South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office with United States President Donald Trump
My most recent More than Music documentary on NPR ponders the South African tour of the remarkable University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra, led by Kenneth Kiesler. The tour happened to coincide with inflamed relations between South Africa and President Donald Trump. I conclude: “During the long Cold War decades, the US sent musicians abroad to countries where we were competing for influence with other major powers — where we were insufficiently known or not sympathetically understood. South Africa is such a country today – right now. The University of Michigan tour showered credit on the university and its young musicians. It also, I would suggest, performed a service to the nation.”
A recurrent theme, in the show, is the rule of law – and an impression, in South Africa, that at present it’s more reliable there (where ex-President Jacob Zuma was tried, convicted, and imprisoned) than in the United States. Another is that the Trump Presidency, for some South Africans, triggers memories of the apartheid decades.
Andries Coetzee, who accompanied the tour, is a University of Michigan Linguistics professor who was born and raised in South Africa. He testifies to the urgency of exposing American college students to other cultures, and the commensurate importance of welcoming foreign students at American universities. And he told me a startling story about a meeting at the University of Western Cape, which has long partnered the University of Michigan. Once a Black university under apartheid, University of Western Cape is now “a powerhouse in South African education, representing the country as a whole,” Coetzee said. “What was very moving to me . . . was when members of the leadership team turned to us, representing the University of Michigan, and said: . . . ‘Now you are in a situation in the US where higher education is under severe duress and oppression. . . . We have a lot of experience over decades on how to exist under such conditions. How can we now help you?’’”
Another participant in the NPR show is Christopher Ballantine, South Africa’s pre-eminent music historian and, at 82, a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle. Like Coetzee, he acknowledges the formidable challenges South Africa faces today, including rampant Black unemployment. Like Coetzee, he’s optimistic about the country’s future. Chris regularly reports on South African opera for the British journal Opera. He told me that my recent experience of Aida in Cape Town – the subject of a previous blog — was a truthful experience.
“What’s made South African opera so rich in Black vocal talent is the long tradition of choral singing in South Africa. Thousands of choirs. . . . When this Black singing talent is brought into the opera house, before audiences that are unfortunately still largely white — although that’s slowly changing — then you do get this bridging. The rapturous applause is not just rapturous applause at superlative singing, it’s also rapturous applause because people are coming together in a way that never used to be possible. You see that all the time. Not only at concerts. . . . If you go to important sports matches in South Africa – the rugby world cup, for example, which South Africa has now won on the last two occasions — there’s an enormous sense of national pride and national unity around that.”
I asked Chris Ballantine if classical music in South Africa is stigmatized as “colonial.” He replied:
“There is of course a keen awareness of the colonial legacy here. But it’s not used in any kind of punitive way. And that’s unlikely ever to occur. If you think of the fact that South Africa is one of the most multi-cultural countries in the world. The constitution guarantees cultural diversity. It guarantees the right of all 12 official languages to exist side by side. What that means is that this recent nonsense about white genocide in South Africa is just that. It’s total fabrication.”
I also chat with South Africa’s leading classical music impresario, Bongani Tembe, who runs the orchestras in Durban and Johannesburg, and in 2022 founded a national South Africa orchestra with government support.
In two previous blogs, I deployed video clips to document the transformative impact of the young Michigan musicians in Soweto, Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Cape Town. On the NPR show, you can sample their performance of one of the peak achievements in Black classical music: William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony (1932). It’s a piece I’ve written about a lot. Kiesler’s reading, in South Africa, was the strongest I’ve ever heard, superior to all the commercial recordings. As I remark on NPR: “These highly skilled pre-professional musicians comprise one of the least jaded, most engaged symphonic ensembles I’ve ever come across” – a topic that connects to my recent report, in the New York Review of Books, on Aida at the Metropolitan Opera (and its jaded musicians).
In my NPR show, I award the last word to the orchestra’s remarkable conductor. Ken Kiesler had no idea, when he chose South Africa for his orchestra’s first tour abroad, that the visit would coincide with the expulsion of South Africa’s ambassador to the US. It made the tour all the more meaningful, Kiesler said.
“Isn’t cultural diplomacy the sort of natural result of simply being authentic and sharing ourselves with others and receiving how they are with respect, even with admiration and love? When we remove what happens between governments, and government leaders, it’s just people listening to each other. Its such a beautiful experience that connects us . . And I think we should do more of it, all of us.”
Kiesler added that he initially considered taking his orchestra to the major halls of Europe. “It didn’t inspire me, and I knew it was the wrong thing.” South Africa “felt like the right place and the right time.”
P.S. – As my NPR colleague Jenn White observes, More than Music is no longer supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities – allocated funds were cancelled. WAMU, our host station, is currently seeking alternative sources of sponsorship.
To hear a pertinent More than Music show on cultural diplomacy click here.
My pertinent book, on the cultural Cold War, is “The Propaganda of Freedom.”
LISTENING GUIDE (to hear the show, click here):
3:00 — Kenneth Kiesler on the Soweto experience
7:25 — Andries Coetzee on the Soweto experience
12:00 — The University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra surges through the first movement coda of the Dawson symphony
14:30 — Kiesler on the Dawson symphony and South Africa
15:45 — The UMSO plays “Hope in the Night” — movement two of the Dawson symphony
21:00 — Bongani Tembe on classical music in South Africa today
26:30 — Christopher Ballantine on South African pride
28:30 — The UMSO nails the ending of the Dawson symphony
31:00 — A dozen at the District Six museum describes a disappointing visit of Columbia University students
32:00 — Coetzee on the urgency of global engagement
39:00 — Coetzee on the University of Western Cape’s offer to help the University of Michigan
42:00 — Final observations from Kenneth Kiesler
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