Programme notes

One of the details that caught my eye when I first watched Maya Deren's "At Land" was the cameo appearance by (a very young) John Cage, who seemed to change from someone and back into someone else a short way into the film. The cutting from Deren to this character and back somehow cunningly masks the change of actor. In this spirit I appropriated some very spare material from a piano piece I wrote in 2002 and set about continually change it into other versions of itself, trying not to make the changes too obvious.

The music was commissioned by the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa for the "Mirroring Maya Deren" project presented as part of the film programme. The first performance was given on 2 July 2003 in Nombulelo Hall, Grahamstown and the music was played live by Marcus Wyatt (flugelhorn), Carlo Mombelli (fretless bass), Michael Blake (piano) and others. "Mirroring Maya Deren", with scores by Jürgen Bräuninger and Carlo Mombelli for two of Deren's other silent films, was devised by Trevor Steele Taylor, to whom my score is dedicated.

"BWV Fragments" was written on the occasion of Ishbel Sholto-Douglas' retirement from the Rhodes University Music Department. Her life-long passion for Bach's Cello Suites, which she first introduced me to when I was an undergraduate at Wits University close to three decades before, led me to use them as the source material for this little tribute. I cut and pasted, transposed and superimposed fragments, and deliberately misread clefs, but every single note came from Bach.

The cantata "The Ballad of Poui", based on a Caribbean folk story with a libretto by Bridget Crowley, was commissioned by the Brighton Festival for the Brighton Youth Choir. It is scored for chorus SSA, soloists (drawn from the chorus), piano and percussion. The first performance of excerpts from the cantata was given on 22 May 1994 at the Brighton Festival with the Brighton Youth Choir conducted by Guy Richardson.

Synopsis of the Story: The people of the island of El Hosea and their Queen await the rains that will bring new growth to their lands. The Queen's three daughters are to be offered in marriage at the Rain Festival. But the youngest Princess, Poui, is not like anyone else on the island — she is white with golden hair. She must wear a magic crown to keep her from harm. Who will marry her? No Prince offers his hands but Pablo, a farmer, loves her. The Queen agrees to their marriage. Poui is glad as she takes off her crown, believing she will not need it as a farmer's wife. But her sisters hate her for being different and worse, marrying a farmer. They command the Imps of the Night to cut of Poui's hair. No one will marry her then. They reckoned without the old woman who made Poui wear the magic crown. She turns the golden curls into beautiful blossoms on trees that grow up overnight. Then she makes Poui's hair grow again, just in time for the rain festival. Pablo returns and they know their life has just begun.

I wrote this fanfare for four tubas (or tuba and tape) to mark the 75th anniversary of the Rhodes University Department of Music in 1998, while also demonstrating some of the resources of its newly-opened electroacoustic music studio. I wrote the piece for Bruce Stevens, who having recorded all the parts for the tape was subsequently indisposed at the performance, so he gave the world premiere in absentia. It took place in October 1998.

Not long after I had returned to South Africa, Rosemary Nalden asked me to arrange or compose some music for a CD of Christmas carols which the Buskaid Soweto String Project were shortly to record. I went to my 'Carol of the Three Outas', composed for the Brighton Youth Choir in the UK some years earlier, and reworked and extended it for string orchestra with two obbligato violin parts for the brilliant young leaders of the ensemble. It was first performed on 13 July 1998 at the SABC Cape Town by the Buskaid Soweto String Project conducted by Rosemary Nalden.

"Carpet of Memory" was begun in December 1994 on my second visit to North Africa, this time to the Tunisian coastal town of Hammamet where Paul Klee and other artists had spent time in 1914 a few months before the outbreak of World War I. It was after this visit that Klee painted "Teppich der Erinnerung" a strange canvas whose dirty ground, frayed edge and title perhaps lead us to read the picture like an ancient carpet on which curious signs recall past ages and cultures. The recalling of material and how it is processed by memory is a central tenet of the piece.

What had struck Klee so much about Tunisia was the landscape, the architecture, the southern light and the colours, and my own experiences of these on a visit in 1993 are what I brought to the music, while remembering also that Klee had been a fine violinist and keen chamber music player.

The work was originally commissioned, by the Arts Council of England, for Trio Basiliensis with an instrumentation of voice-flute, viola da gamba and harpsichord, and after several interruptions (including moving back to Africa) I completed the piece in 1998. Trio Basiliensis disbanded in the late 1990s and so the piece lay unperformed for several years until I reworked it for the more standard piano trio.

This piece has what one expects in a piano concerto: a clear structure, recognizably recurring harmonies, quite complex polyrhythmic layering, lush orchestral textures with lavish percussion, a dazzling virtuoso piano part, and tunes that you can whistle as you leave the concert hall. Yet this is not a conventional 'classical' or 'romantic' concerto.

The structure was mostly not pre-determined. There are two cyclic forms (common in African and minimalist music), interwoven throughout most of the piece. One is based on the two-chord structure of traditional African bow music, the other is a sequence of four chords most often articulated by the brass. Although the concerto was composed as one 22-minute sweep, three sections are discernible: a quieter 'slow' movement starts halfway followed by a faster and louder finale, although the joins of the three movements are blurred. The material of the slow movement is very different from the outer two; more reflective and with lighter orchestration.

In composing I work like a filmmaker, using montage technique to construct the music. The tunes are used in different environments each time they return, so they are never quite the same. I don't use the word 'theme' because I don't 'do' themes and then develop them in the traditional way, but you will however find traditional and popular South African musics are woven into or referenced in this piece.

The concerto was written as a present for Jill Richards, every South African composer's Best Friend. She has been playing my music all over the world for many years as she has other South African composers, and has recently recorded a CD of my complete solo pieces. So it was a surprise to me that this turned out to be the first piece I'd written especially for her!

