kagablog

There is a Buddhist ideal of writing all the worlds stories on a bean.

The piano is such a bean- what Michael Blake has written on it are not just his stories but a considerable number of its own.

The piano lives between a scientific and an economic boundary It has the same uniformity, comprehensiveness and principled purity that made the nineteenth century able to populate the periodic table. The piano is a conveyance, exactly like photography; both advanced by increased accuracy, range, sensitivity and fidelity until the burgeoning figures of the symphony orchestra appeared in the one and the spectacle of the metropolis in the other.

The nineteenth century sustained writing as an industry Friedrich Kittler has framed its ideal as an Aufschreibesysteme. The piano was the hardware to musics torrent of printed software that rivaled Goethe Hegel, Balzac, Marx, Ruskin, Tolstoy and Darwin in prolixity

Three events mark the pianos contemporeniety–or separate us from its being in the nineteenth century

Arnold Schonberg interrupted its communion with the symphony orchestra by writing piano pieces where pitch is shrunk to a partitioning device. This lets asymmetries of tessitura, attack, phrase and rhythm assume its role. The pianos encompassing neutrality becomes a violent laboratory of the exception. Schonberg painstakingly mapped these singular constructions onto ensembles of no fixed genre. In Pierrot Lunaire it is the piano which is being dramatically, unsuccessfully transcribed by the voice and instruments: saturating them with its anomalies.

Claude Debussy exceeded the piano in the opposite direction ,drawing refractions of the Parsifal orchestra back into it to the brink of ambiguity. The greatest transcriber of Wagner after Liszt he was the first to exceed the limit of the pianos resolution, forcing him to rethink it into an original instrument, an iconic sign in the place of an indexical one.

Being in Morges and remembering rather then identifying is a heroic task: in Remembering Stravinsky we meet Michael Blake’s imagination under torture. If memory is the root of abstraction we find many of Michaels concepts- his furniture for hosting other composers- openly arrayed in these four minutes: like a glimpse into the living room of a bombed out building.

Applying Stravinsky’s mastery of caricature to himself , we meet , along a clear horizon, the seeds of the tiniest Stravinskian world : the tick-tock answer of chord to chord, the instant neutralization of motifs to block phrases forming, the shuttling of material across registers. Yet the plane of this horizon is not Stravinskian - it is Ivesian -and we sense there the tempo of the monument and silent factual inscriptions of the first of the Three Places in New England – one of the earliest compositions to direct utterances into the past tense.

This séance between Michael and the two dead masters is also a public piano story , the third at the base of modernity: Stravinsky’s neutralization.

Few other composers so grasped the tectonic value of the piano , its ability to project structure in place of form. Those pianists who play versions of le Sacre evocatively learn this to their cost. Stravinsky’s coloured pencils, his flirtation with the pianola and his lifelong taste for muted uprights are ancillaries to this massive reduction of the piano from image or voice to diagram: to an empty sign capable of arbitrarily matching any dimension of sonic design.

The longest piece in the collection- Ways to Put in the Salt – has Michaels Ouija bottle pointing to Debussy. The black people of Southern Africa are spectacular pioneers. Jared Diamond famously used their crossing from present day Cameroon to the unknown south through several biomes, social pressures and worlds inhospitable to domestication to prove that ingenuity and resilience rather than empire and wealth are the rewards associated with north south rather than east west migrations. Part of this African self-reliance is an intensely economical culture- where single idioms encode books of statutes, The great Xhosa woman musicians speak of putting the salt into their songs and Michael, familiar with this tradition unpacks this as well as he can into ‘cross rhythms, clap delay techniques, altered scale tones, parallel harmonic and melodic parts , non harmonic tones, dissonance, pattern singing and varied vocal techniques’.

His list becomes a challenge to musical synonymy- functioning like similar instructions in Jasper Johns diaries or Fluxus recipes to block the piano from functioning as a realist instrument, a snapshot – and pushing closer to a properly iconic function.

This is the Debussy edge of the triangle formed in the refolding of the nineteenth century piano-mirror. Michaels reading of Xhosa idiom is inevitably channeled through the author of Voiles - not in style but in logic- exemplifying the ways to put in the salt but never stooping to illustrate them

Their Souls Go Marching On is a fortuitous coda to a collection spelled in the three afterlives of the piano: Schonberg -130 years after his birth and in the company of his co founder of the modern canon ,Charles Ives -finds Michael Blake at his most autobiographical.

Caught between two masters he attempts their manic elision, jolting each one a click forward along their patrimony- Ives in the tempo of Nancarrow and Schonberg in the counterpoint of the Lyric Suite. But two minutes and fourteen seconds are too long to run ahead of the gods and this extraordinary cut-up falters at one minute forty seconds to reveal its most Schonbergian moment of all - a motor coughing into a stall and its most Ivesian- two imbricated styles falling away from each other. This is the essential piano tale – the instrument of balanced neutrality made to ricochet between every kind of asymmetry: the piano as a dictionary to which double grammar is applied to fend off realism.

