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composer and conductor |
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bright
young things
brett pypper - Mail & Guardian, 20 Nov 1997 THIS year's Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Music goes to a real-life composer, that august occupation that some South Africans feel must be "preserved", while others want to consign it to the dust heap of Eurocentrism. So how refreshing that Bongani Ndodana is a 22-year-old native of the Eastern Cape who speaks Xhosa rather than German, talks of access to music as a right instead of a privilege, and is frank about his work emerging in "a cultural paradox". "As part of my quest for an identity as an African, I have been drawn more and more towards an 'African aesthetic' within my art form, which is riddled with European conventions,"says Ndodana. Born in Queenstown and educated in Grahamstown, Ndodana was unable to receive his award personally at Monday's ceremony in Johannesburg. He is currently in Chicago where his string quartet The Sun, the Moon and the Rain had its world première last week. This follows an impressive year's work; performances of his chamber opera Temba and Seliba by the Co-Opera Company in Grahamstown, a recording of his ballet score Episodes by the Cape Town Philharmonic with Ndodana conducting and a showcase performance of excerpts from an operatic work in progress. And in the light of his appointment as composer-in-residence with the Candoulay Dance Company in Toronto, Canada, he probably counts as one of the only South African composers who has a job as a composer. Listen for the work he will produce in the light of this award at next year's Standard Bank National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown. Ndodana's music ranges fairly widely in style, but a tendency to explore indigenous choral genres in relation to Western dramatic forms like opera and oratorio seems to be emerging. And even if his precocity sometimes seems to outpace propriety, Ndodana is the kind of figure that South Africa needs to support and nurture. - Brett Pyper »read more articles & interviews
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