Mokale Koapeng - South African Composer and Choral Director

Two works by the South African composer Mokale Koapeng (b. 1963), Fourever Colourful and Black and White, Prelude No. 2 were given their premiere performances by the Wits Contemporary Performance Ensemble at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg on March 12, 2008. Compositions of Christo Jankowitz, Angie Mullins and Annemarie Ferreira were also on the program.

Mokale Koapeng is a choral director and a Music graduate of The University of Witwatersrand. He has conceived a long-term project which he calls “A Hidden Cultural Picture”. He came across the phrase on the page devoted to the African American composer Edmond Dede (1827-1903) at AfriClassical.com, where a visitor had remarked: “That is most fascinating - it reveals a previously hidden cultural picture which far too few of our contemporaries could conceive. This suggests a rarely seen dimension to that epoch, and raises a lot of questions.” Mokale explains that “A Hidden Cultural Picture” aims to bring classical music of composers of African descent to the music public in South Africa, in part by incorporating it in established national choral festivals.

In 2000 he was appointed as conductor of the University of Pretoria Chorale. Mokale is also the Music Director of SDASA Chorale, a male voice ensemble drawn from the Seventh Day Adventists’ Student Association. It released the CD Simunye: Music For A Harmonious World on the Erato label in 1997 to international acclaim in partnership with a British vocal group, I Fagiolini. The website of I Fagiolini explains the title:

“Simunye is a Zulu word meaning ‘we are one’ and is the name given to a project developed by I Fagiolini and the SDASA Chorale of Soweto. It resulted in a CD and joint concert tours to South Africa, the UK, Scandinavia and Bermuda.”

The CD has 17 tracks, opening with Egolgotha (At Golgotha) and closing with Home. Mokale wrote two of the pieces and arranged a third. All of the tracks can be sampled at Amazon.com