This is one of the best books to have emerged from South African musicology in the last decade … It 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, King’s College, University of London

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, as well as how music and musicians contested and even helped to conquer apartheid. The collection of essays is intentionally broad, and the contributors include historians, sociologists and anthropologists, as well as ethnomusicologists, music theorists and historical musicologists.

Grant Olwage, editor and contributor, is a Senior Lecturer in Music in the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersran­d, Johannesburg.