COLUMN MiChaeL BLake

Preserving the Past, (Con)serving the Future

Michael Blake considers the various directions taken (and not taken) in new orchestral work in South Africa
Local orchestras kick and scream when they have to play new music. Most orchestral musicians in this country have not been trained in the performance of contemporary scores, and only the odd visiting conductor has any interest in presenting a new work, so the odds are pretty well stacked against living composers. But the opera stage apart, the most public platform an art music composer is likely to get, is the symphony concert. Composers (including myself ) pester the directors of South Africas three remaining orchestras for those few magic slots in an otherwise conventional symphony season. Go into any one of their offices and youll see the scores and recordings queued up on the executive desk. In the apartheid state-sponsored days of white music the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) of the SABC commissioned, performed and recorded local orchestral music as part of their brief. Leading Broederbonder Anton Hartman, then head of music, nurtured the careers of composers like Arnold van Wyk, Hubert du Plessis, Gideon Fagan, Stefans Grov, Peter Klatzow, Graham Newcater, Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph and others, up until his retirement in the late 1970s. White audiences received these new works as they might medicine or the scriptures: they listened politely; they thought it was somehow good for them. While white (mostly academic) composers had these excellent resources to play with, black composers were never encouraged to embrace the orchestral world: they were typecast as choral composers, with Michael Mosoeu Moerane (190981) the one exception. Since 1994, orchestras have had to reinvent themselves: diversifying their activities into outreach work and community concerts, pops programmes, fireworks displays and underwater opera, and finding new sources of funding. Little wonder that new works those least popular with audiences and players, and in no way contributing to bums on seats should be the first victims of the new dispensation. Nevertheless nearly two decades down the line, there is still a smattering of new music, including commissioned pieces, to be heard, even though most of it is still by white composers. Between July 2010 and June 2011 four new South African orchestral works were introduced to the public. In July 2010 the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra (JPO) premiered Zaidel-Rudolphs Pendulum, a piano concerto
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that orchestrally recalls the 1970s European avant-garde or, as Paul Boekkooi put it, partly honours the style of her mentor and teacher Gyrgy Ligeti, but also [not surprisingly] touches on African elements,1 and pianistically invokes Prokofiev a consistent voice in her piano writing. Then in October the Stellenbosch University Orchestra premiered Thomas Rajnas new Violin Concerto, well wrought and typically Romantic with the nod we have come to expect to his mid-twentieth-century fellow countryman, Bartk. The Cape Philharmonic Orchestra (CPO) has premiered two works this year: David Earls Double Violin Concerto in June and David Kosviners unterwegs a title that doesnt easily translate, but means along the way, which describes pretty well the musics constant state of movement even restlessness.2 Kosviner, South African-born but based in Europe, is the heavyweight of this quartet of composers. His new work comes as something of a surprise: it reveals a gemtlichkeit that I have never associated with the harder-edged Kosviner of the past. In this piece the chromatic scale takes centre stage, something one first encountered in Gerald Barrys obsessive ____________ (1979).3 But it shares that stage with a rhythmically lopsided chorale that rears its head throughout the piece in various guises,4 and so contributes to an argument or narrative. The glistening solo piano part must have been soloist Jill Richardss dream come true: not particularly virtuoso (for her) as the subtitle confirms but requiring the kind of coloration and shading in which she revels. Meanwhile how has the cause of black orchestral music been advanced in post-apartheid South Africa? The now almost classic Fate le Heso (My Country) by Sotho composer Michael Mosoeu Moerane is held up as the prototype in this country, though it remained a very isolated example for decades and therefore difficult to see as in any way typical of a kind of black orchestral music.6 Composed for an undergraduate examination portfolio, which Moerane completed in 1941, the orchestration, possibly the composition, was mediated by Friedrich Hartmann, and its surface can easily be dismissed as a rerun of Smetanas ravishing nationalistic M Vlast (My Country) (18749). Mokale Koapeng has assessed Moeranes ambivalent position in South

