White Man Sleeps (1986) is his first foray in the genre. It originated as a piece for two harpsichords, viola da gamba and percussion (1982) and was later, at the Kronos Quartet's request, transcribed for strings. Volans' early language is easily recognisable. It's a unique blend of what we as Westerners perceive to be 'African' sounds and an avant garde idiom. At that point, Volans was searching for a paradigm shift in his own conception of music. He had been an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen for a couple of years, an opportunity to thoroughly immerse himself in a very architectural conception of music in which all aspects of it were systematically parametrised. It led to a situation where people had to preface a 15-minute piece by a 30-minute lecture. In an attempt to get away from this sterile approach he turned to minimalism and the street, folk and nature sounds of his native South Africa. This led to a materialist conception of music, in the tradition of Morton Feldman, where the material qualities of sound dictated the musical logic. With that came a much freer approach to composition. As a result, I'm thinking of Volans belonging to that group of composers such as Riley and Bryars who have a free, associative and narrative approach to music. This is what he writes in the booklet that goes with his Quartets nr. 2 and 3:
When I wrote Hunting : Gathering in 1987, I had grown tired of the 'composition etude' - the one-idea piece. I decided to try and write a piece which included as many different musical fragments as possible, strung together in a pseudo-narrative. To keep the fragments separate, each is written in a different key. As I wanted the different pieces to come and go in a random fashion like images or events on an unplanned journey, my principal problem was how to move from one key to another without any sense of development (i.e. without modulating). I was consciously trying to keep the overall scale of events constant, not allowing one piece to dominate the others unduly - rather than viewing everything against a fixed background. (...) Philip Guston tells of working on a painting in the 1950s where, in an effort to get away from form and into the material, he stood close up to the canvas, working quickly and not stepping back to look until the work was finished. In [The Songlines] I juxtaposed very different kinds of music in the order they occured to me, not thinking ahead, and allowing the material to unfold at its own pace. if there was a sense of form at work, it was covert. However, I didn't use everything that occured to me. I tried to follow Guston's suggestion of 'eliminating' both that which is yours already and that which is not yet yours' - in other words keeping only that which is becoming yours.Now compare this account to Riley's notes accompanying Salome Dances for Peace:
What I do is to make many, many minute sketches of ideas and file them away, and at some point as I'm writing, one of those ideas will be the right one for the time. I trust the fact that anything that occurs to me is related to whatever that occured to me before. All kinds of music that appear in my string quartets are the kinds of music that I personally love, and I don't necessarily keep them in separate cabinets. One of the challenges, in fact, is to bring things you love together to live harmoniously.There is certainly a correspondence in the way these two composer approach their craft: there is a sense of freedom, of respect for the musical material. There is also this evocation of abundance. Composing is invoking a choice algorithm. Exactly the opposite from the architectural composers for whom scarcity is the name of the game. Rather than to select from abundance, they want to make the most from the most minute scraps of musical material.
White Man Sleeps slightly predates Hunting : Gathering but seems to partake of a similar nature. It's, in fact, a suite of five dances. The first thing that strikes are the music's complex, irregular rhythmic patterns. They feel like they are modelled on speech patterns. The rhythm is often incisive, percussive even. There is genuinely fast music too. Then there is very little counterpoint. The music is by and large homophonic. The harmony strikes as very exotic but, as Volans suggests, it is also rather static (with very little modulation). Melodically, the music is very sophisticated with an abundance of remarkable thematic material. Altogether, these features lend the music exceptionally clear contours and a beguiling freshness. It sounds very intricate but at the same time it is also very accessible and invigorating. This is music that potentially could mean something to a wide audience without, however, dumbing itself down.
The Smith Quartet's performance on this CD (long disappeared from the catalogue) is truly excellent. The ensemble is still around and judging from their website they specialise in choice contemporary repertoire.
It's not easy to keep abreast of Volan's more recent development. His music was popular in the mid-1980s and several recording appeared that are now very hard to come by. Those with the Kronos Quartet, however, are still in Nonesuch's catalogue. In the mid-1990s Chandos issued a recording of his Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments. A transitional work, it seemed to me. I haven't particularly taken to it (but certainly need to give it another go). Since I haven't seen or heard any new work by Volans. I was intrigued, therefore, to find a recording of his Sixth Quartet (2000) by the Duke Quartet on YouTube. (I have their reading of the Fourth and Fifth Quartets too). Boy, was I in for a surprise! This is really something completely different: a 25-minute ambient extemporisation built on just a few chords that gives Brian Eno a run for his money. Allegedly Volans wrote it just in a single day. And it's actually not a quartet but an octet as a live quartet is multi-tracked electronically.
Triviality of masterpiece? I'm inclined to give Volans the benefit of the doubt. At first hearing the work does make an impression. In this interview Volans explains what pushed him in this direction. It's basically an extrapolation of his desire to overcome style and form in his work. With the Sixth Quartet he also tried to overcome 'content' (hence also the absence of suggestive title). It's not only a question of technique, but also of ethos:
Basically I think now I’m trying to write guiltlessly. Really without guilt. It’s a hard thing to do (...) you can’t live your life looking over your shoulder. That’s what stifles true creativity. Even Feldman – I mean, I adored the man, but Feldman was part of a macho crowd, the big boys of art. They definitely competed with each other – and he cornered the market in long pieces. I thought, we’ve got to get rid of this too – Feldman guilt! I suppose what I’m also trying to point to is the idea of overcoming testosterone. You don’t have to prove anything.It's an intriguing position, but one likely that comes with its own pitfalls. Is this quest for 'the view from nowhere', for a very particular kind of purity at one point not becoming an ideology also?
Luckily, his late work demonstrates that Volans is keeping his wits about it and not losing himself in Cagean 'mind and sound games'. There is a live recording of his Second Piano Concerto 'Atlantic Crossing' (ah, the title again) on YouTube. Plenty of notes in that one. Here Volans seems to gravitate the kind of postmodern pastiche familiar from John Adams (with some Bernstein quotes thrown in for good measure). From what I hear it is fantastically well done.
Volans is certainly a composer that makes me sit up and think. Apart from that his music strikes me as enormously imaginative. I just hope we'll have some more recordings of both old and recent work (the orchestral piece One Hundred Frames, the Concerto for Double Orchestra, the late quartets) coming our way.
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