Once established the Schonberg Debussy Stravinsky triangle is probed in different directions. Three Toys is a commission designed to engage Satie . the spinning top – a presumed source of the famous pear- is pointlessly viewed from different angles- a feint that would have amused Eric. Michael Blake shifts the engagement to a musical equivalent of Duchamp’s rotoreliefs- gramophone driven optical effects from the time when the great Dadaist styled himself as a salesman of visual gadgets. Jill Richards renders these anti-variations - studies in indiscernible difference- with exact irony. These three pieces are the zero on the number line of Michael Blake’s inventory.

French Suite pursues Satie into the domain of Ravel , affectionately teasing the exponents of African Pianism – a debate with which Michael Blake’s name is often associated – with a short cut between Couperin , cinematic motion and dance made in their name. In a similar gesture 38 a Hill Street Blues mosaics the near Webernian Uhadi bow music with Meade Lux Lewis’ Honky Tonk Train Blues- itself a Stravinskian exercise in intervallic economy and gestural counterpoint.

Such pieces highlight the condensation and polyvalence of African music and the inanity of treating its powerful architectures as colour, ornament or citation.

Nightsongs - a construction from eponymous Cole Porter numbers plus the apt ‘ I concentrate on you ‘ recreates in the friction of a single composers work with itself avenues into Scriabin and Ives of the Concord Sonata- an echo in Porterese of Holloway’s Gilded Goldbergs or Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues

Expanding this drift are BWV Fragments, a Kagelian misprision of Bach cello suites and Oh Claire ,an acronym on Myra Hess’ blueprint of Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring – soaked in figuration and whipped along by Percy Grainger.

Bach is perhaps to Michael Blake the utopia of the keyboard , a moment when it could balance a dialogue between two eras, one filled with myth, the other with science , an ideal transparency and pure function before pianos began to illustrate orchestras and then flew apart into three exclusive domains modeled on the sign.

Jill Richards, the David Tudor of South African music, rises to the rhetorical challenge of these works which are Ivesian surveyors pegs around the three territories of the piano She buys into their multiple footings like a stand up comedian working the United Nations General Assembly. Her hypnotic Satie, her hysteric Ravel, her Debussian mimes, her Stravinakian greyness and her endlessly unbalanced Schonberg give her the perfect masks to unfold Michael Blake’s edenic worlds into a one -woman revue.

Rudiger Meyer once remarked that Kevin Volans was South Africa’s Jackson Pollock – if such parallels have any meaning, then Michael Blake -cool wrangler of the disparate - is it’s Jasper Johns.

every good metaphor is a literal falsehood: saying somebody is like an asshole is stupid and meaningless - saying they are an asshole is mindbendingly apt.

blake writes this complicated gloss on david dargie and all the xhosa music he likes . you come and say it’s a transcription of a sketch for sein und zeit . you make your point with something very heideggerian - the Holzwege and the cars which are so nicely de-entifying.

the time fundamental is shot along by your cutting and the murmuring movements and zooms of the cam - just enough to stop anybody thinking it’s a poetic bunch of stills. the vertigo in the middle is fantastic as is the little window of clouds/ goosefeathers /blossoms - who knows and who cares because your point is not to culminate anything by anything else - so we see the big heidegger deal of 1925 - time is equiprimordial with being.

my son commented- unusually tender for blake - but blake in non-heidegger mode does not sound tende r- you have tenderised him.

it happens that mary rorich and i are making a sort of survey of western philosophy and western music together; we sit and present to each other - off the cuff but in some kind of sequence - the cross-play between music as an invention and philosophy as an invention. today we talked about heidegger and were struck by the way he straddles two avantgardes - he’s the peak of expressionism in 1927 and then he resurrects in 51 as the cool objectivity on everybody’s lips - from stockhausen to sartre.

what can i say? i prefer your sheer false assertion of heidegger in blake to blake’s assertion of dargie/xhosa and to my assertion that hes using the whole occasion to pay debts to debussy. now he has a debut piece to MTV too.

Daan Vandewalle – South African Tour – March 2010

One of the highlights in the South African New Music diary for 2010 will be the national tour by Flemish pianist Daan Vandewalle in March.

His programme is built around Michael Blake’s half-hour long “Piano Sonata”, subtitled the ‘Choral Sonata’, commissioned by SAMRO, composed in 2008 and premiered at the Ghent Festival.

Each of its four movements is based on choral music by the choral masters of Southern Africa – Moerane, Caluza, Ntsikana, Mohapeloa, while the work as a whole is modelled on one of the 20th century masterpieces for piano – the Concord Sonata by Charles Ives. The work also draws inspiration from Debussy, Liszt, Busoni, Rzewski, Nancarrow and a host of others, and has been described by Vandewalle as “the first big sonata of importance in the 21st century”.

