![KevinVolans](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/KevinVolans.jpg)
Kevin Volans (born 26 July 1949) is a South African born Irish
composer and
pianist
A pianist ( , ) is an individual musician who plays the piano. Since most forms of Western music can make use of the piano, pianists have a wide repertoire and a wide variety of styles to choose from, among them traditional classical music, ja ...
. He studied with
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th-century classical music, 20th and early 21st-century ...
and
Mauricio Kagel
Mauricio Raúl Kagel (; 24 December 1931 – 18 September 2008) was an Argentine-German composer.
Biography
Kagel was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into an Ashkenazi Jewish family that had fled from Russia in the 1920s . He studied music, his ...
in Cologne in the 1970s and later became associated with the ''Neue Einfacheit'' (
New Simplicity New Simplicity (in German, ''Neue Einfachheit'') was a stylistic tendency amongst some of the younger generation of German composers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, reacting against not only the European avant garde of the 1950s and 1960s, but al ...
) movement in the city. In the late 1970s he became interested in the indigenous music of his homeland and began a series of pieces which attempted to combine aspects of African and contemporary European music. Although Volans later moved away from any direct engagement with African music, certain residual elements such as interlocking rhythms, repetition and open forms are still detectable in his music since the early 1990s which takes a new direction more redolent of certain schools of abstract art. He settled in Ireland permanently in 1986 and was granted Irish citizenship in 1995.
Biography
During his teenage years Volans developed an interest in the music of the post-war avant garde as well as abstract painting. He pursued a Bachelor of Music degree at the
University of the Witwatersrand
The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (), is a multi-campus South African public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits ( or ). The university ...
graduating in 1972. After postgraduate study at the
University of Aberdeen
, mottoeng = The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom
, established =
, type = Public research universityAncient university
, endowment = £58.4 million (2021)
, budget ...
he moved in 1973 to Cologne, where he became one of only five students admitted to
Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groundb ...
's composition class at the
Musikhochschule. He became intimately acquainted with Stockhausen's extensions of
serial technique
In music, serialism is a method of composition using series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres or other musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though some of his contemporaries were als ...
and eventually became his teaching assistant in 1975–76, replacing
Richard Toop
Richard Toop (1945 – 19 June 2017) was a British-Australian musicologist.
Toop was born in Chichester, England, in 1945. He studied at Hull University, where his teachers included Denis Arnold.
In 1973 he became Karlheinz Stockhausen's teach ...
. He also took lessons in music theatre from
Mauricio Kagel
Mauricio Raúl Kagel (; 24 December 1931 – 18 September 2008) was an Argentine-German composer.
Biography
Kagel was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into an Ashkenazi Jewish family that had fled from Russia in the 1920s . He studied music, his ...
as well as taking piano lessons from
Aloys Kontarsky and studying
electronic music
Electronic music is a genre of music that employs electronic musical instruments, digital instruments, or circuitry-based music technology in its creation. It includes both music made using electronic and electromechanical means ( electroa ...
with Hans-Ulrich Humpert.
While in Cologne Volans became increasingly dissatisfied with the new-music movement in the city, which he perceived to be dogmatic and creatively restricting. Alongside other composers such as
Walter Zimmermann
Walter Zimmermann (born 15 April 1949) is a German composer associated with the Cologne School.
Born in Schwabach, Germany, Zimmermann studied composition in Germany with Werner Heider and Mauricio Kagel, the theory of musical intelligence at ...
,
Gerald Barry, and
Michael von Biel, Volans began to question the hegemony of the prevailing new-music style that was based on an extension of the serial techniques of the previous generation. This group of composers, loosely referred to as the
Cologne School, marked the start of the ''Neue Einfachheit'' (New Simplicity) movement which began with a concert series organised by Zimmermann in January 1977. Composers linked with the New Simplicity generally sought a more transparent and direct style, an openness to aspects of tonality and a freedom to use pre-existing material quite in contrast to the intense abstraction of the post-war avant garde.
