Composer Steve Dyer is definitely on a high. He’s concluding rehearsals for the world premiere of his large-scale work, Rebirth, to be played at this weekend’s Miagi festival, but his ebullience stems from what preceded that: a month-long national auditioning process for the Miagi Youth Big Band.
“From what I’ve seen, the future of orchestral music in this country is indigenous and will be so by merit. I’ve heard so many fantastic young players — especially string players. All we need now are more real composers’ commissions and grooming for young conductors to match the riches we have in players.”
Dyer conceived Rebirth as a bridge across “the barriers between so-called classical, jazz and indigenous traditions. If you’re working with kids in their formative years, why categorise music for them in any way?”
Dyer’s resistance to boxes and barriers started during his own formal music education: “I felt I needed to break free.” With Rebirth, the man better known as a jazz saxophonist “decided to explore new palettes of form, texture and sound rather than the standard jazz combo. And gently,” he says, laughing, “I slid into composing a 40-minute work for 117 people!”
Rebirth has five movements, divided not thematically but by length and mood. “Thematic material links the movements and the pacing will, I hope, take the listener on a journey that can be celebrated emotionally, rather than theorised.”
As a saxophonist, he’s been particularly interested in writing for the reed section. “For me, the woodwind sound in classical music immediately dates it, whereas a saxophone always speaks of the contemporary. What I’ve tried to do here is also to bridge between two eras of reed sound.”
Dyer plays the soprano saxophone part in the work, described in the programme as “lead”, but “not in the sense of a concerto where leading means displays of virtuosity. What’s far more important in this piece is the way all the instruments relate to one another. Playing the music is a collective journey.”
Fostering genuine collaboration was one of Dyer’s concerns as a composer. “When you think of how much effort players invest in rehearsal and performance, I think it’s important for composers to make it worth their while in terms of creative space. That wasn’t too hard. The question I still haven’t answered, though, is how to drive a very fast car on the autobahn: how to fully use the power of such a large group of performers.”
His other focus was “expressing our uniqueness on this continent”. He’s used various strategies to do this. “There are some traditional forms in the music that evoke Pedi pipes, Tshikona music or marabi. I tried to look at orchestral instruments with a fresh eye: asking myself, for example, how I can elicit sounds from a French horn that could come closer to a kudu horn? And then there’s rhythm. We have a substantial rhythm section, because this is an African work. Cross-rhythms are fundamental, not simply to underpin a melody, but to play an equal role in unfolding the music.”
For Dyer, Rebirth is the start of a journey he sees as vital for South African music. “We need to strip the myths of elitism and exclusion away from orchestral music. For example, playing every note as instructed by the score in front of you is relatively new: earlier classical music encouraged improvisation in the cadenzas. Orchestral music can link to and feed off other art forms, as African music has always done with dance. And certain instruments and styles don’t belong only to one group. In Venezuela music education initiatives have made concert music the music of the masses. When they play Bach or Beethoven there, it’s as equal in the repertoire with new music by indigenous composers.”
Dyer is heartened by the number of music-education initiatives now in South Africa, “but there’s still a territoriality about some of what’s happening. What we need is for all these initiatives and ideas to come together. And, of course,” he says, sighing, “for it to happen like [it does in] Venezuela, we need serious government buy-in.”