Comunicación

Michael Blake was born in Cape Town on 31 Octo- ber 1951. He studied at the South African College of Music in Cape Town, the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg (BMus) and University of London Goldsmiths College (MMus). In 2000 he was awarded a doctorate by Rhodes Uni- versity. From 1977 to 1997, when he returned to South Africa, he was based in London as composer, pianist and teacher. He is Artistic Director of New Music Indaba – South Africa’s only new music festi- val – and President of the South African Section of the ISCM. This interview was conducted by e-mail

from 15 August 2001 to 14 January 2002, during which time Michael conscientiously kept sending answers from his travels in Argentina, Japan, Eu- rope, England and, from time to time, Cape Town. Interview with Michael Blake on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday

Stephanus Muller: Tell me about your parents –

I’m intrigued about the 50 per cent Niewoudt in your veins, and also how a ‘Capie’ like you ended up at Wits. By the way, where were you born in Cape Town?

Michael Blake: Easy. I was born in Rondebosch, not

all that far from my Cape Town flat. My mother, Mary Niewoudt (her mother was du Plessis), sec- ond youngest of seven children, corresponded with George Blake of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (Northumberland) during World War II, and they married in Cape Town after the war. My father emi- grated to South Africa (if you’ve been to Newcastle you’ll appreciate the attraction of Cape Town). To- wards the end of my school career my father changed jobs and that entailed a move to Johannesburg. I tagged along and decided to stay there for the time being and study at Wits. Wits was a small depart- ment then, with a useless Head of Department (whom we eventually got rid off – student power!), but some very fine lecturers such as Geoffrey Chew (now at Royal Holloway), who introduced me to the music of the Middle Ages, Adolph Hallis (one of the finest pianists and teachers in South Africa, and with

whom I studied for three of my university years) and June Schneider, who was a great inspiration and tireless supporter of new music and new ideas. Fel- low students included people like Kevin Volans.

SM: How did Hallis teach and what did you learn

from him? Were you then mainly a pianist, or were you already composing?

MB: Hallis was a link with ‘the great’ piano tradi-

tion – I know that sounds like a cliché – and I learnt a great deal from him about piano technique and about playing music of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With his Viennese background he was also a link with the Second Viennese School, and I studied some pieces by Schoenberg and Berg with him. He had also been a great promoter of new music in his earlier years in London, mounting regular concerts of then new works at the Wigmore Hall. He also commissioned South African composers such as John Joubert and was quite a prolific composer himself. I’ve never heard anything of his, though I’ve been told it comes very strongly from a nineteenth-century (tonal) tra- dition. He was a mischievous, rebellious kind of soul and I liked that. We disagreed on certain things like Hindemith – I did then, and still do, find Hindemith incredibly boring and academic, and thought that his piano sonatas were rubbish, whereas Hallis thought Hindemith a great twentieth-century com- poser. Once, probably to test his tolerance level, I brought Stockhausen’s Klavierstück IX to a lesson (that’s the one that starts with a chord repeated over a hundred times, then about fifty times, and so on), and he stopped me before we got to the end of the first hundred and suggested we look at some- thing else. I think he dined out on that incident for a long time, because I heard about it from many people. But he was really the finest teacher in Johannesburg at that time, and I was greatly in- spired by his teaching, knowledge and his philoso- phy.

I was already composing, but I suppose I was more of a closet composer. I started soon after my first

piano lesson at the age of ten, but I don’t recall anything I wrote until I was well into my teens, and those were mostly pieces in the style of Bach, or Mozart, or Chopin. And then I discovered twenti- eth-century music when I got to university, and all hell was let loose. Some of my early ‘experiments’ were piano duos (safety in numbers!) involving ev- erything you could possibly do with the instrument, not much melody or harmony, but lots of clusters and playing on the strings, a cadenza for the pedals, and so on – piano hooliganism one might have called it. It was also a chance to experiment with the fash- ionable graphic notation of that time. I never wrote sonatinas and fugues and song-cycles like all good composition students were supposed to do, mainly because I never really had a composition teacher. Nobody (at Wits) ever showed us how to take all the dreary style studies we learnt and become a postmodern or even a post-war composer. Some- how we had to learn to compose by osmosis. So I quietly experimented with all sorts of things, and I think it took me longer than many other people to find a way to compose with which I was truly com- fortable.

All this time I was playing a lot of contemporary piano music (Messiaen, Schoenberg, Webern, Stockhausen, Cage, and some South African com- posers) and in my final year at university I started a new music group, The Orion Ensemble, which also performed Feldman, Bussotti and Ives, among oth- ers. and my own music. We played in art galleries, various university venues, and in 1977 Mannie Manim gave us a regular platform at the Market Theatre.