Africa series
Despite having grown up in South Africa, Volans had little contact with the indigenous music of his homeland due to
apartheid
Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...
strictures which largely prohibited the intermingling of black and white cultures. It wasn't until he was commissioned by
Westdeutscher Rundfunk
Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln (''West German Broadcasting Cologne''; WDR, ) is a German public-broadcasting institution based in the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia with its main office in Cologne. WDR is a constituent member of the conso ...
(WDR) to undertake a number of field trips between 1976 and 1979 to South Africa to record various kinds of indigenous African music that he began to actively take an interest in this music. These field trips alerted him to aspects of indigenous African culture, both musical and visual, which he had previously overlooked. He thus set about planning a series of works in which he attempted to reconcile African and European aesthetics. At the start of the series Volans envisaged that the African source material would be quite recognizable but as the series progressed he would gradually exercise more and more intervention into it so that by the end of the series the African material would be fully assimilated into his own style:
As a political statement, Volans, as a white South African, felt that the series might lend some sort of contribution to the struggle against apartheid and some performances were met with protests from the musical establishment in South Africa. The most well-known piece from the series is ''White Man Sleeps'' (1982) for two harpsichords, viola da gamba and percussion. In this piece Volans attempted to "Africanize" Western European art music by transferring paraphrases and transcriptions of
Venda
Venda () was a Bantustan in northern South Africa, which is fairly close to the South African border with Zimbabwe to the north, while to the south and east, it shared a long border with another black homeland, Gazankulu. It is now part of the ...
, San,
Nyungwe and
Lesotho music, as well as his own material, onto re-tuned period instruments. The subsequent reworking of the piece for a recording by the
Kronos Quartet
The Kronos Quartet is an American string quartet based in San Francisco. It has been in existence with a rotating membership of musicians for almost 50 years. The quartet covers a very broad range of musical genres, including contemporary classic ...
became one of the biggest-selling string-quartet releases of all time. The works immediately following ''White Man Sleeps'', such as the second and third quartets, continue to use some African references, but display an increasing preoccupation with non-directional narratives influenced by the uneven and often random patterns present in African textiles, as well as the open approach to time present in the late works of
Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman (January 12, 1926 – September 3, 1987) was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century classical music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School ...
.
Towards abstraction
Despite the success of the African series, Volans began to find himself increasingly categorized as an "African" composer—a label which he found creatively restricting. In the late 1980s he began to pursue a new direction, developing a style characterized by an overall tendency towards increasing abstraction occasionally punctuated by works where literal African elements once again re-emerge. This is clearly seen in works such as ''Chevron'' (1990) and ''One Hundred Frames'' (1991), as well as his opera ''The Man with Footsoles of Wind'' (1993) based on the last year of the life of the 19th-century poet
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (, ; 20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism. Born in Charleville, he start ...
. A parallel development to this was his increasing interest in writing for dance, an art-form particularly suited to Volans's open conception of formal structure and he has collaborated with the choreographers
Jonathan Burrows,
Siobhan Davies
Dame Siobhan Davies DBE (born Susan Davies; 18 September 1950 in London), often known as Sue Davies, is an English dancer and choreographer. She was a dancer with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre during the 1970s, and became one of its lead ...
and
Shobana Jeyasingh
Shobana Jeyasingh (born 26 March 1957 in Chennai) is a British choreographer and founder of Shobana Jeyasingh Dance.
Shobana Jeyasingh has been creating dance works for 30 years. Born in Chennai, India, she currently lives and works in London ...
.
The key work which confirmed this new direction is ''Cicada'' (1994) for two pianos, which was inspired by his experience inside one of
James Turrell
James Turrell (born May 6, 1943) is an American artist known for his work within the Light and Space movement. Much of Turrell's career has been devoted to a still-unfinished work, ''Roden Crater'', a natural cinder cone crater located outsid ...
