kagablog

A conference on exile organized by musicologists is bound to raise some ambiguities. For a start the term exile exists under leaden skies after Edward Said : he conducted its most recent examination and concluded that using it to characterize anything short of mass political denationalizations like the Palestinian disaster is misleading and frivolous.

This also puts the topoi of literary exile off limits as voluntaristic and too imbued with creative transcendence to characterize the cruel political punishment meted out to the Palestinian people and others in their plight.

Biblical exile- despite its extremely rich theology of covenants, morality for life among strangers and vast pretext for prophecies and condemnations was too identified with Zionist Nationalists to illuminate other stories of exile without prejudice.

In sum Said was concerned with the way exile entered public opinion and wished to remove certain decoys between the public sense of culpability and the condition of ten million denationalized people whom he felt obliged to speak for.

Exile is neither creative nor allegorical, it has no distinct genres – or at least none adequate to serve as a voice to suffering collectively borne. It is not laden with promise or at least with no promise different to the promise of arbeit macht frei or the promise of self determination in homelands for the millions of south africans apartheid white supremacists denationalized between 1950 and 1988.

Said’s ultimatum -no metaphoric use of exile after the Palestinian disaster -has the same weight as Adorno’s more famous ‘all culture after Auschwitz is garbage’. Neither thinker wants to be thought of as placing the topics of exile or genocide off limits , merely highlighting inappropriate means by which to inquire into them.

Now since Adorno was a defining figure in musicology and the sociology of fascism and Said equally inaugural of postcolonial studies it would be expected that a conference on Friedrich Hartmann and exile in the then quasi colony of South Africa would be an enterprise laced between Adorno and Said. What occurred was something quite different. A concert of music by a former leader of the Austrian Fatherlands Front - a fascist organization- was played . This was the centerpiece of the conference which turned out to have been occasioned by the musicological effort of Timothy Jackson to rehabilitate the music of this controversial figure -Friedrich Hartmann-and to rehabilitate his political reputation.

Jackson , a Canadian professor working in Texas, argued that Hartmann had been relieved of his teaching post in Austria because his new Nazi overseer did not believe his sincere declarations that he would divorce his half Jewish wife in exchange for keeping job. Nor was Orel , the Nazi in question swayed by a student petition instigated by Hartmann approvingly describing him persecuting his Jewish students. Hartmann was at that time a voluntary leader of the Austrian Patriotic Front.

Hatmann lost his job and came to South Africa with his wife and child where he continued his career as an academic and composed the music which Jackson aired. Subsequently Hartmann returned to Austria.

Now this would be merely one of those sidelights on twentieth century music which illuminate the roads not taken by the renowned composers - except that this all took place in South Africa. Now few sensibilities are so far off the beaten track as to have not heard of the apartheid government, a white supremacist prolongation of colonial minority rule which hijacked South Africa between 1948 and 1994.

This regime imposed its racist separate development policy on over ninety percent of South Africans, denationalizing people and forcing them into bogus reserves called native homelands. This event stripped rights from , displaced and deracinated far more people then even the Palestinian disaster and counts as one of the largest sustained political harassments in history.

South Africa is still counting the cost of this political misadventure which only came to an end when the apartheid government capitulated in a civil war. Many people who took part in that war were forced into exile by state terror and assassination programs which they were not spared even far over South Africa’s borders. Some of these people were present when Jackson made his case for F. Hartmann being an exile too - a fascist exile ironically fleeing Nazi persecution to became a civil servant in the apartheid regime.

From Jackson’s account, which he never claimed was more than an initial assay, certain facts about Hartmann are not yet clear . These facts determine the status of Hartmann in both 20 c Austrian history ( both fascist and Nazi) and South African apartheid history. These facts will shape Hartmann’s reception in South Africa and the entire scholarly and aesthetic perspective imaginable towards him.

