Abuse and silence in South Africa’s classical music culture: what a student’s story reveals

When I interviewed a man I will call Charles as part of my research on classical music and abuse in South Africa, he shared a poem with me. He'd written it when he was studying music at university in South Africa.

it is madness / this building / with its windows / cold and closed / so that not even the stale air can escape … with its countless doors / their iron locks and tiny square portholes…

You might think the writer was describing a prison or an asylum built centuries ago for those deemed unfit to live in “normal” society; not a university music department.

Charles told me that he was suicidal for much of this period and that he self-harmed. Queer, brown, gifted, and the first in his family to attend university, he's the kind of student who might have excelled in post-apartheid South Africa. Yet he dropped out before he could complete his music studies.

When I asked him why, he said he'd been forced to “juggle” multiple traumas. In his university residence, he experienced racial abuse. At the same time, the musical world that had once given him a sense of belonging became a place of isolation, even incarceration. He described feeling trapped between his love of classical music and the reality of studying in an environment where he did not feel he belonged.

Charles spoke at length about the emotional abuse he experienced from his teacher, who repeatedly told him he was a failure despite his exceptional musical abilities. These experiences compounded his profound sense of isolation. It left him with what he described as feelings of “madness”.

Charles's description of institutionalised music schools is not isolated. “The rooms suggest prison cells,” observed US harpist Judith Kogan of the prestigious Juilliard music school. Hungarian violinist Carl Flesch wrote about how powerful and charismatic music teachers “usually are vampires who suck out their pupils' personality…”

In classical music education, especially when it comes to a performance career, the teacher is a formative influence on the student. They are in a position of power, not only by virtue of their reputation and expertise, but also their professional networks. They're able to create opportunities for students, to recommend them to other influential people and institutions.

As a musicologist with interests in violence and trauma, I have researched how classical music responds to difficult histories and how these histories, including apartheid, have shaped our thinking and writing about music and race in South Africa. My most recent project narrows this to consider abusive behaviours within the institutions that produce classical music. This includes universities, professional organisations, orchestras and choirs.

All is not well

There have been suggestions that all is not well in South Africa's classical music industry. A handful of media reports have focused on individual teachers or famous international performers accused of sexual abuse.

A 2024 report, with a focus on women in the South African music scene, found that just under one third of those surveyed felt pressured to enter a sexual relationship.

Yet South African classical music institutions and the industry more broadly have been vexingly silent about why abuse cultures might be ingrained in their teaching philosophies and practices.

Not even the #MeToo movement and a call for the South African music industry's own reckoning with sexual abuse could rupture the sound-proof walls of South African classical music.

Tackling abuse is imperative to create safer environments for teaching and professional music-making. And also to reckon with the harms that colonial and apartheid cultural production have carried into the present.

Why the silence?

The silence is not entirely surprising. For centuries, classical music in South Africa has remained ensconced in an ethos of non-political neutrality. It was about universal beauty and musical genius. Not things like race, colonialism or apartheid.

It has often represented the most admirable of human qualities, telling stories about “great” composers or performers (often men) overcoming adversity through music.

But apartheid favoured white South Africans. It structured education, social life and economic possibilities according to racial privilege. Classical music performance and listening, part of the European tradition of high art, were largely reserved for white South Africans. It connected them to what was regarded as a western tradition of superior culture and civilisation.

Black students were able to study classical music at white universities only under exceptional circumstances. There, they were generally trained as classroom teachers rather than prepared for careers in concert performance or elite music education.

This history has lived on in many different ways, shaping music institutions after democracy.

Abuse in South Africa

In my own ongoing research, I have heard of powerful music professors or teachers who abused their students. Of male orchestral players and conductors forcing themselves onto women players. Of teachers trading in manipulation and humiliation.

Charles's account is taken from the first work published on abusive behaviours in South African classical music. It exposes blurred boundaries: between the possibilities of teaching to create intimacy, knowledge and self-discovery – and teaching that harms students, reducing them to instruments serving the teacher's gratification.

Charles saw studying music as a key to community, critical thinking and self-discovery. At first his music lessons felt like a safe space. But the warmth could at any moment give way to shouting and a lesson ending abruptly.

A teacher's physical touch is often to demonstrate something about the mechanics of playing or singing. For Charles it began to feel it was also “to show that he (the teacher) was in control”.

What Charles experienced, I argue in my paper, is more than just a case of emotional harm committed against a student of colour in a teaching context. It carries with it the weight of a difficult past.

At its best, teaching and learning invites curiosity, creativity, critique and self-discovery. But emotional harm, sexual talk and a touch that feels controlling amounts to what I call the “pornographic in pedagogy”. Teaching where the transformative possibilities of education are replaced by a harmful play of feelings.

Charles's story is not just the story of an elite teacher and a student. Particular aspects of classical music education and its cultural underpinnings lend themselves to abusive behaviours. This raises questions about the enduring silence in South African classical music about them.

If the history and present of South African classical music is going to be written in all its complexity, it will require for us to grapple not only with the influence of apartheid, but also with the sustained silence about abusive and harmful behaviours that have threaded through them.

Carina Venter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

By Carina Venter, Senior Lecturer in Musicology, Stellenbosch University