Return to BalletNotes Home PageAllegoria, The Music
The explosion of form, texture, timbre, rhythm and expectation in late twentieth-century composition is often hailed as 'freedom of style". Kevin Volans has gone further than most of his contemporaries, by escaping from style altogether and by working directly with music's two fundamental parameters - sound and time. The notion of sound as patterned time goes back to his school days, when Volans played Liszt and Stravinsky on the piano (in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa) and translated them into hundreds of abstract paintings. It continued with a study of information theory, pattern recognition and time experience (at Aberdeen University) and a series of juvenilia in which the main theme was the overcoming of 'consequence' in composition.
Since then, through most of his forty plus works to date, Kevin Volans has relentlessly pursued the precedence of material over concept, the importance of striking image and textural foreground, and the idea that music is sequence rather than consequence.
White Man Sleeps (1982) falls into Volans' early period of composition from Nine Beginnings (1976) to She Who Sleeps With A Small Blanket (1985). During this period Volans found his identity as a composer by exploring the very notion of identity itself, through the course of eleven pieces for small chamber ensemble or tape. In this journey from Europe to Africa and back again, Volans' relationship to both continents is intrinsic, not 'ecstatic'.
In 1982 Adrian Jack, of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts (I.C.A.), planned an installation of Kevin Volans' more African pieces, both tape works and live performances, at the I.C.A. Specifically he requested a new composition to compliment Mbira and Matepe, two African compositions played on Western instruments but with African tuning. Mr. Volans writes, "This posed a daunting problem. The tuning system of the other pieces was specific to Mbira-style music and I wanted to write something quite different. I realized I could add a viola da gamba to the ensemble because its movable frets could cope with the tuning. This would also give me an opportunity of working with my friend Margriet Tindemans.
"The long search for music appropriate to the tuning ensued. In the end I drew from Tswana and Nyanga pan pipe music, from San bow music and from Dasotho lesiba and concertina style, to which I added my own invented folklore. My approach was anything but purist - the music is filtered, slowed down by a few 'line octaves', cast into non-African meters (like the 13-beat pattern of the last dance) and redistributed between the players in several ways. I also used interlocking techniques where they were absent in the original models and vice versa. This treatment now seems to me to be unacceptably Germanic, but at the time I was still very much a Cologne composer. I feel that the piece has more to do with European music in the 1980s than anything else.
"The title, White Man Sleeps come from a moment in Nyanga pan pipe music where the performers leave off playing their pipes for a few cycles and dance only to the sound of their ankle rattles, to let the white landowner sleep - for a minute or two."
The five dances of White Man Sleeps were written for two harpsichords, viola da gamba adjusted for African tuning and non-African percussion. Volans used a non-European sense of harmonic progression and non African staggered rhythms and asymmetrical cycles. "The idea, as Stockhausen's pupil, of doing a piece consisting of short dance movements seemed very 'wicked', and therefore I wanted to do it. Because there is only one subject in my music always, and that is freedom."
White Man Sleeps marked a turning point in Volans' career, the end of what he had envisaged as a series of compositions in which the African elements would work, not like an 'objet trouvé' or an exotic spice flavoring a boring dish, but like a computer virus infecting the whole milieu of contemporary music.
It was a request from Adrian Jack that prompted the reworking of White Man Sleeps for the Kronos Quartet. Mr. Volans writes, "I resisted the idea at first, especially as the African tuning of the original would have to be dropped. It occurred to me, however, that the Western tuning (equal temperament) would mask the source material and make my intentions clearer. I began work.
"After the first performance I changed the order of the movements, placing the last dance, which seemed to me to be the weakest, first. Thus the piece quietens down and becomes more intimate as it progresses."
In this work, which became String Quartet No. 1 (1986), Volans was obliged to totally rethink his score of White Man Sleeps for an ensemble which among other things could not play in African tuning. The rhythmic vitality and structural ingenuity of the original was retained, yet this is an absolute fresh and intriguing work as a string quartet, conceptually very far from the original.
String Quartet No 1, White Man Sleeps was first performed July 13, 1986 by the Kronos Quartet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. "I lay back and could not believe my ears...It was music as I had never heard before or could have imagined. It derived from nothing or no one. It had arrived. It was free and alive...I believe this to be devotional music of the highest order. For me, Kevin is one of the more inventive composers since Stravinsky," commented Bruce Chatwin in What am I Doing Here (1989).
White Man Sleeps was also arranged for three guitars in 1995.
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