A conference drawing connections between landscape and music will be held at the Music Department of Stellenbosch University (SU).
The Hearing Landscape Critically (HLC) conference runs from Sunday 8 September until Wednesday 11 September at the SU Conservatoire and will include a number of free concerts, exhibitions and film screenings which are all open to the public.
This second conference presented by the HLC Network is titled "Music, Place, and the Spaces of Sound" and is hosted jointly by the Music Departments of SU and Oxford University in England.
Carina Venter, Administrator of the HLC Network at Oxford University, says in planning the conference students and academics of both universities discussed fundamental questions about the application of music, discourse and art in general in conversations about land and landscape. "These included questions such as in which landscape and which music South Africa sees and hears itself," she says.
Some of the themes that stem from these questions and will be addressed at the conference include "spaces and sounds of power and politics", "philosophical approaches to the spaces of sound", "spaces and sounds of transformation/devastation", and "landscape as utopia, dystopia or heterotopia".
The keynote speakers are Prof Cherryl Walker of SU's Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, and Prof Carol Muller of the University of Pennsylvania.
The conference opens on Sunday at 17:15 with a screening of the film The Exhibition of Vandalism by Aryan Kaganof, after which Justice Edwin Cameron will deliver a response.
A lunch-time concert on Monday will feature solo flute and chamber compositions which address a dwelled-in landscape in music, as expressed by South African composers Stanley Glasser, Fiona Tozer, Bongani Ndodana-Breen and Hans Huyssen. Marietjie Pauw (flute), Tozer (guitar), Huyssen (cello) and Benjamin van Eeden (piano) will perform in the Fismer Hall.
Another film by Kaganof, An Inconsolable Memory, about the Eoan Opera Group of Cape Town will be screened in the Jannasch Hall on Monday at 13:30.
Also on Monday, pianist Kyle Shepherd, known for his innovative jazz compositions, will improvise during a silent film screening of 1960s District Six footage in the Fismer Hall.
On Tuesday, the lunch-time concert is entitled Songs of soil and water: An exploration of music of protest, love and transformation, featuring Soweto-born composer and performer Neo Muyanga. In Wednesday's concert two "landscape" compositions will be performed: Silence where a Song Would Ring (for baritone, violin and percussion) by Huyssen, and Sand, was daar (an electronic composition) by Theo Herbst.
During the conference there will be displays and sound installations designed by Hannelore Olivier, Laura du Toit and Leah Barclay in the Endler Hall.
The Sasol Art Museum will host the exhibition Lingering Absences: Hearing Landscape through Memory, curated by Dr Lizabé Lambrechts and Ernst van der Wal, from 9 to 20 September. This exhibition about the Eoan Group offers "a visual and auditory perspective on the dynamics of opera production in a time and in places subject to involuntary removals of coloured communities in Cape Town".
For more information and the full programme, visit musiclandscapeconference.wordpress.com.
CAPTION: Musician and composer Neo Muyanga soaking up the urban landscape of Cape Town. Muyanga will perform at the HLC conference on Tuesday, 10 September.
