Stephanus Muller holds masters degrees in musicology from the University of South Africa and Oxford University. In 2001 he was awarded a DPhil from Oxford University before returning to South Africa in the same year. Elected as the chairperson of the Musicological Society of Southern Africa in 2004, he was instrumental in merging this society with the Ethnomusicology Symposium in 2006. After his appointment as lecturer at Stellenbosch University in 2005, he created the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) as a research and music heritage conservation initiative. Since then, DOMUS has acquired some of the most important and valuable archives of individuals and institutions pertaining to South African music, making it a unique repository of recorded music, scores and archival documents on the African continent. Since his appointment at Stellenbosch University, Muller has supervised groundbreaking studies by a new generation of South African music scholars, many of whom have gone on to study at prestigious universities abroad or occupy teaching positions at South African universities. He is currently Professor of Musicology at Stellenbosch University and Director of Africa Open – Institute for Music, Research and Innovation, an ambitious institutional project that responds to the challenges and opportunities of music studies in South Africa. He is also the Principal Investigator of the Andrew W. Mellon Delinking Encounters Project and the South African holder of the British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship for the project South African Jazz Cultures and the Archive. In these capacities he manages, funds and supervises a range of important research initiatives. In 2015 he was awarded the prestigious Fowler-Hamilton Visiting Research Fellowship at Christ Church, University of Oxford. Muller has published widely locally and internationally and received Stellenbosch University’s Chancellor’s Award for Research in 2015. His most recent book, Nagmusiek, was awarded the Eugène Marais Prize by the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns, the Jan Rabie Rapport Prize, the kykNET-Rapport Prize and the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for Creative Writing in Afrikaans.

Hilde Roos is the General Manager of Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University. Her research concerns historical and contemporary representations of opera in South Africa with special reference to the intersection of the genre with politics and race. Her PhD dissertation focused on the indigenization of opera in South Africa. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at Stellenbosch University and UNISA and published in journals such as Acta Musicologica, Historia, Acta Academica, Litnet, the South African Theatre Journal and Muziki. In 2013 she co-edited the oral history book Eoan – Our Story and published her monograph The La Traviata Affair – Opera in the Age of Apartheid with University of California Press in 2018.

Inge Engelbrecht completed her master’s degree (cum laude) at Stellenbosch University in March 2017. Her master’s research focused on documenting the life and works of three composers who have strong ties to Genadendal, the first mission station in South Africa. Inge’s current PhD research is focused on the Afrikaans koortjie tradition in the coloured churches of the Western Cape, a tradition that is part of the cultural narrative of a community that is a largely unexplored field of research. Inge is currently part of the research team of the project called The Genadendal Music Collections Catalogue (GMCC) that aims to create a fully accessible online database of the music collections kept in the Moravian Mission Museum in Genadendal.

Paula Fourie is a writer living in Stellenbosch, South Africa. She currently works as research fellow at Africa Open: Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University where she is completing a monograph based on her doctoral research, a biography of South African musician and musical theatre composer Taliep Petersen. Using biography as a means to explore the reciprocal relationship between an artist’s life and work, Paula’s work is specifically concerned with the creation of life stories through the performance of memory, on the one hand, and the curation of the self in personal archives, on the other. It is perhaps unsurprising that these convergent interests have led to a commitment to explore the boundaries between historical writing and fiction.

Paula is also active in professional theatre, having worked alongside her husband, South African playwright Athol Fugard, since 2012. Production credits include Master Harold … and the boys (Signature Theatre, New York, 2016, associate director), The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek (Fugard Theatre, Cape Town, 2016, co-director), and The Shadow of the Hummingbird (Fugard Theatre, Cape Town, 2014, co-director). Recently her practical work in theatre has met with her work as a researcher, resulting in a secondary research project concerned with exploring the role of music in the Fugard’s oeuvre.

Paula holds BMus and MMus degrees from the University of Pretoria. While working towards the latter during 2009 and 2010, she was employed at the Drakensberg Boys Choir School in Kwazulu-Natal as choral conductor, arts and culture teacher and head of the New Boys Training Programme. Since receiving her PhD from Stellenbosch University in 2013, she has travelled abroad extensively, whether serving her involvement in theatre, or to present her academic research at conferences in Europe, the USA or South America. Paula’s published work includes academic journal articles, essays, book reviews, interviews, plays, poetry, and photo-essays. Her work on Taliep Petersen’s biography has been supported by an African Humanities Program Postdoctoral Fellowship hosted by the American Council of Learned Societies (2015) and a grant from the Academic and Non-Fiction Author’s Association of South Africa (2016).