The role of these facts is best grasped via two divergent historical narratives. We do not yet have the information to choose between these narratives. They are as follows:

A) Friedrich Hartman sincerely believed that volunteering for a leadership position in the Austrian Fatherlands Front was a reasonable thing to do. Since antisemitism was not official policy of the Austrofascists he married a half Jewish woman. He felt pressured to lie in order to keep his job in Nazi Austria. These lies included declaring he was in the process of divorce from his wife and also petitioning students to vouch for his zealous persecution of Jewish students .

When these lies failed to prevent his dismissal he fled Nazi Austria for South Africa with his wife, presumably not divorced and settled into an academic position where, chastened by his experiences with fascism, he became apolitical and applied himself to composition , administration and teaching. Alarmed by the growing intolerance in apartheid South Africa and by xenophobic denials of opportunity to him in the musical world, he ended his exile and returned to Austria where he spent the rest of his life.

B) Friedrich Hartmann was a deeply sincere fascist. He joined the Austrofascist Fatherland’s Front because it was politically and institutionally dominant- dominant enough under Mussolini’s protection to actively persecute Nazis as well as communists in the Austrian opposition.

When it became clear that Hitler was in the ascendant, Hartmann decided to switch allegiance to the Nazi party as more appropriate to his convictions To achieve this he was prepared to abandon his wife and to persecute Jewish students. He sincerely wished for Nazi acceptance and was shocked when his former allegiance to the Vaterländische Front was, despite his sincere zeal , held against him and he was purged from his job. His fascist beliefs led him to chose South Africa as more promising frontier for his extreme rightist thinking, using his wife’s half Jewish status as a sweetener to his immigration bid he entered South Africa under the mask of political exile and joined over six hundred other fascist and Nazi diehards who were recruited by the sa nationalist government to man its upcoming state and academic takeover. When the South African government realized that it could achieve its white supremacist goals without retaining now unpopular neo Nazi ideologies , Hartmann found his role as fascist aesthetic and ideological exemplar undermined. Unable to endure the decline of explicit fascist thinking in the wily apartheid state- by then trying to construe itself as a democratic whites only republic- Hartmann went back to Austria where a strong neofascist movement had never declined and where he lived in hope of the return of the VF.

both scenarios are over etched, designed to convey the ideal-typical sketches which Max Weber believed were indispensable to the beginning of any historical or social investigation- ladders which, once climbed, can be thrown away in favor of more subtle hypotheses once the most parsimonious explanations are put in place.

The historical and aesthetic evaluation of Hartmann, which Tim Jackson has begun will not progress until scenario A can convincingly refute scenario B or vice versa.

It is likely that this evaluation exceeds the capacity and expertise of any one scholar. Judgment beyond musicology is required to understand the migrations between the VF and the Nazi party- the kind of judgment possessed by general historians of the era such as Michael Kater and his colleagues. The relation of Hartmann to fascist recruits into South African administration and universities needs to be investigated by historians of apartheid structures and of the fascist diaspora.

Why does any of this matter ? Because Hartmann’s music was presented in South Africa on the strength of narrative A. This narrative is based on anecdotal evidence which at the moment is insufficient to rule out the plausibility of narrative B.

If A turns out to be well supported in future then premiering Hartmanns music and theming a conference around his then proven exile will seem a commendable exercise in historical objectivity and insight.

If B turns out to be well supported then South Africa has unwittingly hosted the celebration of a fascist, an apartheid zealot and an unrepentant opportunist.

The present issue is simply whether the conference rooted in Hartmann’s exile and promoted alongside a premiere of his music should ever have gone ahead before the musicological, historical and South African political communities had an opportunity to adequately weigh the evidence for A or B. No single scholar, however gifted, can claim to represent consensus on a matter that they themselves have only recently brought to discussion I hope that the decision between A and B is not still simply seen as some scholarly stake because it is a political issue which at worst portrays South Africa today as a safe cultural harbor for neofascists.

