Of Fictalopes and Jictology

2018, 7 minutes

Film about Graham Newcater

Graham Newcater, born in 1941, is the only South African composer who has consistently composed within the 12-tone technique. After his acclaimed compositions of the late 1960s (the First Symphony and the ballet Raka), his recent piano compositions broke several decades of compositional silence. Graham Newcater writes: "At one level I view music as a scientific and technical job, an engineering design, if you like. A mystical relationship arises between the constituent notes of a row, which should be given free play and not inhibited or distorted by over-rigorous application of the system. The twelve-tone system brings about subtle weights of sound which would never occur otherwise…the twelve-tone system offers a divine relation. It is the source not only of music but of mystic truth."

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