Professor Christopher Ballantine

Professor Christopher Ballantine’s academic career has been built around a fundamental interest in the role that music can play in the struggle for a better, more egalitarian society, and his work has broached a range of theoretical and disciplinary fields, including the sociology of music, musical meaning, and the philosophy of music. A graduate of the universities of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town, and Cambridge, he is currently an Emeritus Professor and Lifetime Fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). He has produced numerous books and articles related to endogenous music in Africa, and varieties of 20th- and 21st-century popular, classical, and operatic music. Several of these publications are now widely regarded as ‘classics’ in their field. In addition to a large number of peer-reviewed articles in many of the world’s leading musicological journals, his books include Music and its Social Meanings and the award-winning Marabi Nights: Jazz, ‘Race’, Society in Early Apartheid South Africa.