‘These are like sketches. They’re fully formed pieces, but they are like my workshop,” says composer Michael Blake of the piano music on his new CD, performed by the internationally acclaimed South African pianist Jill Richards. And, indeed, the pieces on Complete Works for Solo Piano 1994-2004 provide an insight into Blake’s compositional language and is a handy introduction for those coming to his work for the first time.
Born in Cape Town in 1951, Blake studied at Wits, Goldsmiths College in London and at Rhodes University. He moved to London in 1977 and stayed there for two decades, during which he performed with the “electroacoustic” group Metanoia and founded the London New Music ensemble.
He is now the director of the New Music Indaba in South Africa and has taught and had his works performed all over the world. His piano concerto, subtitled Rain Dancing, premiered in Johannesburg earlier this year, the latest work in an oeuvre that works across a wide variety of often unconventional instruments and formations.
Hence the CD of piano pieces is a useful — and eminently listenable — introduction to Blake. It ranges from an early composition for piano, the two-part French Suite (18th-century harpsichord meets the African mbira) through the Satiesque Three Toys to the more recent Oh Clare. One piece, Nightsongs, even reworks bits of Cole Porter songs (all, except one, with the word “night” in the title) into a new work.
“Each piece was requested by someone for something quite specific,” says Blake. The first of the Toy pieces was requested by the Evenings of New Music festival in Bratislava, which celebrated Erik Satie that year; the CD presents that first Toy and two more, to echo Satie’s three Gymnopédies. Oh Clare was requested by Australian pianist Antony Gray, who was making an album of pieces based on Bach. The title is an anagram of “chorale” and the piece is based on the Bach chorale Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, in the Myra Hess arrangement for piano.
“Because I’m a pianist and I’ve learned and played the traditional repertoire, I find it difficult to write for piano without drawing on all that tradition, so I constantly avoided that. Then, in 1994, someone asked me for a piano piece, and I deliberately wrote something that was not pianistic in the traditional sense. It’s more like kora music from West Africa than anything else.”
The way Blake uses the piano is one reminder of the African music on which he draws — and blends with the American experimental tradition that opens the way for such freedom (the music of Charles Ives and John Cage particularly). But that is not his only African resource. Blake develops harmonies from those of the Southern African uhadi, a bow attached to a calabash that resonates when the bowstring is struck.
The uhadi, says Blake, “has just two chords, but with all the overtones, for me there’s enough there to be able to do what I want to do. With that in place, I can work on the rhythm and other elements of the music. The rhythmic element is one of the most important in my work. It’s rhythm that really binds my pieces together, that articulates them, but not in an obvious way.”
Western art music, casually called “classical” music, has by now investigated every melodic and harmonic possibility, from the well-tempered clavier of Bach to the total serialism of Boulez. In the 20th century it was rhythm that came into its own as a new arena for development, and here Blake’s work joins the Western mainstream.
“Trying to mediate African and European music,” he says, “I realised it was the American experimental tradition that had made it possible — because of those freedoms, because it was not teleological.”
Of that tradition, Cage, of course, was the great revolutionary. But Ives is the protean forebear, a maverick who lived from 1874 to 1954 but most of whose important work was done in the early part of the 20th century. Ives “gave composers freedom”, as Blake puts it.
Ives was classically trained, but his sonic world absorbs many different kinds of music — in one famous instance, he creates the impression of “two brass bands marching past each other, playing different tunes”.
For himself, says Blake, “I love having all these different musics grinding together and creating new sounds.”
Yet the aural experience of Blake’s music, at least in the form of most of the piano pieces, is not “grinding”, but one of poise and spaciousness. It is not only the Three Toys, here, that echo Satie, or have what Blake refers to as Satie’s “sculptural quality — you can see an object from different angles”.
Their percussiveness and off-kilter, staggered rhythms have a ritual, dancing quality, which links the piano works to pieces he has composed for instruments such as xylophone and marimba. One piece on the CD, 38a Hill Street Blues, exists in versions for both piano and percussion duo. (Many Blake pieces have been transcribed or recomposed for various resources.)
There is a sense, in Blake’s piano works, of a lovely simplicity that has, in fact, been shaped from a deep complexity. They feel old and new at the same time.
“I’ve spent most of my composing life trying to create form from scratch,” he says. “I really have no interest in the pre-existing forms. The most exciting work of the last 100 years is that in which the composers let the material find the form, rather than dumping the material into the old form.”