The first performance was given on 17 October 2007 in the Linder Auditorium Johannesburg, by and the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Cleobury.

"Connectivity" reconnects the chords of "Louange à l'éternité de Jésus", the fifth movement of Messiaen's "Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps", in new ways that Messiaen may have thought of but never used, or may not have thought of at all. It is one of 8 minute-long pieces which opened the Messiaen Centenary Concert at the New Music Indaba 2008. I remember that at the time 'connectivity' was a fashionable state of (non)being on the Unisa Sunnyside campus where I was teaching, because of constant server and other communication failures. The Chamber Music Company of London gave the first performance on 6 September 2008 in the Atrium of Wits University, Johannesburg.

"Cum martelli incrudena (With hammer and anvil)" is a thirteenth-century Italian ballad for three voices, in which a scale rising from the first to the seventh degree is gradually built up and then broken down over a considerable number of bars, by the systematic addition and subtraction of pitches, making it a kind of minimalist prototype. I arranged "Cum martelli incrudena" using Percy Grainger's principle of "elastic scoring", and thus making performance possible by a fairly wide range of instruments. I dedicated it to Barry Peter Ould to mark the founding of Bardic Edition, with whom I had just signed a publishing agreement. It received its first performance on 3 May 1989 in the Purcell Room, London, by London New Music.

Darragh Morgan's request for a new piece came about the time I was starting work on my first opera, "Looking for Salome" (based on Etienne Leroux's novel "Sewe Dae by die Silbersteins"), so I decided to make a paraphrase of the first scene, more or less giving the voice parts to the violin and the orchestral parts to the piano. There are roughly three types of material: music associated with the Silberstein family, with the main character Henry in his monologues, and with the 'Bishopscourt set'. This is prefaced by solo violin music, based on an mbira chord cycle, which then goes on to become the orchestral music. The title is the opening line of the libretto (written by Christine Lucia) and as I recall was also the first thing Darragh Morgan said to me when we met in person in Durban for the first time a few months ago. The composition of the opera, and this piece, has been made possible through a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pretoria. "Do you prefer red or white?" is dedicated to Darragh Morgan and Mary Dullea who gave the world premiere in Howard College Theatre, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban on 26 June 2004.

1. The Hyena
2. The Hyena Addressing her Young Ones
3. The Giraffe
4. The Zebra
5. The Horse Cursed by the Sun

These settings were composed in 1992 in response to a long-standing request from Guy Richardson. The poems, in a 19th-century translation by the philologist W H I Bleek (1827-75), are taken from his collection "Reynard the Fox in South; or Hottentot Fables and Tales" (London, 1864). The first performance was given by the Brighton Chamber Choir conducted by Guy Richardson on 11 July 1992 in St Augustine's Church, Brighton.

The death in 2003 of the philosopher and musician Edward Said, and the posthumous publication of his book On Late Style, led me to consider afresh the notion of so-called late style in music. I looked particularly at piano music — late Beethoven, late Schubert, late Liszt and late Brahms — and given Tony Gray’s special affinity with Brahms’ four late sets of Klavierstücke, I set about composing (what might be) the first of a series of reflective essays for the same medium.

Said talks too about ‘lateness’ in the writings of Adorno, who — on the subject of late Beethoven — wrote:

“his late works constitute a form of exile…the late works are relegated to the outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document…the power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself…objective is the fractured landscape, subjective the light in which — alone — it glows into life. He does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.” (Adorno “Essays on Music“)

I composed A Fractured Landscape (in memoriam Edward Said) at Tony Gray’s request for his concerts in Australia in August 2009. I started the piece in Hout Bay in June, wrote a good deal of it in London at Tony’s piano, and finished it on tour in my hotel room in Pretoria on 21 July. It received its first performance in Adelaide on 17 August 2009.

1. First Dance (Non rubato; crotchet = 120)
2. Second Dance (crotchet = 152)

The form of the French Suite is loosely related to the Bach Suites, consisting as it does of dances in contrasting styles. But there are only two, and both owe their musical genesis to Africa rather than the Baroque. The "First Dance" is underpinned by a chaconne-like pattern with variations in continually changing metres, interrupted regularly by a short refrain derived from Zimbabwean mbira music. The melodic material of the variations makes reference to West African kora music. By contrast, the "Second Dance" juxtaposes and sometimes overlays material derived from a wide range of sources including mbira music, again) and the result is analogous to cinematic montage. The instrumental writing derives from 18th-century French harpsichord music and early 20th-century French piano music. The first performance was given by Sally Rose on 26 November 1994 to launch the 'St Luke's Concerts', Brighton.

The 'hindewhu' is the only non-percussive instrument used by the Ba-Benzélé pygmies: a whistle, consisting of a tube cut from a hollow twig of a papaw tree. It produces only one sound, and the technique of playing consist in alternately blowing the whistle and singing or yodeling one or more notes. My piece of the same name was written with two early 19th-century clarinets in mind, which I chose for their unique, fruity timbre. I composed it mostly on the Greek island of Paros where I spent the summer of 1989, and finished it in London in 1990. It was written for Lesley Schatzberger and Sharon Lyons who gave the first performance on 20 April 1990 in the Purcell Room, London.

This piece was written in response to a long-standing request from Paul Simmonds for a new piece especially composed for an old instrument, in this case a modern copy of a classical harpsichord. I departed from the kind of African-European syntheses that I was composing at the time, and decided instead — as it was 1985 — to write an occasional piece marking the tercentenary of the births of three of the greatest composers for the instrument (Bach, Handel and Scarlatti).

