Associate Professor Sylvia Bruinders

Associate Professor Sylvia Bruinders is Head of Ethnomusicology and African Music at the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town where she teaches courses in Ethnomusicology, African and World musics.

Her dissertation on the Christmas Bands Movement in the Western Cape received the Nicholas Temperley Award for Excellence in a Dissertation in Musicology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, from which she published several journal articles and book chapters. Her monograph, Parading Respectability: The Cultural and Moral Aesthetics of the Christmas Bands Movement in the Western Cape, South Africa (NISC 2017) was supported through a Postdoctoral Fellowship of the African Humanities Program (2012-2013), funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York through the American Council of Learned Societies.

She completed the Honours degree in Musicology at UCT in 1995 where she was introduced to the study of Ethnomusicology. In 1997 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, USA. Wesleyan University has a renowned World Music programme and she was fortunate to study West African drumming with Abraham Adzenyah, a master drummer from Ghana, Brazilian Samba, Caribbean Steelband, the kora and jazz (mallet) percussion. Her Master's thesis, under the supervision of Prof Su Zheng, investigated informal musical instruction in community structures in Cape Town.

At the University of Illinois Prof Tom Turino supervised her PhD dissertation. There she also attended performance ensembles such as Zimbabwean mbira and drumming as well as Balinese and Javanese Gamelan. She also participated in cultural exchange programs and studied with local musicians and music teachers for a month in Bali in 2000 and in Zimbabwe in 2001. 

She is currently the Director of the multi-institutional, Pan-African, Andrew W. Mellon-funded research project, Mapping Africa’s Musical Identities, which includes six universities on the African continent. She enjoys hiking, swimming, tai chi and Pilates.