Mac McKenzies Goema Orchestra. Photo: John Edwin Mason

African music: to white concertgoers he is the composer of one orchestral work, to the black community the composer of several popular choral works and a number of awfully difficult songs.7 Pursuing the paradigm of black orchestral music (or rather the lack of it), Koapeng first-ever resident composer at the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival (JIMF) caused something of a fracas earlier this year when he attacked JPO boss Shadrack Bacabal for ignoring black composers and soloists in orchestral programming and mis-educating blacks about the fact that black people worldwide have made significant contributions to (Western) classical music.8 What doesnt feature in the rather vitriolic public exchange was that the JIMF did host the premiere of a new twenty-minute work by Koapeng, Dipesalema tsar Dafita (The Psalms of David) for soloists, choir and orchestra, performed by the Johannesburg Festival Orchestra at around the same time. Perhaps, though, this opportunity for Koapeng only served to underscore his awareness of the general lack of opportunity. Mzilikazi Khumalo, whose two large-scale dramatic works have been orchestrated by Chris James, Mike Hankinson and Robert Maxym, bemoans the lack of opportunity in his day for black composers to study Western composition techniques and orchestration (though Moerane and Reuben Caluza did manage to get something together), while singling out Bongani Ndodana-Breen and Andile Khumalo as young (black) composers who have now had these opportunities.9 What his words highlight, however, is that although the SA National Youth Orchestra is a training ground for young instrumentalists there is no equivalent for composers. What a young or emerging orchestral composer really wants is an opportunity of the kind provided by the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra: to be able to workshop a short new piece with an orchestra. After all, if the symphony concert is a composers most public platform, s/he wants to hit listeners between the eyes first time. What better way than to try it out in private first? A different kind of orchestral groove is provided by the Cape Town Composers Workshop run by Mac McKenzie with his Cape Town Goema Orchestra. This grew out of a negative experience of a symphony orchestra playing Mackenzies work, so he assembled his own outfit of enthusiasts and

opened it up to any interested composers. In March 2011 we heard works in progress from young jazz trumpeter Mandla Mlangeni a harmonically and rhythmically sinewy piece titled L.O.V.E. and guitarist Derek Gripper, reworking an earlier collaboration with the late Alex van Heerden called Spore by die Bek van n Ystervarkgat, alongside McKenzies own Goema Symphony, which pushed the Cape genre structurally just about as far as it could go. Luckily for all these composers, they had two more opportunities to develop, extend and recompose their works. That, I guess is the real essence of a workshop, and it is a wonderful model for more established orchestras to follow. And what of South African orchestral music abroad? One of the stranger exports was William Waltons creaky Johannesburg Festival Overture included as the South African work during the CPOs tour of the US earlier this year. True, it includes some traditional African melodies sent to Walton in the 1950s with which he was commissioned to do something ethnic for the LSOs South African tour. But this is 2011 what a wasted opportunity for showcasing new local work abroad. I am sure Allan Stephenson must have dished up a Cape Town Overture by now, which wouldnt have upset even the most conservative American audiences and would have waved the drooping symphonic flag a little higher.
1. Paul Boekkooi, Preview in Star Tonight, (20 July 2010). 2. David G. Kosviner, Programme Note for world premiere, February 2011. 3. Irish composer (b.1952) who flummoxed programmers with titles that couldnt be read. 4. Kosviner. 5. Ibid. 6. Recorded on Marco Polo 8.223709, by the National Symphony Orchestra of the SABC, conducted by Peter Marchbank but only in 1994! 7. Mokale Koapeng, The Problem with Mosoeu Michael Moerane in NewMusicSA 7, 8 (2008/9), 78. 8. Zingi Mkefa, No Minor Role for Black Keys in Music in Sunday Times (15 January 2011). The event was also recorded in the <|Mail & Guardian|>, which is significant since classical music rarely features in these papers! 9. Serious Music in an African Context in NewMusicSA, 3, 4 (2004/5), 14.

Michael Blake is a composer, performer and writer on music. He is a Research Fellow in the Department of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology at the University of South Africa.
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