I did however adopt two rather African characteristics (though both are not uncommon in European music either). Firstly I chose a different tuning system — meantone temperament, in which the thirds are pure — and secondly I used a cyclic form, in this case a fairly free kind of passacaglia. The theme of this passacaglia is built on the pitch equivalents of B-A-C-H (B = B flat and H = B natural in German) together with the purely constructed thirds of the meantone tuning. The work opens with a short 'prèlude non measurè' (unmeasured prelude), giving some French perspective to the piece.

Although I first sketched the work in 1985 — with the Bach tercentenary in mind — it was put aside for a number of years before I finally completed it early in 1994. The first performance of "Hommage à MDCLXXXV" was given by Paul Simmonds on 11 May, 1994 in the Chapel Royal Brighton during the 1994 Brighton Festival.

"Honey Gathering Song" was originally composed in 1989 as a piece for dance (choreographed by Gill Clarke and titled "For the Off"). Revising it in 1999 as a concert piece I expanded the more interesting material and scrapped that which seemed less interesting. I approached the traditionally problematic medium of flute and piano by integrating the two instruments through the use of almost identical material and by bringing their timbres as close together as possible in interlocking or heterophonic textures. Pieces with the title "Honey Gathering Song" can be found among the music of the pygmy communities in Central Africa. While I make use of African materials and compositional techniques, generally filtered or paraphrased, there is no direct reference to pygmy music in this piece. The revised version was premiered in Grahamstown, South Africa in 2000 by Anne Laberge and Michael Blake. The piece also exists as a "Quartet for flute and strings".

"iKostina" was a request from Thalia Myers for "Spectrum 4", commissioned by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. The "Spectrum" series is devoted to miniatures which are technically approachable while remaining musically engaging. In the fourth book Thalia Myers focused on music for beginners, and distilling the essence of my musical language in this way was an enormous challenge. "iKostina" ('concertina' in Xhosa, an indigenous South African language) is one of the many instruments imported and adapted for local use, often played by rural musicians walking along the roadside, or in bands together with guitars and other instruments. The great uhadi bow player Nofinishi Dywili undoubtedly inspired this music. It was first published by the Associated Board in 2005.

This orchestral transcription of "Let us run out of the rain" was made almost immediately after the original was first performed. It paraphrases Nsenga kalimba (thumb piano) music recorded in the Petauke District of Zambia (in southern Africa) by John Blacking in 1961, and transcribed by him. The tunes were composed and performed by Gideon Bingaili, Ackson Lungu, Taiad Mwanza and Ackson Zuly. The work was originally composed for piano or harpsichord duet (1986) and arranged for string quartet (1991) and percussion quartet (1995).

"Kwela" is both about memories and memory. The idea of writing a piece which both recalled and reconstructed this particularly vivid childhood memory had been taking shape in my mind for some time. But thinking about the use of memory as a compositional device is what actually got the compositional process underway. And unlike other pieces I'd been writing at the time in which I started out with no specific formal plan in mind, here I started by letting the cyclic structure of the model shape the work.

'Kwela' is a form of urban street music that developed in South Africa during the 1950s, influenced by American jazz orchestras. In addition to the characteristic pennywhistles, a typical band would include a homemade guitar, tin rattles and a one-string bass with a wooden-box resonator (such as a tea-chest). The music they played was characterised by a repeated (cyclic) chord sequence with repetitive melodic lines for the pennywhistles. Both the chord sequence and the call-and-response structure of the melody have their origins in traditional South African bow music. David Coplan, writing about the 'kwela' phenomenon in his classic study "In Township Tonight", notes that "the music gave rise to a sexually suggestive form of jive dancing called 'patha patha' (touch touch), in which partners alternately touched each other all over the body with their hands in time with the rhythm. The dancers often shouted the word 'kwela' (Zulu for 'climb on' or 'get up') to induce others to join in."

On another level "Kwela" is an examination of 'kwela' in the broader sense — the generic form, the characteristic sound, the musical materials, the musical origins, the performance history. I started out composing a response to another cyclic work — the "Bolero" of Ravel — but departed from that monolithic approach after a dozen or so cycles and took a freer approach. The original version of "Kwela" for chamber orchestra dates from 1992; I remixed it for strings only in 1998 and added the coda in 2002. It is scored for first and second violins, violas, first and second cellos, and basses, and lasts about 9½ minutes. The first performance was given by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra conducted by Bernd Ruf on 21 December 2002 in the Mozartsaal, Stuttgart.

"Kwela" is both about memories and memory. The idea of writing a piece which both recalled and reconstructed this particularly vivid childhood memory had been taking shape in my mind for some time. But thinking about the use of memory as a compositional device is what actually got the compositional process underway. And unlike other pieces I'd been writing at the time in which I started out with no specific formal plan in mind, here I started by letting the cyclic structure of the model shape the work.

'Kwela' is a form of urban street music that developed in South Africa during the 1950s, influenced by American jazz orchestras. In addition to the characteristic pennywhistles, a typical band would include a homemade guitar, tin rattles and a one-string bass with a wooden-box resonator (such as a tea-chest). The music they played was characterised by a repeated (cyclic) chord sequence with repetitive melodic lines for the pennywhistles. Both the chord sequence and the call-and-response structure of the melody have their origins in traditional South African bow music. David Coplan, writing about the 'kwela' phenomenon in his classic study "In Township Tonight", notes that "the music gave rise to a sexually suggestive form of jive dancing called 'patha patha' (touch touch), in which partners alternately touched each other all over the body with their hands in time with the rhythm. The dancers often shouted the word 'kwela' (Zulu for 'climb on' or 'get up') to induce others to join in."

