Interview: Philip Miller on BikoHausen

Miller’s musical works are just that – inventions. Last year, he went deep into his intellectual resourcefulness to reimagine an unrecorded conversation that happened some 46 years ago. In 1971, at the end of a working lecture tour to South Africa, German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and his wife, the artist Mary Bauermeister, visited Soweto where they were accompanied by black consciousness activist Steve Biko. There is little archival evidence of this meeting, but Miller found it significant to artistically imagine the topics that the two visionaries might have covered. Miller combined the better known approaches of Biko and Stockhausen to forge the portmanteau BikoHausen, a triptych installation that combined the services of some of South Africa’s most creative and “responsive” musicians. They include Siya Makuzeni (voice), Ann Masina (voice), Bham Ntabeni (voice), Vus’umuzi Nhlapo (voice), Tlale Makhene (percussion and voice) and Waldo Alexander (violin).

Music In Africa spoke to the 53-year-old Miller about BikoHausen and how it was born inside the mind of the respected South African composer. 

Music In Africa: What’s the difference between sound artist and composer?

Philip Miller: It’s a question that cannot be easily answered. For me it’s about going past the idea of music being beyond the compositional realm and into physical spaces. I use the distinction for myself to extend the idea of being a composer in the most traditional sense, where the music is extended to non-musical formats.

Why did you choose the story of Stockhausen meeting Biko in South Africa? Was it an important story to retell?

When I was in the archives in Darmstadt [Germany], I went there trying to examine the archive in its relation to Africa and particularly South Africa, and the connections and disconnections between European modernism and the movement led by Stockhausen, as well as the lack of African composers’ representation in Darmstadt. So it was about me thinking about what connection I could find through this archive. I found out that Stockhausen had visited South Africa in ‘71. That led me to his wife Mary Bauermeister’s diary and an anecdote that they had met Steve Biko. That’s where I found a kind of interesting thought around the question of connections: two radical leaders in two very different movements who met. That made me think about this conversation.

Is music, which is the larger element of this installation, the most apt art form to imagining this conversation? Perhaps poetry or some kind of creative literature might have been more appropriate?

Every artist makes different choices. I was doing research in sound and music and I don’t particularly like poetry. The piece is about imagining a conversation about words and I wanted to work with musicians. I thought that Stockhausen’s lectures would bring interest to the musicians. Had I been a poet I might have done something else. 

Stockhausen was a difficult man to talk to, to understand…

He completely revolutionised the idea of music-making and performance. I knew about the most superficial things around him, but the more I listened to recordings of his lectures, the more I thought, ‘How radical’, and what a highly unique thinker he was for his time. There was a tremendous amount of learning that I took from the lectures. My understanding is that he had very pure ideas of what he thought was right or wrong. I thought about, how did these two people meet and what did they say about each other? But I believe he had a nature of curiosity because he went with Stephen Biko to Soweto in ’71.

We don’t know whether they spoke easily to each other, whether they were relaxed. I would imagine that he would have been very interested. It seemed that towards the end of his career he became very esoteric. He moved into strange science fiction that I personally think lost sense of him.

For Stockhausen the performance was sometimes more important than the music itself.

Yes. BikoHausen very much reflects that, without reflecting much on the writing of the music but on the performance. Our collaboration in studio between the various musicians was very much about performance. That’s why there were many cameras. I wanted the audience to understand the notion of intuitive responding to the text and each other. This piece is all about performance rather than a carefully composed score.

At one point there was a call for a huge emphasis in modernist music where everything had to be written down and it had to be performed in a conventional concert hall. What interested me was how Stockhausen allowed musicians to free themselves from the score, the notation. There was an enormous amount of freedom for the performer but incredible detail about what sounds he wanted. I certainly wanted to explore that in my work.

How important is improvisation in general – as a state of creativity?

Firstly, improvisation is not something new. In South Africa it’s part of the very nature of music and musicians and is part of music that is traditional and non-traditional. Stockhausen actually doesn’t like to use the world ‘improvisation’. His description is ‘intuitive music’ because he doesn’t want the specific reference to jazz. Intuitive music is about people listening to each other and responding.

For me that distinction became a vital part of making BikoHausen. I was very specific about the people I wanted to take part in this. All of them, whom I’ve worked with for many years, are very comfortable with creating ideas and responding intuitively and trying things without necessarily knowing how it will sound. I wanted to celebrate all of these elements and also to take this work back to Darmstadt and say, ‘There are these radical thoughts in music from a European or modernist perspective that continues to be part of music-making in South Africa, and the way I work with musicians here.'

What are your other inspirations when it comes to a collaborative approach?

They often involve collaborating with artist who work in other disciplines. I work a lot with artists like William Kentridge, and so inspirations often come from visual aspects. Sometimes it’s a photograph, it could be perhaps text, a concept. Archive is very much a part of my inspiration, too. I’m very much interested in sound and visual archives. I’m also, like many creative people, interested in the world around me: the city or the sounds that make up the soundtrack of one’s life. I listen to sounds, not necessarily music, as an emotional response.

How long did it take you to get good at what you do? When did you say to yourself, okay now I’m comfortable to create without any worries about the medium?

I never feel that. Firstly, I don’t say, I’m this or I’m that. The idea that I’m a composer sitting comfortably in my life in music, satisfied, it doesn’t really enter into my head. I’m always rethinking, doubting, reworking, going back, and questioning myself that there is more to be learnt. Of course, I make music and sound, and in that sense I am a composer. But the idea that I’ve achieved a certain amount of work doesn’t leave me with the sense that I can always do it. Every project has to be approached individually and examined. Each work becomes in itself a re-examination of who I am and what I do.

Let’s talk about the state of composition in Africa. Do we have enough composers in Africa?

Well, I’m not a musicologist and I haven’t done a survey on this. I think there are many different ways in which music is composed in Africa and one has to just pull down barriers and not examine. There are people making and producing music in many different forms.

Is there a community of composers in which they draw influences and inspiration from each other?

There are ways in which we network with each other through technology, learning from each other through obvious ways like YouTube. But I do think that there could be more ways that we could be aware of each other’s work and connect with each other. But very simply put, people are doing very different things and we don’t always overlap with each other, because many composers are quite discreet about what they do. So perhaps those connections need to happen more, although cross-disciplinary work is starting to happen more and I think it’s partly through technology.