Arnold van Wyk

Arnoldus Christiaan Vlok van Wyk (26 April 1916 – 27 March 1983) was a South African art music composer, one of the first notable generation of such composers along with Hubert du Plessis and Stefans Grové.

Despite the strict laws imposed by the Apartheid government during his lifetime, van Wyk's homosexuality was ignored by the authorities throughout his career due to the nationalistic nature of his music.

Arnoldus Christiaan Vlok van Wyk was born on 26 April 1916 on the farm Klavervlei, not far from Calvinia, a small town in the Northern Cape province of South Africa.

He was the sixth of eight children.

His mother, Helena van Dyk, came from a wealthy family seemingly descended from the seventeenth century court painter Anthony van Dyck.

The couple married when farming provided reasonable hopes of financial security, however Van Wyk's father was never an efficient manager of the business.

Little is known about his childhood other than that life was difficult.

From as early as 1918, the family struggled financially, his father Arnoldus Christiaan Vlok van Wyk abused his wife and children.

Several members of the family, including Van Wyk's mother and eldest sisters, demonstrated musical talent but had little opportunity for musical education.

Van Wyk took occasional piano lessons from his 'favourite" sister Minnie and soon he was "improvising dramatic piano illustrations of stories told by anyone soft-hearted enough to pay him sixpence." At 16, Van Wyk was sent to boarding school at Stellenbosch Boys' High School in Stellenbosch. He took piano lessons first from the cellist Hans Endler and later from Miss C.E. van der Merwe. His mother died in Somerset Hospital in Cape Town, followed a few weeks later by the death of his eldest sister. He matriculated at the age of seventeen and decided to spend the next year preparing for an overseas piano scholarship, an effort that proved unsuccessful. He took a job in Cape Town in the claims department at an insurance company. During this time, he made contact with Charles Weich, music critic of the Afrikaans newspaper Die Burger, who invited him to perform for the first time at a concert of works "by unknown South African composers" hosted by the Oranjeklub.

It brought an audience to Van Wyk's works and provided the young composer with a voice.

In 1938, Van Wyk began studies aimed at a BA-degree at the University of Stellenbosch.

He interrupted his studies to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

He was the first South African composer to receive a Performing Right Scholarship to study there, initially granted for one academic year.

During the next couple of years Wyk worked as a freelance composer and musician and made several tours of piano recitals throughout the Union of South Africa, a concert series organised by the then Reddingsdaadbond, an organisation established in 1939 to promote and invest in cultural projects throughout the Union.

The concerts were designed to cultivate classical music appreciation among rural Afrikaners.

Numerous music critics have questioned the "nationalistic style" that appears in van Wyk's works.

During Van Wyk's time at the Royal Academy, his works were performed at several student concerts, including his Violin Concerto, conducted by Sir Henry Wood and performed by fellow student Doreen Cordell in 1940.

To supplement his income, Van Wyk took a job at the recently formed Afrikaans section of the BBC, where he worked as announcer, translator, deviser of programmes, and newsreader, for the remainder of his time in London.

Through this BBC appointment he met British composer and musicologist Howard Ferguson, who was "immensely impressed by [the] beauty and originality" of his works.

A lifelong relationship developed from this meeting and resulted in performances of several of Wyk's works on stages throughout the United Kingdom during his eight-year stay there.

The first of these public performances included Van Wyk's "Five Elegies for String Quartet", performed as part of the well-known National Gallery Concerts.

While studying at the Royal Academy, Van Wyk received many prizes, including the 1941 Worshipful Company of Musicians Medal, awarded to the most distinguished student in the Academy.

Van Wyk had many concerns about his first professional training from his composition teacher, Theodore Holland.

After a few months at the Royal Academy, Van Wyk wrote in a letter:

"This evening after I had done some decent practicing, I played some of my earlier pieces—the "Nocturne," the "Bagatelles," the "Romanza" & "Mazurka" and this has put me in a nice, blue sentimental mood. It would be natural to write a blue letter, with purple moments & mauve cadences, but I'll do my best not to inflict this on you. Contact with the English has taught me the indecency of emotion; has taught me that naked emotion is as unforgivable as walking down the street without one's pants. I have as yet not decided whether I am a better man now that I have assimilated this philosophy."

Other works performed included his two piano-duet works, "Three Improvisations on Dutch Folksongs," and the variations entitled "Poerpasledam", an Afrikaans corruption of the French "pour passer le temps). Other works performed during Van Wyk's stay in England were of his First Symphony, also conducted by Sir Henry Wood, as part of a special BBC broadcast on South Africa's Union Day celebrations in 1943, and the Saudade for violin and orchestra, originally the middle movement of the Violin Concerto, performed by violinist Olive Zorian at an Albert Hall Promenade Concert conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.

Some critics questioned Van Wyk's popularity with English audiences and argued that the BBC promoted his works as part of its larger campaign on behalf of the Afrikaners who formed part of the Allied Forces of World War II.

Van Wyk received permission to continue his studies there until 1944.

Wyk returned to South Africa in 1946 following the end of the Second World War.

When Van Wyk returned to South Africa in early December 1946 "he received a heart-warming welcome".

His return prompted an interest in contributing to South African art music, motivated by nationalist concerns.

He completed his Second Symphony (Sinfonia Ricercata) during this time, a work commissioned for the 1952 Van Riebeeck Festival, as well as his orchestral work "Rapsodie" (1951).

Several scholars argue that Van Wyk's songs represent his finest work.

Following his Rhapsody came an important song-cycle "Van Liefde en Verlatenheid", praised by critic Malcolm Rayment as "one of the most important contributions of our time to the literature of songs".

At a public lecture in 1955 for the Commonwealth section of the Royal Society of Arts, critic Stewart Hylton-Edwards pointed out that Van Wyk would not be capable "to write English music to the end of his days".

Another argues that Van Wyk felt exploited by the nationalists and that they were only concerned with his contribution to the cultivation process of South African Art Music.

Wyk especially disliked his connections with the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), which frequently commissioned works from him and presented him with his only broadcasting opportunities.

In South Africa Van Wyk continued working on his "Kersfees Kantata" (Christmas Cantata), a work he had begun composing in London that promised him financial security with yearly state-sponsored broadcasts.

To avoid any further connections with the Afrikaner Nationalists, Van Wyk accepted an appointment as lecturer in Music at the English-speaking University of Cape Town, a post that "promised security while allowing some time for composition and piano playing".