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TROPISMS – A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE GENESIS OF A COMPOSITION, STRING QUARTET NO. 5, DANCERS ON A PLANE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2021

Kevin Volans
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Abstract

This article considers the nature of the relationship between composers and musicologists and explores the aesthetic roots and ideas of my 5th String Quartet, Dancers on a Plane, which has recently been the subject of a musicological study.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Information
Tempo , Volume 76 , Issue 299 , January 2022 , pp. 67 - 78
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

An updated version of this article was published in January 2022, all of the corrections were minor typographical changes.

References

1 https://sounds.bl.uk/World-and-traditional-music/Kevin-Volans-South-Africa

2 Blacking, John, Venda Children's Songs: A Study in Ethnomusicological Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995; originally published Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

3 The Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People. 2002, Nonesuch Records, 79704-2. Recorded in Zimbabwe by Paul Berliner and originally released in 1973.

4 Tracey, Andrew, How to Play the Mbira Dza Vadzimu (Roodepoort: The International Library of African Music, 1970)Google Scholar.

5 In 2004, for example, although aware that the piece had been withdrawn, Martin Scherzinger wrote about it again in a chapter in the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music: ‘In his piece Mbira, for example, Volans simply presents ten full minutes of basically unaltered transcriptions of the mbira tune Nyamaropa (performed by Gwanzura Gwenzi) for two retuned harpsichords.’ Scherzinger, ‘Art Music in a Cross-Cultural Context: The Case of Africa’, in Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, eds Anthony Pople and Nicholas Cook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 548–613.

6 Fourie, William, ‘Between the Musical Anti- and Post-Apartheid: Structures of Crisis in Kevin Volans's String Quartet No. 5, Dancers on a Plane’, South African Music Studies, 39 (2019), p. 132Google Scholar.

7 Fourie, ‘Between the Musical Anti- and Post-Apartheid’, p. 152.

8 Fourie, ‘Between the Musical Anti- and Post-Apartheid’, p. 156.

9 Andrew Tracey and Laina Gumboreshumba, ‘Transcribing the Venda Tshikona Reedpipe Dance’, African Music, 9, no. 3, pp. 25–39.

10 See, for example, Blacking, John, ‘Problems of Pitch, Pattern and Harmony in the Ocarina Music of the Venda’, African Music, 2, no. 2 (1959)Google Scholar; Blacking observes that ‘The tone and pitch of wind instruments may vary considerably because of such factors as changes in temperature or in the position of the player's mouth in relation to the embouchure’, adding that ‘Venda boys were not at all disturbed if the pitch of a single tshipotoliyo varied from one performance to another, even when the interval was as large as a whole tone’.

11 Fourie, ‘Between the Musical Anti- and Post-Apartheid’, p. ?.

12 Tracey and Gumboreshumba, ‘Transcribing the Venda Tshikona Reedpipe Dance’, p. 28.

13 Denis Diderot, Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, 1796, in Diderot's Selected Writings, ed. Lester G. Crocker, trans. Derek Coleman (New York: Macmillan, 1966).