Prior to his DMA, Khumalo studied under Marco Stroppa at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart (HMDKS) and with Jürgen Bräuninger at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
He was the runner-up in the 2006 SAMRO overseas scholarship competition[13] and featured at a number of NewMusicSA's New Music Indabas,[14] the Sterkfontein Composers Meeting,[7] and the Grahamstown National Arts Festival.
[16]George Lewis has also written of the piece,This extraordinarily compact composition performs with aplomb the bridging of the temporal gulf between words, which can generate an entire network of associations in an instant, and music, which despite its reputation for immediacy, takes its time to construct its environment.
While many composers routinely report their interest in "time"–a seeming truism–the implication of Khumalo's composition goes beyond now-conventional disruptions and transgressions of disciplinary boundaries.
Shades of Words transposes disciplinary contentions and struggles for meaning to a higher and more resonant register that asks us how to reconcile two experiences of time: one in remembrance, recollection, and fantasy, where indeterminacy and agency meet, and the other on a (now often virtual) page, operating in the interstices between immediacy and permanence.
[the clever and sensitive ensemble of the young Black African composer Andile Khumalo, concealed [the notion of crying out] consistently under a whispering, constantly tensioned surface.
Music, which does not seek the great gesture (against the expectations of our "post-colonial" consciousness), does not show a black fist, but rather, through very European material and at an instrumental level, asks the elementary question of contemporary South African composers: How can the individual (the viola here) have its way, despite all opposing circumstances in the ensemble?