Michael Blake Recordings

Michael Blake is a South African born composer and pianist. He was based in London from 1977, returning to the ‘New South Africa’ twenty years later. Apart from teaching composition at several universities, he was responsible for a number of post-apartheid New Music initiatives – including joining the ISCM, and setting up a new music festival and composers meeting – which aimed to improve the status of composition after the divisive years of apartheid. His musical language is partly the result of an immersion in the materials and playing techniques of African music, but also drawing on virtually any found material, and is influenced by both experimental film and African weaving techniques. His works have been widely played, in Toronto, New York, Havana, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Australia, India, Japan, and throughout Europe and Africa, and now appear on some 15 CDs.

Since 2015 he has lived in rural France with his wife, musicologist and writer Christine Lucia, and their Breton spaniel Dollie, but spends part of each year in Cape Town, where he is honorary professor of experimental composition in the Africa Open Institute at Stellenbosch University.

www.michaelblake.co.za
www.afrikosmos.michaelblake.co.za

[photo by Rudolph Willemse]