LANGUAGE BEYOND WORDS
Composer Philip Miller has an ear for happy coincidences and connections in sound,
Sounds, traditional songs and objects, the energy of a city and the transient noises that bring it to life, have for many years been the tools of choice for composer Philip Miller, but more recently, the nuance and mischief of language has enthralled him, too. A glimpse into his working practice reveals the give and take, the tentative steps in one direction, the passionate leaps in another that accompany a sense of “rightness”.
Miller is known and respected for his collaborations with William Kentridge. Collaborative installations by Kentridge, in which Miller’s music forms such a gentle, fierce and integral part, are on show in two Cape Town venues, in arguably the biggest Kentridge exhibition Africa has seen.
But Miller has over the years also been developing a significant body of work of his own. He’s involved in several projects concurrently, grabbing studio time whenever he can. He is in the process of composing the music for choreographer Dada Masilo’s new work The Sacrifice, which debuts in April 2020. In order to develop it, he’s pooling thinking with soprano Ann Masina, who Robyn Orlin and Kentridge supporters may remember for her stage presence and her vocal range, which is both unabashed and alarming.
He asks Masina to grunt like a Tswana
woman grinding meal. This, of course, is a tiny view of the work in an embryonic state, but it’s a curious experience. Masina is sitting in a sound studio in Norwood, Johannesburg; Miller works with the possibilities of her voice as a painter may with colour.
He explains how the development of his work rests on happy coincidences.
“A few years ago, before the World Cup in 2010, I was asked by German radio to do a sound piece about the city of Joburg,” he says. “I chose to work about miners, and the idea of going underground. I did my research: I went down a mine shaft in Mponeng, a mine in the Vaal Reef. I met miners. I became very interested in the notion of being in the ground and the sound world it presents.”
The project evokes the work of artists such as South African photographer David Goldblatt and installation artist James Webb, who played with what a mine represents in terms of an historical and an actual experience. Miller knows these approaches and thought about them with great care.
“I knew that at some point I was going to lose the mechanical noise of the mine, and I moved into the question of language. I started to read a lot about language, which led me to something called Fanakalo, which is the pidgin language used by mineworkers during apartheid.
“I spent a lot of time reading about language being both a vestige of apartheid, of power relations, but still as a mode of communication. It’s very practical. It’s still being used notwithstanding that there have been statements issued by the National Union of Mineworkers and mine management that they should phase out Fanakalo because it is anachronistic and problematic.”
Miller’s friend, Graeme Reid, an anthropologist who is the son of a miner, told him about a Fanakalo dictionary of mining terms and phrases, published in the early ’60s. He managed to find a copy of it. “I realised this was my text, my catalyst and my libretto, and that through it I could develop phrases and ideas around mining and I could work with it in a way that ruptures a dictionary, because of course a dictionary tries to control and regulate and to hold meaning in its form.”
As the work developed and Miller’s thinking was allowed to grow around ideas, the project hinged on other events that were happening. In 2014, he worked on Rehad Desai’s searingly important film Miners
Shot Down, which offered documentary insight into the Marikana massacre of 2012.
Miller explains his signature approach in his music, which is as much about the concept of quoting so-called found sounds as it is about a traditional approach and an ability to break rules as he goes.
Miller’s connections to other people and the songs and sounds they hold dear to them are rich, but never intrusive. “One of the first singers I worked with was the late Tumelo Moloi. We were working on various projects. At the end of one recording session, in the early 2000s, she started singing a song, which sounded very beautiful, and I asked her where that song came from. She said ‘My mom used to sing it to me.’ It is in moments like that that I get to understand something which can explore my world, but be porous enough to allow other things into it …”
He says of the simple, deep value of folk music: “It’s that music language in which I can look at someone else’s culture and keep something of myself. I don’t believe that in collaborating with William my own work could be compromised. My work developed into a signature, but that signature also involved collisions of different worlds.”
Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to
Work is at Zeitz Mocaa. Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture is at the Norval Foundation. On show until March 23 2020.
’I started to read a lot about language, which led me to something called Fanakalo’