Output details

Mammals of Southern Africa for piano trio

This work exemplifies and illustrates many of the key concerns and practices of Fokkens’s research. First, it locates him as one of relatively few South African composers to interact with and explore the potential of techniques drawn from traditional South African music (the solo music for uhadi and umrhube bows of the Xhosa-speaking group). The obvious dangers – generating unconvincing cross-over, or reducing the idea of ‘African music’ to a set of clichés – are avoided in his work by the interaction between these technical means and other musical traces from a range of sources. The underlying project – a key one for many African creative workers today – is to explore personal identity as a post-colonial, modern African (in Fokkens’s case specifically diasporic South African) and how this intersects with broader cultural issues.

Secondly, resources drawn from Xhosa bow music relate mostly to pitch content, cyclic structure and, in some cases, texture. Pitch content in bow music is based on two fundamental notes a tone apart, over which melody is generated through the manipulation of the overtones. All pitch content in Fokkens’s works since 2005 is based on this principle, with two extrapolations – many works also use fundamental pairs a semitone apart; and Fokkens abstracts the 7th partial on each fundamental to give an extra pitch in the set a ‘quartertone flat minor 7th’ above them. These quartertones are used in an integrated pitch system in all pieces where practicality permits. Of specific interest here is that whilst the strings use this full 8-pitch set, the piano – being unable to play the quartertones – uses only the 6 notes of the original bow music-derived set.