MEINTJES, Louise 1960-

PERSONAL:

Female. Surname pronounced "Main-keys"; born 1960, in South Africa. Education: University of Texas at Austin, M.M., Ph.D. (anthropology).

ADDRESSES:

Office—Duke University, Department of Music, Box 90666, Durham, NC 27708-0666. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Duke University, Durham, NC, assistant professor of ethnomusicology, 1996—, director of graduate studies in music, and associated faculty in department of cultural anthropology.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fulbright scholar; Charles Seeger Award, Society for Ethnomusicology; research grant, Wenner-Gren Foundation, 2001; Rockefeller fellowship in the black performing arts, Stanford Humanities Center, 2001-02.

WRITINGS:

Sound of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2003.

Contributor to Ethnomusicology.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Researching "South Africa, music as symbolically spoken, meditation and technology, music/language relationships, and the politics of cross-cultural collaborations."

SIDELIGHTS:

Louise Meintjes, a professor at Duke University, is the author of Sound of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. In the book Meintjes describes her fieldwork in a Johannesburg recording studio during the production of a mbaqanqa album by the band Isigqi Sesimanje. As Sally Hicks wrote on the Duke News & Communications Web site, Meintjes "follows the band through the studio process, writing in an almost journalistic style as she describes the musicians and technicians struggle over lyrics, blending vocals and overdubbing percussion as they also deal with everyday life in Johannesburg."

According to Library Journal reviewer Bill Walker, the South African-born Meintjes "is acutely aware that the music was inseparable from what was going on in her native country at the time," namely, the transition from apartheid to a democratic form of government. "South Africa was a highly politicized place in the early 1990s in this transition period," Meintjes explained to Independent Online contributor Michael J. Kramer. "There were so many spaces that were overtly about racial politics. One of the things I found fascinating about the studio itself is that the race, class, and gender politics in their historical moment all got talked about through talking about sound and through talking about technology. It came out through the way sound got shaped, and through struggle for control over technological manipulation."

Critics praised Meintjes's work in Sound of Africa! Walker called the work "lively and distinctive," and Kramer stated that the author "reveals the complex negotiations of meaning and memory, performance and power, recording and reckoning, during the transitional years from apartheid to a new South African society."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

African Sociological Review, Volume 7, number 1, Michael Drewett, review of Sound of Africa!: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio, p. 189.

Choice, July-August, 2003, Kazadi wa Mukuna, review of Sound of Africa!, p. 1919.

Library Journal, March 15, 2003, Bill Walker, review of Sound of Africa!, pp. 86-87.

ONLINE

Duke News & Communications Web site,http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/ (March 28, 2003), Sally Hicks, "Book on South African Recording Studio Looks at Cultural Backdrop of Afro-pop Music."

Duke University Press Web site,http://www.dukeupress.edu/ (April 19, 2004).

Independent Online,http://www.indyweek.com/ (February 25-March 2, 2004), Michael J. Kramer, "Deconstructing the 'Indestructible' Beat."*