Michael Masote: Violin maestro who helped spread popularity of classical music
1941 - 2017
MICHAEL Masote, who has died in Johannesburg at the age of 76, started the first black youth orchestra in South Africa — which grew into the Soweto Symphony Orchestra and spawned the famous Soweto String Quartet — and translated Handel’s Messiah into nine local languages.
He conducted the first performance of The Black Messiah in 1983 at Soweto’s Holy Cross Anglican church, which was packed by, among others, activists of the Azanian People’s Organisation, the most dominant and militant anti-apartheid group at the time.
The performance, which was accompanied by Masote’s Soweto Youth Orchestra and a choir trained by him, was a stunning success musically and politically.
It was a triumphant demonstration that classical music was not the preserve of whites. And the philosophy inherent in the piece, a powerful refutation of everything that apartheid stood for, was made more relevant and accessible to South Africans than ever before, thanks to Masote’s translations.
In 1996 he wrote a new version to commemorate the adoption of the democratic constitution. Renamed The South African Messiah, it included some Afrikaans and retained some of the original English. It was performed by the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra in 2001.
Under apartheid, racially mixed orchestras were banned, and so it was his mission to start a symphony orchestra that black children could participate in.
In 1965, he started the Soweto Youth Orchestra at Uncle Tom’s Hall in Orlando West.
Out of this grew the Soweto Symphony Orchestra, which became the pride of oppressed people all over Southern Africa.
Under his baton it performed across the region, including Harare, Gaborone and Maseru. He also conducted a performance of the orchestra at the inaugural Grahamstown Arts Festival in 1978.
Masote taught himself to conduct by paying the janitor at the Johannesburg city hall to lend him his uniform and a broom when the National Symphony Orchestra was having rehearsals.
While pretending to sweep in the passage outside the hall he would INSTRUMENT OF JOY: Michael Masote study the movements of the conductor and pay careful attention to what he said to his orchestra and how he communicated with the musicians.
Masote was born in Sophiatown on January 7 1941, the third-youngest of eight children.
His father, Sekolo, was a delivery man for a butchery, and his mother, Esther, was a domestic worker.
Choral singing was an important part of family life and his parents and most of his siblings sang in the local Methodist church choir.
In 1950 violinist Yehudi Menuhin toured South Africa and gave a free concert in Sophiatown which the nineyear-old Masote attended.
He was entranced and decided that he wanted to be a violinist. It was not until he was 17, by which time the family had been forcefully removed from Sophiatown and relocated to Soweto, that he got his first proper bow and violin from the family of the editor-to-be of the Sowetan, Aggrey Klaaste.
He joined the Jubilee Music School, where his first violin teacher was Jeffrey Diedericks, with whom he became a member of the Ionian ensemble under Khabi Mngoma.
He later took lessons with the celebrated teacher Alan Solomon.
In 1973 he was awarded his licentiate as a violin teacher from the Royal School of Music.
In 1964 Masote joined the Johannesburg Bantu Music Festival, where he became a cultural officer, trained choirs, gave violin lessons and rewrote African music into orchestral format.
The police would stop him and make him open his violin case to prove he was not carrying a gun.
Then he would have to give an impromptu recital to prove that it was not stolen. He would play Sarie Marais for them and their belligerence would melt.
Once he was trapped for speeding. The white traffic cop aggressively demanded he open his violin case and then told him to play something. When he played Sarie Marais the officer called his colleagues to hear him. They were so moved that they gave him a couple of Cokes, told him to forget the speeding offence and waved him goodbye.
Frequent all-day rehearsals of the Soweto Youth Orchestra aroused the suspicions of the security branch that it was a cover for underground activities against the state.
Their suspicions about Masote deepened when he began dating, and started a music school with, the daughter of PAC chairman Zeph Mothopeng, Sheila.
In 1976 they were both detained under the Terrorism Act, along with Mothopeng, who was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment on Robben Island.
They were released but closely watched, harassed and occasionally detained, particularly after trips to Swaziland, Lesotho and Botswana, where Masote conducted performances for South African exiles.
In 1998 he obtained his BMus from Unisa, which awarded him an honorary licentiate in 2005. Also in 2005 he received the Order of Ikhamanga in bronze from president Thabo Mbeki.
Masote, who died of heart failure, is survived by his wife, Sheila, and three children. — Chris Barron
When he played ’Sarie Marais’ the officer called his colleagues. They were so moved that they gave him a couple of Cokes