Anke Froehlich is a researcher on The Genadendal Music Collections Catalogue (GMCC) project. She works on the archived music collections at the Moravian Mission Museum in Genadendal. Anke is also a master’s fellow at Africa Open Institute under the supervision of Dr Lizabé Lambrechts. Her master’s research is concerned with the political economy of online music sharing and attempts to map its legal, systemic, and aesthetic implications for music production and distribution in South Africa.

Willemien Froneman is an extraordinary associate professor at AOI. She writes about white musical aesthetics in South Africa, mainly through the lens of boeremusiek—a marginal and much-stigmatized genre of South African folk music. She coedits the journal SAMUS: South African Music Studies.

Dr Lizabé Lambrechts
Volkswagen Stiftung Research Fellow and Project Leader of the Hidden Years music archive (Hidden Years).
Lizabé Lambrechts is a Volkswagen Stiftung Research Fellow, partnered between Africa Open, Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (Stellenbosch University), the School for Oriental and African Studies (University of London), and the British Library and Archive. She completed her PhD in 2012 on five South African music archives as sites where embedded notions of power and politics become visible. After being appointed as the project leader of the Hidden Years music archive project she obtained training as an audio-visual archivist at ICCROM, an affiliate of UNESCO. She serves on the Executive Committee of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM).
Her Ph.D. research was focused on investigating five music archives in South Africa as sites where embedded notions of power and politics become visible. This work was an attempt to situate music archives within the recent critical discourse on archives and processes of archive making, a discourse wherein the music archive was mostly absent. Employing self-reflexive ethnographic methodologies combined with a rigorous theoretical framework, allowed for a wide range of theoretical explorations about notions of politics, community, crises, storytelling, apparatus of capture, loss and being lost in the archive. In addition, this work incorporated a critical interrogation of archival methodologies such as the creation of inventories, catalogues, classifications, chronologies, descriptions, numbering systems and finding aids to explore the mechanisms of the archive that serve to institute and maintain power. This study revealed that archival processes, individuals, institutional spaces and contexts, function within an intricate web that is continually working towards creating the archive.
During her post-doctoral work, she has published and worked with a variety of media and contexts in order to explore notions of archive, its impact on the present and our understanding of the constructions of history. Some of these projects include the collaborative exhibition project “Lingering absences: Hearing landscape through memory” (2013), a collaborative sound installation “As you are standing here” (2016), and a performance piece, “Archive in Process” (2016), wherein the daily life and routine of an archivist was performed in front of a window where passers-by could view and interact with the various processes that determine archival collections.
Through pursuing interdisciplinary work spanning music and culture studies, history, curatorship and archival science, her work locates its civic responsibility both in terms of the past and the present. Whereas her work is historically concerned with re-inscribing marginalized voices into the historical record, it is also aware that institutional and personal archives harbor the potential to reinvent and to look at things anew.

Pakama Ncume works as a Sound Archivist at Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation, Stellenbosch University.

After completing her B.A (Music Education) degree at the then University of Transkei, she enrolled for Postgraduate Diploma in Library and Information Science (PGDIPLIS) at the University of Cape Town. On completion of the diploma, she moved back to the Eastern Cape. Because the area had few libraries, jobs in this field were scarce. With the advantage of having two professions (educator and librarian), she then took a teaching post at Nozuko Senior Secondary School in Mthatha. It was during her time as an educator that Pakama decided to further her studies and enrolled with the University of Transkei for an honours degree in Library and Information Science, a degree she completed in 2004.

She later joined an NGO, Room to Read South Africa in Pretoria as a Programme Manager for the Reading Room Programme. Her main responsibility was facilitating implementation of school libraries and conducting teacher trainings on library management in various regions of Mpumalanga and Eastern Cape. Because the schools had no librarians, teachers had to be librarians too. With all the teaching responsibilities, it was not easy for them to also read all the librarianship books available. It was because of this gap that Pakama started to write simplified step by step guides and manuals for school teacher librarians on library management, library activities and library sustainability for two NGO’s (Room to Read and African Solutions to African Problems)

Having gained experience in community developmnet work, Pakama joined a social facilitation company Masimanyane Community Developers as a Social Facilitator. In 2013, Pakama started working at Walter Sisulu University where she was appointed as a Music Librarian and Sound Archivist. Pakama was responsible for starting and setting up the sound archive that comprised mainly of LP’s that the university had received as a donation from SABC (sound recordings that were used on air by former Radio Transkei and Capital Radio). She was also responsible for digitizing the sound recordings. In 2017, she joined AOI also for the same role of a Sound Archivist, mainly responsible for digitizing a wide collection of sound records including reel to reel tapes, LP’s, tape cassettes etc.

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).