Music Research Forum | Luis Velasco-Pufleau – Stravinsky in Apartheid South Africa

Join us for the first talk in our music research series for 2026. The Museum will be open from 5.30pm with the talk starting at 6pm.

Luis Velasco-Pufleau – Stravinsky in Apartheid South Africa

At the beginning of the 1960s—a period of violent and widespread political repression in apartheid South Africa—Igor Stravinsky accepted an invitation from the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) to conduct his music in a series of concerts in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town. However, he also gave a concert in KwaThema, a township for black South Africans located approximately 40 kilometres east of Johannesburg. This presentation draws on first-hand archival sources to offer new insights into the terms, negotiation process, and reception of this concert series. Examining the rationale behind the association of European art music with the ideology of white supremacy underpinning apartheid legislation, I explore some of the hidden stories of apartheid brutality as well as the voices of resistance that had been silenced in earlier narratives on Stravinsky’s visit to South Africa.

Luis Velasco-Pufleau is an affiliate researcher at the University of Bern and a member of the Swiss Young Academy (SYA). A former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow with interdisciplinary interests, his research focuses on the relationships between music, ethics, and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is also interested in exploring the political dimension of aural memories and sound archives. He is the editor of the open-access research blog Music, Sound and Conflict (https://msc.hypotheses.org/) and an editorial board member of the journal Transposition (https://journals.openedition.org/transposition/).

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Image: Igor Stravinsky and Anton Hartman at Johannesburg Airport, 18 May 1962. Source: SABC Music Library, used with permission.