kagablog

Michael Blake

Two circumstances led to the composition of my first piano sonata. The more recent one was a request from Daan Vandewalle (who I first met four years ago in Bratislava) to compose a virtuoso piano sonata for him - about 15 minutes duration. He had given me his remarkable CD recording of the Ives Concord Sonata and so I needed little convincing; I knew at once that this would be my opportunity finally to pay homage to the Ives, a piece I first got to know more than thirty years ago.

The other circumstance went back further, to a lecture-recital I gave in Buenos Aires in 2001 (around 9/11). I wanted to present a programme of South African piano music spanning both the length of the country and the depth of the 20th century, but inevitably ran into problems seeking out repertoire by so-called black composers. That’s when I hit on the idea of making some transcriptions of choral pieces for piano solo, specifically pieces by Michael Moerane (“Ruri”) and Reuben Caluza (“Umantindane”).

I always intended to make further transcriptions, and I remembered this when I was thinking about writing a piano sonata for Daan Vandewalle. Eventually I decided on a ‘double’ homage (two for the price of one): pianistically to the Concord, materially to the choral composers, and conceptually to both. I consider the Ives work to be one of the pillars, if not the pillar, of the 20th century piano repertoire. It continues to inspire composers, challenge performers and affect listeners.

I tried to forge a parallel between the monumentalism of the Ives work and the enormous breadth of the so-called African choral tradition and the composers themselves, especially those composers who lived and worked in the earlier 20th century. These were the pillars of the Southern African choral tradition, our Palestrinas, Lassos, Tallis’s and Byrds.

Like Ives I wanted to have a four-movement structure, but ended up with three: two substantial outer movements, and a very short central movement, all quite unrelenting. The first movement pays homage to Michael Moerane and quotes his song Ruri (“Truly”) somewhat obliquely, the second to Reuben Caluza, quoting distorted fragments of his ragtime song Umantindane (“Tokoloshe”), while the third is a homage – in his centenary year - to Joshua Mohapeloa and takes his song Senqu (“Orange River “) as a theme for variation.

The first movement is permeated throughout by variants of the figure – a pair of chords - with which it opens, rhythmically varied and extended over the course of the movement, but with the pitches more or less unchanged. This material is intercut with passages of high or low bell sounds, a lyrical melody with a very jittery accompaniment, and so on. Both Moerane’s Ruri and fragments of Ives’s Concord Sonata are quoted and/or paraphrased.

The second movement takes two elements from Ives’s Concord - extensive use of clusters and the quasi-‘deconstruction’ of ragtime - and applies these to Caluza’s piece. The reminiscence of Nancarrow’s set of so-called ‘boogie-woogie’ etudes for player piano (No 3) is also intentional, and the quotation here even extends to the first piece I wrote for Daan Vandewalle in 2004. Their souls go waltzing on paid homage to both Ives (“Three Page Sonata”) and Schoenberg (“Five Piano Pieces Op 23”), a specific request from the 2004 edition of ‘Evenings of New Music’ in Bratislava -involving some 40 composers.

As far as we know Caluza and Ives never met, and I don’t know if Caluza ever heard anything by Ives while he was studying in America at Hampton University, but I like to think of this movement as something of an imaginary exchange (or perhaps a collision) between the two men.

The third movement follows a very particular scenario, the result of two important circumstances. The first was becoming acquainted with Senqu, a piece of Mohapeloa’s that I did not know. Particularly unusual was the rarely used 9/8 metre – rarely used in Southern African choral music that is. The second was a visit to his sparsely furnished, and sadly crumbling, former home in Morija. One of the few remaining items on his bookshelf was a vocal score of Lucia di Lammermoor. With Kagelian fervour I pressed these circumstances into service and contemplated the possibility that Mohapeloa might have attended opera performances during his period of study with Percival Kirby in Johannesburg during the late 1930s and early 1940s, with the possible result that he may well have become the great Southern African opera composer we have never had.

