A Composer's Journey on the Road to Mecca

Abstract

A COMPOSER’S JOURNEY ON THE ROAD TO MECCA CHRIS VAN RHYN HE FOLLOWING DIARY ENTRY by the present author provides the biographical context of the essay that follows: My first introduction to the village of Nieu-Bethesda in South Africa’s Great Karoo region was during a family holiday in June 1998. At my mother’s suggestion, we visited Helen Martins’s Owl House of which I had never heard. My lack of expectation, coupled with the openness characteristic of an optimistic late-teenage sensibility not yet tainted by life experience, provided for a profound experience. The air was stale and tangibly thick with an energy of deep sadness caught in the colored milled glass walls and glass panes, wire, numerous cement statues of owls (amongst other things) and a collection of kitsch art and knick-knacks inside the house. The often grotesque and surreal statues in the so-called Camel Yard (Example 2), Helen’s “Mecca,” begged to be relieved from their claustrophobia and never-ending journey East. In August 2013 I returned, hoping to relive my previous experience. Perhaps owing to an underlying cynicism cultivated over fifteen years, the result of expectation, or the commercialization (and resultant T 68 Perspectives of New Music sanitization), of Martins’s space that had since taken place, I was unable to re-conjure the experience. With envy I watched children running through the yard, shrieking and pointing at Martins’s creations. All I could do was attempt a re-composition in music of what I now saw as having been a spiritual encounter. It was my reading in 2012 of Athol Fugard’s play on the life and work of Helen Martins (The Road to Mecca, 1984)1 that first prompted me to revisit Nieu-Bethesda. Although my music composition, The Road to Mecca for piano (2014), takes its name from this play, it was my first-hand visual encounter with Helen Martins’s landscape and the spiritual impact it had on me that inspired its conception. This work was first performed at the North-West University Conservatory Hall in Potchefstroom, South Africa, in August 2014. It received its American première at Harvard University’s John Knowles Paine Concert Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January 2015. This paper traverses the road between cultural geography, visual arts, and music composition in its theoretically speculative exploration of the possibilities for translating into music the spiritual in a landscape—the experience of transcendence, that which goes beyond human knowledge and reason. HELEN MARTINS AND LANDSCAPE Helen Elizabeth Martins was born in Nieu-Bethesda in December 1897, where she also spent her childhood as one of six children. According to Ross (1997, 25), Helen was named after a deceased older sister and was therefore “manifestly linked with death right from the start of her life.” The Jungian analyst Vera Bührman believes that “‘replacement children’ . . . carry the fantasies of the mother [and] never form the identity of an integrated person” (Ross 1997, 25). After a brief marriage and spending time elsewhere in South Africa, she returned to Nieu-Bethesda in the 1930s to take care of her ill mother and father who died in 1941 and 1945, respectively. Some time after this she began to transform her home and yard into a work of art2 with the help of a range of men who physically executed the pieces. Koos Malgas, who assisted Martins during the last twelve years of her life, was “the finest craftsman-cum-artist of the three.”3 Neither Helen nor any of her assistants had any formal art training (Ross 1997, 16). In addition to the milled glass that were added to almost every surface, walls were broken down or built, and windows were inserted. The cement statues in the yard were accompanied by perspex suns, moons. A Composer’s Journey on the Road to Mecca 69 and stars (Ross 1997, 15). The Dutch Reformed Church played a central role in the village by its influence on the lives of the inhabitants —doubting its teachings would have been unacceptable. Martins grew to reject most of the religious, moral, and social norms associated with the church.4 Villagers grew suspicious of...