Today we consider the merits and contributions of Leni Riefenstahl, Martin Heidegger, Gottfried Benn, Werner von Braun, Giuseppe Terragni, Richard Strauss, Herbert von Karajan, Paul de Man and many others only against a clear understanding of their involvement in fascism . It is only correct that a recently rediscovered composer who shares their provenance should be subject to equal deliberation and scrutiny. This has nothing to do with witch-hunting ; it has everything do with bringing appropriate collateral and contextual information to bear before putting a work of art into candidacy for our appreciation.

The denazification process around Heidegger did not turn on the high opinion in which he was held by peers- including Sartre- but around his role in the National Socialist state and institutions. The German people had a right to deliberate whether they wanted Heidegger’s ideas to re enter the public realm as authoritative opinion in a society recovering from Nazism. South Africa held a truth and reconciliation process to deal with apartheid crimes against humanity. Its statutes ought to apply to the process of rehabilitating Hartmann. Certainly no more unilateral construals of Hartmann or other apartheid era public figures as exiles or victims ought to be simply accepted at face value. What if , on further examination, Hartmann turns out to be Hartmann B?

After decades of equivocation few who examine all the facts doubt that Heidegger was a sincere Nazi. Somehow it became possible to imagine Germanys best philosopher and Nazism as compatible- a perception that eluded earlier generations.

Has Nazism become more subtle? Has Heidegger simply slipped out of contemporaneity in being well enough understood and settled more obviously in his era?

When a significant piece of thought, art or music is put into candidacy for our appreciation, it is vital that its provenance be disclosed and understood for this alone confers its identity. This is obvious in those far from rare cases when a painting long attributed to a famous name is revealed as a fake (despite remaining physically identical to itself , it becomes a different work overnight ) The great Viennese architect Adolph Loos stands today under consideration as a pedophile.

Perhaps everybody who knew Loos knew this fact about him. Perhaps only today has pedophilia become sufficiently established as a violating criminal occurrence to begin attracting some sense of heinousness to Loos? The recent arrest of Roman Polanski has brought underage sex and the power to evade answerability for it into public debate . Nobody can argue that the answer to these questions is irrelevant to our relationship to Loos. Nowadays he has to be great despite his vice- a complex case to argue, not viceless because he is great.

Hartmann’s actual stance on Nazism and his role in the apartheid state makes a nonnegotiable difference to how we consider his music. Riefenstahl’s lifelong denial of the extent of her Nazi involvement is a salient fact in how we experience her films . Her achievement would be different- not better or worse but different (as all historical differences picked out by counter factual conditional sentences are) if she had even once seriously been puzzled by her former self. If Tim Jackson wishes to attain historical justice for Hartmann, pre empting reliable consensus by presenting Hartmanns music as the music of a victim is not a useful way to do this.

Another strand at the exile conference that struck me as interesting but exposed to misunderstanding is the movement to meticulously reconstruct the worlds and idioms of Afrikaans composers of the mid twentieth century. Flowing from the very innovative Stephanus Muller a new kind of archival awareness and biographic detail has entered the musicology of the nationalist and apartheid period: it certainly achieves, in that scholar, a tremendous suggestiveness and adventurousness - as in his examination of Arnold van Wyk via the counterfactual setting of a vast roman a clef. Esme Berman and Karel Nel’s extraordinary Alexis Preller monograph and exhibition is of a piece with this fine grained contextual , document and biographic based inquiry, a final dispensing with the thin, allusive generalities that have stalled South African art writing for decades.

But before this kind of study can reveal the fine grain of musical cultures – the way Baxandall , Podro and Alpers revealed the filigree of period visual cultures, the issue of the cultural policies and academic framework of the apartheid state needs to be addressed. This is not from some wish to put an obligatory political ball and chain on this scholarship but to augment its strength and consequences. It is hard to imagine a contemporary study of reniassance painting without an understanding of mercantile capitalism or a study of Thoreau which ignored agribusiness or the civil war. The danger in South Africa is that apartheid is so central to post 1948 scholarship that it has become a kind of premiss, a background noise to be acknowledged with regret. In recent South African memory, apartheid was the ether in which the spectrum bathed- capitalism, politics, rights, culture.