SM: It strikes me that you seemed to have had quite

a lot of new music to hand in what must have been the early seventies. Was the cultural isolation al- ready beginning to bite then, or was the music de- partment largely isolated from political issues? Which brings me to the question of whether you were politically involved at all at Wits, and why and when did you leave for London?

to engage with the pieces and explore what com- posers were doing elsewhere. The players – from orchestras, among other things – were sometimes difficult. Some were very interested and support- ive, many thought I was crazy. There was very little money, so I had to find people who would play for a few beers and a pizza.

Being a composer in South Africa was always such an isolated thing, and (white) South African com- posers were unpolitical and politically unaware. When composers such as Stockhausen and Feldman came in the seventies and eighties it gave compos- ers a real lift, as did events like the now legendary Adcock-Ingram Composers Conference at Wits in the early eighties. That’s when the so-called Young Turks surfaced. But whatever became of most of them?

Like many of my contemporaries I took part in stu- dent demonstrations at Wits – against some of the most draconian government measures ever – and presented or took part in musical events under the aegis of Aquarius (the cultural wing of Nusas). I was completely unaware of what black composers were doing – their work came as a revelation much later – though I listened to a lot of black South African jazz. In my school days when I was so unstimulated by Christian National Education I used to listen to the jazz programmes on Radio Bantu every day and go to the Cape Town Art Centre in Green Point on Sunday nights where one heard Abdullah Ibrahim, Winston Mann and others. In 1976 I attended the summer courses in Darmstadt (with master classes presented by Ligeti, Kagel and Aloys Kontarsky) and Dartington (Maxwell Davies and Charles Rosen). I remember the thrill of hav- ing a short piece workshopped by the Fires of Lon- don. I also got to meet some of the composers I’d been playing. I met Stanley Glasser who immedi- ately asked me to house-sit for a fortnight while he and his family went to France on holiday. It was that meeting that led me to study at Goldsmiths even-

In 1977 Kevin Volans came over on his field trips, and stayed with me and was very enthusiastic about the possibilities for South African composers who were interested enough to take a look at African music. But almost no one was interested at the time. I had been conscripted into the army when I left school and was also called up for a number of camps during university. In 1976 my unit was on standby during the Soweto riots although I was, in fact, out of the country, and in 1977 I had an invitation from General Magnus Malan to join the ranks of the leg- endary boys on the border. I declined and went into exile in October 1977. The last piece I wrote on South African soil was called Night Musics. It had two performances at the Market Theatre by my own ensemble. One day I’ll get it out and dust it off . . . I never completed another work in South Africa until a few years ago.

SM: Why did you leave South Africa in 1977? Could

it have had something to do with 1976?

MB: As I mentioned before, it was a combination of

factors, the main one being to escape from a very claustrophobic political, social and musical environ- ment. The country was completely mad at the time. Plus I had the military breathing down my neck. Because I was able to take out a British passport and because I didn’t have enough in the way of for- eign languages, Britain was a natural destination. Furthermore, as I said before Stanley Glasser had encouraged me to come and study in his depart- ment in London. The musical scene in South Africa was very parochial, and in many ways it still is, but I really wanted to get out into the wide world, and have the experience of meeting and working with composers and performers from other countries.

SM: If you learnt composition by osmosis at Wits,

did you study composition more formally during your 20 years in London?

in London, though I attended master classes from time to time, and showed my work privately to one or two people. At Goldsmiths I did an MMus in analysis. I was appointed to the part-time staff to direct the Goldsmiths New Music Ensemble, which gave students the opportunity to play some of the modern classics by Schoenberg, Webern, Ives and Varèse as well as more recent work. I also wrote them a piece at their request.

SM: Tell me about London New Music, and also

what you understand ‘experimental music’ to be?

MB: There was an ensemble before London New

Music called Metanoia, which developed from an informal duo with a trumpeter, Jonathan Impett (who had been a fellow MMus student). Later we added clarinet/saxophone, percussion and cello as well as a sound technician who was a member of the group. Jonathan Impett and I, as co-directors, wrote pieces for the group and we commissioned people like Michael Finnissy to write new works. Although we played twentieth-century solo and chamber works for various combinations, our main aim was to explore live electronics and pieces with pre-recorded tape. I wrote two pieces for the group:

Taireva which I worked on intermittently between

1978 and 1983 and Self Delectative Songs dating from 1986. For the earlier piece I even commissioned a kudu horn from Andrew Tracey, which was seized by customs at Heathrow Airport as being livestock. As you will gather from the titles, in these pieces I was exploring African compositional techniques and apart from disillusion with the technology of the time, I was not able to reconcile the technology with what I was doing. I became less and less inter- ested in the kind of music we were programming. Ensemble politics prompted me to leave the group in the summer of 1986 and I immediately began to form an ensemble of which I would be sole director as well as pianist and which would programme the kind of radical, experimental pieces that were not being heard at that time, and which would commis- sion the kind of composers that I felt needed a plat- form.

