Alet Lambert
BIOGRAPHY
Alet Lambert is a part-time music teacher and owner of a music business in Durbanville. She completed the degree BMus(Ed) at the University of the Free State, studying piano with Angelina Scholtz and clarinet with Heinrich Armer. She then embarked on a teaching career, heading up music departments in both primary and secondary schools.
After her relocation to the Western Cape she had the opportunity to continue with post-graduate studies, receiving the degrees HonsBMus (cum laude), BAHons(Phil) (cum laude) and MMus(cum laude) from the University of Stellenbosch.
For her HonsBmus degree she conducted sixteen interviews with South African composers, musicologists and friends of the South African composer, Arnold van Wyk as part of an anecdotal study on Van Wyk. She also did research in postmodern aesthetics, as well as minimalist composers.
Her BAHons(Phil) degree included research on topics such as “The relevance of the arts in the aesthetics of Nietzsche, with special reference to music”, and “The importance of Foucault’s ideas on power and sexuality for the feminist movement, with specific reference to feminist musicology”.
Her structured MMus degree included two mini-theses, (1) Feminism and Musicology, and (2) The Music of Arnold van Wyk: a stylistic profile, as illustrated in selected compositions. During this time, she also worked as an assistant and tutor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Stellenbosch.
RESEARCH
Following on from previous studies her current research interests include complexity thinking (Paul Cilliers), metamodernism, and aesthetic theories especially as developed (and developing) in the work of theorists including Peter Sloterdijk, Donna Haraway and Giorgio Agamben.
The title of her PhD research is “Aesthetic emergence at the interface of complexity thinking, metamodernism and music”. The aim of the research is to expand and reconfigure current knowledge on complexity thinking, reading it around the metamodernist bend in contemporary theory and in relation to 21st-century cultural identities. Her supervisor is Prof. Willemien Fronemann.