Among my most telling experiences of South Africa, when I first visited in 2023, was encountering a group of uniformed schoolchildren passing through security at the Johannesburg airport. They were all singing, beautifully and happily. It is a singing country whose music wears many faces. In the omnipresence of adversity, the music is both infectious and humbling.
A month ago, Kenneth Kiesler’s terrific University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra toured South Africa. The second stop was Soweto. The concert venue was the Regina Mundi Catholic Church, a historic landmark in the struggle against apartheid. (The bullet holes once inflicted by police guns have purposely not been patched.) Soweto is no longer an all-Black township separated from Johannesburg’s white suburbs by a “sanitary corridor.” The audience at the Regina Mundi church was nonetheless Black, also intergenerational and variously attired. Near the end of the concert, the Michigan musicians rose, set down their instruments, and sang a beloved Xhosa song: “Bawo, Thixo Somandla.” Two days before, an inter-racial audience at the University of Pretoria had erupted into rhythmic clapping and piercing ululation; in Soweto, the listeners burst into jubilant song. The church rang with “Bawo, Thixo Somandla,” and with the traditional hymn “Plea for Africa,” and again during Miriam Makeba’s iconic “Phatha Phatha.” The music grew tidal. The audience departed the church singing. The musicians did not depart the church. They gathered in groups, stunned.
In 1979, the composer-pedagogue Gunther Schuller, who commanded a more comprehensive purview of American music than anyone else I have known, delivered a rather famous lecture at the Tanglewood Music Center. He warned the students, most of them fledgling symphonic musicians, that American orchestras had fallen prey to apathy, cynicism, and bitterness. He said boredom was rife in the ranks of the most affluent, most prestigious orchestras. He complained of a “union mentality” and “absentee” music directors. The University of Michigan players I observed in South Africa comprised one of the least jaded orchestras I have encountered in years. They retained attention even when they were not playing. They drew mounting energy from the audiences in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Soweto, and Cape Town. I heard one violinist, at Soweto, impulsively declare that she did not want to return to the United States, that the concert had been “life-changing.”
I was standing alongside Andries Coetzee, a University of Michigan linguistics professor who was born and raised in South Africa. As the singing audience slowly and ceremoniously filed out of the church, with songs of liberation still ringing in the nave, Andries’s eyes moistened, and he said: “I’ve lived in the U.S. now for 26 years and I come back to South Africa very often. But I have not felt as at home, as a South African, as I do at this moment—not for a very long time. When I became a United States citizen some 15 years ago, I automatically lost my South African citizenship. It didn’t mean that I stopped identifying as South African—that is who I am. But I did feel as if I was robbed of a part of my identity. Two weeks ago, the South African Constitutional Court ruled that the law under which I lost citizenship is unconstitutional. So after nearly 15 years of not being a South African citizen, I am all of a sudden one again. Or more accurately, according to the ruling, I have actually been a citizen all along. Tonight felt like a confirmation of my belonging—like a reaffirmation of my identity. It was a ‘welcome home’ from my fellow South Africans.” And he hugged his nearest fellow South Africans, still swaying and singing, still reluctant to leave.
The Soweto concert is what I most gratefully remember, having accompanied the University of Michigan tour as a scholar and scribe. But another image gives me pause: the safari. We visited the Pilanesberg National Park & Game Reserve for two excursions. One took place in the late afternoon and continued into darkness. The other began at five in the morning. Traveling in windowless vehicles open on all sides, traversing dirt roads that at times were barely roads, we witnessed an elemental sunset, a glowing darkness gradually enveloping the grassland, scrub, and distant hills of the veldt. The next day’s sunrise seemed nearly epochal. At one point in our journey, an immense male elephant appeared in the far distance, traversing our own road. He sauntered slowly and implacably toward us, chewing foliage he would occasionally renew. Closer and closer he came, passing within inches of my right arm. His gigantic right ear flapped upon the vehicle. I fixed on his passing right eye. His odor was intense. Like the other Pilanesberg animals, he treated us as an invisible apparition, proceeding majestically on his way.
