John Stafford Smith was a British composer, church organist, and early musicologist. He was one of the first serious collectors of manuscripts of works by Johann Sebastian Bach.
Albert Coates was an English conductor and composer. Born in St. Petersburg where his English father was a successful businessman, he studied in Russia, England and Germany, before beginning his career as a conductor in a series of German opera houses. He was a success in England conducting Wagner at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1914, and in 1919 was appointed chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.
Stellenbosch University is a public research university situated in Stellenbosch, a town in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Stellenbosch is jointly the oldest university in South Africa and the oldest extant university in Sub-Saharan Africa alongside the University of Cape Town which received full university status on the same day in 1918. Stellenbosch University designed and manufactured Africa's first microsatellite, SUNSAT, launched in 1999.
The South African College of Music, abbreviated as SACM, is a department of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town. It is located on the University's Lower Campus in Rondebosch, Cape Town.
Zim Ngqawana was a South African flautist and saxophonist. He was later known as Zimology.
Canticum Novum is the church choir of the Stellenbosch Dutch Reformed Church (Moederkerk). The choir exists as a society of the University of Stellenbosch and is the only choir in South Africa connected to a university singing only sacred music.
Michael Blake is a South African contemporary classical music composer and performer. He studied in Johannesburg in the 1970s and was associated with conceptual art and the emergence of an indigenous experimental music aesthetic. In 1976 he embarked on 'African Journal', a series of pieces for Western instruments that drew on his studies of traditional African music and aesthetics, which continued to expand during two decades in London until he returned to South Africa in 1998. From around 2000 African music becomes less explicit on the surface of his compositions, but elements of rhythm and repetition remain as part of a more postcolonial engagement with material and form. He works in a range of styles including minimalism and collage, and now also forages for source material from the entire musical canon.
Anton Goosen is a South African musician and songwriter. He became a pivotal figure in Afrikaans music and is generally regarded as the father of Afrikaans Rock.
Stefans Grové was a South African composer. Before his death the following assessment was made of him: "He is regarded by many as Africa's greatest living composer, possesses one of the most distinctive compositional voices of our time".
NewMusicSA is the South African section of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). Its formation on 10 May 1999 heralded the return of South African representation at the ISCM after many decades.
Graham Newcater is a South African composer of serial music.
David Marks is a South African-born songwriter, singer, producer, music archivist, and publisher who has been a member of the South African music industry since the 1970s. He spent much of his early career mixing, recording, releasing, and archiving a broad cross-spectrum of South African music.
Arnoldus Christiaan Vlok van Wyk was a South African art music composer, one of the first notable generation of such composers along with Hubert du Plessis and Stefans Grové. Despite the strict laws imposed by the Apartheid government during his lifetime, van Wyk's homosexuality was ignored by the authorities throughout his career due to the nationalistic nature of his music.
The Bow Project is a double album of studio recordings by the Nightingale String Quartet of Denmark, and historic field recordings of uhadi songs by Nofinishi Dywili from Ngqoko, released in 2010. Each of the twelve string quartets, by a different composer, is based on a song by Dywili.
Robyn Nesbitt is a South African artist currently living and working in Johannesburg. Nesbitt's work is distinguished by her meticulous observation of everyday events ranging from the ordinary routines of our life to the celestial routines that surround us. Humorous, poetic, and banal moments become stylized in mediums which include research, process, documentation, drawing, video, and photography. She often collaborates with Nina Barnett.
Oral History of American Music (OHAM), founded in 1969, is an oral history project and archive of audio and video recordings consisting mainly of interviews with American classical and jazz musicians. It is a special collection of the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University and housed within the Sterling Memorial Library building in New Haven, Connecticut. It currently holds over 2,000 interviews with more than 900 subjects and is considered the definitive collection of its kind.
Carleton Sprague Smith was an American music librarian and musicologist.
Hubert du Plessis was a South African composer, pianist, and professor of music whose career spanned several decades. Along with Arnold van Wyk and Stefans Grové, du Plessis was one of the foremost South African composers of the 20th century.
Stephanus Muller is a South African music scholar and writer who has written about South African twentieth-century composition, exile, archiving, language politics, music and apartheid and university institutional transformation. As the last chairman of the Musicological Society of Southern Africa, he was a founding member of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM) in 2006. He also founded the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) in 2005 at Stellenbosch University, and the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (AOI) at the same university in 2016. He received his BMus (performance) from Pretoria University in 1992, MMus (musicology) from the University of South Africa in 1998, and DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2001. Having studied with the writer Marlene van Niekerk, he also holds a MA in Creative Afrikaans writing from Stellenbosch University (2007).
