Two weeks at the New Music Indaba in Grahamstown have left me thinking about the relevance of the international musical avant-garde for South Africa today. Do the psychotic shriekings of a Mauricio Kagel theatre piece and the ear-splitting amplifications of a Karlheinz Stockhausen meditation on sound really have anything to offer the post-colony? If there is still a place for Western classical music in South Africa today (and this is not really in dispute), would it not be better represented by Antonio Vivaldi and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart than by Iannis Xenakis and Gyorgy Ligeti? After all, Stockhausen, Xenakis and the rest occupy a tiny (contested) space on the international concert scene. And locally a once visible generation of composers who subscribed to the modernist project have almost disappeared.Twenty years ago this month the SABC hosted a two-week jamboree of new music, with the charismatic American king of elitism and Bronx aphorism, Morton Feldman, as composer-in-residence. Feldman gave colourful, if otherwise unintelligible, talks on the important influences on his own music, mainly his grandmother and Proust, and contemporary music in the United States, mainly his student Bunita Marcus. He fell asleep during most of the many performances of his own, generally very long, compositions. He was publicly lukewarm and privately vituperative about the music of the South African avant-garde. Peter Klatzow, Roelof Temmingh, Hans Roosenschoon, Jacques de Vos Malan, Carl van Wyk and others were too busy preparing performances of their works and too taken up with their status as art composers to analyse Feldman’s obscure aphorisms or the real situation. Kevin Volans, considered an insignificant newcomer, even though he had served as Stockhausen’s main assistant in Cologne, was the only one who appeared to really engage with questions of African versus European aesthetics. ”Cultural banditry”, growled leader of the pack, Cape Town composer Klatzow, in response to Volans’s series of African paraphrases. Well, what happened to the South African avant-garde? Klatzow and Temmingh returned to the Cape and the safety of pre-modernist styles and audiences. De Vos Malan gave up composing altogether and eventually took the chicken run to Australia. Volans headed back to Europe, where he became leader of the 1990s modernist post-modern, engaged a new audience and made a lot of money. He continued to interrogate the privileging of material by Igor Stravinsky and Feldman, and the non-conceptualist aesthetic of African music. Volans understood the 1983 experience and grew beyond it.But otherwise 1983 was not a good time to bring ”new music” to South Africa: we were too white, too blinkered, too needy, too up our own fundamental orifices.It is a different matter in 2003. There is no longer a South African ”international avant-garde” in music. It is, thankfully, quite dead. Its inability to engage with context and change, its lack of generosity and elitism are the final nails in its coffin. But there are new South Africans whose ears and hearts (and chakras) are open. They are pulsing with a sense that nothing is impossible even in the field of so-called classical music. They listen to Stockhausen’s Kontakte and John Maguire’s A Capella and are amazed, but not stunned into plagiarism. They know they have something of their own to build on.That is why Michael Blake, director of NewMusic SA, aims his New Music Indaba not at the established compositional elite (who are in fact conspicuous by their absence), but at students from every cultural background. A 22-year-old would-be cell-phone entrepreneur who writes for choirs in the Transkei is taken as seriously as a final-year university student; an established jazz composer from Gauteng is commissioned alongside writers schooled in the international classical tradition. Besides daily clusters of contemporary concerts featuring world-class performers in his Grahamstown programme this year, Blake offered 26 young composers two intensive seven-day courses — Operaworks and Growing Composers. Their brief was to compose mini-works to certain specifications under the supervision of an international panel consisting of Dublin-based Volans, London-based Matteo Fargion, electronic composer Jurgen Bräuninger, Dutch composers Theo Loewendie and Christina Oorebeek, as well as local writer and librettist Jane Taylor. Listening to American soprano Beth Griffiths, in a spectacular vocal repertoire of the past 60-years, not only introduced these students to the extraordinary capabilities of the human voice, but gave them a new frame for listening to the Xhosa praise-singing of Dumisani Mpupha and the minutely nuanced utterances of bow-singer Mantombi Matotiyana. Fargion’s piece for amplified cardboard boxes (he performed it himself) was a lesson in simplicity of means, as well as the richness of a language confined purely to its rhythmic, timbral and spatial qualities. Recitals of new music by Dutch pianist Nora Mulder, South African Jill Richards, and French piano and percussion duo Ancuza Aprodu and Thierry Miroglio explored unconventional ways of creating sound and texture. Stellenbosch University’s Kemus Ensemble gave a virtuoso performance of Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie 1, wonderful evidence that ensemble, timing and shared listening belong not only to classical but to all music-making.Whereas the 1983 Contemporary Music Festival made no attempt to engage musical vernaculars other than the Western (with the exception of Volans’s music) and produced no shared projects or dialogue, Blake’s NewMusic SA and the New Music Indaba have produced a number. Most exciting, perhaps, is The Bow Project, a celebration of the uhadi bow music of the Eastern Cape. Eight young composers have written transcriptions of particular bow songs from the repertoire of the legendary bow singer from Lady Frêre, Nofinishi Dywili. In addition they have reimagined the music of their particular song in extended paraphrases for string quartet. Performed this year by the Sontonga String Quartet with Durban soprano Luasi Mcebi singing the generally separate transcriptions, this is compelling repertoire. I have no doubt that several of these pieces (by Paul Hanmer, Martin Scherzinger, Mokhali Kaopeng, Lloyd Prince, Fargion and others) will make it big in Europe and the US. The delicious-looking and extremely talented Sontonga Quartet (of William Kentridge’s Confessions of Zeno fame) are already drawing a younger, trendier audience and pieces from The Bow Project (alongside Volans, Arvo Pärt and Henryk Gorecki) are bound to become important.And so back to the question of the relevance of the international musical avant-garde for South Africa today. No one writes like Stockhausen anymore, nor like Terry Riley or Steve Reich, for that matter. But you need to know. Twenty years ago in South Africa, white composers listened and composed with a kind of last-ditch colonial arrogance that mistook itself for avant-gardism. Today’s new young composers don’t need to bluff: they have a true sense of ”coming from somewhere”; if not an overweening need to ”be somebody”. They are keen to hear the canonic works of modernism and post-modernism. They don’t have much opportunity to hear them live anywhere else in this country. But they hear and understand them within a context of creative options.Watch out for names like Braam du Toit, Hanmer, Mokhali Kaopeng, Prince, Cobi van Tonder and Julia Raynham. They are talking to each other and exploring the local and universal, working honestly to create a new tradition of South African music. — Â