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Graham Newcater, South Africa’s most celebrated twelve-tone composer, has donated a number of valuable musical autographs, sketches, photographs, letters and art works to the Documentation Centre for Music. These include autograph scores of his 1984 String Quartet, sketches and autograph score of the Variations de timbres (1967) and youth works and exercises.
Although the single largest collection of Newcater material in South Africa, the donation constitutes only a small part of Newcater’s musical and literary estate, as most of the composer’s original scores reside in the libraries and archives of commissioning bodies like the SABC and SAMRO. With the help of the composer DOMUS is embarking on a project to bring together authorized copies of this material in Stellenbosch to add to the comprehensiveness of the collection.
(May 2007)
Excerpt from Graham Newcater's Variations de Timbres (1967)
Biography
Graham Newcater was born in Johannesburg on the 3rd September, 1941 but had most of his education in Durban where the family moved to in 1948. There he ended his schooling by studying mechanical engineering at the Natal Technical College during which time he studied music privately, having clarinet lessons and postal lessons in composition with Arnold van Wyk who was at that time lecturer at the University of Cape Town. Returning to Johannesburg in 1958 Newcater worked in the motor industry and continued his music studies, this time having composition lessons with Gideon Fagan. In 1962 he won a scholarship issued by the South African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO) which took him to London for two years study at the Royal College of Music, studying composition under Peter Racine Fricker and conducting in his second year under Sir Adrian Boult. In 1965 Newcater was back in Johannesburg where he worked for a short time at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) but in 1966 returned to London where he won the Ralph Vaughan Williams grant for that year on the recommendation of Howard Ferguson, Robert Simpson and Humphrey Searle with whom he studied privately for six months on the strength of this grant. At the end of 1966 Newcater returned for the final time to Johannesburg where he again worked for a brief time at the SABC.
On the strength of the success in Johannesburg and elsewhere of his First Symphony (begun in London in 1964 and completed on his return) he was commissioned by the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal (PACT) to compose the score for the ballet Raka based on the poem by N.P. van Wyk Louw. This ballet proved such a success that it was soon made into a film which was distributed worldwide by 20th Century Fox.
Apart from Raka, he has had other successful overseas performances, notably his First Symphony in Paris and Brussels and his Philharmonic Overture in Asunción and Montevideo. Newcater is a 12-tone composer and his most important works are:
(Biographical information supplied by Graham Newcater, 2 November 2009)
DOMUS received a donation of Newcater autographs from a James Woods, a friend of the composer since his stay in England in the 1960s. The autographs include Newcater's Concert Overture, Variations for Orchestra, Symphonies no. 1, 2 and 3 (includes sketches) and Three Pieces for Violin and Piano.
James Woods on the Newcater donation:
"When Graham Newcater came to England in the early 1960s he took a room in an apartment block in London, at 15 Rugby Mansions, Bishop Kings Road. My parents, who lived at number 13 immediately below, were very friendly with Mrs Williams, Graham's landlady. So I came to know Graham through Mrs Williams. He and I had a common interest in contemporary classical music, he as a professional practitioner, I as a keen listener.
And we had a tenuous link, in that one of Graham's teachers, Peter Racine Fricker, had recently been the recipient of a commission from the brewery company, Arthur Guinness, for whom my father worked and who was involved in the commission (for, I believe, the third symphony). I rapidly came to admire Graham's music and enjoy his company.
We even talked about collaborating on an opera (on Caligula) for which I would write the libretto; but I hadn’t written more than a couple of scenes before Graham returned finally to South Africa and I discovered I had no talent for drama. I was working for British Rail in operational research during Graham’s stays in England, and continued working for the railways – either as an employee or as a consultant – until I retired in 1996 at the age of 57. I married my wife Lis in 1976."
(E-mail from James Woods, 14 March 2010)
(June 2010)
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Marie Jorritsma is a senior lecturer in the Department of Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology at the University of South Africa (Unisa) in Pretoria. She is also the secretary of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM) and the Reviews Editor of the journal Muziki. On 18 September Jorritsma addressed students and staff in the Fismer Hall on the church music of the coloured community of Graaff-Reinet in the Karoo. The paper entitled ‘The hidden histories in the church music of a South African coloured community’, was based on research she conducted for her doctoral dissertation, ‘Sonic Spaces: Inscribing “Coloured” Voices in the Karoo’ (2006), written at the University of Pennsylvania. Also present at the lecture was musician and Solms Delta Museum consultant Alex van Heerden. Together with the two sisters An-Lize en Letitia Davids, Van Heerden gave a live illustration of some koortjies sung in the community of the True Evangelical Church in Atlantis. Jorritsma also referred in her lecture to the koortjies that characterize congregational singing in Graaff-Reinet.
