Durban-born composer Andile Khumalo studied composition at Columbia University under the guidance of Tristan Murail, Fabien Lévy, and George Lewis. His former teachers include Jürgen Bräuninger, Urlich Süße, Fabio Nieder and Marco Stroppa with whom he studied in Stuttgart (Germany) where he got his Masters in Composition.
Khumalo has attended masterclasses in Darmstadt (Germany), Fondation Royaumont (France), and Stuttgart with leading composers of our time such as Salvatore Sciarrino, Stefano Gervasoni, Brian Ferneyhough, and Isabel Mundry.
His music has been performed and presented in different festivals such as New Music Indaba (South Africa), Germany, Royaumont “Voix Nouvelles” (France), International Society of Contemporary Music (Hong Kong), Switzerland, Sweden, Takefu International Music Festival (Japan) and in the United states by ensembles such as Sontonga String quartet, Ensemble Mosaik, Ensemble Baikonur, International Contemporary Ensemble (New York), members of Ensemble Vortex, and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra.
In 2014, Khumalo was featured in Carnegie Hall‘s Ubuntu Festival as part of a concert featuring a selection of new music composers. His music was also featured in the 2013 Festival d’Automne and the Cologne New Music Forum of the same year.[12] Khumalo has been featured at festivals and competitions in South Africa as well. He was the runner-up in the 2006 SAMRO overseas scholarship competition[13] and featured at a number of NewMusicSA‘s New Music Indabas, the Sterkfontein Composers Meeting,[7] and the Grahamstown National Arts Festival.
Passionate about the IAM transcription project, Khumalo worked together with Bernett Mulungo in creating a publishing company, Jiwe publishers, who continue to transcribe new IAM works. Khumalo presently lectures at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
JIWE PUBLISHERS
For many years, African knowledge has always been associated with the aural traditions that have, in recent times, slowly lost its relevance in a world that is dominated by media and technology. Many social events that provided a conducive environment for the practice of aural traditions (mainly music, storytelling) have since been abolished. The shift towards a tech-based society has, in turn, meant that some African cultures and knowledge shared through aural traditions risk being lost entirely. CDs and in some rare cases videos are used as a form of preserving and cultivating the music tradition. Over and above the use of CDs and DVDs, music notation is one significant aspect that needs to be developed and utilized in a more aggressive way to preserve and make African music knowledge more accessible to the younger generation. Notating African music will allow it to exists in platforms that were initially not favourable to its existence but agreeable to the forms of acquiring knowledge today. JIWE Publishers aims to create an online platform (Online African Music Library) in which broader African music (all genres, from historical up to modern genres) can be archived in written format. The online African music library will make it possible to access the music beyond local and regional existing archives.
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