The elephant stunned everyone into silence. No pictures were taken. Otherwise, some in the car sustained an ambience of happy chatter. We were guests in the vast preserve. It belonged to the animals, not to us. And so it was that nature, immense and eternal, seemed shrunken in dimension to a Disney theme park.
Pondering the gaudy AI imagery of dueling elephants and murderous crocodiles that I encounter on my YouTube feed—of the same animals we glimpsed coexisting in real life—I ask myself: Was our unfeeling vehicle not a metaphor for some Brave New World of intrusive social media? Or might the musicians’ tears in a Soweto church forecast a saner future?
A seminal event in my life was the death last November of our 11-year-old goldendoodle, Teddy. Since Teddy was a dog, not a human, it is no sentimental conceit to recall him as angelic.
At the age of 77, I find myself thinking about animals. Having recently reread D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, I retain the description of Gerald Crich restraining his slender red Arab mare at a railroad crossing:
The locomotive chuffed slowly. … The mare did not like it. She began to wince away, as if hurt by the unknown noise. But Gerald pulled her back and held her head to the gate. The sharp blasts of the chuffing engine broke with more and more force on her. The repeated sharp blows of unknown, terrifying noise struck through her till she was rocking with terror. She recoiled like a spring let go. …
But [Gerald] sat glistening and obstinate, forcing the wheeling mare, which spun and swerved like a wind, and yet could not get out of the grasp of his will, nor escape from the mad clamour of terror that resounded through her, as the trucks thumped slowly, heavily, horrifying, one after the other, one pursuing the other, over the rails of the crossing. …
She roared as she breathed, her nostrils were two wide, hot holes, her mouth was apart, her eyes frenzied. …
Gudrun looked and saw the trickles of blood on the sides of the mare, and she turned white. And then on the very wound the bright spurs came down, pressing relentlessly.
As Crich is a factory owner, this grueling vignette becomes a metaphor for industry overtaking humanity. Throughout Lawrence’s novel, in fact, the animal world is juxtaposed with a botched civilization riddled with complacent assumptions about the superiority of the human.
For a 21st-century American, South Africa can seem a refuge. And the South African students I encountered were often different from the Americans. In Pretoria, where the University of Michigan musicians played alongside the members of the University of Pretoria Orchestra, I had lunch with a 22-year-old double bass player named Sverre. Unlike the Michigan instrumentalists, he was not a conservatory student—his major was engineering. South Africa is a conundrum, so rich in promise, so flush with material and cultural resources; so poor in fulfillment, so wretchedly self-governed. The inescapable question—will you stay or leave?—elicited from Sverre a familiar South African response: thoughtful ambivalence. I discovered in the course of our exchange that he had never had occasion to leave his country. And yet the maturity he commanded was worldly. Young South Africans, I would come to realize (mainly at the impressive music conservatory at the University of Cape Town), cannot be insular. Unentitled, they live lives that are jostled at every turn.
In Cape Town, I visited the District 6 Museum. District 6 was once a bustling neighborhood that was bulldozed and declared fit for whites only. Today, it remains mainly barren and unoccupied. I found myself talking with the docent—a young South African (who was undecided whether to remain in Cape Town or try New York City). He told me about a group from Columbia University that had recently visited. “What I notice is that there’s not a lot of urgency to find out the story. Once we show them where the wi-fi is, you can see their interest melt away. In fact, with the majority of the American students that come here, there’s no interest. They choose to sit down and enjoy the wi-fi. They’re in their own world, making jokes among themselves. They take it as an excursion to kill some time before returning to the hotel.” The most engaged student visitors, he told me, are Asian: “They are very involved, very alert, they even make notes. They’ll ask me questions after the tour: What did this mean? Can you elaborate on that?”
For the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra, a visit to a community music school in Soweto, interacting with gifted musicians as young as eight, proved memorable. But mainly it was their five concerts that brought them into contact with grateful South Africans. Certainly the intensity and virtuosity of the orchestra, and the high skill of its world-class conductor, were key ingredients. Another crucial element was the generous program Kenneth Kiesler chose for the tour (which ended with a sixth concert at Carnegie Hall). The main work was an American masterpiece still incompletely rediscovered: William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony (1932), a profound narrative of servitude and liberation in which the excavation of African roots plays a key role. Kiesler paired the Dawson with excerpts from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. That is: he coupled the two most fulfilled interwar realizations of Antonín Dvořák’s 1893 prophecy that “Negro melodies” would foster a “great and noble school” of American classical music. In combination, they encapsulate a road not taken. Had Dawson enjoyed success and produced a series of African-American symphonies, had Gershwin not died at the age of 38, classical music in the United States could have pursued a more distinctive, more protean path.
