The Times Do Not Permit

This biography of Michael Mosoeu Moerane (1904-1980) surveys the unique life, times and music of the first classically educated African composer in southern Africa.

The Times Do Not Permit is the first extended overview of the life, times, and music of Michael Mosoeu Moerane (1904-1980), a composer brought up in rural South Africa in the early twentieth century. It offers a close study of African choral music that dates back to mission schools and colleges in the Eastern Cape, where a number of future African composers, as well as future political leaders, were educated. Moerane was one of many mission-trained musicians who wrote short a cappella choral works for churches and schools.

The Times Do Not Permit explores the political changes and social conditions that made life for Moerane both possible and impossible as a composer. He was the first black South African to qualify with a BMus degree in 1941. However, this caused difficulties for him both within the African choral circuit, where his advanced modernist style was considered strange and difficult, and within white concert life, from which he was largely excluded. Only his symphonic poem for orchestra, Fatšo La Heso, attained some recognition locally and internationally during his lifetime, and the score survived, unlike many of the piano pieces and smaller instrumental works he wrote.

In addition to telling the story of his ancestry, upbringing, education and teaching career, Christina Lucia offers an analysis of his music, the famous symphonic poem and four of his choral pieces, to reflect the major themes he expressed. The Times Do Not Permit is supplemented with interviews with those who knew Moerane, and ends with a coda of professional letters to, from and about him that gives his voice a presence in the absence of much personal documentation.