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SOUND STRATEGIES: The Innovators Going Global With African Music

<h2 class="wp-block-heading alignwide has-text-align-center" id="h-south-africa-music-conductor">South Africa | Music conductor </h2>



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Words and Curation:&nbsp;Chanel Retief|Art Director: Lucy Nkosi |&nbsp;Photography: Katlego Mokubyane&nbsp;Photography Assistant:&nbsp;Sbusiso Sigidi Studio: NewKatz Studio, Johannesburg|&nbsp;Videographer: @astro.vn |&nbsp;CNBC Africa Videographer:&nbsp;Thabo Mathebula|&nbsp;Video Editor:&nbsp;Chanel Retief|&nbsp;Styling: Bontlefeela Mogoye and Wanda Baloyi |&nbsp;Outfits supplied by: Kworks Design; Imprint South Africa; House of Suitability; LSJ Designs|&nbsp;Hair &amp; Makeup:&nbsp;Makole Made



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<blockquote class="wp-block-quote has-text-align-center is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
“She [Alicia Keys] is the one who actually picked me. She had five options. So it wasn&#8217;t because I was a pretty look or whatever. She was like, ‘Listen, there is just something about you&#8221;
</blockquote>



POWER. THAT IS THE WORD that comes to mind, as Pitse walks on to the set with her conducting baton for the photoshoot for this feature. Hailed the youngest African woman orchestra owner, conductor, classical music arranger, producer, musician, and curator of intimate musically inspired/influenced spaces and experiences, it’s not difficult to see why. 



However, this has not come easy. 



“You&#8217;ve seen me, I&#8217;m quite tiny,” Pitse laughs. “You get into this industry where you see all these groot manne (big men) and they&#8217;ve been in the industry and the business for so long. So the question you always get is ‘What are you doing here?’ There&#8217;s always that thing where I have to prove myself more than I should, and I always have to walk on stage or into spaces, or even at just rehearsals, being over-prepared.”



Serenade Magazine noted in a 2022 article that the average proportion of women in orchestras is still less than 50% while the number of female conductors is barely 10% of the total.



“Historically, in the orchestra space, you would find that not a lot of women have even the first seat. You won&#8217;t really have a female concertmaster, or even a female conductor,” Pitse adds. “It&#8217;s a very tough industry, because like I&#8217;m saying, you have to know more than what you are actually required to. So, there&#8217;s always someone who&#8217;s checking you and often it’s a guy who&#8217;s checking to see if [you] are who you say you are.”



Born and raised in the rich and colorful City of Tshwane, it was in the vibrant streets of South Africa’s capital city that Pitse first discovered and developed her deep love for music. With a family active in the Salvation Army, she soon found her way to its famous brass band, where she learned to play the English horn, trumpet, flugelhorn, and cornet.



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“My grandparents were always at church and subsequently so was my mother. I had to learn something to just make sure that whenever she&#8217;s having a meeting, I&#8217;m doing something at the same time,” Pitse adds. “The trumpet became my first love in my introduction to music.”



From the Salvation Army straight to one of Netflix’s biggest shows, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.



Grammy award-winning artist Alicia Keys wanted to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her song If I Ain&#8217;t Got You, so Netflix created a 74-piece global orchestra made up entirely of women of color to perform a rendition for the show. At the orchestra’s helm was Pitse.



“She [Keys] is the one who actually picked me. She had five options. So it wasn&#8217;t because I was a pretty look or whatever. She was like, ‘Listen, there is just something about you, and from what I&#8217;ve seen and what I&#8217;ve heard, you are so dynamic’.” Although it felt exciting to have Keys co-sign her, Pitse felt a lot of pressure to perfect this as it was a song the world had marveled over for 20 years



“We were recording the music video and in between a take, the camera guys were switching cameras. I was standing on a step in front and [Keys] was at the grand piano on my left. She then started playing the diary and when I looked to my left, she was intentionally looking at me as she was playing.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote has-text-align-center is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">
“OFENTSE KNOWS WHERE SHE HAS COME FROM, AND SHE CERTAINLY KNOWS WHERE SHE IS HEADING – ALL THE WAY TO THE STARS.”
<cite>—Adam Howard, South African music composer</cite></blockquote>



“And now she&#8217;s playing the diary and I&#8217;m looking at her and we are jamming to that diary. And it was such a special moment because I think at that moment, it meant so much to us that we were finally doing this. We were finally here [as an all-female orchestra]. When she stepped away from the piano and we were having our whispering chat, she said to me ‘Listen, we did this’… and that was amazing.”



Adam Howard, award-winning South African music composer and supervisor, describes Pitse as a visionary.



“I think Ofentse’s view of what an orchestra is and can be is just what is needed in a sometimes stagnant and closed classical world. Her passion is palpable and her work ethic second to none. There is a powerful African saying, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, which means a person is a person through our relationships with other people. Ofentse knows this. She knows where she has come from, and she certainly knows where she is heading – all the way to the stars,” says Howard.



