{"id":2486821,"date":"2026-07-03T17:10:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T17:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2486821"},"modified":"2026-07-03T17:10:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T17:10:09","slug":"2026-multiculturalism-musical-excellence-and-a-new-vision-for-music-at-wits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/2026-multiculturalism-musical-excellence-and-a-new-vision-for-music-at-wits\/","title":{"rendered":"2026 – Multiculturalism, musical excellence and a new vision for music at Wits"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Head of Music Dr Musa-Duke Nkuna reflects on a career shaped by diverse cultures and world stages, and a Department that will reflect the best of Africa.<\/p>\n

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There is a particular quality of perspective that comes from having genuinely inhabited multiple musical cultures, not as a visitor passing through, but as a full participant who has sung in their theatres and opera houses, studied in their music conservatoires, learning in the management academies, absorbed their disciplines, and been tested by their exacting standards. Dr Nkuna, Head of the Department of Music <\/a>at the Wits School of Arts<\/a>, possesses that perspective in full measure. Born in Giyani, Limpopo, into a family where music was not an extra-curricular activity but the very texture of life, he went on to build one of the most richly international careers of any South African musician of his generation, performing in opera houses and concert halls across Austria, Belgium, China, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and Switzerland, before joining Wits Music in August 2024 with a mission to share what that world had taught him, and to learn, in turn, from what South Africa has always known.<\/p>\n

He is disarmingly clear about what brought him to Wits. It was not a retreat from an international stage, nor a homecoming in the sentimental sense. It was something more considered, and, in the European musical world he inhabited for nearly three decades, something entirely natural. “One of the things I observed early on in my career in Europe is that the most respected musicians, the ones who had truly lived the life, would at a certain point seek a position at a university or conservatoire. Not because the performing was finished, but because the teaching became the logical next expression of everything the performing had taught them. That is the tradition. You carry what you have learned, and eventually you find the right place to pass it on”. For Nkuna, the two are not in competition. He continues to perform internationally alongside his responsibilities at Wits, and he regards that combination (the active practitioner who also teaches) as the most honest form of music education one can offer a student. The conviction that ultimately drew him here was simply this: that a scholar-practitioner who has genuinely immersed himself in multiple musical cultures carries a particular obligation to bring the lessons of that cross-cultural exchange into a shared endeavour, and to create, in collaboration with outstanding colleagues, a department that reflects the full breadth of what music can be.<\/p>\n

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“What I bring is not a superior way of doing things,” he says with characteristic directness. “What I bring is breadth: experience of many different musical traditions, institutions, and ways of thinking about music. That breadth is most useful when it is placed in the service of a shared endeavour. And that is exactly what I find here at Wits: exceptional colleagues, exceptional students, and an institution with the ambition to match.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Dr<\/h3>\n

A Career Built Across Continents and Cultures<\/h3>\n

To appreciate what Nkuna brings to Wits, it is worth understanding the scale and range of what he has done. He made his operatic debut in 2001 as Don Ottavio in Mozart’s Don Giovanni<\/em> in Chur, Switzerland, a role that announced the lyric purity and stylistic intelligence that would define his career. That debut led to an engagement at the Stadttheater Pforzheim for two full seasons, followed by four years as lyric tenor soloist at the prestigious Cologne Opera House, one of Europe’s most distinguished ensembles, where his own mentor Josef Protschka, the celebrated German tenor, had made his name. From there he accepted a residency contract at the Teatro Nacional de S\u00e3o Carlos, the Lisbon Opera House, one of the oldest and finest opera houses in the world. He has also been a member of ensembles at the Staatstheater Schwerin and the Staatstheater Kassel and has continued to appear internationally as a guest artist throughout his career.<\/p>\n

His repertoire spans from Baroque through to modern opera and encompasses some of the most demanding roles in the lyric tenor canon: Tamino in Mozart’s The Magic Flute<\/em>, Ferrando in Cos\u00ec fan tutte<\/em>, Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni<\/em>, Belmonte in Die Entf\u00fchrung aus dem Serail<\/em>, Arbace in Idomeneo<\/em>, the full Mozart tenor portfolio, alongside Lenski in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin<\/em>, Walther von der Vogelweide in Wagner’s Tannh\u00e4user<\/em>, Rodolfo in Puccini’s La Boh\u00e8me<\/em>, Alfredo in La Traviata<\/em>, Almaviva in The Barber of Seville<\/em>, and Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress<\/em>, among many others. He has conducted orchestras including the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra and the Neue Philharmonie Kassel, and has appeared as a recitalist and oratorio soloist across Europe and beyond.<\/p>\n

