Muzkanda was founded in 2021 in Cape Town, by Rina Schutte and Barry Ross. Their first offering was Muzkanda Kids, a uniquely South African early childhood development programme. The first classes for preschool learners took place in early 2022 at The Music HQ in Wynberg, and soon the first Grade 1 classes were being offered to learners at Rustenburg Girls’ Junior School in Rondebosch. Since then, the programme has expanded to include Grades R and 3 as well. A new sheet music reading course for Grade 3 learners, Muzkanda Muzos, has also been recently launched. From the second quarter of 2024, Muzkanda Kids will also launch at Laerskool Jan van Riebeeck in Cape Town, and the Muzkanda team will welcome it’s first staff teachers.
Muzkanda as a whole has expanded to provide a range of tailor-made music education solutions for schools. Muzkanda offers instruments for hire, as well as music staffing solutions for schools. The Muzkanda team can also come to your school for music demonstration concerts, tailored to foundation phase learners.
Meet the Muzkanda team!
Rina Schutte – Director, co-founder and presenter
Rina is the co-founder of Muzkanda, as well as the primary presenter of the Muzkanda Kids course at Rustenburg Girls’ Junior School. She is not only passionate about childhood music education, but is also an accomplished cellist. Rina has played with some of the country’s leading orchestras, toured internationally with for the global production of Matilda: The Musical, and has even appeared on stage with musicians like Michael Bublé, PJ Powers, Prime Circle, Just Jinger, and the Charl du Plessis Trio.
Rina completed her BMus and BMus(Hons) degrees at the University of the Free State, graduating cum laude for both. In 2012, she was awarded the faculty prize for Best BMus Student in Practical Studies. She was a member of the Junior Odeion String Quartet, which won category prizes at ATKV Muzik (2010) and the Stellenbosch Ensemble Competition (2011), as well as being selected to take part in the Internationale Stichting Masterclasses in Apeldoorn, Netherlands. While still a student, she was an active ad hoc member of the professional Free State Symphony Orchestra.
Between 2014 and 2017, Rina held a teaching post at the Hugo Lambrechts Music Centre in Parow, Cape Town. During her tenure at the Centre, she was awarded four UNISA Certificates for Outstanding Teaching, and many of her students were recipients of the Hennie Joubert merit prizes for their UNISA examination results. Rina also became an active ad hoc member of the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra (2015-2017). Between 2021 and 2023, she conducted the Junior String Ensemble that formed a core part of the Orchestra’s youth programme.
In 2018, Rina was offered a chance to play for the international touring production of Matilda: The Musical (GWB Productions, London; in association with The Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon). This resulted in performances not only in South Africa, but also in Singapore, China, and the Philippines. After the suspension of performances during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rina returned to Cape Town and entered the private teaching arena via her new business, 90 Notes Music Studio.
Since then, Rina’s students have competed in numerous national music competitions, including the Hubert van der Spuy National Competition, the Pieter Kooij Music Competition, and the National Youth Music Competition; many of her students were awarded prizes in those events. Her students have also won numerous awards and medals at Eisteddfods and other local music competitions. She has been invited to present workshops at the South African String Convention in 2021, 2022 and 2023; in the latter year, she was invited to present masterclasses to young string ensembles in Gqeberha.
In addition to running the Muzkanda Kids course at Rustenburg Girls’ Junior School, she is one of the most sought-after children’s cello teachers in Cape Town. In 2023, the cello ensemble she coaches at Rustenburg won the category prize for children 13 years and younger at the SASMT National Ensemble Competition in Pretoria. Rina has also continued to perform for many other musical productions, including The Sound of Music and The Last Five Years. She also regularly performs with PJ Powers and the Soweto Gospel Choir.
Rina’s passionate interest in childhood music education led her to co-found Muzkanda. And she doesn’t only share course design and songwriting responsibilities – she even presents the course to over 70 learners at Rustenburg Girls’ Junior School!
Dr Barry Ross – Managing director, co-founder and content designer
Barry is a co-founder of Muzkanda, helps out with the course content and songwriting for Muzkanda Kids, and runs the business administration side of the company. After leaving academia at the end of 2019, Barry discovered an interest in business, and after co-founding Muzkanda, discovered a hidden talent for writing music and related media for children.
A specialist in music cognition, he completed his PhD at the Centre for Music and Science at the University of Cambridge, working on the neural relationship between music and the syntax of language under the supervision of Prof. Ian Cross. He also holds an MMus in Musicology from Stellenbosch University, where his Masters thesis on musical meaning and it’s relationship with language, supervised by Prof. Winfried Lüdemann (music) and Prof. J. P. Smit (philosophy), was awarded a Rector’s Medal in 2011. He also completed a BMus(Hons) degree, writing on the links between the evolutionary histories of music and language.
Between 2014 and 2016, Barry was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the South African College of Music (SACM) at the University of Cape Town. There, he conducted research into pitch cognition in east African traditional music, as well as assisting in NRF-funded electro-encephalography (EEG) research into music-invoked emotional responses, with Prof. Anri Herbst. From 2017 to the end of 2019, he was a full-time lecturer at the Music Department at the University of Stellenbosch. Barry has lectured extensively on the art music of the 20th century, as well as musical Classicism and Romanticism, rock and popular music, the origins of music, music cognition, music theory, and music education. He has also lectured final year analytic philosophy at the Stellenbosch Philosophy Department. He has published research spanning the origins of human musicality to antiquarian sheet music collections, pitch perception, and the perception and cognitive modelling of pitch in east African traditional music. Barry has also written concert notes for over 300 concerts and twenty CDs, as well as a small mountain of press releases and other PR for the music industry.
In 2019, he founded Firefinch Music as a specialist music research firm, to create novel monetisation ideas for both the classical and commercial music industries in Africa. Firefinch maintains data on digital consumption of popular music in South Africa, and for a while released public charts of streamed music in South Africa. Firefinch has also conducted research work for music copyright claims, and produced specialist content for the music industry. Firefinch’s research services were utilised in the creation of the Muzkanda Kids programme in late 2020.
When not working on Muzkanda projects, Barry is an enthusiastic yachtsman.
Mia-Lana Hough – Presenter
Mia-Lana is the newest member of the Muzkanda family, and spearheads the teaching programme at Laerskool Jan van Riebeeck. She is a third-year Bachelor of Music student at the South African College of Music (SACM) at the University of Cape Town. Her main instrument is singing, which she has been studying formally for ten years. Mia-Lana has always been surrounded by music through her family, choir singing, dancing and playing instruments, and has found that music has added much richness to her life. She is therefore passionate about sharing music with everyone, whether through performance or teaching. In her free time, she teaches singing and piano lessons. Before joining the Muzkanda team, she had already had experience teaching many music appreciation classes for children from the ages of 1-4. Mia-Lana loves working with children and seeing the way they experience and interact with music.
