Kevin Volans - Biography

Biography

Kevin Volans was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa on 6 July 1949, and even though he has spent most of his life outside his native country, is the best known South African composer active today.

In 1972, he graduated from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg with a Bachelor of Music degree, followed by post-graduate education at the University of Aberdeen. From 1973 to 1981 he lived in Cologne, where he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Musikhochschule. During this period he served as Stockhausen's teaching assistant in 1975–76 (Taylor 2001).

During this period of time, along with his contemporaries Walter Zimmermann and Clarence Barlow, he became associated with the musical movement called the "New Simplicity" that would later influence post-minimalist composition. This was a reaction against the complexities and hyperbole of the new music scene in Germany in the mid-1970s, and it proved to be highly influential.

After conducting several field recording trips in 1979, Volans began writing pieces based upon African compositional techniques. This characteristic made him one of the most distinctive composers on the European new music circuit at the time. Some of his works such as Matepe and the first version of White Man Sleeps utilize early music instruments including harpsichord (tuned in African tuning) and viola da gamba.

The first of his compositions to reach a wide audience was a new version of White Man Sleeps, made at the suggestion of the Kronos Quartet in 1985. This version reorders the movements of the original version, and uses conventional western tuning. The Kronos Quartet's album of that name (which however features only three of Volans's five movements) became a best-seller, and White Man Sleeps has been taken up by many choreographers, notably Siobhan Davies. Volans followed it up with Hunting: Gathering, his second quartet, written for Kronos in 1987.

Volans was Composer-in Residence at Queen's University Belfast from 1986-89. Thereafter he has made his home in the Republic of Ireland and in 1994 became an Irish citizen. His notable students include Justinian Tamusuza.

The works of the late 1980s and early 1990s show a move away from the direct influence of African music towards a highly personal sort of minimalism. Part of this may have been the influence of the American composer Morton Feldman, who was a close friend; but the language of the compositions this era, including the orchestral work One Hundred Frames (1990), the striking two-piano work Cicada (1994), or the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1995) are identifiably his own. Central among them is an opera, The Man with Footsoles of Wind, premiered in London in 1993, and based on an idea by his friend, the English novelist Bruce Chatwin. The work of visual artists such as Philip Guston, Jasper Johns and James Turrell figure among Volans's influences in these years.

A close working relationship with the London-based Duke Quartet led Volans to write more for the string quartet medium, including the fifth quartet, Dancers on a Plane (1994) and the sixth quartet (2000). For much of the late 1990s he concentrated on dance collaborations with such choreographers as Jonathan Burrows and Siobhan Davies. Since 2000, however, he has devoted most of his energy to orchestral works; since his fine Cello Concerto of 1997 he has written a Concerto for Double Orchestra, a Trio Concerto which received its UK premier as part of the Soundwaves Festival 2007, and a second Piano Concerto, subtitled "Atlantic Crossing", which was premiered by Marc-André Hamelin in November 2006.