Senqu and other choral compositions by Mohapeloa intimate the possibilities of an operatic language and so in my third movement I used fragments of Senqu as scene-setting, and then having presented the theme, I composed an operatic fantasy on that theme. I worked backwards from the 21st to the 19th century, culminating in a paraphrase on Liszt’s Reminiscences of Lucia di Lammermoor, with the accompaniment closely modelled on Liszt’s.

At two structural points in the music I used, as connective tissue, two further pieces of material - both with riverine connections: Ives’s setting of At the River and Rzewski’s Ives-inspired Down by the Riverside (one of his “Four North American Ballads”) based on the popular song of the same name. As a final tour-de-force I combined the theme of Senqu with the melody of At the River in something of a Lisztian apotheosis, and left Liszt (the world of the late piano pieces now) and Busoni (his “Sonatina No 6: Fantasy on Carmen”) to pose more questions – unanswered - in the coda.

In 2009 I returned to the idea of a four-movement structure. There seemed to be a need for a slow, more reflective movement after the crazy second and before the wild fourth.
(To be continued…)

Originally given as part of a joint colloquium with Christine Lucia at University of KwaZulu-Natal Durban in August 2008.

Fifty or more singers move around freely and unhurriedly in a
large, fairly resonant space.
Each performer sings her/his all-time favourite song as loudly and
lustily as possible, in her/his own independent tempo.
A conductor may control dynamics, texture and other parameters,
even introducing silences into the work, but should never beat
time.
Roving microphones may be introduced to point up individual
voices or groups of voices.
Rules worked out during rehearsals may be applied to govern all
aspects of the work; chance procedures may be used to determine
their application.
The piece may last as long as desired.
The first performance took place during a music theatre summer
school in Chichester, Sussex in August 1994, under the direction of
the composer.
MB
Chichester, August 1994

take a bow… and shove it up your arse! eish. i guess sometimes the line of defence against pedants is to be more anal than them… i know, i use it too. unfortunately when one does that one runs the risk of sounding like a bit like a poephol too.

e.g.: very few people in kzn speak isixhosa. if nishlyn ramanna, as a durbanite, were familiar with any so-called “indigenous south african language” other than his own, it would be more likely to be isizulu - which actually *was* taught to me in a so-called “white” government school in eighties kzn. so, in fairness, i have to observe that you are making the same kind of uninterrogated statements that you lambast ramanna for, back at him.

funny you remark about the absence of ululation: trevor steele-taylor repeatedly held me back from ululating during the last couple of pieces in the first half. in particular, i felt that the one with sazi dlamini that you mention compelled a response, and i felt uncomfortable keeping quiet! trevor said it was an inappropriate context and i supposed he was right, given that he’s a lot more experienced in attending these sorts of erudite event than me, so i kept schtumm. in fact, i suppose i asked him whether he thought i would be out of turn because i sensed it wasn’t entirely appropriate too. it’s ironic given that it was durban, supposedly the biggest, most vibrant, cosmopolitan city at the heart of the zulu kingdom!

the audience response certainly was subdued; even without other bow project performances to compare it to i noticed this, but i don’t believe the blame for this should fall squarely on the audience (and there were plenty of us under 50 - definitely journalistic license you are using here!).

my reserve was largely because michael blake seemed very uptight that night, getting up to fiddle with stuff between pieces (pardon the highly inappropriate PUN). it was also clear that there was a recording taking place - you were sticking up in the midst of us with a camera skimming our heads. people who are sensitive to this sort of thing - and many of the people in the very small audience seemed to me to be connected to the music department, so might well be - often hlonipha the camera by remaining as unobtrusive as possible so as not to ruin the quality of the recording. they don’t do this to the same extent if it’s purely an audio recording because they can’t SEE it happening as obviously… remember that hilariously consumptive cougher on that otherwise exquisite sviatoslav richter recording of lizst’s transcendental etudes from the 50s?

you might argue that in other auditoria the audience paid the camera no mind, BUT i would respond that the venue in durban happened to be howard college, the university’s law building. it has always felt stuffy to me. people are terribly polite in there. i used to watch lunchtime concerts there on mondays while at UND at the end of the 90s, and even those, which were very informal, felt contained and academic. this is mainly because, i think, the propriety of the building rubs off. seriously. i used to go and read in the Howard College law library when i wanted peace and quiet, purely because students respected the rule of silence there more politely than they did in the main campus library.