Ironically it regained some of this former pervasiveness after 1994- the study of apartheid seems always to be either completed or to be somebody else’s problem.

Since 1964, at least , the frame of art and music study has been the elaboration of a world- an art world through which works achieve stable identity or value or a music world such as the ones elaborated in recent ethnographic studies of IRCAM or the attempts to see Darmstadt and die Reihe as a discursive formation. There is - following the extraordinary work of Mary Douglas, Bruno Latour, David Bloor or Ian Hacking, no way in which even the study of logic,probability or polynomials can evade the methods by which groups achieve cohesion and consensus. The synthetic moderne whites only civil society is a veritable Mont Blanc on the horizon of worldmaking - of contrivances of cohesiveness- its reach into education and patronage was subtle and filled with paradoxical effects. The school of Muller- as I like to imagine it, is as close to a genealogical perspective as SA scholarship has yet come. It is a phenomenon to be strongly supported and encouraged for its subject matter as well as the methodological and stylistic sophistication it brings; nonetheless it stands in the same danger as Tim Jackson’s far more conventional dealings with Hartmann- in all these excavations of the personal and the contingent a dimension for analysis of power and the state needs to be reserved Not as a concession to South Africa’s perennial Marxism – which like its expressionism missed its moment and lingers on as a ghost- but as an analysis of public life, patronage, civil society and consensus building that can only honor music by illuminating the seductive matrix in which it made its way.

jean-pierre de la porte

Dear Colleagues,

There are a few points that I would like to address in the comments by professors Lucia and Muller.

Prof. Lucia writes: “hartmann was sympathetic to national socialism and tried (unsuccessfully it seems) to divorce his half-jewish wife in order to retain a high position at the vienna hochschule before he was somehow forced to leave and without too much hassle found his way to sa, where he was immediately appointed as lecturer at rhodes university.”

This is not what I said; I thought my report was more complicated and nuanced than that. What I attempted to demonstrate from the documents was that it SEEMED that Hartmann was planning to divorce his putatively half-Jewish wife in order to retain his position. But Orel had his doubts about Hartmann’s sincerity; furthermore, he - Hartmann - had not provided any proof of having done so. Orel also suspected that Hartmann was NOT truly sympathetic to National Socialism because he had volunteered for a leadership position in the Patriotic Front, which Orel probably rightly claimed showed Hartmann’s true political orientation: Hartmann was an Austro-Fascist, but not a Nazi. As Michael Haas observed, the Austro-fascists were trying to resist German Nazism and retain Austria’s independence. Orel also believed that Hartmann was lying about his intention to divorce his wife and join the Party. Obviously, the new Nazi-controlled Education Ministry also suspected Hartmann of dissimulation, otherwise he might not have been dismissed.

My larger point is that the documents show the lengths to which a person MIGHT go to hold onto his position and avoid exile. In such extreme situations, angels are few and far between. My point was that Hartmann was certainly not lily-white. But in being a shade of gray, he was no exception, certainly among artists and musicians, who, as I suggested, have been all too willing to serve any master, regardless of the circumstances, as long as they could retain their prestige, power, and income. The claim that “Hartmann was sympathetic to National Socialism” is a stretch; better to say that he /appears /to have tried to accommodate with it in order save his job and livelihood. In connection with the Hartmann case, I also mentioned Hindemith and Sibelius. A careful review of the documents shows that Hindemith too wiggled and squirmed mightily in the hope that he might be able to stay in Germany. In retrospect, Hindemith was fortunate that Hitler simply hated him personally and he was kicked out. And, Sibelius, even though by 1943 he was fully aware of the criminal anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime, continued to take its money and collaborate in various ways right up to the bitter end.

