twenty three carapi excerpt
twenty three carapi complete
read the poems of 23 Carapi
Recording of the première by the Koor Nieuwe Musik Amsterdam, 17th March 2000
at the Korzo Theater, Den Haag
twenty three carapi
2000
for mixed choir
13 min.
The texts for twenty three carapi are taken from a collection of poems (Carapace*23) that I came across on a trip to my home country, South Africa. As explained in the editorial this particular edition was international in character and endeavoured “in a small way, as one of its inchoate policies..., to reverse the direction of cultural colonialism. We bring non-South African poets to the attention of local readers and vice versa.”
Despite the international point of departure, the poets featured are all either South African or have some connection with South Africa. Tatamkhulu Afrika (one of the African poets included in the collection but not featured in my settings) for example is mentioned in the poem by Sujata Bhatt, an Indian poetess living with her husband Michael Augustin (himself an artist, prose-poet and broadcaster) in Bremen, a town in which I myself spent some two years studying. Sujata’s name in turn recurs in the poem by James Matthews, a South African poet and novelist.
The personal character of this thread of names is continued in lighter and often intimate texts such as Caroline Long’s The Mozart Café or Stephanie Shutte’s poem about a childhood romance picked up after many years and continued despite great geographical distance. Alongside these poems one finds more serious reflections on religion in Adam Schwartzman’s intricate Rhapsody or on the nature of creativity in Leon de Kock’s The Wall for example. In this respect I feel that the collection reflects a little of the diversity of South Africa and its peoples. Individuals each carrying a shell that helps them define their own world in the presence of others. Sometimes interacting and transforming one-another, sometimes just existing in the same space.
2000
for mixed choir
13 min.
The texts for twenty three carapi are taken from a collection of poems (Carapace*23) that I came across on a trip to my home country, South Africa. As explained in the editorial this particular edition was international in character and endeavoured “in a small way, as one of its inchoate policies..., to reverse the direction of cultural colonialism. We bring non-South African poets to the attention of local readers and vice versa.”
Despite the international point of departure, the poets featured are all either South African or have some connection with South Africa. Tatamkhulu Afrika (one of the African poets included in the collection but not featured in my settings) for example is mentioned in the poem by Sujata Bhatt, an Indian poetess living with her husband Michael Augustin (himself an artist, prose-poet and broadcaster) in Bremen, a town in which I myself spent some two years studying. Sujata’s name in turn recurs in the poem by James Matthews, a South African poet and novelist.
The personal character of this thread of names is continued in lighter and often intimate texts such as Caroline Long’s The Mozart Café or Stephanie Shutte’s poem about a childhood romance picked up after many years and continued despite great geographical distance. Alongside these poems one finds more serious reflections on religion in Adam Schwartzman’s intricate Rhapsody or on the nature of creativity in Leon de Kock’s The Wall for example. In this respect I feel that the collection reflects a little of the diversity of South Africa and its peoples. Individuals each carrying a shell that helps them define their own world in the presence of others. Sometimes interacting and transforming one-another, sometimes just existing in the same space.