one last comment: i must say i did feel the separation between mantombi matotiyana and the nightingale quartet keenly too. it did feel awkward seeing the quartet and mantombi performing on the same stage all night, yet at all times separate from each other. though i didn’t read anything racist into it at all (i read it more with a kind of call-and-response idiom myself), i would personally have loved to hear them play something all together to dissolve that sense of compartmentalisation - in fact i was almost expecting that resolution. it could have been a fascinating experiment, and it would have smashed any possibility of dorks like ramanna reading apartheid into the evening.

however, because of the way the evening was structured, without the quartet and mantombi ever playing together, i think it is understandable that mantombi could have come across as having been put there to perform the “reference pieces” for each subsequent nightingale quartet version. this would make her performance read as curiously museumised in some way: in a sense as the “traditional” rendition faithful to “the great nofinishi dywili”’s original (which, of course, is an impossible notion, and one which would render mantombi’s iteration subservient to nofinishi’s), provided as an antecedent or an ahistorical backdrop for the bow project compositions. the dialogical aspect might have been better highlighted by a confluent performance of everyone on stage so that at some point they inhabited the same space and time, the *NOW*, more explicitly.

ok, enough dissent. i just feel that your response was not measured enough to RE-BUTT that truly shitty review effectively.

cherry bomb

i feel compelled to respond to dr. nishlyn ramanna’s review in the sunday tribune of august 2 2009 of the bow project concert that took place in the Howard College Theatre on friday, july 24. This concert has already been reviewed on the kagablog by helgé janssen, and i would urge all readers looking for a more balanced account of the event to click this link.

Mr Ramanna starts getting it all wrong in the second paragraph of his review when he writes of composers “transcribing an uhadi bow song”. “Uhadi” is the isiXhosa word for a bow with a calabash and hence the sentence should read “transcribing an uhadi song”. dr Ramanna clearly hasn’t done his homework, he is not au fait with the meaning and correct usage of the word that is central to an understanding of this project. This sloppy, ungrammatical use of words extends, unfortunately, to the thrust of his argument as well.

In the third paragraph he once again writes about “the uhadi bow songs of the great Nofinishi Dywili”, which is the equivalent of writing “the calabash bow bow songs”. I make this point again, not to be pedantic, but to be explicit. If one is to make the kind of accusations that dr Ramanna does in his review, then one needs to build one’s house on solid foundations. One needs to know what one is talking about, and to talk about it in a manner that is above suspicion. One suspects however, that Mr. Ramanna is not at home in uhadi territory, that he has not conducted an etymological research into the word “uhadi”, that he does not know that the word refers to the opening, the hole in the calabash, through which the musical notes resonate. This hole is a form of nothing and it is nothingness to which the word “uhadi” is related.

dr Ramanna’s twice repeated grammatically incorrect use of the tautology “uhadi bow” betrays his lack of comprehension of the meaning of the isiXhosa word “uhadi”. One can’t blame him for this, after all he is “old enough to remember the South Africa of segregated schools, beaches and living areas” as he so poignantly puts it. It is highly unlikely that he would have learnt much isiXhosa at school and the blame for that we can lay squarely on the apartheid system of segregation, it certainly isn’t dr. Ramanna’s fault that he does not understand isiXhosa.

But as a writer of a review that is published in a newspaper, even a provincial one like the Sunday Tribune, dr Ramanna has a duty to his readers - not to mention to the artists he is reviewing - to do his homework. When he writes about feeling uncomfortable “with the separateness of uhadi stage left, and super-blonde string quartet stage right” this reader is baffled. Where was Mantombi Matotiyana supposed to sit? In the midst of the Nightingale Quartet? On their laps? dr. Ramanna doesn’t leave us with merely a sense of his uncomfortableness however, but he goes on to add that he couldn’t help finding this seating arrangement “a tad Bantustan-ish.”

Wow.