As a conductor, Nkuna has developed a parallel calling that has found particular expression since joining Wits. He has conducted the Wits Music Department Choir and the Wits Symphony Orchestra in major concert performances, including the prestigious Wits Vice-Chancellor’s Annual Concert, where the programme placed his own composition La vie, l’amour et la mort, Op. 46<\/em> alongside Mozart’s Exsultate Jubilate<\/em>, Berlioz’s Les nuits d’\u00e9t\u00e9<\/em>, and the Bruckner Requiem<\/em>: a programme of considerable ambition that demonstrated both his confidence as a conductor and the quality of the ensembles he is building.<\/p>\n

In February 2025 he was invited as Visiting Professor of Music at Duke Kunshan University in China, where he conducted masterclasses for voice students, gave choral workshops, and performed a Lieder recital with works by Beethoven and Schumann, a seamless embodiment of the practitioner-scholar model he advocates.<\/p>\n

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The Doctorate: Why Research Matters for the Performing Artist<\/h3>\n

Nkuna holds a Doctor of Music in Composition from Nelson Mandela University, a degree he pursued whilst simultaneously maintaining a full international performance career. That fact alone says something significant about his understanding of what it means to be a musician in the fullest sense. For Nkuna, the doctorate was not a credential to be collected once the performing career ended. It was an active, generative inquiry into the questions that performance itself raises but cannot, by its nature, fully answer.<\/p>\n

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“There is a view, still too common, that the performer and the researcher are different beings,” he says. “That the one belongs on stage and the other in the library. My entire life is an argument against that view. Every role I have sung raised questions about compositional structure, historical context, harmonic language, cultural meaning. The doctoral research gave me the tools to engage those questions with rigour rather than intuition alone. And the performance practice gave the research a human urgency that purely academic work can sometimes lack.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He is equally direct about the importance he attaches to his students pursuing the highest academic qualifications. “I encourage every serious student who has the ambition and the capacity to go all the way to doctoral level. Not because the letters before your name open doors, though they do, but because the process of doctoral inquiry changes how you think. It changes the depth at which you engage with your art. A performer who has done that work is simply a different kind of artist from one who has not.”<\/p>\n

His broader qualifications reflect a deliberate accumulation of complementary knowledge across decades: a Bachelor of Music cum laude<\/em> from the University of Durban-Westville; a Master of Music in Composition from Rhodes University; a Master of Music in Concert Performance cum laude<\/em> from the Conservatoire de Lausanne in Switzerland; Arts and Culture Management Studies from Berlin: which encompassed Theatre Management, Choir and Orchestra Management, Opera and Concert Management, and Accounting for Cultural Organisations; both the University Performers Licentiate in Music with distinction and the University Teachers Licentiate in Music from Unisa.<\/p>\n

It is worth pausing on his Arts and Culture Management studies, because it is far more than a bureaucratic qualification. The practical understanding of arts administration, of how festivals are structured, how budgets are planned, how orchestras and choirs are managed, how cultural organisations are financially sustained, directly informs the department-building work Nkuna is now doing at Wits. The inaugural Wits International Vocal and Chamber Music Festival and the Africa Day celebrations described below did not materialise by accident. They were the product of hard-won knowledge about how to make large-scale cultural events happen.<\/p>\n

A Cultural Activist, Not an Entertainer: Reframing the Conversation<\/h3>\n

One of the most important things to understand about Nkuna, and, by extension, about his philosophy for the Department of Music, is the distinction he draws, with considerable conviction, between entertainment and culture.<\/p>\n

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“I do not think of myself as an entertainer,” he says. “I think of myself as a cultural activist and a cultural ambassador. What we do in a concert hall, on an opera stage, in a choral festival, this is not entertainment in the way that word is commonly understood. It is the living transmission of accumulated human knowledge, emotion, memory, and meaning. It is how a society makes sense of itself.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This has direct implications for how the arts are funded, valued, and supported in South Africa, and why they are so often inadequately so. Nkuna identifies a structural problem in the language used to describe the arts sector: “In South Africa we habitually speak about the ‘entertainment industry.’ That framing does enormous damage. It places music, theatre, dance, and the visual arts in the same commercial category as any other product: something to be consumed, rated by market share, justified by ticket sales. It invites a purely transactional relationship between the state and the arts.”<\/p>\n

