The Philosophy of Composition collects the music for cello and piano by Michael Blake, eight works in first recordings by Friedrich Gauwerky and Daan Vandewalle. Schott describes Blake as South African composition's most important link to the American and British experimental traditions of the late twentieth century. The disc spans more than four decades, from a playful piece of 1972 to a cello sonata of 2016.
Blake was born in Wynberg, Cape Town, in 1951. In 1977 he left for London to avoid conscription into South Africa's border war, and he stayed there until 1998, when he returned to teach at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. In 2000 he founded the New Music Indaba festival there, and in 2002 he launched the Bow Project. Gauwerky gave the first performance of Pentimenti, and the sonata was written for him and Vandewalle. The recording is a coproduction with Deutschlandradio, produced by Frank Kämpfer and Rolf W. Stoll, with liner notes by Stephanus Muller.
The title piece, written in 2009 in memory of Don Maclennan, opens the disc with more than ten minutes for cello and piano. The Sonata, subtitled Hours with the Masters, is the longest work: four movements, Allegro misterioso, Scherzo, Fluente and Adagio, lasting about seventeen minutes. A Fractured Landscape, a piano solo in memoriam Edward Said, also dates from 2009 and was composed for a concert tour of Australia by the pianist Antony Gray. Pentimenti sets the cello alone against what its scoring names an imagined accompaniment, while The Richter Scale and Connectivity are miniatures of two minutes or less. Seventh must Fall closes the programme with Vandewalle alone.
The oldest work, Song Without Words (1972), shows what Schott calls deconstruction, playfulness, rhythmic irregularity, irony and a postmodern referential sensibility. Blake's affinity with Charles Ives and John Cage came before he engaged with their music directly, and it is heard here as an openness of structure and material. The other seven works date from 2008 to 2016, a period framed by his retirement to the village of Hout Bay near Cape Town late in 2008 and his later move to France. The disc was reviewed by Carina Venter in Tempo in 2020.
CD, Wergo WER 7361 2, released in 2018, a coproduction with Deutschlandradio.