Here is a leap that one wouldn’t expect. It’s an intellectually lazy turn but one that is grossly irresponsible and potentially very damaging. One that needs to be rigorously interrogated.

I happened to tour with the Bow Project filming a documentary about this extraordinary musical event. I was present when Michael Blake made the decision to place the Nightingale String Quartet right of centre stage in order to place Mantombi Matotiyana equally in the spotlight, and, on a deeper metaphorical level, in order to showcase two distinct musical traditions equally. Blake’s vision of the uhadi tradition as an art music equal to the western composition tradition is controversial and groundbreaking. He has taken the uhadi out of the realm of ethnomusicology and foregrounded its use as a compositional tool. The placement on the stage serves to realise this radical foregrounding, in itself a break with the “Bantustan tradition” of separate development which would place the String Quartet representing Western Art music centre stage and allow the uhadi player only a marginal presence in the context of anthropology rather than music as such.

In fact the real “Bantustanish” experience of the evening was in the audience, over 95% so-called white (with the exception of course of Mr. Ramanna himself) and, with the exception of Jurgen Brauninger’s delightful daughter, hardly a person under the age of 50. Nowhere else during the tour was the reception of the Bow Project so muted, so stiff, so utterly colonial. I agree with Mr. Ramanna that the performance in the Howard College Theatre tended towards the limp. I don’t believe however, that this was because of any defect in the compositions, but rather due to the atmosphere generated by the Durban audience. Ms Matotiyana’s exuberant ululations were greeted with ululatory responses in Tshwane and Jozi and even in Bloemfontein (!). Unfortunately such enthusiasm was not forthcoming from the reserved Durbanites who hardly even responded to Sazi Dlamini’s momentous performance of his and Jurgen Brauninger’s composition Jiwé. That this performance did not blow dr. Ramanna’s socks off I can only attribute to the fact that his shoes must be laced too tightly.

Finally, in his review of the Bow Project, dr. Ramanna makes the perplexing error of comparing a live performance to a documentary film. As the Dutch say this is like comparing apples to pears and is not very useful at all. He ends with what I presume to be a nod towards my beloved Rilke’s advice to the young poet not to write unless the writing is informed by “a deep, unshakeable necessity.” It would not be too uncharitable of me to suggest that dr. Ramanna heed his own advice in future.

Aryan Kaganof
24/09/09

As white composers of so-called art music in South Africa, we start from a very level playing field - a position of total irrelevance. We are a minority, we are marginal, we write music that few people care about or listen to. If we are able to make a point at all, we can probably consider ourselves successful. And if we work in an intuitive way (Adorno’s ‘musique informelle’), then we’re probably a minority within the minority.

While many so-called successful composers continue to re-cycle the traditional forms (sonatas, rondos, minuets, etc) of so-called Western art music – admirable as an environmentally sound pursuit, tedious as an artistic pursuit – I have always found it more productive to lean against those structures rather than (re-)inhabiting them. By virtue of that strategy my collaborators choose themselves, and then we both lean…

MB
HB, 17/9/09

michael blake will be appearing at stellenbosch university on 21 september at a colloquium hosted by stephanus muller presenting collaborative works made with aryan kaganof

Davide and Daniele Trivella
Cape Classic
Vergelegen
South Africa
February 2006

the reverie review text is by mick raubenheimer

Etymology and application of the term, Architecture

The word “architecture” comes from the Latin, “architectura” and ultimately from Greek, “arkitekton”, αρχιτεκτων, an architect, or more precisely “master builder”, from the combination of αρχι a “chief” or “leader” and τεκτων, a “builder” or “carpenter.

While the primary application of the word “architecture” pertains to the built environment, by extension, the term has come to denote the art and discipline of creating an actual, or inferring an implied or apparent plan of any complex object or system. The term can be used to connote the implied architecture of abstract things such as music or mathematics, the apparent architecture of natural things, such as geological formations or the structure of biological cells, or explicitly planned architectures of human-made things such as software, computers, enterprises, and databases, in addition to buildings. In every usage, an architecture may be seen as a subjective mapping from a human perspective (that of the user in the case of abstract or physical artifacts) to the elements or component of some kind of structure or system, which preserves the relationships among the elements or components.

