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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2022
This article considers if and how the five string quartets of the South African composer Michael Blake, written between 2001 and 2014, could be considered as contributing to the compositional and discursive construct that is ‘African art music’. ‘African art music’ has often been evoked in connection with the compositional practices of West African composers especially but has received little consideration and scrutiny of its possible applications to South African composition. The political and artistic isolation of South Africa from the rest of Africa during much of the twentieth century is an obvious reason why this has been the case. But there is also the possibility that white South African composers during and after apartheid have engaged in composition from different intellectual and aesthetic starting points, compared to their African counterparts, due to the specific kind of coloniality they inhabit. The five string quartets afford a perspective on how Michael Blake negotiated the continuities of compositional authority and universalised commitment to a traditional Western sound ideal in the string quartet, with the self-awareness that white composition in post-apartheid South Africa arguably requires.
1 For more historical and biographical context, see Muller, Stephanus, ‘Miniature Blueprints, Spider Stratagems: a Michael Blake Retrospective at 60’, The Musical Times, 152, no. 1917 (Winter, 2011), pp. 71–92Google Scholar.
2 See in this regard Blake's ‘The Emergence of a South African Experimental Aesthetic’, in Proceedings of the 25th Annual Congress of the Musicological Society of Southern Africa (1998), pp. 1–6.
3 Agawu, Kofi, The African Imagination in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 135CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Euba, Akin, ‘Criteria for the Evaluation of New African Art Music’, Transition, 49 (1975), pp. 46–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Euba, Akin, Essays on Music in Africa, vol. 1 (Bayreuth: Iwalewahaus, 1988), pp. 93–101Google Scholar; see also Uzoigwe, Joshua, Akin Euba: an Introduction to the Life and Music of a Nigerian Composer (Bayreuth: Eckhard Breitinger, 1992), pp. 70–72Google Scholar.
5 I have written about this in an unpublished paper, ‘How Is South African Art Music (Not) African Art Music?’, delivered at the International Symposium in Honour of Akin Euba in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2019, considering it via the thought of Souleymane Bachir Diagne, and specifically his ideas of exile, rhythms, co-naissance, convergence and hybridity. For more on Diagne's thought on these concepts, see African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, tr. Chike Jeffers (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2012). In South Africa, the concept ‘African art music’ has recently been used as an analytical framing device by Jeffrey Brukman in ‘‘Creative Ethnomusicology’ and African Art Music: a Close Musical Reading of Wood and Clay, Kundi Dreams and Umrhubhe Geeste by Anthony Caplan’, African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music, 10, no. 3, pp. 142–63, and in ‘ ‘Less a New African Music than an African New Music’: A Close Musical Analysis of Bongani Ndodana-Breen's Emhlabeni’, Musicology Australia, 40, no. 1, (2018), pp. 1–25.
6 Irele, Abiola, ‘Is African Music Possible?’, Transition, 61 (1993), pp. 56–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. p. 59.
7 Agawu, The African Imagination in Music, p. 324.
8 Ibid., p. 325.
9 Muller, ‘How Is South African Art Music (Not) African Art Music?’.
10 Graubart, Michael, ‘Michael Blake: String Quartets Nos. 1 & 2; Piano Quintet. Fitzwilliam String Quartet, Michaele Blake (pno). Michael Blake Edition 002 (MBED Records, MBED 002)’, Tempo, 67, no. 264, April 2013, p. 96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Ibid.
12 Michael Blake (producer), Nightingale String Quartet/Nofinishi Dywili, The Bow Project. 2010, TUTL Records, FKT 044. See also Muller, ‘Miniature Blueprints, Spider Strategems’, pp. 82–84.
13 Michael Blake, Score of String Quartet No. 3 (‘Nofinishi’), BDE953 (Aylesbury: Bardic Edition, 2009).
14 Dargie, Dave, Xhosa Music: Its Techniques and Instruments, with a Collection of Songs (Cape Town: David Philip, 1988), pp. 2007–12Google Scholar. Dargie's field recordings of Dywili's performances are held in the Dave Dargie Collection of the International Library of African Music (ILAM), at Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa.
15 Dargie, Dave, ‘The Redoubtable Nofinishi Dywili, Uhadi Master and Xhosa Song Leader’, South African Music Studies (SAMUS), 30/31, pp. 1–30Google Scholar, esp. pp. 14 and 15.
16 Muller, ‘Miniature Blueprints, Spider Stratagems’, pp. 86–87.
17 Agawu, The African Imagination in Music, p. 266.
18 See, for example, Agawu's discussion of music by David Fanshaw, Steve Reich and György Ligeti, in The African Imagination in Music, pp. 318–24.
19 See in this regard Muller, ‘Miniature Blueprints, Spider Stratagems’, pp. 59–60.
20 See, for instance, the section on ‘The Heritage of Bartok [sic]’ in Euba's J. H. Kwabena Nketia: Bridging Musicology and Composition, a Study in Creative Ethnomusicology (Point Richmond: MRI Press, 2014), pp. 27–30. In his ‘The Challenge of African Art Music’, Circuit: Musiques contemporaines, 21, no. 2 (2011), pp. 49–64, Agawu calls Euba ‘a disciple of Bartók’, p. 51.
21 Agawu lists in this category of transcription as appropriation both Volans and the Ugandan composer Justinian Tamusuza. See The African Imagination in Music, p. 319. Lucia's, Christine ‘The Landscape within: Kevin Volans and the String Quartet’, South African Music Studies (SAMUS), 29 (2009), pp. 1–30Google Scholar, provides interesting ground for comparison with the observations on Blake's string quartets. Her remarks on the ‘core elements or procedures’ in these quartets (interlocking, asymmetry, repetition, patterning, high register, soft dynamics, overlapping sounds, harmonics and open strings) provide a fitting index from which to consider the influence Volans exercised on Blake's string-quartet writing.
22 Michael Blake, Score of String Quartet No. 4, BDE1013 (Aylesbury: Bardic Edition, 2016).
23 Ibid.
24 Agawu, The African Imagination in Music, p. 334.