The programme includes two other South African pieces – “Blyde River Canyon” by Angie Mullins and a new piece for piano and live electronics by Theo Herbst (Stellenbosch only) – plus music by George Antheil, Stravinsky, Messiaen and Ives himself.

Vandewalle was artist-in-residence at the 2006 New Music Indaba in Grahamstown when he performed Alvin Curran’s five-hour cycle “Inner Cities”, a work he has recorded and performed around the world to critical acclaim. While equally at home in the 18th and 19th century repertoire, he enjoys an international reputation as a new music specialist, with a strong focus on 20th and 21st century American piano music.

His programmes often combine old and new, for example the Complete Chopin Etudes or Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition with works written for him by Rzewski, Curran, Frith, Clarence Barlow and so on. He also improvises with artists such as Chris Cutler, Fred Frith and Han Bennink. He has collaborated with groups like the The Simpletones, Champ d’Action, Tense Serenity, Vapori del Cuori, Sonic Youth and Ostravska Banda and he has a piano duo with Geoffrey Douglas Madge.

He teaches at the Ghent Conservatory, and while in South Africa will give workshops for pianists and composers in several centres.

An unique feature of the Johannesburg concert will be a performance of the choral works on which Blake’s Sonata is based, given by the Wits University Choir conducted by Dalene Hoogenhout.

www.daanvandewalle.com
www.michaelblake.co.za

Tour Schedule
-1. 20 March: Howard College Theatre, UKZN, Durban, South Africa

-1. 23 March: Conservatoire of Music, University of the North West, Potchefstroom
-1. 26 March: Wits University, Johannesburg
-1. 27 March: Enoch Sontonga Concert Hall, University of South Africa, Pretoria
-1. 28 March: Endler Hall, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch

Further information from michael@michaelblake.co.za

Colleagues,

I may have been in a somewhat more fortunate position: my stomach virus laid me so low that I was unable to attend the evening’s performance. A CD was passed on to me that I transferred to my iPod. I beg to differ with Michael’s assessment: I found the work gained with repeated listening. The stumbling block – if it can count as one – is that it was composed in 1953. Beyond that – and taken out of the context of his other works – the piece has in my opinion, great resonance. I hope that we can manage to find an opportunity to have it performed in Vienna.

It only underlines to me again the fact that refugee composers are almost never seen as lasting musical protagonists in their host-countries: this is as true of Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky, (who would call them American composers?) as it is of Egon Wellesz or Berthold Goldschmidt: both of whom find themselves listed as “British composers of German birth” in Groves. They are of course first and foremost Austrian and German composers and their compositional as opposed to teaching, conducting or coaching legacies belong to their native rather than adapted countries. It seems cruel, but ultimately true that interest in the music of both composers is zero in the UK but growing in Germany and Austria where they are seen as visible links to a local tradition, even given their circumstances of enforced exile.

Certainly Song of the Four Winds was composed in the context of South African exile, it is however not a work that belongs to the cannon of South African composers. It is as Austrian in its intrinsic language as the symphonies of Egon Wellesz, all of which were composed in Great Britain.

Michael

Dear Friends

This little Sibelius diversion is a timely reminder of one of the flaws in Tim’s argument around points 4 and 5 below. Tim is starting from the premiss that Hartmann is a brilliant composer, if not a genius, but on the other hand his list of unsavoury individuals, as he calls them - Sibelius, Strauss, Wagner, Bruckner, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and Bach – is undeniably a roll call of genius in Western classical music. Hartmann, like most South African composers in the (local) Western classical tradition, was a Saturday afternoon composer, and, at best, his music – on the strength of the long-winded Song of the Four Winds (which we musn’t forget was the raison d’etre for the Music and Exile conference) shows good compositional skill and a mastery in early 20th-century style studies. Hartmann learnt well! But Tim’s paper/pre-concert talk at the conference had us expecting to hear an unjustly neglected masterpiece, and while I think there were quite a few of us who had always wondered what this guy’s music was actually like, we were hugely disappointed - and I think that cannot be blamed purely on the poor playing of the pickup orchestra assembled for the occasion.

So with the first part of the equation disproved by our ears (heaven forbid) – Tim’s notion that Hartmann “can be a great artist and a flawed human being and political figure” - what are we left with?

