Ndodana-Breen also composed
Harmonia Ubuntu, based on the speeches of Nelson Mandela, for the historic tour of the Grammy-award winning Minnesota Orchestra to SA in 2018.
The university announced Ndodana-Breen’s appointment on Thursday.
“At Yale, Ndodana-Breen will create a major new work, ‘African Passion’, based largely on gospel texts, drawing from the many languages of Africa and the diaspora, and evoking a pan-African sonic perspective,” the institution said in a statement.
Ndodana-Breen said he was excited by the appointment.
“I am deeply honoured and equally excited to be part of this extraordinary community of scholars and artists,” said Ndodana-Breen.
“Yale is an amazing institution, everyone has been so welcoming and incredibly helpful. From my time as a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, I know how competitive these fellowships are so I’m truly overjoyed as a SA composer that my project was selected.”
Sligo based author Alice Lyons has been shortlisted for the Kate O Brien award at the upcoming Limerick Literary Festival for her novel Oona.
The award-winning poet s first novel gives voice to a female character on her fraught journey into adulthood and charts her evolution as an artist. Her adolescent numbness is thawed through contact with the physical world, the materials of painting and her engagement with Irish community, culture and landscape.
From 1970s East Coast America to rural Ireland amidst the transformative awkwardness of the Celtic Tiger, Oona is a resonant story conveyed in the innovative form of a Lipogram. Aside from the title, the novel is composed without use of the letter O , the tone of the book reflects Oona s inner damage and the destruction caused by hiding, omitting and obliterating parts of ourselves