's Skyspaces. The piece involves very gradual adjustments of tone, harmonic colour and tempo being applied to a repeated sonority based on a B-flat major and A major triads. Described by the composer as his first minimalist piece, ''Cicadas reduction in content and largely flat surface is a departure from the generally high degree of activity which marked many of his earlier works. Although there is no recognizably African material present in the piece, the existence of interlocking patterns, inherent rhythms and open non-developmental forms demonstrate how African elements continue to inform his work in a background capacity.
In a number of works since ''Cicada'', Volans limited the content and pursued a similar policy of incremental changes at the margins of the material. The reduction of material in these pieces is even more extreme than in ''Cicada'' and exemplifies a tendency which Volans has described as follows:
Two works in particular demonstrate this tendency – String Quartet No. 6 and the Concerto for Double Orchestra. String Quartet No. 6 is not in fact a string quartet at all but a piece for two spatially separated string quartets which can be performed live with both quartets or with one live and the other pre-recorded. The vast majority of the piece consists of just two chords which overlap between both quartets creating a blurring of the harmonies not unlike the blurring of colour fields in the paintings of
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko (), born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz (russian: Ма́ркус Я́ковлевич Ротко́вич, link=no, lv, Markuss Rotkovičs, link=no; name not Anglicized until 1940; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was a Lat ...
, which served as the piece's inspiration. In the Concerto for Double Orchestra (2001) static harmonies are spatially distributed back and forth between a split orchestra with a focus on the "edges" of the chords through accented pizzicatos and dynamics rather than "bleeding" them together. Both of these works demonstrate Volans's concerns with moving the site of musical discourse to the margins of the material, a strategy inspired by his lifelong interest in visual art. The music tends to focus on the interplay between dynamics, voicings, register, timbre and types of attack; parameters which are usually considered secondary to larger-scale transformations in the domain of pitch and rhythm. The reduced approach to content directs attention towards changes in the slightest details and encourages a form of engagement perhaps more prevalent in the world of visual art.
This tendency towards reduction is not universal, however. Perhaps due to the inherent nature of the medium, Volans's concertante works such as the Trio Concerto (2005) and the Piano Concerto No. 2 (2006) are notable for their virtuosic writing and dynamism. Volans's most recent work constitutes yet another phase of development. Beginning with ''The Partenheimer Project'' (2007), much of the new work explores the interaction between individual parts playing independently of each other to some degree. The ''Partenheimer Project'' is spatially separated into three ensembles while both ''Violin: Piano'' (2008) and ''Cello: Piano'' (2008) contain instruments playing at different tempi propelled for the most part by irregular repetition. The transparent scoring and negation of any sense of goal-orientated progression lends the music a static floating quality.
While Volans's music has often been viewed as a reaction to the perceived excesses of serialism, it is nevertheless significant that his approach to dynamics and articulation is always structurally rather than expressively directed. In this way, Volans identifies with the tradition of
modernism
Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...
and his music studiously avoids any lapses into
postmodern nostalgia. He has been described by the music critic
Kyle Gann
Kyle Eugene Gann (born November 21, 1955, in Dallas, Texas) is an American professor of music, critic, analyst, and composer who has worked primarily in the New York City area. As a music critic for ''The Village Voice'' (from 1986 to 2005) an ...
as:
In 1997 the ''
BBC Music Magazine'' listed Volans as one of the 50 most important living composers. In 1999 the
Southbank Centre in London hosted a 50th birthday celebration of his work, for his 60th the
Wigmore Hall
Wigmore Hall is a concert hall located at 36 Wigmore Street, London. Originally called Bechstein Hall, it specialises in performances of chamber music, early music, vocal music and song recitals. It is widely regarded as one of the world's leadi ...
in London organised a "Kevin Volans Day" of concerts, and in 2019 the Wigmore Hall again had a concert celebrating his 70th birthday.
