Visiting Johannesburg this week, renowned composer Kevin Volans spoke to GWEN ANSELL about music past and present, African and European
SERIOUS music in the late 20th century is an esoteric and fragmented world in which performers and composers find survival a struggle. Audiences tend to be rigid adherents of one school or another, and fairly inflexible in what they will listen to, notes composer Kevin Volans, which makes the economics of the field difficult.
Yet Pietermaritzburg-born Volans in Johannesburg for the International Composers Workshop is writing and securing performances for his works despite these odds.
Volanss career is a remarkable one, spanning music studies at Wits, a spell as serialist Karlheinz Stockhausens teaching assistant, field recordings in Lesotho and an accolade from writer Bruce Chatwin as one of the more inventive composers since Stravinsky. Based in Ireland, hes just been commissioned by the BBC Henry Wood Promenade Concerts to write a piano concerto for the 1996 season. That takes me in something of an ironic full circle my first attempt at composition, aged about 12, was a piano concerto.
Volans is softly-spoken and soberly dressed, greying hair fronted by owlish spectacles. The animation comes from within; hands windmilling as he painstakingly demolishes all the generalisations in my questions. Especially, he is animated on the subject of African music.
Theres no single African music, but a diverse range of schools, styles and interpretations. What unites them, for me, is the energy and life in the music, which stems from the joy and spirituality the players apply to their art. But beyond the generalities, I became fascinated by technical and structural aspects. Western music is characterised by an intense anxiety, almost a neurosis, about time. My work with Stockhausen focused intensely on proportioning music in time.
African music, on the other hand, embodies an almost pre-Euclidean sense of time and space. Its additive, not subdivisive. It continues for as long as the energy and inspiration of the players can sustain it. Its communal, yet emphasises uniqueness every player may have a different downbeat which means a wholly different notion of authority: there is no conductor.
Yet despite this enthusiasm, Volans says he does not think of himself as an exclusively African composer. For the past 10 years, Ive been coming towards the realisation that who I am as a composer is independent of labels.
Up to the mid-Seventies, he was immersed in European music through his work with Stockhausen. For the next decade, many of his compositions were attempts to build aesthetic bridges between African and European musics. One example is his composition White Man Sleeps, popularised by a recording by the Kronos Quartet.
In retrospect, Volans feels such pieces had more to do with European music in the 1980s than anything else. Yet Chatwin as a listener heard in them the sounds of thorn-scrub in Africa, the insects and the swish of wind through grass. Yes, agrees Volans wryly, I can never escape my background: the landscape, the light and above all the natural and human sounds of Africa have stayed with me and definitely influenced me.
Now, he is alternately excited and depressed by the music he finds here. Much of the downside, he feels, is a legacy of the past. Despite the rhetoric, the old regime here was more interested in building monuments to culture like those huge and hideous white-elephant opera houses and theatres than in actually building culture. The old scene was marked by an insidious combination of envy of what was thought to be happening in Europe, together with an unwillingness to learn what was really happening there. Concert programming remains intensely conservative, and this has clearly hampered peoples appreciation of African music.
For me, it was my developing interest in contemporary and electronic music, after I had left this country, which opened my ears to African music and a realisation of what Id left behind.
For Volans, the other depressing trend is a kind of unconvincing eclecticism which attempts to marry melodic elements of African and European music without any real transformation of playing and compositional approaches the aural equivalent of airport art.
Yet what hes seen during the workshop has also inspired him. I was fascinated to hear James Khumalo [composer of the modern opera King Shaka] talking about the glides in Zulu music, which cannot be notated, and of the way he worked with classically trained orchestral players to reproduce these. And I have seen really exciting video footage of dance groups in Soweto and the way they are working with all kinds of new music.
The interest in dance reflects the new directions in Volanss own work. Hes increasingly enjoying collaborations with artists, theatre groups and dancers. Theres a freedom in such collaborations which lets me stand back and let another medium take over. The silence of dancers, for example, implies its own music.
Stylistically, he says hes also come into a new fearlessness. I no longer feel I have to prove anything. While still broadly a modernist, Im seeking a kind of music in which old notions of form are no longer applicable: sounds which emerge not as a finished object, but rather as material presented in its raw state. He talks of the work of German painter Gerhardt Richter, whose canvasses are scratched-through layers of paint, providing three dimensions for the viewer. What, I wonder, could be the music equivalent to that …?