On another level "Kwela" is an examination of 'kwela' in the broader sense — the generic form, the characteristic sound, the musical materials, the musical origins, the performance history. I started out composing a response to another cyclic work — the "Bolero" of Ravel — but departed from that monolithic approach after a dozen or so cycles and took a freer approach. The original version of "Kwela" for chamber orchestra dates from 1992; I remixed it for strings only in 1998 and added the coda in 2002. It is scored for first and second violins, violas, first and second cellos, and basses, and lasts about 9½ minutes. The first performance was given by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra conducted by Bernd Ruf on 21 December 2002 in the Mozartsaal, Stuttgart.

"Leaf Carrying Song" is something of a companion piece to the earlier "Honey Gathering Song" (1989; rev. 1999) for flute and piano. Simon Wynberg wanted a piece he could perform with his oboe (and flute) duo partners on both sides of the Atlantic; he also wanted a piece that exploited the sonority of the 10-string guitar. While I chose the oboe d'amore as the melody instrument for "Leaf Carrying Song" specifically because of its gentler overall sound and its dark lower register, the piece may be played on the standard oboe or even flute, just as the guitar part may be played on a standard 6-string guitar. The instruments are generally treated as equal partners.

Pieces with titles like "Leaf Carrying Song" (or "Honey Gathering Song") can be found among the music of the pygmy communities in Central Africa. While I make use of African materials and compositional techniques, generally filtered or paraphrased, there is no direct reference to pygmy music in this piece. Although I wrote the work in 1991 it was never performed at the time; in 2002 I revised the work for a possible premiere performance in Canada, which sadly did not materialise. The first performance eventually took place on 2 November 2008 in the ZK Matthews Hall, Pretoria, with (oboe) and Michal George (guitar). "Leaf Carrying Song" was commissioned by the Arts Council of Great Britain for Simon Wynberg, to whom it is dedicated. It lasts about 8½ minutes.

"Let us run out of the rain" paraphrases Nsenga kalimba (thumb piano) music recorded in the Petauke District of Zambia (in southern Africa) by John Blacking in 1961, and transcribed by him. The tunes were composed and performed by Gideon Bingaili, Ackson Lungu, Taiad Mwanza and Ackson Zuly. It was premiered by Roy Stratford and Michael Blake at the British Music Information Centre, London on 23 June 1986.

"Let us run out of the rain" paraphrases Nsenga kalimba (thumb piano) music recorded in the Petauke District of Zambia (in southern Africa) by John Blacking in 1961, and transcribed by him. The tunes were composed and performed by Gideon Bingaili, Ackson Lungu, Taiad Mwanza and Ackson Zuly. The work was originally composed for piano or harpsichord duet and also transcribed for orchestra with the title "Kalimba". It was premiered by Roy Stratford and Michael Blake at the British Music Information Centre, London on 23 June 1986. This version for percussion quartet was commissioned by Chris Brannick for Ensemble Bash in 1995 and premiered at the Purcell Room, London on 19 July 1996. It is scored for marimba (2 players) and vibraphone (2 players). Ensemble Bash has recorded "Let us run out of the rain" on 'Damba Moon' (SoundCircus SC006).

"Nightsongs" takes apart, and then puts together differently, all the Cole Porter songs I know with "night" in the title as well as the very chromatic "I Concentrate on You". The music inhabits a strange, almost expressionist world, unlike anything I'd written in more than twenty years, with fragments of Porter sometimes fleetingly remembered. I started it in London in March 1997 to play on a concert tour, but only managed to reach the double barline two years later in Grahamstown.

George King and the Choir of Christ Church, Arcadia commissioned this short motet to words by Don Mattera (b 1935) from his collection Azanian Love Song (1983) for the 2007 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. They gave the first performance on 24 December 2007.

"Oh Clare" uses material from the Bach chorale "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", specifically in the piano arrangement by Myra Hess, and follows the 'floor plan' of that model virtually bar for bar. Composed at the request of Australian pianist Antony Gray for his Bach project for ABC Records, it treats both Bach and Hess rather irreverently, with a touch of Australia's greatest composer Percy Grainger for added irreverence. Who is Clare? A beautiful girl I once knew who had a passion for Bach.

She was the joy of my desiring, and somewhere out there she is probably still pursuing her passion.

"PNFT" is a very short realisation of Mozart's "Musikalisches Würfelspiel" for Daan Vandewalle, who wanted "just a little piece". It also provided a musical link to Mozart's "Fantaisie K475" which followed it in concert. The first performance was given during the 2006 New Music Indaba which had the theme 'Reimagining Mozart'.

I have always been fascinated by compositional process and therefore constantly excited about the path that my material will take; form, style and so on interest me less. Since I habitually start with beginnings, which may or may not remain beginnings, I opted to start this piece by composing the end. Secretly I really wanted to follow Edgar Allan Poe's process for writing his classic poem 'The Raven', which he sets out in his 1846 essay 'The Philosophy of Composition'.

So ending with a one-minute cello-and-piano piece that I wrote for a Messiaen centenary concert last year, I wanted to find a way back from or a way to approach that material. As it happens I ended up working backwards from, or towards, something completely different, but in the event the process seemed to concentrate my thinking even more than usual. This led Aryan Kaganof to comment that "every note in the work seems to lead inexorably towards the sequence of notes that begins around the 8 minute mark — this beginning of the end is reached without superfluity, without a single note that could be described as inessential".

Halfway through writing the piece, when I was making slow progress, I received the sad news that a good friend, poet Don Maclennan, had died. I was suddenly quite focussed and finished the piece within days. 'The Philosophy of Composition (in memory of Don Maclennan)' was written for Berthine van Schoor and Albie van Schalkwyk, and was not commissioned by SAMRO Endowment for the National Arts. It lasts about 9 minutes.