Pilgrim Church, 12 Flinders Street
Monday August 17th 2009

The Firm, run by those two hard working composers, Raymond Chapman Smith and Quentin Grant, presented the third of the six concerts for this year. This superb concert featured the highly acclaimed London based Australian pianist Antony Gray, who has recorded vast quantities of music for the ABC.

The concert opened with Barcarole and Sleepers Wake, two delicate pieces by Andrew Schultz derived from his cantata, Journey to Horseshoe Bend. The first movement was open and light in texture, yet featured heavily, internally dampened low bass notes, giving an unusual percussive pedal note effect below the gentle melodic line.

Raymond Chapman Smith’s Nach der Natur (After Nature), a three movement piece inspired by the poem by W. G. Sebald, has flowing, lyrical melodic lines running through it over rich harmonies. This is a fine piece of writing with so much inventiveness contained in a relatively short work and Gray clearly relished the chance to play it.

A Fractured Landscape (In Memoriam Edward Said) by South African Michael Blake, influenced by Brahms, was written especially for Gray’s 2009 Australian performances. This was a complete contrast to the first two pieces, with intense chords and sudden rhythmic and dynamic changes. Where the first two works allowed us to see Gray’s sensitive and thoughtful approach to his playing, this was a showcase for his virtuosity.

Four Inventions by Andrew Schultz is music taken from his opera A Children’s Bach and the four contrasting sections gave an opportunity for Gray to exhibit more of his technical skill and considered interpretation.

The second half of the concert began with the Sonata No, 1 in F Major by Malcolm Williamson, Gray lamenting the fact that so few composers now write piano sonatas, although he pointed out that two of the works in the first half could be considered as sonatas, even though not specifically labelled as such. There was plenty of fire and passion in this piece.

The Sonatina by Peter Sculthorpe, by contrast, opens with sparse writing moving to alternating fast and slow passages with varying harmonic density, cramming numerous ideas into a surprisingly brief piece of music.

Quentin Grant’s Angels was inspired by Duino Elegies, written by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was also represented in the last concert. This is a highly imaginative work with a wealth of variation. Appropriately, this piece had a wonderfully meditative quality and Gray did it full justice with a reverent and subtle interpretation.

Malcolm Williamson’s frenetic Toccata Americana closed the concert. This was the first performance of this very brief, unfinished work, discovered amongst his ex-wife’s papers. Gray’s humorous introduction, with tongue in cheek reference to the works’ subtitle, Daniel Hurrying to the Lion’s Den, set the scene for this fast and furious piece that served almost as an encore.

Antony Gray combines enormous technique, sensitivity, deep understanding of the music and a sense of humour. These attributes made this a memorable and most enjoyable concert. Visit the ABC shop soon for recordings by this fine performer.

There are another three concerts in this year’s series, the next being tenor, Robert Macfarlane, with pianist, Leigh Harrold, on Monday 28th September. The concert on Monday 2nd November features pianist Kristian Chong, and then The Langbein String Quartet will play at the final concert on Monday 30th November. All concerts are at 8PM in Pilgrim Church. Don’t miss them.

http://www.glamadelaide.com/whatshot/Reviews/Latest_Reviews.html

Michael Blake

Commissioned by CoMA UK
(Contemporary Music-Making for Amateurs)
with funds from the Performing Rights Society Foundation,
the Arts Council England, London
and subscribers to CoMA’s Commissioning Scheme
www.coma.org

CoMA Artistic Director 2007/8: Darragh Morgan

First performance: 21 June 2009; Corsham Festival;
CoMA London, Gregory Rose (conductor)

