Sounds of the new simplicity

It's proving a good year at home for Kevin Volans. This South African-born composer has been living in Ireland for well over a decade now - he's even become an Irish citizen - but scant attention has been paid to his music by concert planners here. Things have begun to change in this, the year of his 50th birthday. The NSO played his Cello Concerto in February and he's a featured composer in the Sonorities Festival in Belfast this week and next.

Internationally, the perspective is different. His string quartet, White Man Sleeps became one of the great successes of the Kronos Quartet (I've even seen it described as the best-selling quartet of all time) and he's currently probably the most widely-perform-ed composer living in Ireland.

A white South African who studied in Europe with Stockhausen (and became his teaching assistant), may not seem the most likely individual to hit the world stage for his involvement with African music. Volans earliest, pre-teen composing activity was cast in the romantic shadow of Rachmaninov (at 12 he wrote a concerto, suppressed, which, he says, he would still find challenging to play). And though he soon discovered Stravinsky he "almost skipped", as he puts it, the Second Viennese School and went straight to post-war serial music. "The music I wrote in the Seventies," he says, "was very much more modernist in appearance than the stuff I write now."

Most of the composers I've spoken to who have moved on from serialism describe the shift as a process of natural change. For himself, Volans sees an important element of rejection. "My generation were 25 years on from Stockhausen. By the time the mid-Seventies came around, that whole school of integral, serial music was beginning to flag. The intellectual vigour and the excitement of the Fifties and Sixties was no longer there. "We were being offered either the European music which was asymmetrical in rhythm and pitch and so on, or totally symmetrical, repeat-pattern, American minimalism. Composers like myself and Walter Zimmermann decided that what was missing, really, was a middle-ground, a middle register. You got so tired of going to concerts that were all either one thing or the other, either all high notes or only the high notes and the low notes, or it was all just repeat patterns in the middle. We felt it was necessary to recoup some of the traditional range of possibilities."

The outcome became known as New Simplicity. "This was seen as a kind of starting-point of postmodernism in music. I think of myself as a modernist, not as a post-modernist. I think that what we have in common and what links us to the modernist tradition and the previous generation - and even people like Gerald Barry and myself and Zimmermann and John McGuire, who's Californian - is that we use dynamics and all the other parameters of music structurally. We are structural composers as opposed to expressive. "I don't write crescendos in my music for expressive purposes. You don't get a crescendo when there's a climax. I think that makes the music very different from a lot of so-called post-modern music, which I think is more romantic. The harmony of my work may appear to be romantic. But the way I approach material is more modernist.

"The only subject that ever interests me in music is freedom. I think that to work artistically you cannot obey rules. There can be no taboos, no diaboli in musica, it's just impossible. As soon as a school of music develops sets of rules that cannot be broken, you know that it's at the end of its life. We felt that we were free to write whatever we liked. We were not going to be straitjacketed by historicist dogma."

The pattern repetition of Volans's music has caused him to be described as a minimalist, an association which annoys him. "The first pieces that were sort of minimal were to do with an inspiration of African music. And what I loved about African music and art was this hand-made quality and the irregularity of it. An overriding feature of American minimalism is a machine-like quality. "What I wrote was in opposition to American minimalism. To label African music as minimalist, is like calling the pyramids Art Deco. It's an incredible insult. African music has been involved with repeat patterns for at least 2,000 years, probably since the beginning of time. I happen to use repeat patterns because that was an element of the style and the time-structures of African music. I wasn't interested in minimalism as such."

Volans came late to African music, only after he'd actually moved to Europe. "I discovered it because I became aware, suddenly, of what I'd left behind. Also, I realised it was a music which embodied different concepts of time, which Western music didn't have. It had no anxiety about time. All Western music is based on questions of timing. Beethoven is a great composer from the point of view of timing. His timing is perfect. And in a lot of traditional African music, there is no such thing as timing. It begins and ends when it feels like it."

Working in the heart of Europe, he became aware of having "absorbed a sense of time which was not European, even though I'd grown up with this propaganda that I was European. We were called `European' and black people were called `non-European'. When I came to Europe I discovered I wasn't European at all, really. And then I went back to Africa and discovered I wasn't an African, either. You suddenly become something else and have to find out what you are and explore these options.

"I've always said this, you can escape your cultural background, but you can't escape your environmental background. I think what's very African in my music is a sense of space and light, which is quite different from the European. I've become more and more Europeanised as I go along. But I do feel there is that African aspect of it, which is one of the reasons my music is choreographed so much - the choreographers feel the sense of space in the music, which gives them areas they can work in."

Belfast audiences will hear Swedish percussionist Jonny Axelsson play the virtuoso solo percussion piece, Akrodha (the title is a Sanskrit word for freedom from anger) and a new Double Violin Concerto will be premiered by the London Sinfonietta. "I had to write the concerto at enormous speed, in just four weeks. I don't know where it's come from. I struggled with the first movement and I borrowed lots of stuff from other pieces. The Scherzo movement just came from nowhere. I wrote it very easily. The same with the third movement. It wrote itself, in a day, and it's a long movement. "In the last six years, I've worked more and more, so-called intuitively. But, in fact, it's not even intuitive. I have suddenly started writing music almost in real time. I wrote a percussion piece before breakfast and had to phone up Gerald Barry and say `come and listen to this, because I don't know'. The pieces just appear, fully-formed." He likens composing in this way to the immediacy of painting. "I get to the end of the piece and I don't even know what the beginning is. It's the exact opposite of Stockhausen, with months of pre-planning and all that kind of stuff. This is a new development for me, which I'm not questioning too much."

Jonny Axelsson plays Kevin Volans' Akrodha at the Harty Room tomorrow night and the London Sinfonietta play his Double Violin Concerto at the Whitla Hall on Tuesday. Full de- tails of the festival, which has concerts running from tomorrow lunchtime until Wednesday 5th, can be had from 08 01232 335105.