Students
Volans taught composition at the
University of Natal
The University of Natal was a university in the former South African province Natal which later became KwaZulu-Natal. The University of Natal no longer exists as a distinct legal entity, as it was incorporated into the University of KwaZulu-N ...
, where he received a DMus in 1986. He was also composer in residence at
Queen's University Belfast (1986–89) and at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...
(1992). Since moving to Ireland in 1985 he has exerted a considerable influence on the direction of music in the country through his teaching. His notable students include, Andrew Hamilton,
Jennifer Walshe
Jennifer Walshe (born 1 June 1974) is an Irish composer, vocalist and artist.
Biography
Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1974. She studied composition with John Maxwell Geddes at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, ...
,
Simon O'Connor
Simon David O'Connor (born 25 February 1976) is a New Zealand politician and a member of the New Zealand House of Representatives. He is a member of the National Party. He has represented the Tāmaki electorate since 2011. He is a member of ...
, Deirdre Gribbin, Elaine Agnew, Deirdre MacKay, Jonathan Nangle and Juergen Simpson.
Discography
* ''She Who Sleeps with a Small Blanket'' (Robin Schulkowsky, CD, Sony, 1985)
* String Quartet No. 1: 'White Man Sleeps' (Kronos Quartet, CD, Elektra Nonesuch, 1987)
* String Quartet No. 1: 'White Man Sleeps', (Dance no. 1) (Kronos Quartet, CD, Elektra Nonesuch, 1987)
* String Quartet No. 1: 'White Man Sleeps', ''Mbira'', ''She Who Sleeps with a Small Blanket'', ''White Man Sleeps'' (Original version) (The Smith Quartet, Kevin Volans, Robert Hill,
Margriet Tindemans
Margriet E. Tindemans (March 26, 1951 – December 31, 2014) was a musician, specializing in medieval music.
The fourth child of Wilhelmina Coenen and Henricus Tindemans, Margriet demonstrated her musical talents early, and was named first violi ...
, Robin Schuikowsky, CD, Landor, 1990)
* 'Norwegian Wood: Happiness is a Warm Gun' (Lennon, arr. Volans) (Aki Takahashi, CD, EMI, 1991)
* String Quartet No. 2: 'Hunting Gathering' (Kronos Quartet, CD, Elektra Nonesuch, 1991)
* String Quartet No. 1: 'White Man Sleeps' (Kronos Quartet, CD, Elektra Nonesuch, 1992)
* String Quartet No. 3: 'The Songlines' (3 rd movement) (Balanescu Quartet, CD, Argos, 1994)
* String Quartet No. 2: 'Hunting Gathering', String Quartet No. 3: 'The Songlines' (Balanescu Quartet, CD, Decca/Argo, 1994)
* String Quartet No. 5: 'Dancers on a Plane', String Quartet No. 4: 'The Ramanujan Notebooks', Movement for String Quartet (The Duke Quartet, CD, Collins Classics, 1994)
* ''Mbira'' (Kevin Volans Ensemble, CD, WDR World Network Recording, 1995)
* ''White man Sleeps'' (Guitar version of Dance No. 4) (Tilman Hoppstock, CD, Signum, 1995) Into Darkness (Sequenza, CD, Neuma, 1998)
* ''This is How it is'', ''Walking song'', ''Leaping Dance'', Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments, Untitled (Netherlands Wind Ensemble, cond. Wim Steinmann and Daniel Harding, CD, Chandos, 1999)
* ''Cicada'', ''Duets'' (Mathilda Hornsveld, Jill Richards, CD, Black Box, 2000)
* ''This is How it is'' (Netherlands Wind Ensemble, cond. Wim Steinmann, CD, CMC, 2001)
* String Quartet No. 2: 'Hunting; Gathering', String Quartet No. 6, String Quartet No. 1: 'White Man Sleeps' (The Duke Quartet, CD, Black Box, 2002)
