sounds without names: michael blake’s COMPLETE WORKS FOR SOLO PIANO 1994-2004
MICHAEL BLAKE
COMPLETE WORKS FOR SOLO PIANO 1994-2004
MBED 001
“If you start talking about music you start lying.”
Johnny Mbizo Dyani
“The critics, they are a plague I have never understood. If I were a great surgeon, and some fellow who had never held a scalpel in his hand, who was not a doctor, and who had never so much as put a splint on a cat’s paw, tried to point out where I had gone wrong in my operation, what would people think? It is the same with painting. What is amazing is that people do not realize it is the same, and although they would laugh at the pretensions of the man who criticizes the surgeon, they listen with nauseating respect to the charlatans who comment on art. There might be some excuse for listening to the opinions of a critic who once painted, even if only mediocre works. But that is just as absurd; because what could be reasonable about a mediocre painter giving advice to a good one?”
Ernesto Sabato
The Tunnel
As an example of what not to write about Michael Blake’s Complete Works For Solo Piano one could perform a taxonomy of useless gestures incorporating biographical details; anecdotes from the composer’s youth; examples of illustrious figures whom the composer studied with (particularly if dead but still famous); list the schools of music that the composer blundered through (Wits, Goldsmiths & Rhodes in this instance); genres that the composer invented but subsequently discarded; catalogue all the legendary virtuosos that the composer had a ‘special’ relationship with and uniquely composed for; etc.
Furthermore one could specifically not write about the specialist techniques used by the composer and even more pertinently not write about the actual sound of the music, nor indeed about the emotional effect that listening to the music might have on one.
Such a taxonomy might infer that all writing about art/music is useless and ultimately has no value beyond its apodictic existence as writing per se. Such a seemingly nihilistic approach to the Complete Works For Solo Piano might forego any of the above mentioned standard practices in favour of an heuristic foregrounding of composition titles, listed in alphabetical rather than chronological order, thereby avoiding the inane and commonplace litany of tired adjectives (‘smoky’, ‘bluesy’, ‘jazzy’, ‘neo-something’, ‘post-something else’).
Ergo:
BWV Fragments
French Suite
Oh Clare
Nightsongs
Remembering Stravinsky
Their Souls Go Waltzing On
Three Toys
Ways To Put In The Salt
An immediate consternation arises given that one of Blake’s compositions is entitled 38a Hill Street Blues and not Thirty Eight ay Hill Street Blues. Encountering this taxonomic problem – where exactly to place this music, where does it fit – one finds, paradoxically, that no matter how one tries not to write about Michael Blake’s Complete Works For Solo Piano one repeatedly encounters the same problem: the music does not lend itself to the kind of lazy compartmentalizing that both so-called critics and the marketplace presume as an a priori requisite for the music to be assimilated and valorized within the mechanism of the culture industry. Perhaps it is largely for this reason that Michael Blake’s name is not household. He is an outsider’s outsider so far removed from the comfort zones of the classic FM listener that he may as well not exist.
Furthermore, adding salt to the hermeneutic wound, Blake’s precise quality of outside is neither atonal, nor serial, neither minimal nor screechingly expressionistic. In fact these Works For Solo Piano are achingly beautiful compositions that reveal a deeply romantic sensibility always pulsing under the self-consciously complex curtain of textural play on the surface of the music.
Blake’s music doesn’t announce its radicality with big, bold gestures; there are no fireworks lighting the way. His signature is so coded, hidden and slyly patterned, it often takes one by surprise, for instance in Three Toys No.2, a miniature that ends resolutely, twice. The first ending is perfect, as in a short story by Poe. The second ending, an oblique coda to the previous ending, provides the kind of maddeningly ironic self-reflexivity we recognize in the aphorisms of Pessoa. What is being obyed here is an internal alchemy, and not merely the “rules” of composition.
But Blake doesn’t even stick to his own rules, doesn’t abide by his own rhetoric, he’s not a domesticated composer. One reason for this might be that he’s escaped the nightmare of being a commodity, of his music being commodified, for an unusually long time. This first cd has come very late in his career so in a way he’s still beginning, still allowing himself the great luxury of real experimentation. Michael Blake hasn’t had the opportunity to become ossified into a repetitive cliche of himself – for this reason he is South Africa’s most unknown famous contemporary composer.
Most importantly, Michael Blake understands silence from the inside. This is particularly relevant when trying to understand why the repetitions in his music work so wondrously. It’s because they’re not repetitions – they are re-evaluations of the silences that frame the notes. And it is precisely this heightened awareness of the urgency and drama of framing that makes Michael Blake’s music so pertinent to visual artists, to those who paint.
When one stops writing about music one stops lying. The beautiful truth of the Complete Works for Solo Piano can only be heard.
Aryan Kaganof
this article was first published in art south africa vol 07 issue 03 summer 2009
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