• Issue #01
  • Issue #02
  • Issue #03
  • Issue #04
  • Issue #05
  • Issue #06
  • Issue #07
  • Issue #08
  • Issue #09
  • Issue #10
6
Contents
editorial
KEVIN DAVIDSON
“Soulbrother #1”
TESHOME GABRIEL
Ruin and The Other: Towards a Language Of Memory
MLADEN DOLAR
Singing in Pursuit of the Object Voice
Theme Graham Newcater
STEPHANUS MULLER
Sapphires and serpents: In Search of Graham Newcater
ARYAN KAGANOF
Of Fictalopes and Jictology (2018)
MEGAN-GEOFFREY PRINS
Toccata for Piano (2012): The gift of newness
OLGA LEONARD
The Leonard Street Meetings (2008-2012)
ARYAN KAGANOF
Her first concert - 15 October 2011
STEPHANUS MULLER & GRAHAM NEWCATER
Interview (2008, transcribed 2010)
AMORÉ STEYN
The Properties of the Raka Tone Row as seen within the Context of other Newcaterian Rows
STEPHANUS MULLER
The Island
GRAHAM NEWCATER
CONCERTO in E Minor Op. 5 (1958)
ARNOLD VAN WYK
A Letter from Upper Orange Street, 14th June 1958
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Concert Overture Op. 8 (1962-3)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Variations For Orchestra Op 11 (1963)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Nr.1 Klange An Thalia Myers (1964)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Allegretto e Espressivo (1966)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Variations de Timbres (1967)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
String Quartet (1983/4)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Songs of the Inner Worlds (1991)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
ETUDE I For Horn with Piano Accompaniment (2012)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
ETUDE II For Horn with Piano Accompaniment (2012)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
SONATINA for Pianoforte (2014)
GRAHAM NEWCATER
CANTO for Pianoforte (2015)
LIZABÉ LAMBRECHTS
The DOMUS Graham Newcater Collection Catalogue
galleri
TAFADZWA MICHAEL MASUDI
Waiting For A Better Tomorrow
ILZE WOLFF
Summer Flowers
NIKKI FRANKLIN
Sans Visage
BAMBATHA JONES
Below the Breadline
TRACY PAYNE
Veiled
STAN ENGELBRECHT
Miss Beautiful
ALEKSANDAR JEVTIĆ
We Are The Colour of Magnets and also Their Doing
GRAHAM NEWCATER
Augenmusik & Some Tarot Cards
EUGENE SKEEF
Monti wa Marumo!
borborygmus
PASCALE OBOLO
Electronic Protest Song As Resistance Through the Creation of Sound
AXMED MAXAMED & MATHYS RENNELA
A Conversation on the Bleaching of Techno: How Appropriation is Normalized and Preserved
FANA MOKOENA
A problem of classification
PHIWOKAZI QOZA
Choreographies of Protest Performance:
MASIXOLE MLANDU
On Fatherhood in South Africa
VULANE MTHEMBU
We are ancestors in our lifetime – AI and African data
TIMBAH
All My Homies Hate Skrillex – a story about what happened with dubstep
TETA DIANA
Three Sublime Songs
LAWRENCE KRAMER
Circle Songs
NEIL TENNANT
Euphoria?
frictions
LYNTHIA JULIUS
Vyf uit die Kroes
NGOMA HILL
This Poem Is Free
MSIZI MOSHOETSI
Five Poems
ABIGAIL GEORGE
Another Green World
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships
RIAAN OPPELT
The Escape
DIANA FERRUS
Daai Sak
KUMKANI MTENGWANA
