The workshop will take the form of a series of seminar-style discussions that will reflect on music as a medium for social and restorative intervention in a world that turns on the production of structural, socio-economic and epistemological inequality. The workshop will look at the potential, foreclosures and the limitations of music as a space of consolation and reconciliation. One of the underlying premises is that any discussion of this kind cannot merely gloss over the modes of complicity and exploitation when music and the humanities more broadly are set to work restoratively in spaces marred by inequality and traumatic pasts/ presents.
In the first seminar (75 minutes), the focus will be Philip Miller’s cantata entitled: Rewind: a Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony. Composed in 2006, the hour-long work was conceived to mark the tenth anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The second seminar will take up roughly 150 minutes of the time and will consider the role of music and song in the struggle against apartheid.
About the presenter
Dr Carina Venter is currently a junior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford. She holds a BMus degree from the University of Pretoria, master’s degrees from the Universities of Stellenbosch and Oxford as well as a DPhil from Oxford with a dissertation entitled “Music, Violence, Response: Experiments in Postcolonial Reading.” She is interested in music as a mode of approaching problems and possibilities that are endemic to late capitalism and the so-called postcolonial.
Enquiries may be directed to Ms Marinda Malan via email, at Marinda.Malan@nwu.ac.za.
Photo: Dr Carina Venter
