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. The essays focus on a variety of music (jazz, music in the Western art tradition, popular music) and on major composers (such as Kevin Volans) and works (Handel's Messiah). Musical institutions and previously little-researched performers (such as the African National Congress's troupe-in-exile, Amandla) are explored. The writers move well beyond their subject matter, intervening in debates on race, historiography, and postcolonial epistemologies and pedagogies.

Lara Allen is a researcher at WISER (the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research) at the University of the Witwatersrand and was previously Junior Research Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge

Introduction: Grant Olwage Chapter 1: Back to the Future? Idioms of 'displaced time' in South African composition Christine Lucia Chapter 2: Apartheid's Musical Signs: Reflections on black choralism, modernity and race-ethnicity in the segregation era Grant Olwage Chapter 3: Discomposing Apartheid's Story: Who owns Handel? Christopher Cockburn Chapter 4: Kwela's White Audiences: The politics of pleasure and identification in the early apartheid period Lara Allen Chapter 5: Popular Music and Negotiating Whiteness in Apartheid South Africa Gary Baines Chapter 6: Packaging Desires: Album covers and the presentation of apartheid Michael Drewett Chapter 7: Musical Echoes: Composing a past in/for South African jazz Carol A. Muller Chapter 8: Singing Against Apartheid: ANC cultural groups and the international anti-apartheid struggle Shirli Gilbert Chapter 9: 'Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika': Stories of an African anthem David Coplan and Bennetta Jules-Rosette Chapter 10: Whose 'White Man Sleeps' Aesthetics? and politics in the early work of Kevin Volans Martin Scherzinger Chapter 11: State of Contention: Recomposing apartheid at Pretoria's State Theatre, 1990-1994. A personal recollection Brett Pyper Chapter 12: Decomposing Apartheid: Things come together Ingrid Byerly Chapter 13: Arnold van Wyk's Hands Stephanus Muller