A personal favourite, Percy Grainger is certainly one of the most colourful figures in early 20th century music. He comments on "Colonial Song", one of his most beautiful pieces, thus: "No traditional tunes of any kind are made use of in this piece, in which I have wished to express my personal feelings about my own country (Australia) and people, and also to voice a certain kind of emotion that seems to me not untypical of native-born Colonials in general." ¹ When Darragh Morgan asked to write an 'African' piece for CoMA, I reflected on the many individual compositions that made up "African Journal (1976-2002)" and distilled my ideas in "Postcolonial Song", appropriate perhaps to the postcolony in which South Africans now live. I have not quoted any specific traditional African musics, though I have drawn on some of my own earlier 'African' pieces which reimagine a number of Sub-Saharan musical traditions. Grainger of course reinvented the notion of 'elastic' or 'flexible' scoring in the 20th century, which is central to this and the many other pieces written for CoMA, and his biographer John Bird's vivid description of his adventures in South Africa on a concert tour in the early years of the 20th century ² provides another serendipitous link in this chain of happy compositional inspirations. "Postcolonial Song" was commissioned by CoMA (Contemporary Music for Amateurs) with funds from the Performing Rights Society Foundation, the Arts Council of England London and subscribers to CoMA's Commissioning Scheme. It is dedicated to Barry Peter Ould — friend, Graingerphile and dedicated music publisher. It lasts just over 5 minutes.

• ¹ Grainger, Percy. 1913. "Sentimentals Nr 1. Colonial Song". London: Schott & Co, 3.
• ² Bird, John. 1976[1982]. "Percy Grainger". London: Faber & Faber, 88

"The Quartet for Flute and Strings" is an adaptation of "Honey Gathering Song" for flute and piano (or harpsichord). "Honey Gathering Song" was composed during January to March 1989 as music for a short dance choreographed by Gill Clarke, titled "For the Off". (I remember Gill Clarke finished choreographing the last bar and headed straight for the airport and South America to give workshops there — hence the title of the dance.) It was revised ten years later and the first concert performance was given on 28 April 2000 in the Beethoven Room, Grahamstown, South Africa by Anne La Berge (flute) and Michael Blake (piano).

Pieces with titles like "Honey Gathering Song" are found among the music of the Rain Forest Pygmies, but no direct reference is made to their music in my piece. The first performance of the "Quartet for Flute and Strings" took place at the Europe-Asia Festival in Kazan, Tatarstan in March 2002. It last about 8 minutes.

This quintet takes some of its material from a piece for two classical clarinets, completed in 1989 and premiered by Lesley Schatzberger and Sharon Lyons. Here, using identical instrumentation to Mozart's great Clarinet Quintet, I have continued my preoccupation with the special tonal qualities of the early clarinet, exploiting its greater quartertone possibilities, and the way in which it blends more readily with the softer, finer, reedier sound of the gut-stringed instruments. But as with Mozart's Quintet, the piece also translates very successfully onto modern instruments.

The material is derived from a number of African musical sources, both melodically and rhythmically, and in part harmonically, while texture and sonority come particularly from Mozart. The piece was commissioned by its dedicatees, the Fitzwilliam Quartet and Lesley Schatzberger, with funds provided by Yorkshire Arts. It is cast in a single movement lasting about 12 minutes.

The idea of writing a piano quintet was proposed by the Fitzwilliam's violist Alan George a few years ago. After the initial performances of my "First String Quartet (In memory of William Burton)" — in South Africa, Europe and the USA in 2001/2 — I mentioned that I had an idea for a second quartet. But Alan thought I should do as Shostakovich had done before and write a piano quintet next — and also as the Russian composer had done, I should play the piano in it myself. I warned Alan of the dangers of closely following the Shostakovich model: there could be not one more, but maybe another 14 string quartets!

While the piano quintet tradition does not go back as far as the 18th century, it includes at least half a dozen landmarks, the first of course being the Schumann with which the composer single-handedly "invented" this medium. So in my piece I chose to pay homage to Schumann and his "Piano Quintet in E flat Op 44" of 1842 in particular. While his piece does not challenge the conventions of the form too much, he creates moments — for example harmonic passages and textures — that are outside the conventions of the time. In a sense, therefore, I am paying homage to the creative impulse to break away from tradition.

My "Piano Quintet", completed in the first six weeks of 2006, is in only three movements — a substantial first movement based on the rhythmic proportion of 4:3 — a particularly African one, a gentle restless "Adagissimo" and a very short crazy "Scherzo" — with a total playing time of about 21 minutes. As Shostakovich did when working with the Beethoven Quartet of Moscow before, I wrote the string music with the individual members of the Fitzwilliam Quartet very much in mind. And as Schumann did to Clara before, I have dedicated the piece to my wife, Christine Lucia, whose research interests serendipitously include the chamber music of Robert Schumann.

The score is prefaced with a poem by W G Sebald:

Feelings
my friend
wrote Schumann
are stars
which guide us
only under
a dark sky

"Remembering Stravinsky…Morges, Autumn 2001" was composed in Switzerland while I was staying outside Lausanne in the town of Morges, where Stravinsky had lived from 1914 to1920, and composed "L'Histoire du Soldat and Les Noces". Visiting his house (now the head office of Swatch), and looking out the windows at views he might have enjoyed, inspired me to write a memorial piece to that most resourceful of 20th century composers. I worked every morning in the tranquillity of Paulette Robert's beautiful garden and dedicated my piece to her. By a remarkable coincidence she had spent some of her childhood years in an apartment in the "Stravinsky house".

The score is prefaced with lines from Olive Schreiner's novel 'Story of an African Farm': … "of the joy of the dreamer no man knoweth but he who dreameth … without phantoms and dreams man cannot exist." The musical material is derived from two vocal sources, one Shona and one San (Bushman), and is transformed by repetition and extension, superimposition and distortion. I suppose this is the stuff of dreams.

