Books about composers are generally located in subject areas such as orchestral or piano music, opera or chamber music, jazz, electro-acoustic music, popular music, folk or traditional music. The focus of this ‘musical life’, Michael Mosoeu Moerane (1904–1980), wrote one short orchestral work but more than 80 short a cappella choral works for amateur choir, of which only about 10 were known during his lifetime. Composers in the past about whom biographies are written tended to have worked mainly in Europe, North, Central or South America, the Russian Federation and Australasia. Moerane, on the other hand, spent his whole life in rural southern Africa: first the British Cape Colony, then the British Protectorate of Basutoland, then apartheid South Africa and post-independence Lesotho, the latter, one of the smallest and poorest countries in the world.

In addition to subject area and geographical area, there is another unconventional factor in this case. This is not a detailed chronological biography, but an overview of Moerane and his music from different perspectives. A birth to death narrative, even if this were desirable, is impossible because insufficient personal and professional documentation survives to support such an account. If there were personal diaries, certificates, memoirs, notes, memos, LPs and books, they have disappeared – only a few photographs and professional letters are to be found. If much more had existed, however, would it have brought us any closer to ‘the truth’ about Moerane? Biography, to Freud, was an exercise in idealisation, which is why he went to some lengths to destroy his professional papers. Peter Gay makes this claim in the Preface to his biography of Freud, where he also quotes Freud's warning: ‘Whoever turns biographer, commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to embellishments, and even to dissembling his own lack of understanding, for biological truth is not to be had, and, even if one had it, one could not use it.’ There are a couple of truths about Moerane in this book that might make some members of the family uncomfortable, but they are very far from amounting to ‘biographical truth’ writ large. As for dissembling my lack of understanding, some readers will no doubt find plenty of this here.