Brett Pyper
The newmusic@rhodes series does not aim to present a Who’s Who of South African art music. Instead, it focuses on one specific vein within the work of composers from divergent traditions: music that somehow reflects the encounter of African and Western musical values in South Africa. This approach de-emphasises the substantial South African repertoire in the Neo- Romantic idiom as well as local composers largely in the thrall of the modernist aesthetic of the post-World War ll European avant-garde (Graham Newcater, Peter Klatzow, etc).
The term “new music” refers essentially to music that is written down, but while acknowledging its position largely on one side of the oral/written divide, the Rhodes series includes areas of overlap with related traditions. Grahamstown-based composer/arranger/reed player Rick van Heerden leads a free jazz exploration that profiles the entry of improvisation into contemporary Western art music.
The series also includes works by Simon Mnomiya, Lawrence Chonco, and Mzilikazi Khumalo, who have all, in their earlier and increasingly in their more recent work, overlaid the music of the mission school with the indigenous voices that it had displaced. African church music has always to some degree represented a meeting of African and Western musical cultures, if only in local performance idioms being applied to imported hymns. But aside from notable exceptions like Khumalo’s oratorio UShaka, this meeting has seldom before been recognised by concert programmers.
Many of the names featured in the Rhodes series are likely to be new to general audiences. There are, however, two exceptions. Stefans Grov (born 1922) is widely regarded as South Africa’s leading active composer of art music. Since the early 1980s, Grov has engaged substantially with African elements in his work, although always within the context of his tautly-reasoned, distinctive style, which can be traced to the motivic language of Bach, Brahms and Hindemith.
Kevin Volans (born 1949) is the only South African musician to have sustained an international career as a composer.Volans’s association with Stockhausen in Cologne in the mid-1970s propelled him to the forefront of European avant-garde musical thought. It was there that he developed an interest in African music, and his work of the late 1970s and 1980s includes a series of “African paraphrases”.
Two modernists retaining a more direct allegiance to the idioms of the post-war avant- garde who are profiled in the Rhodes series are David Kosviner (born 1957) and Dirk de Klerk (born 1959). Tellingly, both composers are presently resident abroad, Kosviner in Stuttgart and De Klerk in London. Blake points out that their South African origins continue to leave traces in their musical thinking.
The youngest composers to be profiled in the series, Martin Scherzinger and Rudiger Meyer, are both Wits graduates currently studying abroad. Scherzinger, completing a PhD at Columbia University in New York, has explored what he describes as “the logic of `affinity’ and `difference’ between Western and indigenous African music”, notably in piano pieces that draw on Zimbabwean mbira music, which Scherzinger has studied. Meyer is studying in the Hague, and his work includes experiments with elements drawn from Nyanga panpipe dances.