Michael Blake

27 January 2010 9.00 a.m. – 6.00 p.m. (followed by the Hartmann/Moerane concert at the Linder Auditorium at 8.00 p.m.)

Wednesday 27 January 2010

9:00 Welcome and introduction

Session 1: Exile, Literature and Music

9:15 Muff Andersson - The nomad sings, the nomad walks, the nomad rests: the ‘condition’ of exile
9:35 Matildie Thom-Wium - ‘My country, my dry, forsaken country’: On exile in Arnold van Wyk’s, NP van Wyk Louw’s and Ovid’s Tristia.
9:55 Willie Kgositsile - Title to be confirmed

10:15 Questions/comments/discussion
10:45 Tea

Session 2: Identities

11:15 Michael Haas - From Bach to Schönberg: How “German” was music from fin de Siècle Vienna?
12:05 Xoli Norman - Title to be confirmed
12:25 Stephanie Vos - Interpreting the notion of nationality in the case of John Joubert

12:45 Questions/comments/discussion
13:15 Lunch

Session 3: In conversation

14:00 Stephanus Muller, Steve Dyer, Warrick Sony, Michael Blake and Mokale Koapeng
Discussion panel

15:30 Tea

Session 4: Exile in composition and performance

16:00 Jean-Pierre de la Porte - Exile on the spot: how does one recognize minor music?
16:30 Pre-concert talk by Mokale Koapeng (on Moerane) - Title to be confirmed
17:00 Pre-concert talk by Tim Jackson (on Hartmann) - Title to be confirmed

18:00 Symposium ends

18:05 Drinks and dinner at Goethe
19:15 Travel to Linder
20:00 Concert at Linder - Moerane, Hartmann and Mozart

Thursday 28 January 2010

Session 5: Places

9:00 David Coplan - S.A. Jazz in Exile: Exporting Sophiatown and District 6
9:20 Hilde Roos - Opera in exile: the Eoan Group
9:40 Gwen Ansell - So close to home: South African jazz in African exile

10:00 Questions/comments/discussion
10:20 Tea

Session 6: People

10:50 Tim Jackson - keynote address - Title to be confirmed
11:40 Aryan Kaganof - Blue Notes from Johnny
12:00 Chris van Rhyn - The wingless flight – A consideration of Priaulx Rainier and her Requiem in the context of exile
12:40 Colette Szymczak - Jonas Gwangwa, musician and cultural activist

13:00 Questions/comments/discussion
13:30 Lunch

Session 7: Perspectives

14:15 Christine Lucia - The smell of a grass fire
14:35 Chats Devroop - Emotional displacement amongst South African Jazz Musicians who stayed behind
14:55 Mokale Koapeng - Composing in South Africa

15:15 Questions/comments/discussion
15:45 Closing remarks
16:00 Symposium ends

Goethe Institut Johannesburg

The Music and Exile: North-South Narratives Symposium explores the relationship between sound and place in South Africa and internationally. This is done from the perspective of scholars, performers, composers and other stakeholders in the discourse, and covers a wide variety of music, including art music, jazz, South African traditional and popular music. The Symposium forms part of the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival, and will present an informative and thought-provoking extension of the Festival’s 16 music concerts. The Symposium is specially linked with the concert on 27 January at the Linder Auditorium, where works of double-exiled composer Friedrich Hartmann and South African composer Michael Moerane will be performed.

The topic of exile is of great significance in music of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century, as the political situations of Apartheid and the Second World War, to name only two instances, caused many migrations. Exile is, however, not only limited to experiences of political oppression: exile could be forced or voluntary (or combinations of both), as well as physical and/or spiritual. Composers or performers who have been forced to leave their countries are different to those who leave it voluntarily; musicians who use their music to migrate ‘inwards’ in their art are different to those who use it to remember the places they have left behind. Exile prompts categories like ‘Before the departure’; ‘uprootment’, ‘flight’, ‘arrival’, ‘place’, ‘new beginnings’, ‘nostalgia for home’ and ‘return’. Although these conditions of exile are universal, and enable a geographically and historically wide-ranging discussion, exile can be seen as a topos of South African cultural, and specifically musical, production.

Some of the prominent scholars who will present papers at the symposium include Timothy Jackson (University of North Texas), Michael Haas (Jewish Museum, Vienna), Christine Lucia (Stellenbosch University), David Coplan (University of the Witwatersrand) and Gwen Ansell (author of Soweto Blues). There will also be discussions led by Stephanus Muller (Stellenbosch University) with composers and performers Michael Blake, Mokale Koapeng, Steve Dyers, aryan kaganof and Warrick Sony.

Members of the public are welcome and attendance is free. To reserve a place please send an e-mail to dpt@johannesburg.goethe.org. For more information, contact Stephanie Vos at 012 429 6782 or svos@unisa.ac.za, or visit the website www.join-mozart-festival.org. The symposium programme will be made available on the website next week.

Composer Michael Blake has been described by musicologist Stephanus Muller as “the most important and most influential South African art music composer to have worked in South Africa since the advent of democracy” (introduction to a Colloquium, 21 September 2009, Stellenbosch University). “Yet his biggest contribution”, Muller goes on to say, “is his probing and highly original aesthetic, setting a standard of creative daring, musical refinement and conceptual interest that, inasmuch as it is still relatively unknown, will almost certainly be recognized as a major contribution to South African cultural life in future”. At about the same time, film director Aryan Kaganof hailed Blake as “South Africa’s most famous unknown contemporary composer” (Art South Africa, Summer 2009). Famous (or unknown) to whom? and influential and perhaps even infamous to whom?