Hartmann was infinitely fortunate that Prof. Smeath-Thomas of Rhodes University decided to hire him. In Hartmann’s case, no commission composed of Afrikaners or of ex-Nazis or others was involved: Hartmann was hired by Smeath-Jones, the Master of Rhodes University, who saved his career and possibly his life and that of his wife and daughter. Smeath-Jones deserves further investigation. A chemist, he remained at the University of Liverpool after he had obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in 1908 and worked his way up through the ranks until in 1919 he was awarded his Doctorate and appointed Senior Lecturer in Analytical Chemistry. He was appointed Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Cape Town in 1923 and held the post until 1938 when he was elected to the Mastership of Rhodes University College, Grahamstown. Thus, Smeath Jones must have come into contact with and hired Hartmann soon after he became Master.

Unfortunately, our knowledge of Hartmann’s biography is still too sketchy to allow a detailed correlation of the life with the music. After the conference, I spent a morning in the archives of the University of Capetown. I discovered that the beautiful fair copy of “Grahamstown Mass,” the great song of atonement and thanksgiving that Hartmann completed shortly after his arrival in South Africa in the summer of 1939, is dedicated to his wife and daughter (the pencil draft bears no dedication). Was this composition somehow connected with Hartmann’s earlier thoughts of abandoning them to save his career? And then another curious fact: among Hartmann’s large-scale works, the “Grahamstown Mass” was the only one never to be performed. Is this because the forces required were simply too large, or were the biographical associations just too painful?

Regarding the affair that seems to be behind “The Song of the Four Winds,” again I learned only after the conference the following: Hartmann did have an affair with his teacher Franz Schmidt’s daughter Emma, apparently a great beauty, who died from complications of childbirth in 1932 (whose child?). Apparently, Schmidt experienced a spiritual and physical breakdown after her death, but achieved an artistic revival in his Fourth Symphony of 1933 (which he inscribed as “Requiem for my Daughter”) and, especially, in his oratorio “The Seven Seals.” Surely, Hartmann must have heard Schmidt’s Fourth Symphony, premiered in Vienna in 1934. Was he present at the premiere of Schmidt’s oratorio on 15 June 1938? This would have taken place not long after the events described in Orel’s report, which is dated March 31, 1938, i.e., during the very difficult period when Hartmann was desperately trying to leave Austria. Is this affair referred to in “The Song of the Four Winds,” or is it a later affair in South Africa? If it is the earlier affair, are there also musical connections between “The Song of the Four Winds” and the related pieces by Schmidt - in addition to those discussed with Joseph Marx (Hartmann’s other composition teacher), Mahler, Puccini, and Bruckner?

I would be in favor of a publication arising out of the conference. I found the level of the presentations high, and the diverse yet related topics fascinating. People will, of course, have the opportunity to refine and expand their presentations, and perhaps the organizers can contribute an introduction addressing some of the excellent points raised by our colleagues.

Best wishes,

Tim Jackson, Ph.D.
Professor of Music Theory
College of Music
University of North Texas

dear christine

i read your impressions on the exile conference in johannesburg, and feel compelled to respond. there is much in your piece that puzzles me: the connection of irony (or lack of it) to the specter of an old musicology; the idea that hartmann’s status as exile was attributed ‘without any evidence’; the notion that trauneck could be more ‘interesting’ as a musical figure because he is politically less distasteful; the pique about balance and representation and evenness.

much of this, forgive me dear friend, is nonsense, or is made so by the way you present it. hartmann’s work and politics were not kept separate at all. in fact, jackson’s presented research opened the interface between the two. hartmann’s exile was not presented as a fact without evidence, but as a researched historical narrative with continuing gaps in understanding. trauneck might romantically better align with south african narratives of struggle than does hartmann, but as a composer hartmann is infinitely more interesting than has been realized locally (as is trauneck in his own way). and as for everything being ‘far from representative’, well, you will know that this is the trump card to question the integrity of any dialogue in our country. And it can (and will) apply to any and every conference on anything anywhere in the country. in the light of the musical, political, generational, racial and gender diversity on display in presenters and topics, however, i note this concern with some consternation. as far as dyani’s ten minutes goes or koapeng’s ‘short shrift’ as evidence of uneven ‘grabbing’, i am bemused. since when have you started minute-counting to weigh the importance or impact or significance of a contribution? It is a flawed methodology, in this case demonstrably so because dyani’s ten minutes was a mind-grabbing performance and koapeng’s short shrift was augmented by two 30 minute presentations later.

but mostly i am upset by your assertion that ‘there would be great harm in putting this sheaf of preliminaries out as an academic book or journal or volume or set of “proceedings”’. how could the publication of ideas be harmful? and to whom? and again, how will this take us back into old south african musicology? this seems to connect to your idea of the presentations containing ‘too little critique’. i disagree, unless you understand critique to mean coherence, systematic probing, coordinated analysis and then go on to apply it to the collective of the symposium as a whole, rather than individual contributions (of which the standard was very high). tell you what, though, you’ll have to do some travelling to find a conference with enough ‘critique’, if that is what you mean by it. you are expressing the wish for the well-matured and carefully considered argument of a monograph, not a symposium proceedings. but why should south africa be so profoundly different from other places in the world and wait for our collective deliberations to mature into monographs before considering publication? is this a colonial obsession with getting it right? and can we ever get exile right? and is what we managed now not as much as can be achieved now, and therefore valuable and legitimate and historically important (also to record) for that reason? anyway, as pirandello showed us long ago, papers in search of a theme are revealing, shocking, illuminating and unsettling in the best of ways. more so, if anything, than papers that march in step to one.

you write that the cards are now on the table, and that the game can now be played. says who? and at whose behest? your own, as discourse referee? the ‘authentic exiles’? michael haas, who opined on ‘how and when to do it’? and what am i supposed to be doing with myself while i wait for the ‘development of historical distance’? and my students who are in their early twenties? meditate on where the bus is going? we’re already playing the game, and like all play it is fulfilling and fun and messy and surprising and creative and random and dangerous and challenging. ‘god knows what we were trying to do in johannesburg’, you write. leave god out of it, she’s too busy looking after our overheated planet and the rest of the problems afflicting the ideological faithful in these days of blingful spectacled bliss. allow me to tell you what we were doing: we were connecting/juxtaposing/representing widely divergent stories and people and musics. we were listening to one another, talking with and to and past one another, eating together, listening to music together, getting to know people and ideas radically different from our own. we were laughing and crying in each other’s presence and getting angry with each other. we were bringing generations and interests and ideologies that exist separately in our world into contact. we were feeling our way towards a shared future by trying on the clothes of exile (why the negative vibe about intellectual cross-dressing?) we were doing what scholars and musicians everywhere and of all ages do, which is to engage with ideas and music that confound and confuse us and to emerge confounded and confused but in this case more humanly connected: mk veterans with dominees’ daughters with german exiles with up-tight calvinists with deleuzian architects with jet-lagged texans with opportunist film-makers with feminist stalinists with traumatized jazz musicians with behatted anthropologists with strangely accented conductors with playwright-composers with examinations tsars with double-barelled passport holders with, deliver us from evil, young afrikaner musicology students honing their craft.

i know, i know. not representative or diverse enough. you’re a hard one to please. but i think you’ve got this wrong, and hope you will make your work (thoughtful and outstanding as always) available to an eventual publication.

with great affection and respect
stephanus

In Memoriam Surendran Reddy (1962-2010)

Surendran Reddy, died on Monday night in Germany, at the age of 47. He had been ill for two years and was in hospital for the last few days. He is survived by his devoted parents Leela and Y.G. Reddy, his brother Rajen, and his daughter Leela, He is also mourned by many close friends, especially Heike and Florian in Konstanz, and I am sure he will be mourned by fans who loved his music, his indomitable spirit, and his larger-than-life creativity and originality.

