African Music Theatre at the Professorship of Musicology

To kick things off in 2016, a panel discussion entitled “Seeking the Future of Opera in South Africa” with director Shirley Apthorp and director Kobie van Rensburg of Umculo Opera Incubator discussed topics related to the role and potential of South African opera for post-apartheid social change.

In 2017, the South African composer Hans Huyssen used his opera The Masque (2005) to discuss the compositional processes of opera in the post-apartheid era. In spring 2018, Dr.   Hilde Roos from the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa) spoke about the EOAN Group, an opera company from the so-called “coloured community” that successfully staged operas in Cape Town from the mid-1950s to the 1970s.

During the symposium “South African Opera Productions after the Apartheid” hosted by Dr. Lena van der Hoven in autumn 2018, Prof. Dr. Naomi André gave a lecture on her monograph “Black Opera: History, Power, Empowerment”, which has since won many awards. This continuous academic and artistic engagement with (South) African music theatre has truly given Musicology at the University of Bayreuth a unique selling point in the German-speaking university scene in recent years. And Musicology has continued this tradition over the last two semesters.

In January 2021, Prof. Dr. Bode Omojola from Mount Holyoke College in the USA, as a musicologist, composer, and expert on New Yorùbá Opera, gave a lecture entitled “Towards an African Operatic Voice. Composition, Dramaturgy and Identity Strategies in New Yorùbá Opera”. Afterwards, he discussed the core themes of his lecture with students using the example of his opera “Ìrìn Àjò – Odyssey of a Dream”, which he premiered with students in the USA in 2018. In 2020, he published an article under the same title in the anthology “Opera & Music Theatre” (African Theatre 19), co-edited by Dr. Christine Matzke and Dr. Lena van der Hoven from the University of Bayreuth, which was dedicated to the significance and function of opera and music theatre in Africa and the African diaspora.

In April 2021, Dr. Bongani Ndodana-Breen, currently a fellow at the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University, was a guest at “Oper bewegt” with his lecture “Composing South Africa: History, Resistance, Politics and Opera”. In his lecture, Dr Bongani Ndodana-Breen discussed both his best-known opera “Winnie – The Opera” (2011) and his short opera “Hani” (2010). Both Dr. Bongani Ndodana-Breen and Dr. Bode Omojola are members of the Black Opera Research Network (BORN), which was founded last year by a group of scholars including Dr. Lena van der Hoven.

In addition, Prof. Dr. Stephanus Muller, Director of the Africa Open Institute at the University of Stellenbosch, has been selected for a Senior Fellowship at the University of Bayreuth Centre of International Excellence for the 2021 summer semester. He will work together with Dr. Lena van der Hoven on the project “How is South African art music (not) African art music?” from September 2021. The project will be the first to raise the production of art music in South Africa in the discourse on African art music as formulated by Nigerian composer Akin Euba, who was artist-in-residence at the Iwalewahaus from 1986 to 1992.