Michael Blake was born in Cape Town in 1951. He took piano lessons at the South African College of Music from the age of 9, and began composing soon afterwards. He studied at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (BMus, 1970), afterwards attending summer courses in Darmstadt and Dartington with Mauricio Kagel, György Ligeti and Peter Maxwell Davies (1976). In 1977, he launched the first New Music concert series at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg with his ensemble Moonchild. His first works attracted the attention of veteran South African composer Arthur Wegelin, who described him, prophetically, as “a musician with talent and initiative and the potential to become a prominent composer in South Africa’s musical life.” That potential was however soon forestalled by his departure for Europe (the spectre of active military service drove many white males abroad), where, at the invitation of another South African composer, Stanley Glasser, Blake studied music theory and analysis at the University of London Goldsmiths College (MMus, 1977).

Blake spent twenty years in London (1977 to 1997), as a freelance composer, pianist and teacher. He was part-time lecturer at Goldsmiths College, where he founded and conducted the Goldsmiths Contemporary Music Ensemble. From 1979 to 1986 he was the keyboard player in the electroacoustic group Metanoia, and its co-director. In 1986 he founded the ensemble London New Music for the performance of experimental music, and the group gave regular concerts at the South Bank, Institute for Contemporary Arts and elsewhere. LNM undertook British Council-sponsored tours in Europe, and broadcast regularly for BBC Radio 3 and European radio stations, premiering new work commissioned by Blake from his contemporaries — Gerald Barry, Matteo Fargion, Christopher Fox, Chris Newman, Howard Skempton, Kevin Volans — as well as playing non-mainstream (’downtown’) composers he considered important — Cowell, Crawford Seeger, Ives, Wolpe, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Bunita Marcus, Barbara Monk, Christian Wolff and Walter Zimmermann.

Described in the Musical Times as “one of the two leading protagonists [along with Kevin Volans] of the South African art music scene”, Blake has divided his time between composing, teaching, and promoting the work of fellow composers. At the beginning of 1998, he moved back to South Africa and settled in Grahamstown where he taught composition at Rhodes University and established the (now) annual contemporary music festival, the New Music Indaba. Blake was its director from 2000 to 2006. At the 1999 meeting of the International Society for Contemporary Music held in Bucharest, Blake made a successful bid for South Africa’s re-entry into the ISCM after an absence of nearly four decades, and was President of the ISCM South African Section, NewMusicSA, for six years. In this capacity he has represented South African new music at a number of festivals and meetings worldwide. It is this double life as an ‘influential’ entrepreneur that perhaps elicited Muller’s comment, and by the same token, has kept knowledge of his work as a composer somewhat out of the public eye, as Kaganof notes.

It was the former quality that enabled colleague Grant Olwage to single Blake out as “one of the ideas-men of the South African music scene” (in the Preface to the book Composing Apartheid): Blake’s vision for the New Music Indaba was to have the widest possible audience listening to the most challenging music of our time, and discussing it critically. As a teacher of composition, he believes that the ability to compose is innate in everyone and just needs to be cultivated: through exposure as much as by teaching. Always interested in young composers, Blake was struck after his return to South Africa in 1998 by the lack of opportunities for young black composers in the education system. He therefore established a “Growing Composers” project within the New Music Indaba in 2000, inviting some of the most distinguished composers and cutting-edge ensembles from Europe, America and Africa — many of whom were personal friends — to give classes annually in Grahamstown. The success of these events has elicited praise from both the academy and South African government, and the fruits of it in the form of new works by for example Sibusiso Njeza and Lloyd Prince have been heard as far afield as Amsterdam and New York.

Some of these “growing” composers have gone on to receive commissions for subsequent Indabas and have contributed to festival projects. Most notable among these is “The Bow Project” (2002-5), a concert series over four years where works were commissioned as responses to traditional African bow music — still performed in South Africa by a few (rare) players. Music by these players, as well as recorded performances, were transcribed by seventeen composers, who then wrote short string quartets based on the transcriptions: traditional bow meets new bow. Commissions also went out for projects like the bicentennial “Reimagining Mozart” (2006) — eleven new works provided responses to, and were programmed alongside, classics by Mozart. These projects saw established jazz composers and improvisers such as Carlo Mombelli and Paul Hanmer encouraged to ‘cross over’ into the world of classical chamber music.

An improvising musician himself, Blake has made guest appearances with Dutch saxophonist Luc Houtkamp (at the Unyazi Electronic Music Festival, another project of NewMusicSA, launched in October 2005) and with jazz pianist Nishlyn Ramanna. He has also been commissioned, by Trevor Steele Taylor, to create live improvised scores to ‘classic’ silent films screened at the Grahamstown Film Festival.