I first met Surendran at the University of Durban-Westville Music Department in 1983. We had just joined the department as young lecturers: Surendran much younger than me at a mere 21 years old. We bonded immediately, dealing with our shared abhorrence at the apartheid hegemony still reigning over a black institution such as this by transforming it into a surreal artwork. I do not know how I would have survived UDW at that time, without him. I also grew to know and love his family at this time, and spent many hours in their home in Reservoir Hills. We played the piano together, we talked endlessly about music, literature, philosophy, and from him I learned more about the pain of being black in South Africa than I have from anyone before or since. We were once about to enter an empty restaurant in Amanzimtoti together for a cup of tea when the waiter met us at the door, surveyed the empty room and said, “I’m sorry, but we are full”. We did not know whether to be angry, to laugh, or to cry. I think that on the drive back to Durban we did all three.

Surendran (or “Sir Rendran” as he liked to call himself, using that super-upper-class British accent he sported) was a child prodigy as a pianist, winning an Associated Board overseas scholarship at the age of 15 that enabled him to study at the Royal College of Music in London. His piano teacher was Yonty Solomon and he had a wonderful harpsichord teacher (whose name I cannot recall). He majored in harpsichord for the ARCM (Associateship of the Royal College of Music) that he obtained at the age of 16, having already achieved his FTCT (Fellowship of Trinity College, London) in piano, the year before. He graduated with a BMus (Hons.) in Musicology when he was still only 18. Surendran then began post-graduate student at King’s College (London University), where his teachers included Brian Trowell, Reinhard Strom, Pierluigi Petrobelli, Rosamund McGuinness, and Thomas Walker. Visa problems obliged him to return to South Africa, however (it had never really been his home; he was brought up in Zimbabwe) in 1983, without completing the masters degree he so much coveted. He took up a lectureship in theory of music (I think it was still called “harmony and counterpoint” at that stage) at UDW, and held it for two years.

In London before this, he had won many awards, prizes, competitions, and scholarships, and had opportunities to perform at the Wigmore Hall, St Martin-in-the-Fields, and Queen Elizabeth Hall. (His website www.surendranreddy.com gives more information.) But although his outstanding talent was recognised in South Africa by some people, the climate in 1983 was not always helpful to taking him to further heights. He was a finalist in the SABC Competition for Keyboard players at the end of 1983, for example, in both the piano and harpsichord categories – an unheard of achievement – but, much to his and many other people’s surprise, was not the overall winner. This was a deep disappointment which he took in a highly professional spirit, but the kind of shadows such experiences cast over his life deepened over the years, and it is my personal viewpoint that it is what eventually drove him into what one might call exile, in Konstanz, Germany. He loathed German bureaucracy but he made good friends there, eventually became a German citizen, and had a reasonably successful free-lance career. He also made frequent trips back to South Africa, to performed, and to see his family.

Surendran worked with many great artists, recorded two solo CDs (Reddy Steady Go and Rough’n Reddy) and was a fabulous rock-classical-jazz pianist. He was also a composer. His earliest pieces were pastiches of 18th and 19th-century music, sometimes collected into “suites” that brilliantly combined historic chordal and contrapuntal gestures with his contemporary taste for jazz’. Sometimes his music was pure sentimentality, sometimes, pure irony. This ability to understand musical style inside out made him a great teacher, at UDW in Durban, at Fuba in Johannesburg, and privately wherever he happened to be. One of the last times I saw him he was giving one of his completely wacky and lovable lectures of “Clazz” (his term for the cross-over jazz-classical style he perfected) to an almost empty hall at Pretoria University, along with his brilliant tabla- player friend and colleague from Konstanz, Florian.

His fusion band Channel 18 (Surendran on piano and keyboards, Bruce Cassidy on EVI, Denis Lalouette on bass, and Rob Watson on drums) performed all over South Africa. One of his latest projects in Germany was a duo called “Campaign for Real Time” in which he collaborated with German composer / keyboardist Andreas Apitz in a programme featuring their own works.

One of my best memories of Surendran the artist is the complete cycle of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues that he played to a small audience at UDW in (I think) 1983, on harpsichord and clavichord. It was spread over four days and he grouped the works together into four collections, not playing them in the usual chronological order, but approaching them with the insight of someone who has powers of understanding as a performer that one rarely experiences.

It is hard to imagine the world without him. Farewell, dear friend.

christine lucia