Past projects

The Andrew Mellon-Michael Mosoeu Moerane Critical Edition research project was a music heritage reclamation project that began in 2017 and ended in 2022 with the publication of the Moerane Edition. A team of five research students and a research assistant, led and trained by Professor Christine Lucia, were involved in different aspects of the collection, transcription, translation, historical and cultural contextualisation and digital online publication of 51 works by Moerane. As a missionary-trained colonial subject, Moerane (1904-1980) composed most of these works for unaccompanied choir, but uniquely, he also wrote a symphonic poem for orchestra. With the benefit of a more advanced training that his African peers, Moerane developed a more advanced musical language characterised by a conjunction of African traditional and Western late romantic and early modernist styles. The project thus not only met its goals in terms of research and the training of future scholars in the editing of an endangered heritage, it also made public for the first time a significant body of indigenous knowledge and music that contributes to the growing project of de-colonising culture nationally and globally. 

The website on which the Moerane Edition is published by African Composers Edition in collaboration with the Moerane family has a separate page on every work giving samples, historical background and translations. It also has a General Introduction to the Edition, a Catalogue of Works, a Biography and a List of Sources used in research.