In 2021, the Indigenous Music Technologies (IMT) Working Group received funds from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences for a twelve-month research programme which will include workshops, research outputs, and a conference to investigate the intersections of music technologies and indigenous knowledge systems in Southern Africa.
The IMT Working Group was born out of a growing interest shared by a number of scholars and artists in the meeting of traditional forms of music making and their attendant technologies. Three members of the core working group committee have worked together at festivals and symposia where indigenous musical knowledge and practice was brought into dialogue with digital musical technologies. Here, it became apparent that there still existed a hierarchy in which African music making was seen as subservient to unquestioned narratives of Western-centred technological innovation. Our working group challenges this notion by investigating the ways in which forms of indigenous knowledge and practice might already contain productive technological thinking which can be recentred in musical scholarship and practices.
Working Group Members
William Fourie is the principal investigator for the Indigenous Music Technologies working group. He is a lecturer in musicology and coordinator of postgraduate studies for Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网’s Department of Music and Musicology. His research focuses on modernist music in post-apartheid South Africa. He has published in journals such as Twentieth-Century Music, South African Music Studies, and Tempo. He holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 of London.
Elijah Madiba is the manager and sound engineer for the International Library of African Music at Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网. He holds degrees from 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 of Port Elizabeth (NMU) and Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网, and is currently studying toward his PhD under the supervision of Lee Watkins. He has published in Ethnomusicology Fourm and has contributed to a number of research partnerships across the world.
Cara Stacey is a South African musician, composer and musicologist and the Standard Bank Young Artist for Music 2021. She is a pianist and plays southern African musical bows (umrhubhe, uhadi, makhoyane). Beyond her solo performance work, Cara collaborates with visual artist Mzwandile Buthelezi and jazz guitarist Keenan Ahrends in a project titled ‘The Texture of Silence’. Cara has performed across southern Africa, in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Peru, the USA and Switzerland with the likes of Shabaka Hutchings, Sarathy Korwar, Dan Leavers, Galina Juritz, Natalie Mason, Beat Keller, Matchume Zango, Jason Singh and Juliana Venter. Cara is the founder of the Betwixt concert series with cellist Nicola du Toit. She sits on the executive committee for the South African Society for Research in Music and is the International Council for Traditional Music country liaison office for the kingdom of eSwatini. She is the host of a few radio shows: Khashane, a monthly show of diverse African musics on the UK-based online station Repeater Radio; ‘Run Amok’ with Galina Juritz on The Other Radio; and ‘Betwixt’ on Hamshack Radio. Cara is a Senior Lecturer in African Music at North-West 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 (South Africa). She is based between Johannesburg and Mbabane.
Mpho Molikeng: I, Mpho Molikeng, am Lesotho-born multi-facet artist (musician, actor, curator, poet, painter, storyteller, and cultural activist/entrepreneur). I have dedicated the past twenty years to learning, playing and teaching indigenous musical instruments of Southern Africa and sharing them with Africa and Europe in the age of technology. Playing indigenous instruments has also afforded me composing music for television commercials, documentaries, feature-films and featured in a number of theatre shows, both drama and dance. I continue to look for new ways to make African indigenous music relevant against all odds.
Sibusiso Ncanywa is a Master of Music candidate at Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网’s Department of Music and Musicology. He is currently interested in research around vernacular technologies, artificial reverb, music technology, identity, and South African choral music.
Thandeka Mfinyongo is a musician born and raised in Nyanga East, Cape Town. Mfinyongo’s love and passion for performing arts started at a very young age while at church. In 2017, she graduated with a Performer’s Diploma in Music; in 2018, she graduated with an Advanced Diploma in African Music from the 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 of Cape Town. Mfinyongo specialises in two Xhosa instruments, uhadi (gourd/calabash bow) and umrhubhe (mouth-bow). And she recently finished her Master’s in Music Performance at SOAS 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 of London, majoring in kora (an instrument from West Africa). Mfinyongo is currently doing her PhD in Ethnomusicology at Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网.