Meanwhile, having revised the work early in 1999, I subsequently noticed many fascinating parallels with the techniques of San rock painting during a visit to the remarkable paintings at Tandjesberg, near Ladybrand in the Free State. The coda was inspired by listening to a whole weekend of concerts of Charles Ives in London.

The idea of writing a piece for Yasutaka Hemmi originated during a visit he made to Johannesburg in 2005 for a performance of David Young’s "Skin Quartet" and my "String Quartet No 1" on the final stop of a world tour. The concept for the piece originated after that performance during a late night party at The Ant (in Melville, Johannesburg). The musical material is derived in part from the score for Aryan Kaganof’s cellphone movie "SMS Sugar Man", and is inspired by Yas’s effortless virtuosity. The ringtone is the one that was activated on my cellphone in 2006. The conversations are spontaneous. It lasts about 6 minutes.

"Rural Arias" is not a collection of country tunes, but a lament for the rural areas of South Africa and the people who live in them, those most affected by devastating problems such as climate change, poverty, and HIV/Aids. This is the real 21st-century South Africa, and the disembodied sound of the singing saw attempts to give voice to those fragile and disempowered communities. The first performance was given on 2 October 2007 in the Arnold Schoenberg Center, Vienna, by Maria Frodl (singing saw) and Ensemble Reconsil conducted by Roland Freisitzer.

The organ piece requested in 1997 by Gerrit Jordaan started taking shape soon after I returned to South Africa to live early in 1998, and represents my first work begun and completed on home soil in more than twenty years. It received its first performance on 27 September 1998 in Commemoration Church, Grahamstown by Gerrit Jordaan. I began work on it around the time that I acquired some new recordings of San music and I was reading an article entitled "Bushman Counterpoint" written in 1967 by the ethnomusicologist Nicholas M. England which describes the often quite elaborate counterpoint that is present in San vocal music. But apart from the title, "San Polyphony" was not really influenced in any way by this music; rather it owes a debt to the music of the 'mbira dza vadzimu', though it does not refer to the music of any one mbira piece in particular.

"San Polyphony" was commissioned by the National Arts Council of South Africa for Gerrit Jordaan to whom it is dedicated. It lasts about 20 minutes.

My enthusiasm for traditional African weaving developed in the 1970s about the same time as I was discovering the many facets of traditional African music. I was asked to create some music for an early SABC documentary film on weaving, and came up with a piece for harpsichord based on mbira patterns, which I subsequently orchestrated as "Ground Weave".

In his phenomenally beautiful book on African textiles, John Gillow describes how the Shoowa, a northern group of the Kuba, in the Congo, decorated their skirts with cut-pile details:

"In the early 20th century Catholic nuns encouraged Shoowa women to use this technique more extensively; in addition to details on skirts, they sewed a large number of panels, usually square, which were used as dowry payments, shrouds, chair and floor coverings, and as symbols of wealth and status. Each geometric design — whether rectilinear, crosses and crotchets, chevrons or squares — is embroidered on a raphia panel and grows, almost organically, across the fabric.

"Nothing is drawn on the raphia panel before stitching commences. All the patterns comes from the imagination of the embroideress and can change as the work progresses…Although there may be one dominant motif, which defines that part of the embroidery, it is likely that the motif will change as it spreads across the panel." (Gillow, J. 2003. "African Textiles: Colour and Creativity across a Continent". London Thames & Hudson: 196)

This description of weaving by Gillow resonates uncannily with the way I like to approach composition, while the actual patterning and asymmetry of these panels is something I've tried to absorb into my work over a number of years. "Shoowa Panel" was commissioned by Frank Mallows for performance with Magda de Vries. It lasts about 12 minutes.

1. The Well
2. Blue
3. Self-Knowledge
4. Poetry (horn tacet)
5. Ownership
6. Reduction (piano tacet)
7. Envoi

I first met Don Maclennan during a short stay in Grahamstown in August 1997, when I was visiting composer in the Department of Music at Rhodes University. The first book of his poetry I encountered was "Solstice": it was launched a few months after my visit and Christine Lucia sent me a copy in London. I was struck by the spareness of the writing complemented by the richness of thought that lay behind it. Although as a composer one is always looking for verse that might be set, I realized at once that I could never 'set' this poetry; it was definitely in no need of a composer's hand. When Musa Nkuna requested a work some years later, it was nevertheless to Don Maclennan's poetry that I turned, and from "Solstice" that I eventually chose seven poems that I loved most. My concern was providing a setting for the poems rather than 'setting' words, and as by now I had a composition called "Tenor and String Quartet" — a wordless piece also written for Nkuna — under my belt, I took the opportunity to plunder it, and so "The Well, Ownership", and "Envoi" have their musical origins in this work. I added words to this existing music with little adaptation, a process that does not draw attention to the cadence of words in the way earlier composers have done but allows the words to speak for themselves. "Self-Knowledge" quotes some phrases from the 2nd movement of my "String Quartet No 1". (Don was at the premiere in Grahamstown and told me afterwards how the 2nd movement had worked for him, while the first hadn't.) Poetry revisits a tenor aria from the first scene of my opera "Searching for Salome". "Reduction" is indeed a reduction: the piano takes a break and we have a duet for tenor and horn, with the vocal line based on a uhadi bow song and the horn standing in for the uhadi bow. "Blue" came 'out of the blue' and, unusually, only uses the 1st verse of the poem. There are few classical models for horn, voice and instruments: Schubert's "Auf dem Strom" is the most significant; but Britten's "Serenade" takes the medium into a new realm. I studied them both very closely as I worked on mine, and gave the horn an important role both in duet with the voice and as a soloist, in much the same way Britten did. After pausing for breath in the fourth song, the horn launches into what is effectively a mini horn concerto, with occasional lines from the voice; and in the final song, the horn again has a considerable solo role. The final ordering of songs was dictated by musical structure rather than poetic narrative. It is my journey through the book, pausing at certain points to reflect musically on particular poems. I must have been struck by the way they are about music, poetry, or the artist.