Duration: c. 5 1/2 min

Note by the composer

A personal favourite, Percy Grainger is certainly one of the most colourful figures in early 20th century music. He comments on Colonial Song, one of his most beautiful pieces, thus: “No traditional tunes of any kind are made use of in this piece, in which I have wished to express my personal feelings about my own country (Australia) and people, and also to voice a certain kind of emotion that seems to me not untypical of native-born Colonials in general.” When Darragh Morgan asked me to write an ‘African’ piece for CoMA, I reflected on the many individual compositions that made up my African Journal (1976-2002) and distilled my ideas in Postcolonial Song, appropriate perhaps to the postcolony in which South Africans now live. I have not quoted any specific traditional African musics, though I have drawn on some of my own earlier ‘African’ pieces which reimagine a number of Sub-Saharan musical traditions. Grainger of course reinvented the notion of ‘elastic’ or ‘flexible’ scoring in the 20th century, which is central to this and the many other pieces written for CoMA, and his biographer John Bird’s vivid description of his adventures in South Africa on a concert tour in the early years of the 20th century provides another serendipitous link in this chain of happy compositional inspirations. Postcolonial Song is dedicated to Barry Peter Ould - friend, Graingerphile and dedicated music publisher.

MB
June 2008

« Sept jours chez les Silbersteins & C’est quoi l’opéra ? » est un geste amical pour honorer le dixième anniversaire de mariage de Christine Lucia et de Michael Blake. La caméra de Kaganof les observe du même angle en train de chanter ensemble une partition d’opéra en train de se faire. Les couleurs changent tandis que la caméra reste plus ou moins sur le même endroit. Un cri vient couvrir le deuxième générique « C’est quoi l’opéra ? ». Les visages sereins du couple de musiciens sont la marque d’une création classique, moderne et calme mais, comme ce cri aimerait nous le suggérer, avec des originalités intérieures.

dionysos andronis

The death in 2003 of the philosopher and musician Edward Said, and the posthumous publication of his book On Late Style, led me to consider afresh the notion of so-called late style in music. I looked particularly at piano music - late Beethoven, late Schubert, late Liszt and late Brahms - and given Tony Gray’s special affinity with Brahms’ four late sets of Klavierstücke, I set about composing (what might be) the first of a series of reflective essays for the same medium.

Said talks too about ‘lateness’ in the writings of Adorno, who – on the subject of late Beethoven – wrote: “his late works constitute a form of exile…the late works are relegated to the outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document…the power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself…objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which – alone – it glows into life. He does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.” (Adorno Essays on Music)

I composed A Fractured Landscape (in memoriam Edward Said) at Tony Gray’s request for his concerts in Australia in August 2009. I started the piece in Hout Bay in June, wrote a good deal of it in London at Tony’s piano, and finished it on tour in my hotel room in Pretoria on 21 July. It received its first performance in Adelaide on 17 August 2009.

Michael Blake

How glad I was to have been privileged to witness this event even though circumstance conspired against me to get there on time!! In spite of the fact that the programme was curtailed (poor audience response/turnout?) it was never-the-less an inspiring evening.

Mantombi Matotiyana now about 70 years old, is one of two last surviving bow players (the other being Madonsini) in South Africa. Mantombi started playing the bow when she was four years old and the tradition appears to have died out due to lack of interest from the youth. The extraordinary lightness of her instrument was the first contrasting feature of this project that hit this viewer/listener like a ton of bricks! It is so luminous and airy, so exceptional in tone and resonance, and so much of the earth, the playing of it so organic and effortless, that one immediately feels weightless. Mantombi’s voice is so perfectly pitched, the intonation clear and ‘perceptive’, the cadence so well honed and deceptively simple, the synergy between the repetitive sound and voice so much in intricate harmony and toned nuance. Aurally healing: penetrating pores, a balm for the skin, a tonic for the soul.

While soaring to extraordinary heights, she sinks deep deep into the earth.

As above, so below.

It was fascinating then, to experience what for me was ultimately a striking spiritual distinction, laterally, across a cultural spectrum: a juxtaposition of aligned worlds continents apart yet demonstrating the equality and quality of value of culture and cultures that span this spectrum.

