Cultural and religious unification through music in Desert Rose’s Silence of the Music

Abstract

Silence of the Musicis a musical theatre piece produced by Desert Rose in 2010. The production not only addresses themes of prejudice and intercultural discrepancies in post-apartheid South Africa, but also carries a message of love and unity. The unifying factor in the show is music – the fusing together of the musics of different ethnicities, religions and cultures. In this article I investigate the ways in which the composer Holmes-Ganief merges different and juxtaposing musical styles in one production as well as looking at the link between music and emotion as a way of explaining the feeling of connectedness between a majority of the audience who attended the production.

JOURNAL OF THE MUSICAL ARTS IN AFRICA VOLUME 8 2011, 87–100