Philip Miller must be South Africa’s busiest composer. He has worked largely in film and television, scoring movies such as Catch a Fire and TV series such as Yizo Yizo, as well as composing the music for several of William Kentridge’s animated mini-movies. He also wrote Rewind, a cantata based on material from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
I caught up with Miller at his home the day before he jetted off to another overseas engagement. He is celebrating the release of Shona Malanga (Next Music), a collection of freedom songs reworked for orchestra and voice, plus a couple of his own compositions, in a similar style, for the film, Catch a Fire. Apart from soundtracks, this is his second CD, the first was The Thula Project: An Album of South African Lullabies.
He was not always a busy composer. ‘I had this small diversion,” he says, laughing, ’10 years as a lawyer.” He played the piano and composed as a child, but it was only much later that he began to study music and composition. He did a post-graduate diploma in composition at Bournemouth University and studied privately with the late Joseph Horowitz.
He worked as a lawyer while keeping his interest in music going and it was through his legal work for the Performing Arts Workers’ Equity that he got drawn back into music-making. ‘I was working with musicians and singers and these songs were starting to infiltrate me,” he says. Working with Angus Gibson on his documentary series on the history of Soweto in the late 1980s was ‘a rite of passage for me that went beyond just making music for a film. I’d never seen any of this [visual] material before. That relates eventually to Shona Malanga, because it’s about how I learned a whole different canon of music.”
Shona Malanga connects with music ‘way beyond the conventional composers one is exposed to as a white boy growing up”. It feeds off his work on the more conventional score for Catch a Fire, the story of an Umkhonto weSizwe fighter. But it also brings South African freedom songs, such as Shona Malanga, Thula Sizwe, Senzeni Na, into dialogue with the Western-style orchestral tradition.
Miller says he decided that, for this project, he was ‘going to work in an orchestral way and very much put my stamp on the songs — I give them a kind of smoothing out and I’m quite conscious of doing that, but it’s partly because I’d discovered how to work with these songs in a filmic-music way. I had to rethink those songs.
‘You have to take that song in its essence, how the harmonies work, look at those structures and think about what that means. I worked with talented musicians and singers and we’d talk about the songs and then I’d ask, ‘How can I take those harmonies and, without overwhelming them, how can I work them with an orchestral palette?’
‘I’d look at context and meaning. So, with Senzeni Na, which is a funeral song, a song of great pathos, I worked with a cello, which has a huge amount of resonance emotionally. But for Shona Malanga I wanted a big orchestral gesture.”
Miller’s composition works strongly in relation to images, as a film composer must, but it can develop in relation to found sound. His Rewind cantata has at its core fragments of tape recordings from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, often no more than an indrawn breath or a cry; it also uses the screechy sound of a tape being rewound. This becomes part of the orchestral and choral texture of the piece.
Shona Malanga pulls all these strands together into a seamless whole. The voices and the orchestra, in Miller’s arrangements, give new life to these songs that are so redolent of South Africa’s liberation-struggle heritage. At the same time the CD transposes them to a new, post-liberation context. If Jacob Zuma can resuscitate Umshini Wam for his own purposes, then Miller can make of such songs something that is simply beautiful to listen to.