Programmes
Stream one
What it is
Built around the principal study: one instrument or voice, taught one to one, examined in recital. Around it sit aural training, harmony and analysis, history, chamber music and keyboard skills.
Western instruments and traditional Botswana instruments are both available as principal study. A student may take the segaba as a first instrument and be examined on it to the same standard, by the same faculty, toward the same degree.
Stream two
What it is
How recorded and amplified music is actually made: studio recording, editing and mixing, live sound, acoustics, and the production craft between a musician and a finished release.
A musician's degree, not a technician's certificate. The same grounding in aural training, harmony and history as the performance stream, because a producer who cannot hear harmony is of limited use to the musicians in the room.
Ethnomusicology
Not an elective, and not one survey module in the first year. A performance graduate in Botswana will work with traditional repertoire, church music, popular forms and the Western canon, often in the same month. A degree that treats only one of those as real music prepares nobody for the work that exists here.
Making it a requirement also decides who the faculty must be. The Academy has to appoint teachers who hold that practice, pay them and give them academic standing.
For researchers
The curriculum and the research programme are still being written, which is the useful moment to join. We are interested in visiting teaching, joint field research in Botswana, curriculum reading from institutions with ethnomusicology departments, and archive or deposit arrangements for recordings of Botswana music.
Specific research programmes and publication plans are being developed, and will be named here once agreed.
Not settled yet
