Neo Muyanga Awarded Composer in Residence Fellowship

The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) are delighted to announce that Neo Muyanga has been awarded a composer in residence fellowship for 2015. An internationally renowned composer and librettist, Muyanga will be composer in residence at WiSER for most of the duration of the fellowship, spending a final month at UCHRI. He will undertake research into the popularity of opera within various black communities in both South Africa and elsewhere in the global south. In addition to this, Muyanga will be workshopping two operas, one based loosely on Zakes Mda’s Heart of Redness, while the other explores the meaning of Mandela in today’s climate of class and race tension in the aftermath of the killings at Marikana, Ferguson and New York. He will engage in research to support development and performance of the operas with faculty at the University of California.

WiSER is committed to promoting interdisciplinary scholarship which engages critically with both aesthetic and social science analyses. Muyanga’s research and interest confirms and strengthens this focus. “Neo Muyanga is not just a South African national treasure but a continental and global one too,” says David Theo Goldberg, UCHRI Director. “An extraordinary resource on the history of popular musics, from gospel to protest song, opera to jazz and pop, he is also an extraordinary composer and performer. We are deeply honored to have him engage with us.”

Neo Muyanga is a Soweto-born composer of operas, pop songs and other musical inventions. He is keenly interested in making music that seeks to expand what is acceptable as new black music and story-telling. He learned to sing choral songs as a child in Soweto and Botswana and madrigals in Italy. He tours widely as a solo musician and as a member of various performance ensembles, including BLK Sonshine and KwaCha. He is a co-founder of the Pan African Space Station – a genre-busting portal of music and sound art on the internet. He describes his current work:

“My research project this year involves taking an in depth look at the ardent follower-ship of the genre of opera in various black communities in South Africa and elsewhere in the global south. It is my firm belief that the love of opera we see (and hear) resonating throughout our townships and in our rural community choirs tells us something important about black aesthetics and concepts of black modernity. Sadly, it is also true that perceptions remain in South Africa and globally of opera as an elitist past-time which deliberately seeks further to marginalise black voices – and to leave them out of contemporary debates about the way forward for opera as praxis and a possible tool for re-defining blackness in the twenty-first century.”
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