Draft:Afrikosmos

Afrikosmos link text is a collection of 75 piano pieces by the South African composer Michael Blake, composed between 2015 and 2020. Afrikosmos is modelled on Mikrokosmos by the Hungarian modernist composer Béla Bartók, sharing its basic concept of a progressive approach from easy pieces to virtuoso concert works, over the course of six volumes of music. While Bartók's pieces draw their material from the folk music of Hungary, Rumania and Slovakia, Michael Blake's pieces draw theirs from the traditional music of sub-Saharan Africa, often in rhythmic cycles. For examples, he draws on xylophone music from Uganda and Mozambique, mbira music from Zimbabwe, panpipe music from Venda, Xhosa music for the Uhadi musical bow, African choral music, popular styles such as mbaqanga, goema, and boeremusiek, flute music from the Ituri Rain Forest, lesiba music from Lesotho, and African birdsong. A selection of pieces has been arranged as Six Africosms for brass quintet, and another group as Afrikosmos Suite for organ.

Volumes
Each volume includes studies, character pieces, dances, pieces exploring rhythm or texture, pieces in different modes, folksong arrangements and transcriptions, and homages to earlier composers. The contents of the six volumes is as follows:

The Music
This music breathes a twentieth-century American experimental sensibility in its motionlessness, sounding introspection, the deliberate affordance of allowing sonority to be sounded again and again until its constituent colours start separating under the operation of repetition.

Some of the compositional techniques frequently found are the anhemitonic pentatonic scale: a five-note scale which has no semitones, for example D-E-G-A-B (e.g. To Comfort a Child, Volume 1); Xhosa bow harmony: two triads which are built on the two fundamental pitches of an Uhadi musical bow, for example C-E-G and D-F#-A (e.g. You are a real rascal, Volume 1); the bow scale: the hexatonic scale resulting from these two bow chords: C-D-E-F#-G-A (this is not the same whole-tone hexatonic scale as used by Debussy for example)(e.g. Two Modes Interlocking, Volume 2); interlocking: different rhythmic parts alternating to create a single line, which can give an impression of great speed (e.g. Interlocking Hands, Volume 1); and polyrhythm: simultaneously combining contrasting rhythms (e.g. Heaven's Bow, Volume 6).

Seakhi rhythm, found in the music of Lesotho, is characterised by additive rhythm and strongly resembles the Bulgarian rhythms Bartók used in Mikrokosmos. The final piece in Volume 6, "Dance in Seakhi Rhythm", is both a homage to Bartók and the Sotho composer Joshua Pulumo Mohapeloa, and like the final dance in Mikrokosmos has the quavers grouped as 3+3+2 in a bar link text.

Antony Gray link text recorded the complete cycle for Divine Art Records link text in June 2021, in the concert hall of the Yehudi Menduhin School in Surrey.