Dvořák furnished a lodestar for Dawson: that the Negro Folk Symphony, like Dvořák’s “New World,” is a Romantic national symphony is one reason for its neglect during long modernist decades that favored a leaner, cleaner, “American” sound. (To my own ears, the symphonies of Aaron Copland and Roy Harris today seem less formidable than symphonies of Dawson and Charles Ives that more intimately hug the American vernacular.) Of the Porgy excerpts, the most electrifying was “My Man’s Gone Now.” Not only did the soprano Karen Slack deliver a torrid reading of Gershwin’s keening lament; this aria is so indebted to Black religious song that it could only strike a pulsing South African chord. And yet, a program note furnished by the University of Michigan orchestra counselled South African audiences to beware the “terrible stereotypes” inhabiting this highest creative achievement in American classical music. As any informed understanding of the work’s complex gestation and reception history will confirm, Porgy and Bess is a parable about a cripple made whole; its inhabitants are not stereotypes but formidable archetypes, with Porgy—who ascends in stature throughout the drama—the heroic moral compass of the community.
However well intentioned, DEI—long robust on the Ann Arbor campus—has conferred no favors on American music. The academic groupthink that condemns Porgy and Bess is in fact another variant of American insularity.
The Michigan ensemble began its tour, at the University of Pretoria, at the precise moment that President Donald Trump, from his Oval Office pulpit, was accusing South African President Cyril Ramaphosa of denying acts of racial persecution. South Africans reacted with outrage and incredulity. In this context, the University of Michigan tour was a timely exercise in soft diplomacy.
Cultural exchange was once a high-profile foreign-policy priority for occupants of the White House. A pivotal instance was the 1959 visit to Soviet Russia of Leonard Bernstein and his New York Philharmonic. Bernstein brought Ives and Copland to the USSR, but he also performed Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. His interpretation—with a sped-up ending—was embraced by Shostakovich himself. This startling exercise in mutual understanding was not so different from the Michigan musicians singing “Bawo, Thixo Somandla.” But MAGA signifies a new isolationism—a go-it-alone toughness. The cancelation of the Voice of America, of Fulbright scholarships, of USAID are all part of this picture. And so is the new hostility to hosting Chinese students.
My own experience of Chinese students is meager but unforgettable. One was hearing and meeting a 20-year-old Chinese pianist: Yifan Wu. His favorite composers are Robert Schumann and Paul Hindemith—a singular pairing. For his all-Schumann recital in New York City, he brought (from China) his own piano bench (he sits low). He improvised between pieces. His interpretation of Schumann’s Kreisleriana was the most compelling I have ever heard. In conversation, he is voluble and cosmopolitan. The kicker is that to date Yifan Wu is wholly trained in China, by Chinese teachers. Then there was the pair of Chinese students my wife and I encountered at a neighborhood restaurant. We were astonished by their poise and maturity—and the alacrity with which they spoke critically (and not) about conditions in China.
China, right now, is exercising immense influence in South Africa. To keep young Chinese out of the United States, or to discourage study in China, makes so little sense that retaining soft diplomacy, sans governmental support, becomes a patriotic initiative. It also sustains the arts in a world at risk. And—a related goal—it sustains basic American ideals of individual freedom. Soft diplomacy, writes Nicholas Cull of the University of Southern California’s Center for Communication Leadership and Policy, limns “the soul of a nation, making it possible for friends and adversaries alike to see what makes a country tick.”
Doubtless the University of Michigan tour was conceived as a showcase for its exceptional orchestra, abroad and at Carnegie Hall. Its higher purpose, deserving even greater applause, was to combat metastasizing American isolationism—and, commensurately, the growing insularity of young Americans entrapped by circumstances and technologies now being inflicted upon them.