From the mid-1970s onwards Blake’s musical language was partly the result of an immersion in the materials and playing techniques of African music, and he composed a series of pieces loosely collected in what he calls his “African Notebook”. These explored mbira music for example, and sometimes produced new variations or mapped the figuration onto arrangements of music by Bach and Purcell. By the time he settled in London, this had become a more substantial “African Journal” to which more than 24 different pieces (and numerous alternative versions) were added over the next two decades until he returned home in 1998. Several of these have become his most performed pieces, in particular Let us run out of the rain (1986) and French Suite (1994). Martin Scherzinger, in the Cambridge History of Twentieth-century Music has described these as “understated translations of African music into Western idioms [that] deftly negotiate the borderline between quotation and abstraction, and, in the process, interrogate the opposition between the two” (609).

When Blake completed his doctoral composition portfolio at Rhodes University in 2000, one of the external examiners was the distinguished African scholar and composer J.H. Kwabena Nketia. Nketia begins to marry the idea of Blake’s influence as an agent of compositional influence with the idea that he embodies that change, in his remark that the compositions in the portfolio (which included representative works from the period 1986 to 1999) were “particularly valuable both as models that can be explored by African students of composition and as an approach to the creative dimensions of sounds and structures in African music”.

Since 2000, Michael Blake’s work has revealed a previously unknown depth and postmodern sensibility. As he puts it: “when I woke up in the new millenium I knew I wanted to do things differently”. This watershed in Blake’s life is exemplified in two works: String Quartet No 1, written for his long-standing friends and collaborators the Fitzwilliam String Quartet in 2001 and premiered in Cambridge for Blake’s 50th birthday celebrations, and Ways to put in the salt, an uncompromisingly stark interpretation of African bow harmonics written in 2002 for John Tilbury. In these and other works that followed, an African sensibility is subsumed into the fractured narratives that have become a feature of his recent work. His Piano Concerto (2007) is one such work, and it is notable that even in the cultural climate of the new South Africa where ‘challenging new composition’ is met with even more of a deafening silence than it is in the cash-strapped north, the premiere was seen by critics as a major event on the South African musical scene and a resounding success with audiences.

A passion for unusual timbres and instrumental combinations saw the realisation of two more commissioned works in 2007: Shoowa Panel for vibraphone and marimba (premiered in South Africa) and Rural Arias for singing saw and eleven players (premiered in Vienna). A composer who thinks on his feet and perhaps more than anyone approaches Adorno’s notion of a ‘musique informelle’, Blake draws as much on the visual arts of Africa and the West — African weaving, abstract painting, undergound cinema, silent films — as he does on African musics and American and English experimental music aesthetics. He is “a cool wrangler of the disparate” to quote Jean-Pierre de la Porte, who suggests that Blake is South Africa’s Jasper Johns. Martin Scherzinger points to the same quality when he says, “In Blake’s late musical style, one might say, a breezy mobility thus mingles with filmic montage.”

Since 2003, Blake has been collaborating with independent South African film-maker Aryan Kaganof. The fruits of this relationship so far include short ‘visual realisations’ (in the spirit, but not the style, of Kenneth Anger) of Blake’s Reverie (Kaganof’s Reverie), D.S.I.M.L. (The Hermeneutic Traffic Circle), Ways to Put in the Salt (Martin Heidegger’s Prologomena to a History of the Concept of Time Transcribed for Solo Piano by Michael Blake and Executed by Jill Richards), French Suite — First Dance (Il Strategio del Ragno — The spider’s stratagem), and Three Toys No 2 (Notes on Melancholy). The two have also collaborated on the original score for the first cellphone feature film, SMS Sugar Man, and two documentaries about Blake’s work: Untitled: A Portrait and String Quartet #3.

Blake has now produced work in every medium — stage, orchestral, chamber, keyboard, instrumental, vocal, and choral. He has worked in film (including original scores for ’silents’ by Gustav Machaty and Maya Deren) and dance and in 2009 he completed the draft of an Afrikaans digital opera in seven scenes, Searching for Salome, based on Etienne Leroux’s 1962 novel Sewe Dae by die Silbersteins — Seven Days at the Silbersteins.

An ongoing concern with providing uncompromising repertoire for young or amateur players has over the years seen Blake create works for the major grade examination boards (Trinity College, Associated Board, University of South Africa), pieces for youth choirs and orchestras such as the Soweto Buskaid String Orchestra, and, most recently, Postcolonial Song, an ‘open score’ commissioned for the groundbreaking network of ensembles in the UK called CoMA (Contemporary Music for Amateurs).

