One Student's Silence; One Music School's Reckoning in South Africa

ABUSE AND SILENCE IN SOUTH AFRICA’S CLASSICAL MUSIC CULTURE: WHAT A STUDENT’S STORY REVEALS

Charles was suicidal for much of his time at university. He self-harmed. Queer, brown, and gifted, he was the first in his family to attend university in South Africa, the kind of student who might have thrived in the country’s post-apartheid era. Instead, he dropped out before completing his music studies, unable to reconcile his love of classical music with the reality of studying in an environment where he felt he did not belong.

When asked why he left, Charles described being forced to “juggle” multiple traumas. In his university residence, he experienced racial abuse. At the same time, the musical world that had once offered him a sense of belonging transformed into a place of isolation and confinement. He felt trapped between his passion for classical music and the hostile conditions of his studies. His teacher repeatedly told him he was a failure despite his exceptional musical abilities, compounding his profound sense of isolation and leaving him with what he described as feelings of “madness”.

Charles expressed these experiences through a poem written during his university years: “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…” The imagery evokes a prison or asylum rather than a music department, yet it describes his lived reality within a university music school.

Charles’s experience is not unique. US harpist Judith Kogan has observed that the rooms at the prestigious Juilliard music school “suggest prison cells”. 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, particularly for those pursuing performance careers, the teacher wields formative influence. They hold power through reputation, expertise, and professional networks. They create opportunities for students, recommend them to influential people and institutions, and shape career trajectories.

South Africa’s classical music institutions have remained largely silent about abuse within their ranks. A handful of media reports have focused on individual teachers or famous international performers accused of sexual abuse. A 2024 report examining women in the South African music scene found that just under one third of those surveyed felt pressured to enter a sexual relationship. Yet the broader classical music industry has offered little public reckoning with why abuse cultures might be ingrained in teaching philosophies and practices. Even the global #MeToo movement and calls for the South African music industry to confront sexual abuse have failed to penetrate what remains a soundproof institutional world.

This silence reflects a deeper historical pattern. For centuries, classical music in South Africa has been ensconced in an ethos of non-political neutrality, framed around universal beauty and musical genius rather than questions of race, colonialism, or apartheid. The tradition has celebrated stories of “great” composers and performers, predominantly men, overcoming adversity through music. Yet apartheid structured this entire landscape. Classical music performance and listening, rooted in the European tradition of high art, were largely reserved for white South Africans, connecting them to what was regarded as a western tradition of superior culture and civilization. Black students could study classical music at white universities only under exceptional circumstances, and they were typically trained as classroom teachers rather than prepared for concert performance or elite music education careers.

This history persists in contemporary music institutions. Research into abusive behaviours within South African classical music has documented powerful music professors who abused students, male orchestral players and conductors forcing themselves onto women players, and teachers trading in manipulation and humiliation. Charles’s account represents the first published work on such behaviours in South African classical music, exposing blurred boundaries between teaching that creates intimacy, knowledge, and self-discovery and teaching that harms students, reducing them to instruments serving the teacher’s gratification.

For Charles, music lessons initially felt like a safe space offering community, critical thinking, and self-discovery. That warmth could give way without warning to shouting and abrupt lesson endings. A teacher’s physical touch, ostensibly to demonstrate playing mechanics, began to feel like a demonstration of control. What Charles experienced carries weight beyond individual emotional harm. It carries the weight of a difficult past.

By contrast, teaching and learning at its best invites curiosity, creativity, critique, and self-discovery. Emotional harm, sexual talk, and controlling touch constitute what might be called the “pornographic in pedagogy”, where the transformative possibilities of education are replaced by harmful play of feelings. Charles’s story is not simply the story of an elite teacher and a student. Particular aspects of classical music education and its cultural underpinnings lend themselves to abusive behaviours, raising urgent questions about the enduring silence surrounding them.

If South African classical music is to be written in all its complexity, reckoning must extend beyond apartheid’s influence to include the sustained silence about abusive and harmful behaviours that have threaded through these institutions. Whether that reckoning can reach the closed rooms where teachers and students meet alone remains the question the industry has yet to answer.