Barbara Titus is an Assistant Professor in musicology at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Utrecht University. She is also the Managing Editor of the Dutch Journal of Music Theory. In South Africa she has been based as a Research Fellow at the University of Kwazulu-Natal. In 2007 she started a project on global representations of South African maskanda music at the Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC), Utrecht University. Her talk on 16 October was entitled ‘Maskanda overseas: Some preliminary enquiries’. She discussed how maskanda has become ‘world music’, and how this transformation affects the musical and intellectual signs and narratives of maskanda.
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The activities of Obelisk Music ceased in the early 21st century, although the organisation was never officially dissolved. With the help of the Music Library, DOMUS acquired the scores, recordings and documents of Obelisk Music in July 2008. Not only does this mean that music and recorded music previously unavailable to students, researchers and performers can now be consulted, it also means that the documentary material of Obelisk Music is available to researchers. This is important, as the collection provides a perspective on South African art music practice in the last decade of the twentieth century in the capital city of a South Africa that was undergoing the most profound political changes in generations.
(August 2008)
Stefans Grové is the most celebrated of the first generation of South African composers. He is the only South African composer to date on which a book critical essays has appeared (A Composer in Africa: Essays on the Life and Work of Stefans Grové, Sun Press, 2006), he has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of the Free State and Pretoria and in 2008 he was given honorary membership of the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns. Grové was the first South African recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship and taught for fourteen years at the world-renowned Peabody Conservatoire. He has lived in Pretoria since 1973, where he taught as professor in composition at the University of Pretoria until his retirement in 1987. He is still composer in residence at this university.
In May this year, Grové donated sketches, autographs and printed scores of nearly one hundred of his works to DOMUS for conservation, cataloguing and use for research and performance. The collection contains, with only few exceptions, Grové’s entire work list to date, which means that researchers and musicians will for the first time be able to view and study the composer’s entire oeuvre in one place. The music now housed at DOMUS includes previously unknown youth works: an untitled orchestral piece written in his matric year (1941), a Fantasy for piano and string orchestra (1939) first performed by Dodds Miller as conductor and the Cape Town radio orchestra, a Ballet suite for two pianos (1944), his first string quartet written under the guidance of W.H. Bell in Cape Town (1945) and a Sonatina for clarinet and piano (1946).
Apart from works from Grové’s neo-classical period (including the autograph of his 1955 Flute Sonata recorded by Jean-Pierre Rampal), and his much discussed African style that was already inaugurated with the ballet Waratha (1976), this donation also contains unusual finds. One of these is the stylistic imitations (1967-1995) performed by Grové to great acclaim in America and inspired by Rosemary Brown’s ‘Beyond the Fringe’ recording of 1966. This music, like the imitation piece Cantata Profana (of which the text was reportedly written during a beer drinking session), opens new perspectives on the legendary humour and wit that distinguishes Grové’s music from those of his more melancholic, neo-romantic South African peers. Another unusual work in this collection is the un-orchestrated score of an historical opera, Die bose wind (1983). Based on folk songs, the opera takes its theme from the free burgher rebellion and is situated in Cape Town (somewhere between 1779 and 1783). This work was commissioned by the then Cape Board for the Performing Arts (CAPAB) and has never been performed.
The Grové Collection is one of the most important music collections in South Africa. The donation of this material to DOMUS means that Stellenbosch University is well-poised to become an important centre for research on one of South Africa’s greatest composers.
