If the South African classical concert scene were truly Eurocentric, it would feature a lot more African music. That paradox is largely ignored in the confused debate around the future of our culture. While European concert halls currently offer hospitality to serialists, tonalists, aleatorists, minimalists, African composers and jazzmen all, the defenders of the classical faith here cling narrowly to the stuff penned there one or two centuries ago – “the world’s most beautiful music”.
That phrase, for Professor Christine Lucia, who heads the music and musicology department at Rhodes University is “an unfortunate legacy of the commercialisation of classical music” and part of the reason why she and teaching colleague, composer Michael Blake, have launched a ground-breaking new music series there: new music@rhodes.
“If music departments simply reinforce these values,” says Lucia, “they become like the old local record store, with no reason to exist other than to perpetuate old values.”
The two-year Rhodes season, by contrast, stretches from John Cage and Alban Berg to Terry Riley, Eric Satie and Iannis Xenakis. Along the way, it takes in African and Indonesian music, free jazz improvisation and landmark South African compositions from Kevin Volans, Mzilikazi Khumalo, Stefans Grov and many others. There are recitals, lectures, free workshops and schools events. So far, the series has showcased South African piano duos (including work from Kevin Volans), John Cage, and ferocious jazz improviser Rick van Heerden.
Next up, on May 2, is a full-day, open to everyone, adult education workshop where participants will get to grips with graphic notation and John White’s composition Autumn Countdown Machine.
The “new’ label is a bit of a misnomer; some of the music, concedes Lucia, “is actually quite old.” But for her and Blake, there are important senses in which the music can still be called new. It’s new to Grahamstown, and very often new to South Africa. “[There was] the cultural isolation of South Africa, during and even before apartheid; [a] music education system that … failed to introduce young people to the music of their own century; the state radio service that has not broadcast much 20th century music; other state institutions like the former arts councils that have used the `bums on seats’ funding argument for not playing it …”
Much of the music is also “culturally new to some or other segment of the population” either in itself or in the combinations in which the season presents it. Black and white musics, Lucia points out “have not been regarded by the [white] contemporary music establishment as belonging in the same world, never mind the same weekend of concerts … Separated by language, by music notation, by performance practice, they have developed on separate tracks that never met.” Blake adds: “Contemporary is what is fresh, vital, arresting – whether it’s [mediaeval composer] Hildegarde von Bingen, Rachmaninov … or Cage.”
What unites these two organisers from very different backgrounds is a commitment to musical diversity. Oxford-educated Lucia is a concert pianist and accompanist who has published, inter alia, on multicultural education, Schumann and women as musicians. Cape Town-born Blake founded London New Music in 1986, has performed in a Nigerian music recital alongside poet Wole Soyinka and is a frequently commissioned composer.
The newmusic@rhodes season is not the first initiative of its kind. In Gauteng, the Obelisk Music Society has for some years promoted new South African works, although without the outreach element so central to the Rhodes programme. But in what has been conceived as a musical run-up to the millennium, Lucia and Blake hope to encourage audiences to reflect on the dazzling musical diversity of a century that has produced Stockhausen and seen the birth of the Jazz Age in America and the African choral tradition here. And they hope to break down prejudices against the music of this century. “It’s interesting that people judge new music even before they have heard it , in a way that they don’t judge contemporary literature, theatre or dance.”
Essentially, newmusic@rhodes is about the future. Lucia hopes the new curriculum will allow schools to move away from “promoting the status quo through, among other things, graded examinations.” At the same time, for Rhodes as an educational institution “one of our tasks is to make sure [the black and white] musical tracks meet … Who knows what exciting new compositions might emerge … on both sides?”