So by experimental music I mean work which is outside of the twentieth-century mainstream and which comes principally from or is influenced by the ‘American experimental tradition’ – Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, John Cage, Morton Feldman, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and so on; and in Britain, Cornelius Cardew, Gavin Bryars, Howard Skempton and John White. My own work was moving more and more in this direction at the time. Kevin Volans having rejected the Stockhausen aesthetic after many years of study with the man, had been look- ing to Cage and Feldman in the late 1970s (and became associated with the New Simplicity move- ment in Germany as a result). A lot of experimen- tal music explores only one idea, or one parameter, and much of it is non-goal directed, cyclic, mini- mal, postminimal, postmodern, chance, indetermi- nate, and so on.

London New Music collaborated with many young composers and developed long-term relationships with a number of them (Matteo Fargion, Chris Newman, Christopher Fox, Gerald Barry, Howard Skempton, Bunita Marcus, Tom Johnson and Bar- bara Monk Feldman) over a period of ten years. We played Cage, Feldman, Ives, Cowell, Christian Wolff and the complete music (in four concerts) of Ruth Crawford Seeger. For our debut concert in January 1987 Kevin Volans wrote Into Darkness. Generally, we had a good reception from those critics that appreciated the experimental aesthetic. We did a number of British Council tours to places like Ger- many, the Netherlands and the former Czechoslo- vakia. We made several studio recordings for BBC Radio 3 and recorded several film soundtracks. There were a number of other composer-run groups in London presenting this kind of alternative work and I often commiserated with these colleagues about the difficulties we encountered. But I felt it was essential to promote this aesthetic in a culture where all things ‘Thatcherite, glossy and beautiful’ were dominating the arts more and more, and go- ing down a very depressing and dangerous road. Music education was taking a battering too. As Lon-

don musical life became more ‘yuppified’ in the late 1980s and the 1990s, it became very difficult to get funding from the Arts Council or even to hire a high-profile venue unless the programming was trendy or ‘sexy’ which was the Royal Festival Hall marketing department’s cretinous approach to packaging music.

After ten interesting years I disbanded London New Music in 1996, and in 1997 I made two trips back to South Africa – the second with a programme of Brit- ish experimental piano music – and as you know this led to my eventual permanent return in Janu- ary 1998.

SM: What made you decide to return to South Af-

rica permanently in 1997?

MB: I decided in August 1997 and returned in Janu-

ary 1998. But perhaps I should just fill in a few gaps here, if you don’t mind. As far back as 1989/1990, when my first marriage ended, I was thinking of leaving England and moving to Europe in search of a more inspiring climate for new music, and away from the materialistic and mundane place that En- gland had become under Thatcher. But I fell in love again, with an English pianist, sometime early in 1991 and so my plans to move to Europe were never realised. However, I did leave London for a year in 1993/4 and lived in Brighton (with quite a bit of commuting to London) and during that period I embarked on a group of works, all of which fea- tured the piano and all of which were written for my lover Sally Rose.

First was a piano concerto in 1993/4 with the title

Out of the Darkness – taken from a statement made

by Archbishop Tutu at the time of South Africa’s first democratic election (which was when the piece was completed). He said something like ‘after four decades of repression, we have finally emerged out of the darkness’. And although I wasn’t consciously writing a political piece, somehow that statement resonated with my feelings, and given the optimis- tic mood and upbeat ending of the piece, it seemed

to be the perfect title. It was premièred in June that year with the Brighton

Chamber Orchestra. It’s never been played since, because I’ve been planning to revise it drastically ever since then. Perhaps it’ll be ready for 2004 . . . Later in 1994 I wrote my (believe it or not) first- ever large-scale (well large-ish) solo piano piece,

French Suite, which has become one of my most-

performed pieces. After the initial performances by the dedicatee, I started playing it myself, and then Jill Richards and Chris Duigan have taken it up in recent years, as well as John Tilbury and others. Finally in 1995/6 I wrote a piece for two pianos called Reverie (inspired by Olive Schreiner’s Story

of an African Farm and San rock paintings). This

was premiered during the now legendary Africa 95 Festival in London (which ran on into 1996) at the ICA by Sally Rose and another wonderful pianist, Australian Tony Gray. I have been lucky to have so many fine pianists from all over the world playing my piano works.

At the end of 1996, I was ready to leave England, and my preferred destination was South Africa. Early in 1997 I made a private visit to South Africa to see first-hand what was happening on all fronts. I had been yearning for the South African landscape, the sunshine, the people – for 20 years! I subsequently received invitations to six universities to give a lec- ture-recital that I was doing at the time on experi- mental piano music from Britain (including myself