BONGANI NDODANA on a local composer who left the country to pursue his craft
THE grass is certainly much greener in Europe, where a generation of classical composers from Southern Africa have been exiled by their craft and formed what seems to be a musical diaspora. Unlike their predecessors Priaulx Rainier and John Joubert, who established themselves in England earlier this century, they are more aware of their Africanness. And their musical language is rooted in indigenous music, embodying what could be described as a distinctive African aesthetic.
The sad irony, though, is that their music is hardly ever heard, let alone performed, in their country of birth, even though it has pertinent relevance in defining a uniquely South African voice on the international classical music scene. Instead, we are subjected to strains of a dying Darmstadt European avant garde style at premieres of South African works, with PC strains of Shosholoza added for good measure!
“I feel quite isolated in England,” laments Michael Blake, who has lived there for 17 years. “I am a South African composer on foreign soil.” It is this affinity with the soil that I found the overriding influence in his music.
Blake offers a gentle smile, fixing his gaze on Table Mountain behind me as I study the musical scores he has brought with him. One of them, Let us run out of the rain, with the instruction,”For two to play at one piano or harpsichord”, is based on Zambian Nsenga Kalimba’s music. The cyclic polyphonic strands of music in interlocking rhythms ring in my mind’s ear as I read the music on the page. “What attracts me to African music,” says Blake in magisterial tones, “are the rhythmic processes; its spatial element; the melody and … I can’t quite put my finger on the fourth element.” He is at pains to explain this mysterious fourth dimension: the magical simplicity and subtlety of a tradition of music-making older than recorded history.
Although Blake studied at the University of Cape Town, then at the University of the Witwatersrand under South Africa’s only woman composer of note, Jeanne Zaidel- Rudolph, he acknowledges that he has learnt from indigenous music. “I have grown to use polyrhythms, and have become more aware of pacing my music,” he says. He stresses the craft of melodic variation and observes that: “African music on the whole does not really have dramatic climaxes; it’s more a musical experience.”
When did it all begin? “Before I left South Africa I was listening to ethnic music,” Blake recalls. “I used to get hold of transcriptions [of field recordings] but it was only in Europe that I was bold enough to sit down and structure a whole piece.” It seems that a longing for home played a considerable part in his conversion to explore African sound. Unlike David Fanshawe, who recently visited South Africa with his African Sanctus, Blake is not a foreign explorer of an uncharted culture but an insider making sense of the sounds he grew up hearing. He says of his orchestral work Kwela: “It’s what I heard in the streets of Cape Town in the 1950s as a young boy.” The work explores the permutations of a single melodic idea over a repeated pattern.
Blake is a composer trying to reconcile two traditions of music that he is part of – African and Western classical music – which, on the surface, seem irreconcilable, unlike the African Sanctus, that merely exposes African music as a curiosity.
“I hope we have moved away from the colonial outlook that is gradually becoming a reality as other Southern African composers are making an impression abroad,” he says. Their works have been performed by European ensembles.
The new legion of young composers forms part of a movement that is a far cry from the early days of the founding of the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurbewegings. They seem to be systematically purging South African classical music of its predominantly Afrikaans accent, that had its heyday when Anton Hartman wielded his baton in the SABC music department and the National Symphony Orchestra.
Things have begun to change and even Blake has noticed from England that “in the last 10 to 15 years a lot of local composers have looked towards South African music”. On the question of how the culture of new music should be sustained in South Africa, Blake says: “Most of the composers have left the country because they need to get their music played. There is no truly African local music being performed. At every concert there should be a new work, it’s also important to have these works repeated.”
Pianist Jill Richards will be performing some of Blake’s music at the Grahamstown Festival in July