Two Poems
VADIM FILATOV
Azsacra: Nihilism of Dancing Comets, The Destroyer of the Destroyers
claque
ZAKES MDA
Culture And Liberation Struggle In South Africa: From Colonialism To Apartheid (Edited By Lebogang Lance Nawa)
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The Promise of genuine literary stylistic innovation
ZUKISWA WANNER
[BR]OTHER – Coffee table snuff porn, or...?
SEAN JACOBS
Davy Samaai The People's Champion
KNEO MOKGOPA
I Still See The Sun/ The Dukkha Economy
CHRISTINE LUCIA
Resonant Politics, Opera and Music Theatre out of Africa
ARI SITAS
The Muller’s Parable
ZIMASA MPEMNYAMA
CULTURE Review: The Lives of Black Folk
RIAAN OPPELT
Club Ded: psychedelic noir in Cape Town
DYLAN VALLEY
Nonfiction not non-fiction (not yet)
DEON MAAS
MUTANT - a crucial documentary film by Nthato Mokgata and Lebogang Rasethaba
GEORGE KING
Unknown, Unclaimed, and Unloved: Rehabilitating the Music of Arnold Van Wyk
THOMAS ROME
African Art As Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, And The Idea Of Negritude. By Souleymane Bachir Diagne.
SIMBARASHE NYATSANZA
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Making Africa visible in an upside-down World
ekaya
BRIDGET RENNIE-SALONEN & YVETTE HARDIE
Creating a healthy arts sector ecosystem: The Charter of Rights for South African Artists
KOPANO RATELE
What Use Would White Students Have For African Psychology?
NICKI PRIEM
The Hidden Years of South African Music
INGE ENGELBRECHT
“Die Kneg” – pastor Simon Seekoei in conversation.
SCORE-MAKERS
Score-making
off the record
BARBARA BOSWELL
Writing as Activism: A History of Black South African Women’s Writing
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
MUSIC AS THE GOSPEL OF LIBERATION: Religio-Spiritual Symbolism and Invocation of Martyrs of Black Consciousness in the Azanian Freedom Songs
IGNATIA MADALANE
From Paul to Penny: The Emergence and Development of Tsonga Disco (1985-1990s) Pt.2
ADAM GLASSER
In Search of Mr. Paljas
TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR
Censorship, Film Festivals and the Temperature at which Artworks and their Creators Burn
PATRIC TARIQ MELLET
The Camissa Museum – A Decolonial Camissa African Centre of Memory and Understanding @ The Castle of Good Hope
IKERAAM KORANA
The Episteme of the Elders
OLU OGUIBE
Fela Kuti
MICHAEL TAUSSIG
Walter Benjamin’s Grave
ANTHONY BURGESS
On the voice of Joyce
feedback
FRÉDÉRIC SALLES
This is not a burial, it’s a resurrection : Cinema without the weight of perfection.
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Social Media Responses to herri 5
the selektah
boeta gee
Hoor Hoe Lekker Slat’ie Goema - (An ode to the spirit of the drum)
PhD
MARY RÖRICH
Graham Newcater's Orchestral Works: Case Studies in the Analysis of Twelve-Tone Music
hotlynx
shopping
contributors
the back page
DANIEL MARTIN
Stuttering From The Anus
© 2024
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
    • Issue #01
    • Issue #02
    • Issue #03
    • Issue #04
    • Issue #05
    • Issue #06
    • Issue #07
    • Issue #08
    • Issue #09
    • Issue #10
    #06
  • Theme Graham Newcater

