On 25 August 2016, during the SASRIM annual conference, Prof Martina Viljoen, academic head of the OSM, announced the release of the book publication, Musics of the Free State: Reflections on a Musical Past, Present, and Future, Zagreb: Croatian Musicological Society, 2015, of which she is the editor. The book is the second volume in the international series Musicology without Frontiers (series editor Stanislav Tuksar). Viljoen explained that drawing on a range of disciplinary points of departure, the underlying issue addressed in this publication is how the idea of ‘a musical culture’ could historically have been so taken for granted in this province and so uncritically conceived of as ‘transparent’ and ‘universal’, as well as how it critically approaches representations of music in the Free State that have their roots ‘elsewhere’: in a ‘white’ past; or a utopian future.