Blake’s compositional output of well over 100 works to date has been performed widely in Europe, North and South America, Australia, and Asia, including New Music festivals in the UK, Belgium, Slovakia, Germany, Austria, Cuba, Argentina, Australia and South Africa. Many works have been recorded for radio and television, and several CDs including Blake’s work have been released, among them the complete solo piano works 1994-2004 played by Jill Richards (2008). He has collaborated with many well-known European ensembles and soloists including the Fitzwilliam String Quartet, Trio Basiliensis, Musica Aeterna, Ensemble Bash, Ixion, the Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, Stuttgart Kammerorchester, John Tilbury, Daan Vandewalle, Antony Gray, Lesley Schatzberger, Yasutaka Hemmi, Darragh Morgan, and Mary Dullea. Since his return to South Africa in 1997, Blake has worked closely with Jill Richards, Robert Pickup, Magda de Vries, and Musa Nkuna. In recent years, he has received commissions from the Arts Council of England, the National Arts Council of South Africa and the Southern African Music Rights Organisation.

Michael Blake has given solo and (often with Jill Richards) piano duo recitals throughout Europe and the Americas and, since his return to South Africa, at universities around the country; he has particularly championed music by South African, American and British experimental composers. In 2007 he formed the Michael Blake Ensemble for the performance of his own work by the best South Africa players. He has been a guest lecturer at universities in South Africa, the Janacek Academy in Brno, the National Conservatory in Buenos Aires, the University of Toronto, Goldsmiths College, and a visiting composer at Bucknell University, USA. He was lecturer and composer-in-residence at the University of South Africa in 2007-2009.

Courting controversy since his student days, when he organised a week of performances of Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben Tagen to celebrate Wits University’s golden jubilee, Michael Blake at once inspires and irritates, forcing listeners out of their comfort zones and debunking the mysteries of composition. A mover and shaker, and a composer with “nothing to prove and plenty to say”, as critic Mary Jordan put it after Rural Arias was performed at the Arnold Schoenberg Centre in Vienna, Blake is now shifting his focus much more towards composition, and away from his entrepeneurial role.

A recent major work, the thirty-minute 2008 Piano Sonata (subtitled the ‘Choral’) sets up a series of interlocutions between two disparate twentieth century traditions — Southern African choralism and American experimentalism, in particular Charles Ives’ monumental Concord Sonata. As the latest manifestation of a project that started ten years ago when Blake began working with local choirs at the New Music Indaba, the ‘Choral’ Sonata pays tribute to the founding fathers of a tradition often overlooked in wider music and intellectual circles. Composed at the request of Flemish virtuoso Daan Vandewalle, who considers it “the first big sonata of importance in the 21st century”, this work is set to be heard in South Africa, Ireland and more countries in 2010, and recorded for CD release.

New works and premieres in 2010 include Marimba Etudes (for Magda de Vries), Horn Sonata (for Shannon Armer), more pieces in the piano series Fractured Landscapes (for Antony Gray) and String Quartet No 4 (for the Fitzwilliam Quartet’s fortieth birthday collection). Meanwhile tune into Johannesburg radio station Classic FM during drive time where you are as likely to hear Michael Blake’s music, as at New Music festivals and in concert halls on all five continents.

These two short films directed by Aryan Kaganof in 2009 are directly inspired by the musical universe of the composer Michael Blake. The first opens with images of a cobweb, its owner swinging within. The images that follow in parallel are extremely pure and thrilling, in perfect harmony with the score of the first composition, Blake’s “French Suite”. A river runs joyfully like a constant, gentle melody, like the days in an ordinary yet gracious life. The motionless stones and pebbles on the riverbed symbolise the hidden “immobility”, in contrast with the flowing water. The film lasts for 7 minutes, and its title makes us think of the metaphor for a new strategy to structure our human society. A tramp confirms this at the end, saying “I really want to get out of here”.

“Prolegomena to a history of time” is the second part of this diptych. This time the composer Michael Blake has set to music the text of the same name by the philosopher Martin Heidegger (written in 1925) using a “dysnarrative”, in other words, intentionally interrupted by Jill Richard’s interpretation which does not, however, detract from the original musical “intrigue”. The reference to the philosopher Martin Heidegger (who joined the Nazi Party in 1933) does not have any negative connotations as this film is a metaphor for life, just like the first film. In parallel editing we can see scraps of sky, clearings and trees surrounding a graveyard of cars, lost in the middle of a forest. Kaganof’s filming is once again throbbing with life as it observes the graveyard, highlighting the emotional and dramatic contrast. The wrecks of abandoned cars are a sign suggesting approaching death and the resurrection to come. The film lasts for 10 minutes (as does Blake’s composition of the same name) and these ten minutes are the mark of a solid, round figure, like the trees in the forest and the imagination of the duo Kaganof-Blake. By the end, the image becomes fragmented, suggesting the apparent-latent unity of the diptych. We see a square of cloudy sky, surrounded by a black frame.

Written by Dionysos Andronis , translated by Lucy Lyall Grant

I’ll try and be brief: I think this is an opportunity because for the first time Michael’s music is coming out in a way in which you can re-hear and re-examine. And I think people will be contemplating the music more exactly and finding in repetition what a concert often hides, so I’d like to sketch three broad ways in which one can see his music as a project, as a work in progress, and I hope that removing himself from teaching and organising activities a little, his music will fast fill the horizons you possess in blueprint in this CD.