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The current Eoan Board has entrusted a comprehensive collection of documents relating to the history of the Eoan Group to DOMUS for conservation, cataloguing and research. The agreement was signed on 28 January 2008 in Stellenbosch by the acting Head of Department of the Department of Music and Vice-Dean (Arts), Prof. Sandra Klopper, and Mr. Sjafiek Rajab on behalf of Eoan and was collected and transported from the Joseph Stone Theatre in Athlone to DOMUS in Stellenbosch by a team of students and DOMUS staff on 23 February 2008. (March 2008) |
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Following Madosini's repeated request for assistance in setting up a structure that would enable her to teach traditional Xhosa instruments and transfer her indigenous cultural knowledge to a younger generation, the Department of Music at Stellenbosch University (DOMUS) is hosting her as visiting guest – together with an assistant and translator – at its Stellenbosch premises from 6 - 10 October 2009. |
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Programme Tuesday, 6 October 2009 Wednesday, 7 October 2009 Thursday, 8 October 2009 Friday, 9 October 2009 Saturday, 10 October
Photograph: Lunga Kama: |
(October 2009)
In 2009, with the collaboration of Professor Christine Lucia, DOMUS applied for and obtained a National Research Foundation KIC Grant to host a morning symposium and lunch in celebration of the sixtieth birthday of composer Kevin Volans. Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Music, Christine Lucia, convened the symposium programme consisting of contributions by Prof. Jean-Pierre de la Porte (Institute for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Infrastructure in Johannesburg), Jill Richards (pianist), Theo Herbst (University of Stellenbosch) and Mark Brand (Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University). The symposium was compellingly introduced by Lucia, who has been working on a Volans book for some years. Symposium proceedings on Sunday 16 August were preceded by a KEMUS performance of Volans’s first six piano etudes for piano by Jill Richards the previous evening in the Endler Hall.
Richards’s simposium contribution the next day consisted of informal ruminations on Volans’s piano music and her relationship with this piano music and its composer. De la Porte’s paper focussed on Volans and pictorialism and departed from his analysis of Volans’s 1986 Darmstadt address. Herbst and Brand teamed up to provide a discussion of a detailed computer-assisted wave analysis of short audio samples from the two versions of Volans’s early composition White Man Sleeps.
DOMUS obtained enough KIC funding from the NRF to help sponsor a special edition of the accredited journal SAMUS (South African Music Studies) of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM), which will be based on proceedings from the symposium and will be dedicated to Kevin Volans.
(August 2009)
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1 - Theo Herbst and Mark Brand
2 - Jean-Pierre de la Porte and Christine Lucia
3 - Kevin Volans (Photograph by Nick Miller)
4 - Jill Richards
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The aim of the workshop in Stellenbosch was to introduce students to the conceptual strategies of set theory as an analytical system that could provide insight into especially post-tonal musical languages. Set theory is not generally taught in South Africa, but is particularly useful for the analysis of much twentieth century and contemporary South African art music. Because of this DOMUS took the initiative to encourage this kind of analytical discourse about South African music.
(April 2009) |
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Auctorial Reflections on Recent Compositions
These are the words of the renowned composer, John Simon, during a departmental colloquium on 2 February 2009. John Simon was born in Cape Town in 1944. He studied composition at the Trinity College of Music and the Royal College of Music in London under James Patten and John Lambert. His works have been performed and broadcast in South Africa, the United Kingdom and Europe. Until 2005 he was Composer in Residence to the KwaZulu-Natal Phiharmonic Orchestra (the first of its kind in South Africa) and lecturer in orchestration at the School of Music, University of KwaZulu-Natal. Recent engagements include the orchestration of KwaZulu-Natal composer Phelelani Mnomiya’s ‘Zizi Lethu’ (‘Our Hope’), which led to a new composition for concert orchestra, ‘Dance to Freedom’ (premiered at the Cape Town International Festival, November 2007), as well as to the composition of his most recent work, ‘A Peal of Bells’ for string orchestra, tubular bells and celesta, together with an alternative version for cello and piano. During a visit to DOMUS on 2 February 2009 a number of valuable and rare recordings were donated by the composer to DOMUS. These recordings include amongst others, a Symphony, Dover Beach (a cappella setting of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’), two Piano Concerti, a Violin Concerto, a Requiem for orchestra, a symphonic suite (Children of the Sun) and song cycle, ‘Portrait of Emily’. Notable also is his Threnody 2 for strings (dedicated to Steve Biko), which was a response to the situation in apartheid South Africa. This work was under embargo at the SABC until 1993.
(February 2009) |
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At the invitation of DOMUS, the composer and music theorist Dr. Hannes Taljaard presented a workshop on set theory from 6-9 April 2009. Taljaard’s interest in set theory developed out of his activities as a composer. To date he is the only South African academic to have published work on set theory (see his ‘Interpreting Tonality in Three Compositions for Orchestra’ on the music of Peter Klatzow in SAMUS 24, 2004, 29-64). Over the past two years Taljaard was closely involved with two set theory analyses presented as master’s studies at Stellenbosch University on the work of the South African-born composer Priaulx Rainier. These studies by Esthea Kruger and Chris van Rhyn (on the Barbaric Dance Suite for piano and the Requiem for choir and tenor soloist, respectively), represent groundbreaking work on aspects of Rainier’s oeuvre that have not yet been the object of thorough and systematic scholarly scrutiny..jpg)
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