‘I just love it,” says Clare Loveday. “It’s feisty, rebellious and can do anything you demand.” Loveday, a composer, isn’t talking about a racing car or a show horse, but about her favourite instrument — the saxophone.
Her engagement with the sax has been a winning one. In June her works for 12 saxophones, Duodectet I and II, were launched at the International Society for Contemporary Music World New Music Days in Sydney and, three days later, they premiered at the Royal College of Music in London.
The World New Music Days is the equivalent of the Olympics for art music and compositions are selected in the face of fierce international competition. Over its 88-year history the event has launched works by Benjamin Britten, Alban Berg and Ravel. Loveday competed as an individual, recusing herself from South Africa’s NewMusicSA launching pad because she sits on that body’s judging panel.
Johannesburg-born, Loveday graduated from Wits with a BMus in 1990 and played the piano in commercial events and in recitals until a hand injury took her out of live performance. She began lecturing at Wits “and then I got divorced and started work on a doctorate — and I moved from being intrigued by composition into total commitment. I felt more comfortable in composition than I ever had in playing. It offered such freedom and a way of combining the creative and the intellectual that was appealing.”
She describes her earlier compositions as “fairly structured, conservative modernism”. But in 2006 she collaborated with visual artist Gerhard Marx on the work, Collision, at the Wits School of the Arts. Collision grafted cello and violin fragments on to the body of a car wreck, setting up a relationship between sound and image that challenged the boundary between “seeing” and “hearing”.
“That was my breakaway from conventional composing,” says Loveday. “With Gerhard, there’s nothing you can’t do. Wits School of the Arts was promoting interdisciplinary work and we quite consciously wanted to push that as far as it could go.”
Loveday still pushes those boundaries, working with Cape Town visual artist Jill Trappler on a series of pieces in response to Trappler’s images. But increasingly saxophones have come to dominate her writing. Her first sax project was for the Dance Umbrella in the mid-1990s “and that just blew my socks off”. She has written an untitled work for a saxophone quartet and the Vienna-based Ensemble Reconcil premiered her 2007 work, Blink, for two saxophones and string quartet.
The instrument, she feels, brings a challenging edginess “that doesn’t fit entirely comfortably in the classical music world”.
In 2008 Loveday and another South African composer, Paul Hanmer, won a scholarship to spend time at the Swedish International Composers’ Centre in Visby. “It was so quiet — my studio looked out on a harbour with swans gliding around. You feel like you’re at the silent centre of the creative universe.”
The duodectet (for two soprano saxophones, four altos, two tenors, two baritones and two bass saxes) was Loveday’s final doctoral work, conceived at Visby but taking a year to complete.
“My supervisor wanted something huge. I tried saxophone quartet and orchestra, but couldn’t get my head around that — so why not an entire saxophone orchestra?”
The process was challenging. “It’s not like a string orchestra, where you have centuries of reference points. But the saxophone can evoke strings, or an organ, or even a choir.”
Michael Duke, who headed the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Saxophone Ensemble for her work, told Loveday: “It was very saxophonic — it worked well for the players.”
“And I saw how Australians are open to fresh, energetic approaches,” Loveday says.
That’s part of the reason she feels “South Africa needs to look south not north all the time. Hangovers from colonialism are very strong in the art music establishment and music theory.
“Australia and other countries in the south are also struggling with those. We’re still trying to be like Europe, which is wrong — even as we fail to keep up with what’s really going on in Europe … We have to stop cutting and pasting African elements on to a conventional framework and develop our own compositional voice.”
Loveday’s concern is for composition that represents South Africa instead of following European models. She has argued in an essay in the 2010 Johannesburg Salon Volume 2 that the capacity to represent is too often derived here from privilege rather than real insight into what is being represented.
“Those issues concern me greatly, as a white South African and one working in art music, which is European dominated.
“But Duodectet and Blink for me represent Jo’burg, which is where I live. Jo’burg’s a place non-South Africans find hard to understand. It’s cosmopolitan, rich, poor, edgy, shiny, energetic, rough, dangerous and changing faster than you can blink. And it also has a neglected gentler, tender, more beautiful side.
“I’m trying to represent all those aspects, mixed up and layered on top of one another.”
She’d love the chance to reflect that representation back to South Africa “if we could find the players. But I haven’t yet encountered a bass saxophone player here. If there are any out there …”