The undoubted expertise and virtuosity of the Nightingale String Quartet (Denmark) aside, I was struck and mesmerised by the comparative physical harshness, tautness and ‘bovver bootness’ of the violins, the viola and the cello. The complexity and intricateness of the basic construction of these instruments which I had previously seen as ‘refined’ suddenly took on a new dynamic compared to the uhadi bow. The angles of attack of the performers bows towards their stringed instruments and possible differences of resonance that each individual player manifested took on a new dimension. At some point in one of the final pieces of the evening (Blakes String Quartet No. 3 (Nofinishi) 2009) it suddenly felt as if I was listening simultaneously to each musician separately! It was an astonishing experience and I wondered if this was somehow intricately wound round, into and from the presence of Mantombi - she certainly responded with her arms and body! Four individuals bound together by an entangled weaving of musical notes contributing along a time-stream of precision and fluidity. And this was where the second ‘magic’ of the evening took on a zest all of its own!

As next to, so along.

And I think I suddenly understood the Bow Project!

(The taxis in Durban are shocking and with 2010 just around the corner I foresee a huge transport problem emerging. I eventually had to walk.)

light
helge
www.helge.co.za

NAUDé VAN DER MERWE
20/07/2009

Klassieke musiek

Mantombi Matotiyana (uhadi) en die Nightin­gale-strykkwartet.

Nederburg-herehuis, die Paarl

Wat het ’n uhadi-boog, tradisionele Xhosa-musiek, ’n Deense kwartet, ’n spul elektroniese ­toerusting, kontemporêre ­komponiste en die Nederburg-herehuis met mekaar gemeen?

Wel, al hierdie komponente is met mekaar vermeng om die ­African Bow Project se eerste konsert vir 2009 te produseer.

Die projek is in 2002 deur die komponis Michael Blake begin, en omskep tradisionele boog­musiek – oorspronklik gesing en opgeneem deur een van ons land se bekendste boogspelers, Nofini­shi Dywili – tot kuns­musiek vir ’n strykkwartet. Tot 20 Suid-Afrikaanse komponiste het by die projek betrokke ­geraak.

In die konsert het Mantombi Matotiyana elke keer die ­oorspronklike Xhosa-liedere op die uhadi-boog gespeel en gesing voordat die hedendaagse werke, waar komponiste tradisionele Xhosa-musiek as vertrekpunt gebruik, uitgevoer is.

Dis ’n vreemde ervaring om die twee wêrelde op een verhoog te sien.

Die baie bekwame ­Deense Nightingale-stryk­kwartet, hoewel soms ’n bietjie ongeïnspireerd, se voorkoms is stereo­tipies Westers, terwyl ­Matotiyana se voorkoms jou na Afrika verplaas. Sodra sy klaar haar tradisionele Afrika-musiek gespeel het en die kwartet begin speel, word jy teruggedwing in die wêreld van kunsmusiek waar ontledings en analises deel is van die luisterproses.

Die jukstaposisie van die twee musiekwêrelde is ooglopend, maar ’n mens wonder of die ­eindproduk veronderstel is om iets meer te wees as net ’n polarisering van tradisionele Xhosa-musiek en uiters gesofistikeerde kunsmusiek.

Die ontwikkeling van die ­musiek, van die tradisionele ­arena met ’n boog wat twee note speel na die konsertsaal, voel nie altyd organies nie en soms ­geforseerd. Maar miskien is dit wat die komponiste verlang?

Dit is moeilik om spesifieke komponiste in hierdie beperkte spasie uit te sonder, want elkeen het iets anders met die ­oorspronklike musiek probeer doen.

In Paul Hanmer se Ntwazana kry ’n mens ’n meer informele, “maklik om na te luister”-gevoel en Metteo Fargion se Stryk­kwartet no. 4 het sterk duidelike Afrika-ritmes gebruik.

Dit was ook die première van Theo Herbst se Umhala Wasetywaleni (Wat Maak Jy?) vir strykkwartet en klankopname, ’n werk wat musiekgrense uitdaag.

Dit is afgesluit met nog ’n ­première: Michael Blake se Strykkwartet no. 3 (Nofinishi), ’n kort en stimulerende slot vir ’n interessante, uitdagende ­musikale ervaring.

this review first appeared on dieburger.com