* ''White Man Sleeps'' (Guitar Quartet Version) (Dublin Guitar Quartet, CD, Grelslate Records, 2005)
* Piano Trio (Fidelio Trio, CD, NMC, 2008)
* ''Walking Song'' (David Adams, CD, All Write Music, 2008)
* ''Akrodha'', ''Asange'', ''She Who Sleeps with a Small Blanket'' (Jonny Axelsson, CD, 2008)
* ''The Partenheimer Project'' (Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, CD, Ikon Gallery/Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2008)
* ''Four Guitars'' (Dublin Guitar Quartet, CD, CMC, 2009)
Filmography
* ''Dance Films'' by Adam Roberts (Duke Quartet, Kevin Volans, DVD, The Jonathan Burrows Group, 1995)
* ''Zeno at 4am''. (Sontonga Quartet, Pumeza Matshikiza, Lwazi Ncube, William Kentridge, DVD, Marian Goodman Gallery, 2002)
* ''Evidenti: A Film Conceived By Sylvie Guillem'' (Duke Quartet, DVD, NVC Arts, 1995)
Selected compositions
Stage
* ''Correspondences'', Dance Opera (1990)
* ''The Man with Footsoles of Wind'', Chamber opera (1993)
Orchestra
* ''One Hundred Frames'' (1991)
* Concerto for Double Orchestra (2001)
* ''Strip-Weave for Orchestra'' (2002–03)
* Symphony: ''Daar Kom die Alibama'' (2010)
Soloist with orchestra
* Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1995)
* Cello Concerto (1997)
* Trio Concerto (2005)
* Piano Concerto No. 2 'Atlantic Crossing' (2006)
* Piano Concerto no. 3 (2010)
* Chakra for 3 percussionists and Orchestra (2011)
* Piano Concerto no. 4 (2014)
* Concerto for Uilleann Pipes and large Orchestra (2016/17)
* Concerto for solo Percussion and ensemble (2012)
Chamber music
* ''Matepe'' (1980)
* ''White Man Sleeps'' (1982)
* ''Walking Song'' (1984)
* ''Leaping Dance'' (1984)
* ''Kneeling Dance'' (1984 rev. 1987)
* String Quartet No. 1 'White Man Sleeps' (1986)
* String Quartet No. 2 'Hunting: Gathering'(1987)
* String Quartet No. 3 'The Songlines' (1988 rev. 1993)
* ''Chevron'' (1990)
* ''Cicada'' (1994)
* String Quartet No. 5 'Dancers on a Plane' (1994)
* ''Untitled'' (1996)
* String Quartet No. 6 (2000)
* ''1000 bars'' (2002)
*Chakra for 3 percussionists (2003)
* Piano Trio (2002, rev. 2005)
* ''Shiva Dances'' (2006)
* ''The Partenheimer Project'' (2007)
* ''Mr. Handel's Return'' (2008)
* ''Violin: Piano'' (2008)
* ''Viola: Piano'' (2008)
* ''Cello: Piano'' (2009)
* ''Trumpet, Vibe, Cello, Piano'' (2009)
* ''No Translation'' (2009)
* Piano Trio No. 2 (2009)
* String Quartet no. 11 (2013)
* Looping Point (2012)
* Turning Point (2013)
* ''Calefaccion'' (2013)
* ''Matepe for Calefax'' (2013)
* ''7 Flutes'' (2014)
* ''Abhaya'' (2014)
* ''7 Bass Winds'' (2015)
* 4 Marimbas (2015)
* String Quartet no. 12 (2015)
* ''perc : piano 1'' (2015)
* ''Akrodha 3'' (2015)
* ''for Bob'' (2015)
* ''perc : piano 2'' (2016)
* ''C.Roll.A.eS.H.'' (2016)
* ''cello:piano 2'' (2016)
* ''Spoor'' (2017)
* Piano Trio no. 3 (2017)
* ''Seven Clarinets and One Flute'' (2017)
* ''clarinet:violin:piano'' (with CPE) (2017)
* ''Blackbird:Blackbird 1–4'' for 2 pianos (2018)
Solo instrumental
* ''clarinet:solo'' (2015)
* ''L'Africaine'' (2016)
Solo percussion
* ''She Who Sleeps with a Small Blanket'' (1985)
* ''Asanga'' (1997)
* ''Akrodha'' (1998)
Solo piano
* Three Structural Etudes (2004)
* Three Rhythmic Etudes (2003)
* Piano Etudes Nos. 7 & 8 (2008)
* Piano Etude No. 9 (2008)
* 3 Books of Piano pieces for 'Young' Players (2012)
* ''PMB Impromptu'' (2014)
* Piano Etude No. 10 (2015, withdrawn)
* Piano Etude No. 11 (2015, rev. 2018)
