s College Cambridge in 2001-2002, and academic resident at the Bellagio Rockefeller Center in April 2009. In 2004-2008, Lucia edited the journal SAMUS: South African Music Studies (formerly the South African Journal of Musicology: SAMUS). She was Extraordinary Professor in the Music Dept. at Stellenbosch University from 2009 to 2014, and has been Honorary Professor at Africa Open Institute since 2016. She has published two books: The World of South African Music: A Reader (2005) and Music Notation: A South African Guide (2011) as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She established the website www.african-composers-edition.co.za in 2012 for the publication of South African music, which now houses the Joshua Pulumo Mohapeloa Critical Edition in Six Volumes, revised 2016 for CD-ROM (published 2018), and the Surendran Reddy Performing Edition, still in progress. She also produced the CD African Choral Heritage: Recordings of Joshua Pulumo Mohapeloa in 2013. Christine Lucia won a National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences award in 2018 for ‘Best Digital Humanities Project for Community Engagement’. Over the past twenty years she has mentored, supervised, or examined many postgraduate students in South Africa and abroad and still acts as a reviewer for national and international journals and publishers.

I am working in crossroads of memory studies, political history and hip hop, and specialised in Mozambican rap. I defended my thesis in cultural anthropology in 2017 at the University of Eastern Finland. At 2018-2019 I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape (UWC). My recent works about Maputo rap include ‘‘Hidrunisa Samora’: Invocations of a Dead Political Leader in Maputo Rap’, published in the Journal of Southern African Studies (JSAS), and ‘Who has the word? MC Azagaia’s intervention into past and politics in Mozambique’ in Lusophone Hip-Hop anthology. I also contributed the second book about the topic (in Portuguese) widening my regional perspective to Beira and Chimoio, central Mozambique. I was winner of the Colin Murray Grant awarded annually by the JSAS ‘for engaged and original fieldwork’. I recently gave a talk about ambivalence of Samora Machel in Mozambican rap in the 2019 Annual African History Lecture of the UWC, and just before current corona restrictions I talked about sonic biography of Mozambican alternative hero Uria Simango in Africa Open Institute, Stellenbosch and in the Centro de Estudos Africanos, Maputo. I am a scientific coordinator of the Mozambican grass root research organisation Bloco 4 Foundation, and a member of an international hip hop collective Interligados. I designed a general theme for the group’s song ‘O Poder dos Fracos’ (Power of the Weak), which was broadcast in the Chuck D’s And You Don’t Stop show broadcast widely throughout the planet.

P.S. I am also an emergent radio feature maker. My first long feature (in Finnish) was based on my research and Maputo’s sounds, and was broadcast by the Finnish Broadcasting Company. I have also prepared shorter podcasts for instance for Mozambican hip hop radio programmes.

Annemari is an Associate Professor of English as a Foreign Language at Woosong University, South Korea. Her research, art and teaching interests concern the politics of the interpersonal. Taking a trans-disciplinary approach to the interpretation and mediation of communication, her work explores the meaning-making that occurs in, and stems from, ‘in-between’ spaces of verbal and non-verbal expression. Her ongoing preoccupation with dialogue informs an attempt to explore the political dimensions of the ‘in-between’ and its employment in political discourse.

Annemari’s research continues to engage with early medieval literatures that provide rich source material for the study of politically-rooted cultural discourse. Her most recent research projects (including her Doctoral thesis, undertaken at the University of Oxford) explore the politics of performance in Viking Age skaldic poetry (in particular the role of dialogue in the construction of skaldic diplomacy).

In addition to teaching, Annemari co-runs an interdisciplinary research network on Old Norse Poetry in Performance which seeks to facilitate conversations between academics and practitioners in literary, musical and dramaturgical fields on the subject of Old Norse-Icelandic poetic performance in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Links:
https://sites.google.com/site/dialogicthings/

https://oldnorsepoetryinperformance.com/

Lena van der Hoven is Professor for Music Theatre at the University of Bern since 2022 and has been Assistant Professor for Musicology at the University of Bayreuth since 2015. She received a PhD in Musicology from the Humboldt University of Berlin for a dissertation on the Politics of Musical Representation in Prussia from 1688 to 1797. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Since 2016 she has been a member of the Young Scholars’ Program of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Through the EUR∞SA-Program she won a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Africa Open Institute in Stellenbosch (2017-2018). In 2018 she received the Scientific Award of the University of Bayreuth for her research on South African Opera.

