Reported by Dr Jaco Meyer
The 19th annual conference of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM) was held between 26 and 28 September at the University of Stellenbosch. Among the many themes of the presentations, some new and exciting categories were seen this year, such as bodies and health, the politics of curriculum, AI and musical creativity, spaces of learning, technology and digital culture, and machine learning and sound. This conference offered scholars the opportunity to share their research with peers and gain additional insights into their own work.
Dr Jaco Meyer presented his paper, “Echoes of Winternag: Style, Aesthetics, and Shifts in Composition” at this conference. In this paper, he discussed the more than forty different musical settings of the iconic Afrikaans poem Winternag by Eugène Marais, and how these settings align over time with the aesthetic developments of composition in South Africa, from nationalism to modernism and postmodernism. He also highlighted matters around archival work, representative music-institutional bodies and access to information.