* Piano Etude No. 12 (2015, rev. 2018)
* ''Marabi Nights'' (2016)
* ''53,73369155794372 notes a second, for Clare'' for midi keyboard (2016)
Vocal
* ''Gloso a lo Divino'' (2006)
* ''Canciones del Alma'' (2009)
* 3 Xhosa songs (2012)
* ''The Mountain that Left'' (2013)
References
Sources
*
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* .
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* .
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Further reading
* Anon. n.d. (a) "Volans, Kevin". CMC Composer Profile. .
* Ballantine, Christopher. 2001–2002. "Christopher Ballantine reviews ''Cicada''". ''
NewMusicSA: Bulletin of the
International Society for Contemporary Music
The International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) is a music organization that promotes contemporary classical music.
The organization was established in Salzburg in 1922 as Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM) following th ...
– South African Section, First Issue'', 7–8.
*
Blake, Michael. 1992. "Volans, Kevin". In ''Contemporary Composers'', eds. Brian Norton and Pamela Collins, 951–952.
* Blake, Michael. 1993. "Almeida opera: Kevin Volans and Julian Grant". ''
Tempo
In musical terminology, tempo ( Italian, 'time'; plural ''tempos'', or ''tempi'' from the Italian plural) is the speed or pace of a given piece. In classical music, tempo is typically indicated with an instruction at the start of a piece (ofte ...
'' 186, 52–53.
*
Bräuninger, Jürgen. 1998. "Gumboots to the Rescue". ''
South African Journal of Musicology
''SAMUS: South African Music Studies'' is an annual peer-reviewed academic journal and the official journal of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM). The journal is abstracted and indexed in RILM and The Music Index. Online acc ...
: SAMUS'' 18, 1–16.
* Clarkson Fletcher, J., J. Dazeley, J. Taylor, and E. Wetherall. n.d. "Towards New Models for the Analysis of Post-serial and Post-tonal Music, with Particular Reference to Kevin Volans' ''
White Man Sleeps''". In ''Proceedings of the 25th Annual Congress of the Musicological Society of Southern Africa, Grahamstown, August 1998'', ed. W. Lüdemann, 7–18.
tellenbosch: Musicological Society of Southern Africa.* Fox, James. 1988. "Staging Songlines: Interview". ''
The Village Voice
''The Village Voice'' is an American news and culture paper, known for being the country's first alternative newspaper, alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf (publisher), Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, th ...
'' 18, no. 12:138–139, 199, 202.
* Gaisford, Sue. 1999. "How We Met: Elizabeth Chatwin & Kevin Volans". ''
The Independent
''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publish ...
'' (London), 4 July.
*
Gann, Kyle. 1988.
Boston Composers and Kronos Quartets: Fear of Symmetry. ''
The Village Voice
''The Village Voice'' is an American news and culture paper, known for being the country's first alternative newspaper, alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf (publisher), Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, th ...
'' (23 February): 76.
* Gann, Kyle. 1998b. "Consumer Guide". ''
The Village Voice
''The Village Voice'' is an American news and culture paper, known for being the country's first alternative newspaper, alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf (publisher), Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, th ...