The first of the three themes which really resonate with Michael Blake’s music is his place within the historical tasks of any composer growing up and having their formation in the 1970s: aware of their situation in Africa but also aware of the indifference of the rest of the world - and he’s taken a very unusual stand within his broader historical situation.

He could have been a very successful parochial composer had he chosen to be, but he has chosen to confront a number of widely defined historical problems directly in his work. And so it’s quite easy to locate Michael Blake stylistically in a kind of force field opened between the great alternatives of the 1970s: the path taken by Stockhausen and the path taken by Feldman.

But on the other boundary it’s also easy to locate Blake in another - derived - force field: that is one moving from the present to reprise the nineteenth century in the hands of Kevin Volans and moving the opposite way with Wolfgang Rihm, who crosses the various boundaries which made strands of twentieth-century music in the 50s and 60s – a kind of trek towards the present based on fecund taboo breaking.

Now Blake is so interesting because he’s not trying to adhere to a path, even idiosyncratically - he’s trying to create the exception. When I met him he was one of a few proficient double bassists so he was conscripted into the student orchestra. And the conductor of this orchestra was a very idiosyncratic man who thought he was Herbert von Karajan, and would make cutting remarks - I remember he made a nasty remark to Blake who’d second guessed him about something - he said “Mr Blake, one rotten apple spoils the barrel!” And in that way he characterised something really unique and fundamental about Michael without knowing it. If you observe a thousand white swans you’re still not sure that all swans are white, because the 1001st swan might turn out black. But if you observe just one black swan then you know for sure that all swans are not white. So Michael has always gone after the exception in terms of the historical frame of reference, the international force field in which his music operates - hoping it will cause the barrel of meek assumptions to rot. He has always tried to find the loophole, that one black swan, that one case which either makes other bodies of work seem absurd, paradoxical or portrays them in a very strange light.

So if there is quotation of style or engagement with other composers, it’s usually to wring their neck. And this maybe explains why his work has such a broad spectrum - it seems to drill here and then there, it feels like a whale moving under water popping up to spout here and then somewhere quite unexpected - in fact its sole consistency is that it exists to find the loophole and the exception.

The second perspective from which to approach Michael’s music is its return - in several ways - to an ideal of the baroque: to find the machine that could be infallible, could implement a method perfectly, that could correct itself. We know that when Bach was dying he had a copy of Leibniz’ Théodicée next to him, so there was this great dialogue between composers and thinkers who were each trying to find a machine of knowledge, a machine of experience, something that could run all by itself - the fugue in the case of Bach and the monad in the case of Leibniz.

Now it’s tempting to draw a parallel between Michael’s compositions and today’s equivalent of Leibniz - somebody who is trying to find the machine that can not only correct itself - interrogate itself - but perhaps become conscious of itself. One would like to see the parallel developed between Michael Blake and Douglas Hofstaedter. Hofstaedter became famous for his book on Gödel, Escher and Bach, but very few people saw that he was really talking about a power of a system to be self-referring, to create a kind of loop with itself, and to gather what new kinds of consequence may come from the loop.

A great deal of Michael’s music is self-referring - what is extremely systematic or motoric in his music, or what seems almost formally or fugally structured is a scramble to use the ongoing output of the composition as its input - to make an automaton.

Hofstaedter and Blake share an instinctive love of anagrams. Hofstaedter wrote a very brilliant book on anagrams and he anagrammatises his way through all of his books, even on very technical subjects, and nobody is ever safe from Blake’s anagrammatic wit either. I think in a century which saw Schoenberg and Webern creating such anagrammatic music, it’s interesting to see this somewhat taboo sensibility returning, but in an often explicit form. I like to fantasize an opera by Blake on themes by Douglas Hofstaedter. That would define the second platform for finding in his work every kind of contemporary automaton.

And the third way of catching Blake on the move - very briefly - is to think about the way he approaches the dialogue with African music. He has come after a cusp of great visibility in this matter and he’s exercised tact and reserve. He is not concerned with quotation, he’s not concerned with content, nor with transcription - he seems to be wholly concerned with certain procedures or habits, heuristics or mannerisms, not ways of thinking but ways of putting things together, which are the tectonic qualities of African music and which increasingly make up the tectonic or constructional qualities of his own music.

It’s very interesting to see this resonance develop between two musics as artefacts rather than as ideas or ideological toys and to see compositional procedures which, in the hands of this very literate composer becoming more and more fluent, more and more heuristic, more and more oral-seeming through this immersion. So what you see deep in the CD is a wonderful set of animations in Michael Blake - his storyboards. I believe he is working in all of these directions. It remains to the future to see which becomes strongest or whether he turns all into something we can’t yet imagine in synthesis.

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