The 2011 New Music Indaba (NMI) of New Music South Africa takes place at Arts on Main this weekend.
Way back, when the indaba ran under the National Arts Festival umbrella in Grahamstown, there was an element of serendipity; audiences could discover new music by gambling on one event out of many. That ended when a freestanding indaba based itself at Unisa — nobody drifts into Unisa by chance. But with luck, the weekend café, market and gallery browsers on Main Street will be similarly tempted.
There is a lot to tempt in this year’s indaba.
Guests include the Swiss duo of Roland Dahinden (trombone and alpenhorn) and Hildegarde Kleeb (piano), Austrian percussionist Lukas Ligeti and Canadians violinist Veronique Matthieu and pianist Sophie Patey, who will present the world premiere of a work by Canadian composer Gabriel Dharmoo. And in the vision of Dahinden and Kleeb,both formidable players and composers in their own right, another titan is represented: American multi-reed player and composer Antony Braxton.
Dahinden was Braxton’s teaching assistant at Connecticut and both have collaborated with Braxton on recordings. On Friday October 14, the two will present an afternoon workshop for players — bring your own instrument — on Braxton’s music. Braxton has described what he writes and plays as simply “creative music”.
He dislikes the straightjacket of genre conventions and his scores integrate abstract and figurative graphics into their notation. (Today’s conservative jazz establishment figures, typified by Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis, have returned the compliment by shutting Braxton out of their jazz house.)
Many highlights
Dahinden is a similar destroyer of walls, creating work that interrogates the division between music and visual arts, an idea that gets expression in the Friday evening concert, Recall Pollock.
The indaba also hosts a strong South African contingent. Carlo Mombelli, Paul Hanmer, Magda de Vries, Robert Fokkens and several others feature in various contexts, from a sundowner rooftop percussion concert on Friday to a Swiss-South African collaborative event on Saturday.
For many, a highlight will be pianist Jill Richards’s performance of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata on Saturday afternoon. Written in 1912 as a homage to four American writers of earlier eras, Richards says the work nevertheless “feels so compelling, interesting and fresh every time I practise it: like a voyage of discovery. Ives was way ahead of his time.”
The composer wrote a dense, technically challenging piece and Richards admits she “finds the challenge irresistible — it is very difficult indeed!” But although hard work can solve the physical playing challenges, “the real challenge is the musical one. The scale of it means it requires lots of musical thinking to make it work as an entity. It’s one of those pieces that, for me, anyway, you have to play before you die.”
Sunday afternoon brings Swiss and South African innovators together in a different context: a workshop run by Dahinden and Kleeb with 16 young composers and performers associated with New Music SA’s Growing Composers’ project.
Cameron Harris, who handles the project for NMSA, says the group comprises “music/composition students from the various universities, jazz musicians from Alexandra who are interested in experimental music — a couple of performers from the more commercial side, one person who improvises on the uhadi bow — and a number of past [Growing Composers] participants”.
Harris says Dahinden and Kleeb’s decision “to create a unified piece of work” from such diversity “will require the workshop leaders’ skill and experience in large measure and will also stretch the creative resources of the participants”. But he feels that’s the point: the purpose of the project is “to provide an extra boost [through] the chance to learn from and work with high-level performers — and to interact with each other outside of more formal Âstructures.”
The workshop is open to the public. I can’t help hoping there might be some space for work written by participants. One of the great joys of some previous NMI Growing Composers’ workshops was the discovery of new compositional voices — another aspect of the event’s serendipity.
The New Music Indaba takes place at the POPArt Space in Arts on Main on October 14 to 16.
For full information go to http://newmusicsa.org.za/indaba2011