STEPHANUS MULLER

Sapphires and serpents: In Search of Graham Newcater


Leonard Street, about 20 minutes’ drive south of the city centre of Johannesburg, is a 1.4 km stretch of residential housing, small flats, corner shops. Located in Kenilworth between Turffontein to the west and Rosettenville to the east, it ends to the north in Turf Club Street next to the Turffontein Racecourse, established by the Johannesburg Turf Club in 1887. If you continue driving westwards on Turf Club Street, it turns into Alamein Road that takes you to Gold Reef City and the Apartheid Museum.

30 Leonard Street is a red brick, square corner house with a green corrugated iron roof and a low brick garden fence, upon which newer black painted stainless steel spiked palisades discourage intruders. The garden gate leads to a small porch flanked by two black ornamental pillars. It was here where I first met Graham Newcater, and where his family lived when he was born on 3 September 1941. I quote from an interview I conducted with the composer in 2008, in his home:

In 1941 we lived here (my grandmother owned this house then) and there was a nursing home just down the road, about ten blocks from here. (Now it’s a parking lot for a supermarket). I was born there, so you can say, these days, that I was born in a parking lot. I had my early schooling here in Johannesburg. My father was in mechanical engineering, a metallurgist – a specialist in metals – who worked as a foundryman. We went down to Durban where he worked in one of the big shipping firms there. That was in 1948. I had most of my schooling in Durban, first at Addington Primary School, and then later at the Natal Technical College where I studied mechanical engineering for two years because the Newcaters were traditionally all in engineering. My grandfather and his brother came from Scotland, Glasgow, to work here, first of all on the Duncan docks in Cape Town, and then up here to work on the Randfontein gold mines. So my father was insistent that I study engineering and get a degree in that and only pursue music as a sideline.

It was not easy ‘finding’ Graham Newcater. Among my personal files that I perused in preparing this talk, I came upon an incomplete article I had written on the composer on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 2001. It is entitled: ‘Wat het geword van Graham Newcater?’ – ‘What has become of Graham Newcater?’. The first sentence reads: ‘Graham Newcater het verdwyn.’ – ‘Graham Newcater has disappeared’. I started looking for Newcater in 2001 as part of my research on Arnold van Wyk. I phoned Mr. Michael Levy, then Head of what was called Serious Music at SAMRO, in an attempt to get contact details. Levy informed me that he had lost all contact with Newcater, but that SAMRO still payed royalties into a bank account. Newcater therefore had to be alive, but the address that SAMRO provided to me, proved to be dated. I corresponded with Dr. Mary Rörich, who published important research on Newcater, but she informed me that she hadn’t seen him in years and would appreciate it if I could let her know if my search was successful. I researched telephone directories, where I found one Newcater who, it turned out, knew nothing about the composer. I vaguely recall that I then wrote letters to a number of addresses previously associated with the composer, but I did not document the process.

One day, in February 2003, a letter arrived in the post from Graham Newcater, 30 Leonard Street, Kenilworth, Johannesburg, 2190. It thanked me for my own letter of 27 November 2002, and apologized for the delay in replying to me, citing ‘the disruptive effect of the festive season’. In the letter he documented his memories of Arnold van Wyk, ending by writing:

The last time I saw Nols was at a concert in the Great Hall at the University of the Witwatersrand on the 30th of January, 1981 at which was performed his Symphony No. 1 and my Third Symphony. We sat next to each other and he asked me whether I thought his symphony sounded too much like Sibelius, and at the end of my work he turned to me and said, ‘I like music with a tune to it, but the Coda is very beautiful!’

After that, I exchanged a few letters with Newcater, and also passed his address on to Professor Chris Walton, then the Head of Music at Pretoria University. Chris subsequently visited Newcater, and was instrumental in sparking an interest in his music by two young students, Olga Leonard and Amoré Steyn, both of whom went on to produce MMus dissertations on Newcater’s music. My next contact with Newcater happened in 2007, when I approached him to ask if he would donate his literary estate to the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) at Stellenbosch University. With the financial aid of the Music Library, DOMUS was able to pay for the on site ordering and sorting of this collection, which I flew back to Cape Town, carrying the manuscripts and other documents with me on two separate occasions after visits to 30 Leonard Street.