Her research interests include the diverse entanglements of opera and music theatre with politics and their function in societies. Her present focus for her Habilitation project lies in contemporary South African opera productions, with a special interest in the transformation of the genre in the socio-political context. She is also a member of the DFG project ‘Opera buffa as a European Phenomenon. Migration, Mapping, and Transformation of a New Genre’ at the University of Bayreuth.

She was the convener of several symposia, a conference and workshop with topics as ‘Music and Democracy’ (2015), the 450th anniversary of Staatskapelle Berlin (2015-2016), ‘South African Opera Productions after the Apartheid’ (2018), and transformation processes of opera through new media and digitalisation (2019). She has presented at conferences in Germany, South Africa, the UK, Sweden, Finland, France, Italy and Brazil. Soon to be published is a volume on opera and music theatre in Africa, which she co-edited in the Boydell & Brewer series ‘African Theatre’. In this volume she also co-authored a chapter on black empowerment in the South African opera adaptations Unogumbe (2013) and Breathe – Umphefumlo (2015) from the Isango Ensemble.

Selection of Grants and Funds

2019 Grant of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences for the Workshop “Oper im Wechselspiel der Medien”, Munich 2019

2018 WIN-UBT Conference Grant for Symposium “South African Opera productions”,    Bayreuth

2018 DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Congress Grant for the Conference of the South African Research in Musicology 2018 in Durban

2017/2018  EUR∞SA grant for Postdoc-Fellowship at Stellenbosch University

2017 DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Congress Grant for IFTR-Conference 2017 in Sao Paulo

2016/2017 Small grant, Bureau of the Equal Opportunity Commissioner, University of Bayreuth

2016 DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Congress Grant for IFTR-Conference 2016 in Stockholm

2016-2022 Grant, Junges Kolleg of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences

2015 Third-party grant, Hertie Foundation for the conference “What does democracy sound like?”

2015 Third-party grant for the Symposium of the Staatskapelle from the Foundation Preußische Seehandlung

2014-2015 Post-Doc Grant, Max Planck Institute for Human Development

2008-2011 PhD Grant, Evangelisches Studienwerk e.V. Villigst

Dr. Jessica Rucell

Jessica is an expert in international development, gender inequality and has worked in the United States, Asia and Africa. She has directed programs, research and advocacy on violence against women, cultural preservation and humanitarian response. Her contributions have had practical impact on policy, service delivery and advocacy. Jessica’s work through AOI aims to expand South African art and literary canons and respond to the call to decolonise South African university research and teaching.

Her training is interdisciplinary. Jessica applies archival, quantitative and qualitative methods to her research and has taught sociology, human rights law, and history. She holds a PhD in Politics and International Development, University of Leeds, UK; a MA in Development Studies, University of Rotterdam, Institute of Social Studies, NL, and a BA in Asian Studies, The New School University, US.

Aryan Kaganof is a project of African Noise Foundation

List of films produced by AOI – Stellenbosch University.

The (missing) Legend of Jiwe (42min23sec) 2018

A Word As Heavy As Bullets (27min50sec) 2018

nege fragmente uit ses khoi psalms (20min59sec) 2018

Graham Newcater – Of Fictalopes and Jictology (6min56sec) 2018

Suiwer (47min08sec) 2017

Daniel-Ben Pienaar: Removing The Room (6min17sec) 2017

Hauntology For Mark Fisher (4min12sec) 2017

Say It With Flowers (24min24sec) 2017

Roesdorp Naklank (3min38sec) 2017

String Quartet #3 For Four Cameras (28min36sec) 2017

Metalepsis in Black (82min09sec) 2016

Your Silence Is Painful (13min05sec) 2016

khoisan ghost kreun (16min33sec) 2016

Opening Stellenbosch: From Assimilation To Occupation (104min54sec) 2016

Kreun (17min01sec) 2016

Threnody For The Victims of Marikana (16min26sec) 2015

Night Is Coming (66min17sec) 2014

An Inconsolable Memory (99min02sec) 2014

Stellenbosched (9min07sec) 2013

Oladele Ayorinde, educator, pianist and cultural entrepreneur, is a ‘THInK’ (Transforming the Humanities through Interdisciplinary Knowledge) Doctoral Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, South Africa. Recently, he was also appointed as a Research Fellow of the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Stellenbosch University, Cape Town, South Africa. Situated within Music and Anthropology, Oladele’s research project is exploring the nexus between music, agency and social transformation in contemporary Africa. His Master’s thesis entitled Dizu Plaatjies and the Amampondo: music, agency and social transformation explored how music and music-making could inform social and economic empowerment among the previously disadvantaged people in South Africa. His research shows how social agencies draw on music as social and cultural capital to negotiate a place in the socio-economic and socio-political structure of pre-and–post-1994 South Africa. According to him, discourse on ‘transformation’ should be re-focused on social and economic empowerment of the South African people, especially the previously disadvantaged people. In his PhD studies, focusing on Fuji music – a contemporary Yoruba popular music form – Oladele is exploring how the so called ‘street musicians’ are re-imagining the society through their music, music-making and ‘associated practices’, and how this enterprise is informing socio-cultural, political and economic transformation in Lagos. More specifically, through the lens of Fuji music and its agencies, his research aims to understand processes of cultural and socio-economic empowerment strategies among Fuji musicians in Lagos, Nigeria.

Juliana M. Pistorius is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield. She received a DPhil in Musicology from the University of Oxford in 2018. Her research investigates opera, migration, and the politics of coloniality and decoloniality in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. As the managing editor of SAMUS: South African Music Studies, she takes an interest in matters of access and linguistic diversification. She is Treasurer of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM).

In December 2018, Wayne Muller received his PhD degree in Musicology from Stellenbosch University with a thesis titled, A reception history of opera in Cape Town: Tracing the development of a distinctly South African operatic aesthetic (1985–2015). This study revisited the historiography of opera in South Africa and traced changes in the performance practices and views on the performed works. Themes such as transformation, contemporary relevance and the Africanisation of opera are explored as means of creating a distinctly South African operatic aesthetic. His research interest is in the history and performance of opera in post-apartheid South Africa. He complete a Master’s Degree in Journalism at Stellenbosch University in 2001, after studying BA Sociology and an Honours Degree in Journalism. Since starting his career in community newspapers in 2000, he has been involved in arts journalism. After working in the magazine industry for three years, he joined Die Burger in Cape Town in October 2007 as Assistant Arts Editor and specialist writer on not only classical music and opera, but also dance and theatre. In 2011, he joined Stellenbosch University as a Publications Editor. His interest in music stems from an early start with piano lessons at the age of 7, and becoming a church organist in his teens. While a student in Stellenbosch, he studied organ with Niel Pauw and singing with tenor Petrus van Heerden at the Stellenbosch Conservatoire, and is currently a singing student of Magdalena Oosthuizen. He  has served as a judge of classical music performances for the kykNET Fiesta Prizes, Kanna Awards (KKNK), the Hans Gabor Belvedere International Singing Competition (media jury), as well as the Fleur du Cape Theatre Awards. From 2009 to 2017, he produced an annual classical music concert for the Suidoosterfees, and has been a member of the festival programme selection committees of the Suidoosterfees, KKNK, Aardklop, and the Vryfees in Bloemfontein. He is co-editor of the oral history book, Eoan – Our Story.

Michael Blake was born in 1951 in Cape Town and left South Africa in 1977 to settle in London where he continued his studies and formed the alternative new music ensemble London New Music. Returning to South Africa in 1998, he established the ISCM South Africa, the New Music Indaba and Unyazi festivals and the Sterkfontein Composers Meeting. He has been visiting professor at universities and conservatoires in America, Europe and South Africa, and has given masterclasses as far afield as Bolivia and Japan.

Largely self-taught as a composer, his work is associated with conceptual art and the beginning of an experimental music movement in South Africa in the 1970s. His output extends from solo piano music and string quartets to orchestral music and opera. In 1976 he began a series of pieces based on African composition techniques, continuing in recent years to explore a postmodern aesthetic in a range of different styles. He was described in the Musical Times in 2011 as “perhaps the first South African composer to be unselfconsciously an African composer. His are the blueprints and stratagems of a new cosmopolitan South African sound”.

He has worked with the Fitzwilliam String Quartet, Ensemble Bash, Fidelio Trio, Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, Axelsson-Nilsson Duo, New Juilliard Ensemble, Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, Mexico City Chamber Orchestra, and pianists such as John Tilbury, Michael Finnissy and Daan Vandewalle. In the past few years he has had commissions and performances at international festivals including Festival d’Automne à Paris, Ars Musica Belgium, World Music Days Slovenia, as well as in New York, Mexico City, Tokyo, Vienna, Milan, Cologne, Stockholm, Vilnius etc. His music has been recorded on a dozen CDs, and a Wergo CD of his complete cello music with Friedrich Gauwerky and Daan Vandewalle will be released in April 2018.

He has collaborated with fimmakers and artists, notably Willem Boshoff in the multimedia piece ‘Scoring Boschpoort’. His first artist book, ‘Five Pieces for Piccolo and Tuba’, is being released in a signed limited edition later this year.

He currently divides his time between his home, in France, and South Africa where he is Honorary Professor of Experimental Music at Africa Open Institute, University of Stellenbosch.

www.michaelblake.co.za https://soundcloud.com/ichaellake https://vimeo.com/album/3290650

Jürgen May, born in 1957, studied music in Bielefeld and musicology in Bonn. In 1989, he received his Ph.D. with a dissertation on early-seventeenth-century lute music. From 1984 to 1993 May worked on the edition of Beethoven’s letters at the Beethoven-Archiv Bonn. From 1999 to March 2018 he was Research Fellow at the Richard-Strauss-Institut Garmisch-Partenkirchen. He directed the Richard-Strauss-Quellenverzeichnis (Richard Strauss sources catalogue) and the edition of Strauss’s late writings, and is member of the advisory board of the Richard Strauss edition at the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Since 2017, May is Associate Professor Extraordinary at AOI.

Jürgen May has conducted research into 19^th and early 20^th century composers, particularly Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Strauss. One of his focusses is the interrelationship between creative output, biography, and social and political contexts. His publications include studies on the creative process, music and politics in National Socialist Germany, and biographical mythmaking. As an editor of texts rather than of music, his methodological approach is based on critical studies of sources in which he has considerable expertise. At AOI, May is currently preparing the research database “Genadendal Music Collections Catalogue” (GMCC), which will serve as a pilot project for MUSA, a comprehensive online platform for documentation of, and research into, music of southern Africa.

Chris Walton (*1963 in England) studied at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Zurich and held a postdoc Humboldt Fellowship at Munich University. He was head of Music Division at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich from 1990 to 2001. He also lectured at ETH Zurich and worked as an occasional freelance répétiteur and continuo player. He was appointed Professor and Head of Music Department at the University of Pretoria in 2001. Today he lectures in music history at the Musikhochschule Basel. He is an Honorary Member of the Allgemeine Musikgesellschaft Zürich and was awarded the Max Geilinger Prize in 2009 for his contribution to Swiss-British cultural ties.

Chris Walton is a music historian. He has published several books, many articles and reviews. His main research areas are Austro-German Romantic music from 1820 to 1950, Swiss music, and South African music. His books include biographies of the Swiss composers Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) and Richard Flury (1896-1967), a study of Richard Wagner’s Zurich years, and a study of composers and their inspiration from Wagner to Alban Berg, Lies and Epiphanies, which has now been published in German translation.
Together with Stephanus Muller, Walton has edited two books on South African music: A Composer in Africa: Essays on the Life and Work of Stefans Grové and Gender and Sexuality in South African Music.
Walton has contributed articles to the New Grove, Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the Cambridge Wagner Encylopedia and other reference works. He is currently running a research project on Richard Wagner and the Austro-German conducting tradition at the Bern University of the Arts.