"Solstice: Seven Poems of Don Maclennan" was composed between January and August 2004 in Johannesburg. It was commissioned by SAMRO Endowment for the National Arts for Nkuna and Trio Capricorn of Cologne and is dedicated to Don Maclennan and Musa Nkuna. The poems are taken from Maclennan's "Solstice", published in 1997 by Snailpress in association with Scottish Cultural Press, and used with the permission of the poet. The premiere will be given on 15.8.08 in Pretoria.

The idea of writing a piano quintet was proposed by the Fitzwilliam's violist Alan George a few years ago. After the initial performances of my "First String Quartet (In memory of William Burton)" — in South Africa, Europe and the USA in 2001/2 — I mentioned that I had an idea for a second quartet. But Alan thought I should do as Shostakovich had done before and write a piano quintet next — and also as the Russian composer had done, I should play the piano in it myself. I warned Alan of the dangers of closely following the Shostakovich model: there could be not one more, but maybe another 14 string quartets!

While the piano quintet tradition does not go back as far as the 18th century, it includes at least half a dozen landmarks, the first of course being the Schumann with which the composer single-handedly "invented" this medium. So in my piece I chose to pay homage to Schumann and his "Piano Quintet in E flat Op 44" of 1842 in particular. While his piece does not challenge the conventions of the form too much, he creates moments — for example harmonic passages and textures — that are outside the conventions of the time. In a sense, therefore, I am paying homage to the creative impulse to break away from tradition.

My "Piano Quintet", completed in the first six weeks of 2006, is in only three movements — a substantial first movement based on the rhythmic proportion of 4:3 — a particularly African one, a gentle restless "Adagissimo" and a very short crazy "Scherzo" — with a total playing time of about 21 minutes. As Shostakovich did before when he worked with the Beethoven Quartet of Moscow, I wrote the string music with the individual members of the Fitzwilliam Quartet very much in mind. And as Schumann did to Clara before, I have dedicated the piece to my wife, Christine Lucia, whose research interests serendipitously include the chamber music of Robert Schumann.

I gave the first performance with the Fitzwilliam Quartet in the concert hall of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge on 30 April 2006. A year later I decided to follow Brahms' model, but in reverse, and transcribe the piece for two pianos.

The score is prefaced with a poem by W G Sebald:

Feelings
my friend
wrote Schumann
are stars
which guide us
only under
a dark sky

The Stockholm Saxophone Quartet asked me to write them a piece during their previous visit to South Africa in 2002 and I wanted to have one ready for their 2006 visit. The premiere was scheduled for Sweden in March, but illness prevented me from completing the work in time. The piece was inspired by two frogs in Punda Maria (the northernmost camp in the Kruger Park) who duetted all night after the start of the torrential rains in January that resulted in many road closures and most of the animals simply hiding. But these two fellows croaked on, allowing me to capture them on my mini disc player, and they put in a guest appearance towards the end of the piece. It was commissioned by SAMRO Endowment for the National Arts and is dedicated to Sven, Jörgen, Leif and Per. It lasts about 10½ minutes.

My "String Quartet No 1 (in memory of William Burton)" is a 24-minute piece about my relationship with two continents and two cultures which have shaped and informed my life and my work. The first movement might be heard as more African, with the sound of the lute or harp dominating, while the second may be heard as more European, in particular the sound of the 17th century viol consort. While one can find a semblance of the classical string quartet structure lurking in the background, almost everything that happens in the foreground, on the surface and just below it, contradicts that structure. The music strikes out on its own path and never really reaches closure, evaporating in the final bars. When I started out I had no idea where the music would go; I just allowed myself to be constantly surprised. From the point of view of the tradition, there are references to the some of the finest string quartet composers of the 20th century — tiny snapshots of Bartók, Shostakovich, Revueltas, Schnittke and Volans — whose work helped me chart my own course through the most intimate of mediums, and made me want to write a string quartet in the first place. My piece is also a memorial for a dear friend whose early death left an irreplaceable gap in my life. William Burton too was born, and grew up, in Cape Town and migrated towards Europe in the late 1970s where both of us lived in a largely alien environment, with South Africa as our reference point, and at one level this piece is also about that long, slow migration.

I composed my Second String Quartet, a single 22-minute span, in the space of three weeks during a residency at the Visby International Composers Centre, Gotland, in December 2006. Unlike my regular composing space in Johannesburg with its urban view and noisy soundscape, here I looked out daily on the peaceful Baltic Sea and a large congregation of ducks.

I had been reading Adorno's quintessential "Minima Moralia" and prefaced the score with a line from it: "Thought waits to be woken one day by the memory of what has been missed…"

The piece is dedicated to Grant Olwage, engaging conversationist and inventive co-conspirator in devising the New Music Indabas in Grahamstown from 2000 until 2006.

There could be a good case for describing Moerane as a forerunner of musical postmodernism in South Africa. The popular SATB a cappella song "Sylvia" validates such a notion very well. It was composed in 1968 — coincidentally the year of the riots in France which significantly affected many spheres of life, and the year that Luciano Berio composed his masterpiece "Sinfonia" whose second movement is a now classic example of musical deconstruction. While "Sylvia" yields up a simple ABA structure, the musical sources are strange bedfellows: A is lyrical with a nod to Mahler, while B suddenly bursts into ragtime; a brief bridge leads us back to a varied A and a short coda. The melody of the A section, which opens unusually with a downward octave leap, may well have been modelled on the fourth of Mahler's "Rückert-Lieder — Liebst du um Schönheit (Lov'st thou but beauty)". What other South(ern) African composer would have made such a bold juxtaposition of musics in a choral work during the mid-century! I made this arrangement of "Sylvia" for oboe (or flute or violin) and piano for the first ever concert of music by composers associated with the University of South Africa — faculty and students, past and present. Kobus Malan (oboe) and Michael Blake (piano) gave the first performance on 2 November 2008 in ZK Matthews Hall, Pretoria.

"38a Hill Street Blues" owes something to the uhadi bow music of the Xhosa in the Eastern Cape where I used to live. It also owes something to stride piano playing (in particular Meade Lux Lewis's "Honky Tonk Train Blues") which I listened to a lot in my teens. The title itself possibly owes something to an American television series, but was in fact my home address in Grahamstown. I wrote the piece, in the desert in Namibia during January 2000, at the request of Marcel Worms for his ongoing "New Blues for Piano" project.

"Their Souls Go Waltzing On" was another request from Daniel Matej, this time for the "Tone Roads Project", commemorating the 130th anniversary of the births of Charles Ives and Arnold Schoenberg. In the spirit of the request I appropriated some fragments of material from Ives's "Three-Page Sonata" and Schoenberg's "Five Piano Pieces Op 23". I remembered that the Ives work opens with the timeless B-A-C-H motif and on reading through the Schoenberg I found it hidden away in various guises. What a perfect opportunity to include JS Bach in the manipulation of these daylight-robbed materials! Taking a cue from Schoenberg's Op 23: No 5 (the Waltz) and the March sections in the Ives, I came up with a kind of march-waltz … or a waltz-march?

"Three Toys No 1", which is based on a group of pitches from the opening of Satie's "Trois Morceaux en Forme de Poire", was a request from Daniel Matej for the "morceaux en forme de poire" project premiered during the sixth edition of Evenings of New Music. The title refers to short pieces commonly found in collections of Elizabethan virginal music, but it could also refer to a spinning top which might have been the "pear shaped object" Satie had in mind…

"Three Toys No 2 and No 3" came about because I wanted to compose different views of the "object" I had called "A Toy (Three Toys No 1)", and so the complete set might be an aural equivalent of viewing a piece of sculpture from three different perspectives. The changes that occur between pieces are related to pitch and mode; in every sense they could be read as a response to Satie's "Trois Gymnopédies".

1. Counting Song
2. My Bullroarer
3. A Sad Song

When Charles Ramirez was overhauling the guitar syllabi for the Trinity College grade exams he asked me if I would contribute pieces for the first three grades, and expressed the wish that these would have something of an 'African' aesthetic. I turned again to John Blacking's transcriptions, this time those of Venda Children's Songs, and chose three pieces that I felt would translate well into guitar music which was technically elementary but musically challenging. They were commissioned by Trinity College London who first published them in 1997.

The first of "Two Studies for Prepared Piano", "Gang 'o Notes" pays homage to a great jazz piano master of the twentieth century. Art Tatum, whose piano improvisation fits into a keyboard tradition that spans the 17th thru 20th centuries, regularly transcended the medium of his instrument, so the prepared piano is perhaps a fitting medium for this study. I have divided the instrument into registers that are 'prepared' and those that are completely 'unprepared'. "Gang 'o Notes" was requested by Shirley Hoffmann to whom it is dedicated. She gave the first performance on 7 July 1983 at the First SABC Contemporary Music Festival in Johannesburg.

"Untitled" was begun in August 2000 but largely completed in Cape Town the following summer. With a working title of "Fast and Loud", a deliberate departure from previous works, it also turned into my most minimalist work up to then. It is largely concerned with surface and very little with traditional formal structures; its minimalist surface — finely graded variations of nuance and colour — belies the virtuosity required of both performers. "Untitled" was commissioned by SAMRO Endowment for the National Arts for Robert Pickup and Jill Richards to whom the piece is dedicated. The first performance was given by Robert Pickup (clarinet) and Jean-Jacques Dünki (piano) on 12 July 2002 in the Basílica Menor San Francisco de Asís, Havana (Cuba) during a tour by the Ensemble Opera Nova Zürich; the South African première was given by Robert Pickup (clarinet) and Jill Richards (piano) on 27 August 2004 at Wits University, Johannesburg. It lasts about 19 minutes.

"When you track an animal you must become the animal. Tracking is like dancing; because your body is happy you can feel it in the dance and then you know that the hunting will be good."

This description of hunting by !Nqate Xqamxebe of the !Xo San (Bushmen) in the central Kalahari was the initial inspiration for "Ways of the Dance", after I saw the Foster Brothers' film The Great Dance (beautiful images, lousy music). I tried to evoke something of the fragility of life for this sadly vanishing group of Southern African inhabitants.

"Ways of the Dance" was written for Ancuza Aprodu and Thierry Miroglio who gave the first performance on 24 May 2003 at Tage der Neuen Musik, Bamberg, Germany. It lasts about 15 minutes.

"Ways to Put in the Salt" was written at the request of John Tilbury to be played in a concert with Morton Feldman's "Palais de Mari". In the course of researching Xhosa music (in the Eastern Cape, South Africa), one of Prof David Dargie's informants, Mrs Amelia No-Silence Matiso, told him how the Xhosa people like "to put salt into their songs" to bring the performance to life. Salt may be added rhythmically, melodically and harmonically through the use of cross-rhythms, clap-delay techniques, altered scale tones, parallel melodic and harmonic parts, non-harmonic tones, dissonance, pattern-singing, and a variety of vocal techniques. The now legendary Nofinishi Dywili, whose live and recorded performances are among my most memorable musical experiences, was probably the greatest exponent of uhadi bow music. The day after I had completed the piece I heard from Andrew Tracey that she had died.