When Pitse entered the industry, her main goal was always “to break barriers” so that classical music could be propelled into popular culture, something that became evident when she did the Netflix special.



“I&#8217;ve always tried to fuse the world of the very mainstream and sacred world of classical music with the mainstream world of pop,” Pitse adds. “That is also something I continuously want to do and create more access [to] so if people can see that orchestra is actually not so boring, they will want to be a part of this world.”



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Meet Cover Star: Ofentse Pitse “MY DREAM WAS ALWAYS TO BREAK BARRIERS”

Only 27, Ofentse Pitse owns and conducts an orchestra in South Africa, rewriting the soundtrack for the region’s abundant though overlooked musical talent. But the pandemic has made performing together a logistical conundrum.



IF IT REQUIRES 10,000 HOURS OF dedication to master an instrument, it takes someone of harmonic resolve to become the conductor of a 45-piece orchestra, and 30-member choir, by the age of 27. Ofentse Pitse is the owner of Anchored Sound, the Johannesburg-based, all-black phenomenon rewriting aspiration’s soundtrack for the region’s abundant but overlooked musical talent.



The first black South African woman to own and conduct an orchestra was playing the flugelhorn, a gift from an uncle, by the age of 12 (her grandfather was the trumpeter and jazz conductor Otto Pitse); her nascent talent and determination were nurtured by the Salvation Army band in her home town of Mabopane, Pretoria, the capital of South Africa.



“In the beginning, the dream was a silent dream,” she says. “I didn’t really share my ideas, I was just thinking of how far I wanted to go. I didn’t see enough representation in the brass band at church. I thought to myself, ‘hang on, I’ve not seen enough girls’! That was a leadership step.”



A formative experience at school then sparked a natural instinct for transgressive innovation.



“I remember one day just wanting to touch the piano in the music department,” she says. “And being told, ‘no, you can’t touch the piano’. That made me feel so small. My argument will always be that you have to be what you want to see; you cannot fight a system if you are not willing to challenge it yourself.”



Out of this frustration, Anchored Sound was born, named after the Biblical metaphor of hope as the anchor of the soul. The choir and orchestra, supported by Pitse, with funds from her own architectural practice, perform everything from Sibelius to Vivaldi to Dvořák, with Pitse’s leadership in turn bolstered by mentorship from the University of Pretoria Symphony Orchestra conductor, Gerben Grooten.



“I told him that if we need to do the very hard pieces, we are going to do the very hard pieces,” she says. “So we do. It’s always a challenge, every single week. He always emphasizes the leadership required. How you stand, or how you enter a rehearsal space, influences how you are treated. Because being a woman, sometimes when they see me enter the space they think, ‘ah, what does she know’!”



The obstacles she faces are financial as well as cultural; funding is scarce and difficult to obtain. “Sometimes people see your pictures and you look like money, they hear interviews, you sound like money,” she says. “But there’s not one single person investing in Anchored Sound, the brand, or myself as a conductor. It’s challenging to keep the ship afloat. I learned early on that if you want something to happen, you cannot wait for the government, or whatever, because then I would complain for years without having anything done.”



Central to her role is her support for her members, many of whom lack the resources to purchase their own instruments or fulfil their own ambitions alone.



“I empower my members by first of all being great – or at least a good enough! – example,” she says. “So beyond just the musicianship, I always encourage them to study, even if it’s not music. Education is the tool for opening up many doors mentally, not just in terms of opportunities. In the beginning, I would help them with their registration at school, with their tuition, with their accommodation.



Whenever we book concerts, the funds go straight into their education. Most of them are very talented, but they come from homes that are disenfranchized.”



The pandemic has also made rehearsing and performing together a logistical conundrum that is difficult to solve for members from disadvantaged communities.



“Technology doesn’t come as second nature to some of us, so it has been difficult to facilitate how we go digital,” she says. “All the major orchestras have the infrastructure to have your good cameras, your good clip-on mics. For us, it’s very challenging, because you have players in remote areas, some in very small houses. If you ask them to record using their phone, you find in the other room there’s a baby sister making noise. So I’ve been looking at new ways of thinking as conductors, because we are so used to meeting up in spaces that are enclosed; how do we live with this new norm? How do we create a new world symphony?”



For Pitse, the unexplored musical frontier that emerges after the pandemic will be unapologetically, dynamically African.



“My second dream is to create an African orchestra, with African instruments like the marimba and the balafon (gourd- resonated xylophone),” she says. “Most musicians who play African instruments don’t know how to read music, so it would be such a spiritual exchange. These musicians know how to be guided by the spirit of music. And that’s the beauty of all things African – it really is the spirit! I’m eagerly excited to make that happen in the near future, to find out how the spirit of Africa can come alive within this new world of what an orchestra can be.”



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&#8211;BY ALASTAIR HAGGER

Tag: Ofentse Pitse

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