Felicia Lesch has spent four decades using music as a vehicle for social change. From a high school teacher to the founder of the Stellenbosch University Jazz Band, she built a career at the very institution where Apartheid was conceptualised and used it to serve the people it once tried to shut out.
Tucked away in a corner at the Stellenbosch University Conservatory is an office numbered A117.
It’s unassuming at a first glance. Grey walls. Four paling yellow couches. Files upon files upon files.
Yet if you walk further in, you might find a woman sitting on that pale yellow couch. She might smile at you, or offer to show you how the bamboo instrument propped up on her desk works.
Beyond the memorials, the museums and the history books live people like Felicia Lesch. She is a pioneer in music education and social justice; not in law, but in the lives of every musician who stepped into room A117 – her office at the Conservatory.
“I discovered I liked playing”
Music began at home for Lesch. Growing up, she spent a lot of time watching her father play the church organ and eventually took piano lessons herself when she was seven years old.
“I liked playing,” she says. “I discovered I liked playing in concerts.”
Growing up as a coloured woman during Apartheid, Lesch attended Livingstone High School in Claremont, a place whose efforts to politically conscientise her became embedded in her very fabric as a human being. She describes how throughout her schooling career, some teachers had been placed under house arrest or students continuously disappeared from classes, some “coming back beaten black and blue”.
It is against this background that she later became aware of jazz as an underground movement. With these venues at the time not approved by the government and many of the musicians banned, she says she came to understand jazz as a conduit for resistance.
“They did not accept the status quo like the classic musicians did,” she says. “There was no boundary between black and white in the jazz world.”
Music teacher and founder of the Stellenbosch University Jazz Band, Felicia Lesch sits at a piano in the Fismer Hall at the Stellenbosch University Conservatory. She did not play on a grand piano until she was 13 years old, something she refused to let happen to her students whilst a primary school teacher during Apartheid. PHOTO: Jade Wainwright
“Remember this day, because this is going to end”
In 1986, when Lesch began working as a music teacher at Heathfield High School in Cape Town, it was still deep Apartheid in South Africa.
“The day I came for my job interview there, I was told that the school [was] under siege,” says Lesch, describing the police on the scene and the tankers surrounding the property. The school principal had told her afterwards that they were attempting to start a music department if she was still willing to work there.
She was.
Classes never constituted a full day under a state of emergency, and children were often sent home in small groups for their safety. Lesch decided to practice with the music kids in her small classroom to keep them busy after school, and in 1987 the Heathfield orchestral ensemble was born.
One day, Lesch and her students were found by a neighbouring school that had heard the music and surrounded the classroom while rallying. She recalls telling her children to hide under every table they could, not wanting to “expose them to any rocks potentially coming through” the room’s singular window.
“I think I was as scared as they were, because of the noise,” she says.
When the crowd outside had dispersed, she sent the kids to a teacher across the road.
“There was a young man, Albert Engel, he was in matric,” she says. Engel made sure the kids got there safely. She found him an hour later, laughing with the children, while she still felt petrified.
“He had turned it into an adventure for the kids,” she says.
She has never forgotten what she told them while they were crouched under the tables on the floor.
“Remember this day,” she had said, “because this is going to end.”
Music teacher and founder of the Stellenbosch University Jazz Band, Felicia Lesch, demonstrates how the angklung, an instrument from Indonesia, works. After teaching the ambassador to Indonesia’s daughter piano in 2000, he gifted an angklung to Heathfield High school, sparking Lesch’s interest and an invitation to travel to Java for seven weeks to learn how to play it. PHOTO: Jade Wainwright
In abject mourning
The young man, Albert Engel, grew to become a dear friend of hers. As the first full-time brass lecturer and the first person of colour to lecture at the music department at Stellenbosch University (SU), Engel was an inspiration to her.
He died on the 8th of September, 2003. Exactly one week after Lesch, too, started working at SU.
At 35, he was still a young man when he died.
Lesch explains that he had been in a car accident on the way back from Namibia. The accident also claimed the lives of his brother and 8 other musicians.
In 2005, Lesch took over his role as coordinator of the certificate program at the music department. The program was designed as a bridging course into tertiary music studies for students from previously disadvantaged communities.
“It’s kind of circular how life is,” she says, as she describes the process of stepping into the role and inadvertently starting the SU Jazz Band from that. He had told her one month before he passed that he wanted to bring jazz into the university’s symphonic ensemble.
“He told me a lot of things before he died,” she says.
As she continued to pursue his dream of bringing jazz to SU, she held onto his words.
“This is what he said, this is what he said,” she would remind herself, all while being in abject mourning for the beautiful soul that he was.
Music teacher and founder of the Stellenbosch University Jazz Band, Felicia Lesch, plays the piano in the Fismer Hall at the Stellenbosch University Conservatory. She describes having experienced a sentiment of racism during her initial years working in this building. “Every mistake I made was magnified instead of helped,” she recalls. PHOTO: Jade Wainwright
Fighting like mad
When Lesch founded the Stellenbosch University Jazz Band (SUJB), it began as an occasional band; an ensemble that played together informally at a few scattered venues. She kept trying to establish the band as a credit-bearing ensemble, but says she faced numerous issues due to her position in admin and the colour of her skin. *
In 2009, she was selected to conduct the National Schools Jazz Band after several years of accompanying students to the National Youth Jazz Festival in Makhanda. It was there, she explains, that something in her shifted, and she decided to redouble her efforts when she got back to Stellenbosch.
In August of that year, the SUJB had their first official concert. They went on to win the National Ensemble Competition in 2012 and a kykNET Fiësta Award in 2018, among many others.
Lesch herself has been the recipient of two SU Rectors Awards for Excellence in 2010 and 2014. She speaks highly of the support she received from Prof. Winfried Lüdemann, the former chair of the music department, who recommended her for both awards. He was also responsible for motivating and converting her admin position to an academic one.
“I fought like mad,” she says, recalling the stigma faced from classical musicians. “Some musicians openly said here: ‘It’s party music. It’s not serious.’”
The Endler Hall at the Stellenbosch University Conservatory, home to the Stellenbosch University Jazz Band since their first official performance in 2009. Under Felicia Lesch’s leadership, the band built a reputation for dynamic performances, sharing the stage with artists such as Tete Mbambisa, PJ Powers, and Amanda Strydom over the years. PHOTO: Jade Wainwright
An agent for social change
Lesch conducted the SUJB from its founding in 2009 until her retirement in 2023. Although retired, she remains involved in the music department.
Bronwyn Moses, founder of the Stellenbosch Work Centre for Adults with Disabilities (SWC), speaks of her collaboration with the SUJB that began in 2016.
Lesch organised fundraising concerts for the centre, a collaboration that Moses says went beyond funding and “broke down the barriers between SU and the community”. According to Moses, Lesch included and opened up a new world of music to the disabled beneficiaries and made room for their enjoyment.
Moses points out the significance of Lesch breaking down such barriers at the very institution where Apartheid was conceptualised.
“Felicia opened the doors of the Endler Hall to the community,” she says. “For many disadvantaged Stellenbosch communities, she and the band became a symbol of hope.”
Felicia Lesch in her office A117 in the Stellenbosch University Conservatory. She started out in an admin role, a position that converted to an academic one after a motivation from former chair of the music department, Prof. Winfried Lüdemann. A longtime supporter of Lesch’s, he recommended her for both Rector’s Awards she won and attended every concert she conducted. PHOTO: Jade Wainwright
Becoming Mrs. Lesch
When Lesch looks back on all she has accomplished, what she is most proud of is her daughter, Odile Burden, who also works in music education, teaching violin at Somerset College.
The two also collaborate through the Ronnie and Eileen Music Education Project, a Saturday morning initiative Lesch manages in Kuils River that offers free and subsidised music training to children. Lesch started an incubator programme there for four and five-year-olds after receiving a donation of small violins, and Burden now helps run it.
For Burden, music and education have been a constant in her life thanks to her parents. She has an incredible admiration for the sheer scope of people Lesch has guided over the decades. When she bumps into any of them in a professional setting, she sees the reverence and respect they still hold for Lesch in the title they use to refer to her.
“I know that they’ve come through my mom’s hands by the fact that they [still] call her Mrs. Lesch,” she says.
*Stellenbosch University’s Acting Chief People Officer, Prof Nico Koopman, said the University takes all concerns about racism and discrimination seriously, and that it is “unacceptable now and it was unacceptable then” that Felicia Lesch experienced this. He noted that the University has since introduced training, awareness campaigns and confidential reporting channels, and remains committed to building a culture where all staff and students feel respected and valued.