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Renée (Belcher) van den Berg completed the MMus Music Therapy degree (cum laude) through the University of Pretoria in 2012 and has worked as a music therapist and therapeutic music practitioner in a range of contexts (such as adult psychiatry, paediatric palliative care, dementia care and neuro-rehabilitation). She has also participated as a facilitator in regenerative creativity workshops for people working in the Arts.

Since completing her BA Hons in English Literature and the Licentiate in Saxophone in 2000 she has taught the saxophone, clarinet and recorder, as well as subject music, jazz band and orchestra. She has been involved in numerous community music projects such as the Western Cape Music Education Project with Ronnie Samaai (Kuils River) and the Frank Pietersen Music Centre (Paarl) where she held the position of head of the Wind Department. She has also worked as an arts journalist and jazz columnist for the Afrikaans newspaper, Die Burger, specialising in jazz and culture/place specific music (including music from Zimbabwe, Senegal, Japan, France, Spain and New Zealand). As performer, she has shared the stage with musicians, composers and writers such as Johannes Kerkorrel, Schalk Joubert, Laurinda Hofmeyr, Pierre-Henri Wicomb and Willemien Brümmer.

As a musician who has made music with people ranging from the ages of 6 months to 80 years, Renée has experienced the value of musicking as a tool to cultivate a sense of mastery, achievement, connection and community, not to mention the great joy it may bring us. As a lifelong learner about music, health and well-being she is looking forward to starting her PhD.

Renée brings a wealth of experience and insight as teacher, therapist and journalist to the Saxophone section as Orchestral Studies and Teaching Method lecturer.

Joshua Frank completed a master’s degree in musicology through the Stellenbosch University Music Department in 2019, and took up a part-time lecturing post at the same institution the following year. His principal research interest is the empirical study of musical emotions, with occasional forays into the evolutionary origins of music and aspects of Baroque performance practice.

Joshua’s undergraduate studies were focused on performance, and he maintains an active profile playing the guitar, recorder, and oboe. He performs in various settings, with emphasis on orchestral playing and Baroque chamber music. Outside of the context of strict Western Art Music, he explores the possibilities of the folk-classical idiom as a member of the ensemble Here Be Dragons.

Willemien Froneman is an extraordinary associate professor at AOI. She writes about white musical aesthetics in South Africa, mainly through the lens of boeremusiek—a marginal and much-stigmatized genre of South African folk music. She coedits the journal SAMUS: South African Music Studies.

Leonore Bredekamp completed BAMus at the Stellenbosch University and holds an MPhil in Modern Foreign Languages (Technology Enhanced Language Instruction). She has been involved in ethnomusicological research as multi-media specialist and lectures music technology on first year level in the BMus programme. She is actively involved in theatre productions and ensembles as electric – and acoustic bassist.

Annamarie Bam graduated with the degrees B.Mus and B.Mus(Hons) from the University of the Free State, South Africa, having taken lessons with Harold Strebel in Cape Town and Heinrich Armer in Bloemfontein. She was the overall winner of the ATKV Forte competition and won the overseas scholarship for Performer’s Licentiate from the Royal Schools of Music. She continued her studies at the Royal Academy in London under John Davies, Richard Addison and Antony Pay and also attended master with Karl Leister in London and Guy Deplus in Nice. Her orchestral experience began at an early age in Bloemfontein where she joined various wind bands and also the PACOFS Orchestra as an ad hoc member. She was principal clarinet of the S.A. National Youth Orchestra for four consecutive years. When she returned from London, she joined the Natal Philharmonic Orchestra as sub-principal clarinet and was later promoted to co-principal. In 1992 she took up a full-time teaching position at the Musicon in Bloemfontein and rejoined PACOFS. As an experienced chamber musician, Annamarie has played with ‘Taffanel Trio’, the ‘Poulenc Players’ sextet, in a duo with Elna van der Merwe, and in a trio with Elna and Sabina Mossolow, on recent appearances at the Woordfees (2016, 2018), and in Sasolburg with ‘Trio Classique’, an ensemble with Benjamin van Eeden (piano) and Karen Gaertner (viola).

Annamarie teaches privately at home and at the Johnman Centre in Stellenbosch and began a recorder school (the ‘Little Crickets’) for young children in 2005. She teaches a course in clarinet repertoire and teaching methods as a part-time lecturer at the Stellenbosch University Music Conservatorium. She lives in Somerset West with her husband and two daughters. Annamarie joined the Stellenbosch City Orchestra in 2015 as clarinet player. The orchestra gave its first performances at Oude Libertas (Stellenbosch), at Lourensford (Somerset West) and, recently, in the open air concert hall Congratia, near Oudtshoorn.

Liesl Stoltz studied at the University of Stellenbosch after which she studied in France and Italy where she obtained diplomas with distinction. She numbers among her teachers Éva Tamássy, Shigenori Kudo, Pierre-Yves Artaud and Peter-Lukas Graf and has won numerous prizes in national and international competitions in Romania and Germany.

She has appeared as soloist with the Cape Town, Eastern Cape, Johannesburg and KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestras, the Free State Symphony and with the UCT String Ensemble, Camerata Tinta Barocca and Odeion Simfonia. In June 2010 she obtained the degree D.Mus from UCT. She continued with post-doctoral studies at the same institution and did several recordings and performances featuring South African flute music. In 2017 her CD “Explorations – South African Flute music” was proclaimed the winner in the category “Best Musical Composition” in the annual Humanities and Social Sciences Awards of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. At present she performs extensively as soloist and chamber musician and teaches at the South African College of Music, University of Cape Town. She plays a 14k Yamaha flute and was named a Yamaha South Africa Artist in 2018.

Dr Carina Venter

Lecturer, Musicology

Chair, South African Society for Research in Music

I hold a doctorate from the University of Oxford, master’s degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Stellenbosch, and a BMus from the University of Pretoria. My research interests centre on music, violence, decolonial thought, and discourses of apartheid and colonialism. I have published locally and internationally, and am motivated to think, write, and teach at the intersections of music, politics, and those questions that continue to render our present precarious and unequal. I have supervised students on a wide range of topics, including decolonisation of the tertiary music curriculum, trauma and violence in music, music and gender, and several South African composers. My current cohort of postgraduates work on topics including the music of Philip Miller, musical theatre in the 1970s in South Africa, video-game music and psychoanalysis, curricular decolonisation, Afrikaans cabaret, and emancipative pedagogies. I am committed to teaching, research, and supervision, activities which I believe should be emancipative and continuously challenging of our thinking, music-making, and listening practices. My latest publications can be read here,  here, and here.