The consequence, he argues, is a chronic underfunding of the cultural sector that reflects not just fiscal pressure, but a fundamental misunderstanding of what culture does. “When you speak of an ‘entertainment industry,’ you are speaking of something that generates revenue and can therefore be left to market forces. When you speak of a ‘cultural sector,’ you are speaking of something that generates social cohesion, national identity, critical thinking, and intergenerational memory; things the market cannot adequately provide and which the state therefore has a duty to support. The moment you start calling it the cultural sector rather than the entertainment industry, the entire funding logic changes.”<\/p>\n

This distinction shapes how Nkuna speaks to his students about their futures. “I tell them: you are not training to be entertainers. You are training to be cultural ambassadors for your communities, for your country, for Africa. That is a different kind of responsibility. And it deserves a different kind of recognition and support from the society you serve.”<\/p>\n

Internationalisation and Multiculturalism: The Advantage of the Wide Lens<\/h3>\n

For Nkuna, the years spent performing in multiple countries were not simply a career trajectory, they were an education in cultural plurality that no single institution could have provided. Singing Tamino in Mozart’s The Magic Flute<\/em>, performing Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress<\/em>, appearing in oratorio concerts with choirs whose traditions of choral singing stretch back centuries; each of these demand a genuine inhabiting of a different musical world.<\/p>\n

“There is something that happens to you when you learn to be fully present inside a musical tradition that is not your own,” he reflects. “You begin to understand your own tradition with a clarity that is simply not available from inside it. The distance teaches you. The difference illuminates. And then when you bring all of that experience back to your own context, you see possibilities that were always there but that you could not previously see.”<\/p>\n

This is the philosophy that underpins his approach to building Wits Music <\/a>as a truly international department. Internationalisation, for Nkuna, is not about importing foreign models or seeking foreign validation. It is about creating the conditions in which multiple musical traditions can genuinely converse: where African music is not a tributary feeding into a Western mainstream, but an equal and generative voice in a genuinely multilateral musical discourse.<\/p>\n

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“South Africa is one of the most naturally multicultural societies on earth,” he says. “Our music reflects that. The choral tradition, the Nguni musical heritage, the Cape Malay influence, the jazz lineages of the townships, the classical traditions introduced through European settlement and missionaries, all of these are part of what it means to make music in South Africa. A department that genuinely embraces that plurality is not diluting its focus. It is expanding its creative and intellectual resources beyond what any single-tradition department could achieve.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He is quick to emphasise that this multicultural vision is not his alone. It is the collective project of a department whose staff bring the full breadth of that plurality with them. “I am not trying to change the department,” he says emphatically. “I am trying to collaborate with outstanding colleagues to grow it, to take what is already excellent and help it become more of itself. That is a very different thing from imposing a personal vision.”<\/p>\n

The Collaborative Vision: African Music, African Spectralism, and New Programmes<\/h3>\n

The intellectual and programmatic ambitions of the department under Nkuna’s leadership are, in the best sense, collaborative. He is eager to credit his colleagues and to be clear about the distinction between his own contributions and theirs.<\/p>\n

Dr Andile Khumalo, a composer of international standing who completed his Doctorate of Musical Arts at Columbia University in New York under the supervision of George Lewis and Tristan Murail, is a leading figure in the field of African Spectralism: a compositional approach that engages with the full harmonic spectrum characteristic of African tonal systems, treating overtones, microtones, and resonant frequencies with the analytical rigour that European Spectralism brought to its own tradition. Khumalo’s work has been performed internationally and represents one of the most significant contributions to contemporary African compositional thought. His presence in the department is a source of immense intellectual distinction, and the development of African Spectralism as a formal area of study at Wits is a project Nkuna wholeheartedly supports and seeks to amplify through the department’s programmes and public profile.<\/p>\n

Equally significant is the work of Dr Mbuti Moloi, whose specialisation in African Music has produced a pioneering new programme that brings formal academic rigour to the study of African musical traditions in all their diversity. This programme is not an addendum to a Western-centric curriculum, it is a central pillar of the department’s academic identity, reflecting the understanding that African music is not ethnographic curiosity but a living, complex, and intellectually rich tradition that deserves the same depth of scholarly engagement as any other.<\/p>\n

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Concert Life and the Festivals: Proving What Is Possible<\/h3>\n

If the intellectual ambitions of the Department are best expressed through its research programmes, its artistic ambitions are expressed through its concert life. And here, the evidence of what is possible under Nkuna’s leadership is already tangible.<\/p>\n

In May 2025, the Wits School of Arts<\/a> mounted a landmark Africa Day celebration spanning two weeks of events across multiple venues on campus encompassing music, panel discussions, public lectures, and storytelling across a range of genres and traditions. On Africa Day itself, the 25th <\/sup>of May, the centrepiece was Nkuna\u2019s Mass for Justice, Op. 49<\/em>, at the Linder Auditorium, featuring choirs and soloists performing with the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra, preceded by a keynote address by Prof. Tinyiko Maluleke on The Music of Africa as a Source of Resilience.<\/em> Nkuna\u2019s Mass for Justice is a composition whose title speaks directly to his understanding of music as a vehicle for social meaning, not merely aesthetic pleasure.<\/p>\n

Then, in April 2026, the Department launched what is set to become a defining fixture in the South African concert calendar: the inaugural Wits International Vocal and Chamber Music Festival. Spanning fourteen concerts from 22 April to 2 May across Wits campus venues, the festival opened at the Seabrooke Music Hall with a performance of Faur\u00e9’s Requiem<\/em>, Op. 48, reframed as a memorial for the youth who gave their lives in the 1976 Soweto Uprising. The Wits Music Department Choir, accompanied by pianist David Butlin and conducted by Nkuna, delivered what reviewers described as a technically refined and emotionally gripping performance that set a high standard for the festival. Soprano Charmaine Nkuna and bass Thato Morutle delivered standout solo performances that demonstrated exactly the kind of vocal talent the department cultivates and the heights its students and associates can reach.<\/p>\n

“These festivals are not vanity projects,” Nkuna says. “They are proof of concept. They show what this department is capable of when we are given the space and the resources to do what we know how to do. They show what our students can achieve. They show what our staff, many of whom are accomplished musicians, bring to this institution every day. And they are beginning to show the broader public and the international community that Wits Music is a place worth watching.”<\/p>\n

The contribution of the department’s sessional staff deserves acknowledgment in this context. Wits Music’s sessional roster includes performing artists and recording musicians of considerable standing, individuals who bring not just pedagogical skill but active professional credibility to the teaching environment. Their students learn from people who are not describing a career in music from a distance but living one in real time. This is one of the department’s distinctive and underappreciated strengths, and one that Nkuna intends to build upon.<\/p>\n

Musical Excellence as a Standard, Not an Aspiration<\/h3>\n

Underlying everything Nkuna describes: the research programmes, the festivals, the international partnerships, the interdisciplinary collaborations, is a single, non-negotiable commitment: the pursuit of the highest possible standard of musical performance. “Excellence is not elitism,” he says, in what sounds like a formulation he has had occasion to make before. “Excellence is the standard we owe our students. It is the standard they owe the music. When a student walks onto a stage having been trained at Wits, I want every member of that audience to know they are in the presence of someone who has been prepared to the highest level. That is not a luxury, that is the entire point.”<\/p>\n

He speaks about the Department’s ambition to become a genuine centre of musical excellence in Africa and beyond, not by mimicking established institutions, but by developing its own model: one that combines research depth, performance excellence, cultural plurality, and the kind of interdisciplinary openness that only a great university environment makes possible. “Wits is not just a music school. It is a research university of international standing. That means our students have access to scholarship, to intellectual life, to disciplines that interact with music in ways that can transform how they understand what they are doing. We want musicians who can also think, who can write about their work, research their traditions, situate their practice in the widest possible cultural and historical context. That combination is what the world needs from South African music right now. And it is what we are working, together, to provide.”<\/p>\n

The Composer: A Body of Work That Speaks<\/h3>\n

Nkuna the composer is a figure whose output commands respect quite independent of his achievements as a performer or an academic. He has composed over 60 complete works, a body of output that includes a Requiem for soloists, chorus and orchestra; a Mass for Justice; two Cello Concerti; several song cycles; sonatas; chamber works; and compositions for solo instruments.<\/p>\n

His Requiem of Hope and Forgiveness<\/em> received its world premiere at the International Choir and Orchestra Music Festival in Kassel, Germany in November 2022, performed by the Neue Philharmonie Kassel. In December 2023, the same festival saw world premieres of both his Cello Concerti, performed by the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, a programme that carried resonance given the circumstances of that orchestra in that moment of history. He has just completed writing an opera: The Fallen Youth<\/em>, in remembrance of the youth that in protest on 16 June 1976. Nkuna\u2019s relationship with composition is not a side interest. It is as central to who he is as anything else.<\/p>\n

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Music in the Age of AI: Authority and Presence Are Still Ours<\/h3>\n

Asked about artificial intelligence and its implications for music education and practice, Nkuna responds with the same thoughtful equilibrium that characterises his approach to everything. “AI is a tool. And like every tool that has appeared in the history of music: notation, the tempered piano, the recording microphone, the digital audio workstation, etc. it will change some things and leave others intact. Our job is to understand clearly which is which.”<\/p>\n

“Our students are entering a world in which these tools are simply present. We would be doing them a disservice if we pretended otherwise. What we can do is ensure they engage with those tools from a position of genuine musical authority, with a clear artistic identity, a developed aesthetic sensibility, and the kind of deep technical and historical knowledge that allows them to use any tool purposefully rather than be used by it.”<\/p>\n

Challenges and the Path Forward<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nkuna does not underestimate the challenges. The South African arts funding environment remains difficult. University music departments across the country face pressure to justify their existence in purely economic terms. Students from under-resourced backgrounds face additional burdens. And, understandably, the public narrative around arts careers remains stubbornly pessimistic.<\/p>\n

On funding: the solution begins with language: replacing the ‘entertainment industry’ frame with a ‘cultural sector’ frame and building the argument for state support because of culture’s social and civic functions rather than its commercial returns. On student welfare: mentorship, bursary development, and an active effort to connect students with professional networks before they graduate. On the public narrative: demonstrate, through events like the festivals, what musical excellence looks like, and let the evidence speak.<\/p>\n

“The advice I give students about careers is simple: become excellent, not merely good. Excellent is rare. Rare is sustainable. And then build a life that is structured to support your artistry: multiple income streams, strong professional relationships, and a clear sense of what you stand for as an artist. A musician who also teaches, conducts, records, and manages their practice is not a lesser musician. They are a musician who gets to keep making music.”<\/p>\n

Roots: The Sound That Was There from the Beginning<\/h3>\n

Nkuna grew up in a musical family. His father is a composer. Nkuna studied singing with James Conrad in Durban before continuing his formation with Pierre-Andr\u00e9 Blaser at the Conservatoire de Lausanne: a journey from Giyani to Durban to Switzerland that encapsulates the multicultural arc of a life in music. The sophistication of the Lausanne training and the rootedness of the Limpopo childhood are not in tension in Nkuna. They are in conversation. And that conversation is, in many ways, the template for what he wants the Department of Music at Wits to become.<\/p>\n

Legacy: The Work Continues Beyond the Name<\/p>\n

When asked about legacy, Nkuna says: “I want, in practical terms, a department that is stronger in every dimension when I leave than when I arrived. Stronger in its research output, stronger in its performance standards, stronger in its international partnerships, stronger in the diversity and quality of its programmes, stronger in the professional lives of its graduates.”<\/p>\n

And beyond the practical? “I hope that what I will have contributed, alongside my colleagues, is a demonstration that music in Africa does not have to choose between its own traditions and the world’s. That it can be simultaneously deeply rooted and genuinely international. That African musical knowledge and Western musical rigour are not opposites, but they are potential partners in something that neither could achieve alone. If this department embodies that understanding when I am long gone from this office, that will be enough. More than enough.”<\/p>\n


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\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.wits.ac.za \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3 July 2026 – Wits University Head of Music Dr Musa-Duke Nkuna reflects on a career shaped by diverse cultures and world stages, and a Department that will reflect the best of Africa. There is a particular quality of perspective that comes from having genuinely inhabited multiple musical cultures, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2486822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2486821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/2026-Multiculturalism-musical-excellence-and-a-new-vision-for.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2486821"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2486823,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486821\/revisions\/2486823"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2486822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2486821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2486821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2486821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}