Kevin Volans

[4] Alongside other composers such as Walter Zimmermann, 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.

[4] 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.

[5] Composers linked with the New Simplicity generally sought a more transparent and direct style, an openness to aspects of tonality and freedom to use pre-existing material quite in contrast to the intense abstraction of the post-war avant-garde.

[6] Despite having grown up in South Africa, Volans had little contact with the indigenous music of his homeland due to apartheid strictures which largely prohibited the intermingling of black and white cultures.

[13] 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.

[14] 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.

[15] 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 and Shobana Jeyasingh.

[16] Described by the composer as his first minimalist piece, Cicada's reduction in content and largely flat surface is a departure from the generally high degree of activity which marked many of his earlier works.

Malevich, Mondrian, Yves Klein, Rothko, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden and others immediately spring to mind... At the turn of the century I became increasingly interested in eliminating subject matter in my music as far as possible.

[23] 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.

[16] 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.