And then, in 2011, when Newcater turned 70, he was awarded a Parnassus Award by the Music Department. He flew down to Cape Town – where he had last visited in the early 1970s when he conducted his ballet, The Rain Queen. It was his first visit to Stellenbosch, and he came to receive the award, but also to attend a small performance of his work in the Fismer Hall. This was organized by a young doctoral student in the Music Department, Mareli Stolp. At that event we dimmed the lights of the hall and listened to a recorded performance of Newcater’s First Symphony of 1962-64. I asked the audience to reflect on the fact that we were gathered in a concert hall dedicated to live performance in order to listen to a decades-old recording of a milestone symphonic work in the South African repertoire. The means of production that gave rise to this work and its initial performance, I said, no longer exist in South Africa. At the end of the concert, Olga Leonard played the world premiere of a short piano piece, From the Garden of Forever.

That event, I’d like to think, together with the commission Newcater received from the SAMRO Endowment for the National Arts to compose a piano work for the 12th Unisa International Piano Competition, sparked renewed compositional activity at 30 Leonard street. Since 2011, Newcater has written eight new piano works, of which two have been performed tonight for the first time.

In responding briefly to what we have heard tonight, I should like to invite you to think with me about two words.

The first word is: ‘Always’.

Fundamental to this word, is the notion of music being ‘in good order’. In our 2008 interview, Newcater said the following:

I love mechanical engineering, as I’ve said to people over the years. I often think of the composing of music in terms of engineering. It’s all a matter of balance, proportion, stresses and strains, energy and its harnessing to create power. These are all engineering principles.

The music we have heard tonight, comes from a place of being ‘in good order’ understood as a function of operational integrity, as it were. My invocation of ‘always’ derives from the same metaphorical principle that connects the chronometer to the notion of time, and eternity: not the thing itself, but the measure of the thing. Considering ‘always’ in this way takes us to a sense of aesthetics understood as ‘running smoothly’ as a result of ‘being well maintained’. The ‘always’ to which I would like to direct our attention is therefore not the one beloved by Greek astronomy, or Christian mysticism, or 19th century German idealism. It is always embedded in the task of man to attend to the musical order of things.

The second word is: ‘Because’.

I register this word as concurrently allowing us to think of a lack, and an imperative. Because of its syntactical function of allowing us to provide reasons, and at a further push to infer causality, the word in relation to the music is of negative relevance – i.e. relevant precisely because the music is not demonstrably important in current political, economic and academic contexts. The ‘because’ I want to evoke is the ‘because’ of an answer that will not provide reasons for actions undertaken and refuses, for whatever reasons, the artful deception of the ex post facto explanation for those who demand it. This ‘because’ resists efforts to coerce ‘always’ into linguistic and material rationality. But ‘because’ in this sense is also sovereign and – to use the better Afrikaans word – ‘vanselfsprekend’, a thing that speaks for itself. Such is the music we heard tonight: unbowed and proud.

Conclusion

Both Aryan Kaganof and Mareli Stolp embarked on a search for Graham Newcater. Aryan’s film Of Fictalopes and Jictologies has found him at 30 Leonard Street where, in a sense, he has always lived but not always been, composing music that is ‘just music’. It has suggested that we not think of Newcater’s music in in relation to a real world anterior to the sounding structures, but to imagine instead that this music precedes the real in a way that challenges its order.

Mareli’s performance engaged the complex interlocking worlds embedded in the scores of Fountains, Chromatic Serpent and the Sapphire Sonata. She has through hours of work and study of the beautiful calligraphy of the composer – a task of the modern performer comparable to the medieval scholastic isolation and dedication to faithful text reproduction – proposed a Graham Newcater of equally monastic immersion in the construction of musical structures that speak strangely, compellingly, of the order of things and of history. Combined, both have confronted us with art that changes how we regard the real.

Graham Newcater, Mosaics

The above text was delivered at the Graham Newcater concert in the Stellenbosch Art Gallery on 25 January 2018 at 7.pm, as a response to a film by Aryan Kaganof and piano performance by Mareli Stolp.You can download the brochure made for this event here.

Share
Print PDF
Theme
Graham Newcater
ARYAN KAGANOF
© 2024
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute