In 1976 he embarked on 'African Journal', a series of pieces for Western instruments that drew on his studies of traditional African music[1] and aesthetics, which continued to expand during two decades in London until he returned to South Africa in 1998.
In 1970 he registered for a Bachelor of Music degree at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg studying composition with June Schneider and Klaas van Oostveen, and piano with Adolph Hallis.
London New Music undertook British Council-sponsored tours in Europe, and broadcast regularly for BBC Radio 3 and European radio stations, premiering new work commissioned by Blake from his contemporaries – Gerald Barry, Matteo Fargion, Christopher Fox, Chris Newman, Howard Skempton, Kevin Volans – as well as playing non-mainstream ('downtown') composers he considered important – Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Charles Ives, Stefan Wolpe, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Bunita Marcus, Barbara Monk, Christian Wolff and Walter Zimmermann.
So from the mid-1970s his musical language was partly the result of an immersion in the materials and playing techniques of African music His first mbira-based piece, for harpsichord, was written as the soundtrack of a 1976 TV documentary about African weaving, and during the following two decades that he was based in London, it was followed by pieces for string quartet, a variety of chamber ensembles, keyboard solo and duo, solo instruments, orchestra and choir, culminating in San Polyphony for organ (1998/2006), his first commission after settling back in South Africa in 1998.
Martin Scherzinger has described these as "understated translations of African music into Western idioms [that] deftly negotiate the borderline between quotation and abstraction, and, in the process, interrogate the opposition between the two".
[2] Alongside 'African Journal', there were also pieces which drew on other music, for example: Bach (…ode-cantata…, 1980), or Art Tatum and Fats Waller (Two Studies for Prepared Piano, 1983), or Cole Porter (Nightsongs, 1997).