"Here’s to the visionaries and the dreamers, and to the artists whose music help our ideals take flight and shape our future vision" 2015

This is the 5th year of SAMRO Foundation’s investment in the SAMRO Hubert van der Spuy Competition, a competition celebrating its 27th year. This investment is more than just a financial one – it is an investment into the future of our country, into the seedlings which often germinate at this competition and blossom at the SAMRO Overseas Scholarships Competition and become music ambassadors of whom we can all be proud of.

In 2011, it was also SAMRO’s 50th Anniversary and a very special year for the SAMRO Overseas Scholarships Competition for Singers. SAMRO commissioned composer Peter Klatzow, who won the SAMRO scholarship for composers in 1964, to set former President Mbeki’s iconic “I am an African” speech to music for voice and orchestra. This was a year of re-establishing SAMRO’s identity as an African organization.

Our road of transformation with this competition, is one which affiliates with the transformation of this country and intertwined with the identity of this competition. It has not been as easy road, especially with the loss of Leon Hartshorne, a visionary who walked the road or transformation with us. However, with Hilda and the current SASMT team, we are back on track and are proud that many more South African compositions are being performed.

Transformation aligns our institutions to what we want and need in this country, our country, our African country. This alignment should not damage the fragile cultural institutions but should build them and integrate them into where society is going. Our artists are at the forefront of that vision, the renaissance and the African dream.

That is why the National Planning Commission asked two of our foremost writers, Prof Njabulo Ndebele and Antjie Krog, to look back from 2030 and co-author its vision statement.

It is visionaries such as these that we celebrate here today – on whose thoughts, creativity and imagination the house of SAMRO, which protects and invests in the rights of composers, is built. That building starts with this kind of investment in the youth who will not only shape and envisage our future, they will be our future.

Here’s to our future!

Andre Le Roux