This biography of Michael Mosoeu Moerane (1904-1980) surveys the unique life, times and music of the first classically educated African composer in southern Africa.

The Times Do Not Permit is the first extended overview of the life, times, and music of Michael Mosoeu Moerane (1904-1980), a composer brought up in rural South Africa in the early twentieth century. It offers a close study of African choral music that dates back to mission schools and colleges in the Eastern Cape, where a number of future African composers, as well as future political leaders, were educated. Moerane was one of many mission-trained musicians who wrote short a cappella choral works for churches and schools.

The Times Do Not Permit explores the political changes and social conditions that made life for Moerane both possible and impossible as a composer. He was the first black South African to qualify with a BMus degree in 1941. However, this caused difficulties for him both within the African choral circuit, where his advanced modernist style was considered strange and difficult, and within white concert life, from which he was largely excluded. Only his symphonic poem for orchestra, Fatšo La Heso, attained some recognition locally and internationally during his lifetime, and the score survived, unlike many of the piano pieces and smaller instrumental works he wrote.

In addition to telling the story of his ancestry, upbringing, education and teaching career, Christina Lucia offers an analysis of his music, the famous symphonic poem and four of his choral pieces, to reflect the major themes he expressed. The Times Do Not Permit is supplemented with interviews with those who knew Moerane, and ends with a coda of professional letters to, from and about him that gives his voice a presence in the absence of much personal documentation.

""This is one of the best books to have emerged from South African musicology in the last decadeIt opens up a new level of discourse about music during the apartheid era: a level on which the theoretical, the ethical, the historical and the aesthetic play against each other in newly meaningful ways.""
--Roger Parker, Cambridge University (UK)

""Composing Apartheid endeavors to trace the relationships between names, concepts and realities as they variously interacted, and continue to interact, on the musical landscape, and it does so as historically and socially responsible scholarship.""
--Grant Olwage, from the Introduction

"Composing Apartheid" is the first book ever to chart the musical world of a notorious period in world history, apartheid South Africa. It explores how music was produced through, and was productive of, key features of apartheid's social and political topography. The collection of essays is intentionally broad, and, the contributors include historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, as well as ethnomusicologists, music theorists, and historical musicologists.

The essays focus on a variety of music (jazz, music in the Western art tradition, popular music), major composers (such as Kevin Volans) and works (Handel's "Messiah"). Musical institutions and previously little-researched performers (such as the African National Congress's troupe-in-exile Amandla) are explored. The writers move well beyond their subject matter, intervening in debates on race, historiography, and postcolonial epistemologies and pedagogies.

This book includes contributions by Lara Allen, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; Gary Baines, Rhodes University (South Africa); Ingrid Byerly, Duke University; Christopher Cockburn, University of KwaZulu-Natal; David Coplan, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa); Michael Drewett, Rhodes University; Shirli Gilbert, University of Southampton; Bennetta Jules-Rosette, University of California, San Diego; Christine Lucia, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; Carol A. Muller, University of Pennsylvania; Stephanus Muller, University of Stellenbosch (South Africa); Brett Pyper, New York University; and Martin Scherzinger, Princeton University.

"Grant Olwage" is a senior lecturer at the School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Music notation: a South African guide presents a new and uniquely South African approach to learning about staff notation - especially for musicians who are educated in the tonic solfa system. As they work through the book, learners build up an understanding of each aspect of notation by experiencing it as music. Tonic solfa is used in the earlier chapters to help learners relate the sounds to the concepts. In addition, the free CD offers 99 music clips played on a keyboard, illustrating some of the examples of notation given in the book. The book is aimed at mature school pupils and adult learners whose first language may not be English. However, it will be useful to students of music from any sector of society, whether they are enrolled in a formal course or want to find out more on their own. Each chapter is devoted to particular aspects of notation. Most of the chapters are built around a piece of music generally familiar to South Africans. Because South Africa has a strong vocal and choral culture, examples are often drawn from the choral repertory. The book and CD include many examples of South African music, as well as samplings of classical western music from all eras, and jazz. Examples and exercises are drawn from this rich representation, and by means of self tests learners steadily become confident in reading and writing music in staff notation. They will also build up a strong knowledge of how music works, by seeing the structures of a wide range of music from diverse cultures in South Africa.