On Saturday evening, Alex van Heerden and Derek Gripper performed their three-movement concerto Spore by die Bek van ‘n Ystervark Gat with the Sontanga Quartet, as part of the New Music Indaba. Van Heerden and Gripper, who have worked together previously on the album Sagtevlei, try to explorethe traditional Afrikaans music of the Western Cape, while using contemporary classical and jazz idioms.
“We brought the vastrap into the avant-garde string context … using the trance element of music, the quiet,” says Gripper. “We’re trying to evoke the landscape of the Boland and using those idioms and sounds, and also those of the contemporary classical guitar and the idiom of the classical guitar concerto.”
The musical heritage they’re working with has a lineage that also includes European, Khoisan and Malay traditions.
“So, being a meeting historically, we’re now trying to continue that meeting point, now that we’re free to do so, and also explore the different sides of what has become an Afrikaans music,” says Gripper.
In the first movement, Gripper’s minimalist phrasing and circularity creates a stark, spectral space over which the music drifts, almost synchronous, and through which the rapid, high-pitched strokes of a violin cut like an insect call. Strains of jazz enter with Van Heerden’s breathy, scratching trumpet, which is slowly uplifting, rising and falling, seasick on the monotonous strains beneath it.
Van Heerden gently sings an old folk song: “Sussie my kind kom huis toe / Ag nee my ma, ek dans nou / Wat het jy die hele aand gemaak? / Ag my ma, ystervark gejag.”
The second movement begins with Van Heerden’s use of the mouth bow, which announces a more discordant passage. It lurches around, slimy and viscous, characterised by dusky chord sequences.
The final movement is more fast-paced and romantic, the vastrap elements predominating. We hear more of the contrasting voices of the string quartet in a stretched, soupy dance tune — and we realise that the possibilities of this richer instrumental palette have not been used as fully as they might be.
Van Heerden and Gripper push the envelope of their own instrumental sounds to beautiful effect and it would be interesting to hear them writing for other instruments in the same challenging way.