'' 43, no. 35 (1 September): 64.
* . 2006. "'Zur Freiheit führen viele Wege': Der Componist Kevin Volans über Afrika und die Musikalische Avantgarde". ''
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
'Die'' (; en, " heNew Journal of Music") is a music magazine, co-founded in Leipzig by Robert Schumann, his teacher and future father-in law Friedrich Wieck, and his close friend Ludwig Schuncke. Its first issue appeared on 3 April 1834.
His ...
'' 5, September/October, 16–17.
* Loppert, Max. 1993. "Volans: The Man Who Strides The Wind". ''Opera'', 68, 1102–1104.
*
Marcus, Bunita. 1989. "Preface". ''New Observations'' 67:2.
* Olwage, Grant. 1999–2000. "Who Needs Rescuing? A Reply to 'Gumboots to the Rescue'". ''
South African Journal of Musicology
''SAMUS: South African Music Studies'' is an annual peer-reviewed academic journal and the official journal of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM). The journal is abstracted and indexed in RILM and The Music Index. Online acc ...
: SAMUS'' 19, 105–108.
* Potter, Keith. 1982. "Repetitive Music Again (and Again)". ''Classical Music'' 28 August 1982.
* Pooley, Thomas M. 2008. "Composition in Crisis: Case Studies in South African Art Music 1980–2006". Unpublished MA Dissertation:
University of the Witwatersrand
The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (), is a multi-campus South African public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits ( or ). The university ...
.
* Rörich, Mary. "''Three Rhythmic Etudes''. Dublin: Black Sheep Edition, 2002; ''Three Structural Etudes''. Dublin: Black Sheep Edition, 2003"
core review ''
South African Journal of Musicology
''SAMUS: South African Music Studies'' is an annual peer-reviewed academic journal and the official journal of the South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM). The journal is abstracted and indexed in RILM and The Music Index. Online acc ...
: SAMUS'' 25, 151–154.
* Scherzinger, Martin. 2004. "Art Music in a Cross-cultural Context: The Case of Africa". In ''The Cambridge History of Twentieth-century Music'', eds. N. Cook and A. Pople, 584–613. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
* Scherzinger, Martin. 2004–2005. "Of Sleeping White Men: Analytic Silence in the Critical Reception of Kevin Volans". ''
NewMusicSA: Bulletin of the International Society for Contemporary Music – South African Section, Third and Fourth Issue'', 22–26.
* Scherzinger, Martin. 2008. "Who's 'White Man Sleeps'? Aesthetics and Politics in the Early Work of Kevin Volans". In ''Composing Apartheid: Music For and Against
Apartheid
Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...
'', edited by Grant Olwage, 209–235. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
*
* Taylor, Timothy D. 2001. "Volans, Kevin". ''
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'', it is one of the largest reference works on the history and theo ...
'', second edition, edited by
Stanley Sadie and
John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
* Taylor, Timothy D. n.d. "Volans, Kevin". ''
Grove Music Online'', edited by Dean Roote.
* Walton, Christopher. 2002–2003. "Kevin Volans 'String Quartets Nos. 1, 2 & 6'". ''
NewMusicSA: Bulletin of the International Society for Contemporary Music – South African Section, Second Issue'', 22–24.
External links
*
Contemporary Music Centre, composer pageBiography of Kevin Volans at musicsalesclassical.comField recordings made by Kevin Volans of music from Lesotho and South Africa
{{DEFAULTSORT:Volans, Kevin
1949 births
20th-century classical composers
21st-century classical composers
Alumni of Maritzburg College
Alumni of the University of Aberdeen
Irish classical composers
Living people
Irish male classical composers
People from Pietermaritzburg
Pupils of Karlheinz Stockhausen
South African composers
South African male composers
South African emigrants to Ireland
South African people of British descent
White South African people
20th-century male musicians
21st-century male musicians