The South African composer Hans Roosenschoon, now in his mid-thirties, is showing encouraging signs of reacting constructively to several very powerful European influences. Roosenschoon apparently studied in London, although the sleeve-note gives little biographical information. On this evidence, however, it is those strong, seductive continental voices—Berio, Ligeti, Lutos Iawski, Stockhausen—which have lingered longest in his mind. And it takes musical character of no little determination to rise above the pale imitation of any or all of these.
Imitation is certainly fairly pale in the earliest piece recorded here, Palette (1977) for string orchestra, despite the aggressive stance of its swooping, Polish-style clusters. Yet the music's sheer diversity of material—an occasional hint of the style's pre-history in Bartok, even a glimpse of a vanished world of richly-laid-out consonant harmony—may be personal rather than inherited, and if it suggests indecision rather than positively-embraced comprehensiveness, it evidently provides the impetus for the collage-like qualities of Roosenschoon's later compositions.
The movement from Ars Poetica from 1978-9 with choral writing evoking Lutos Iawski's Michaux settings, adds up to less than the brief, pointed and only occasionally diffuse Anagram for orchestra (1983), which makes play with the letters of the composer's name. Unfortunately, the longest and most recent piece, If music be (1984), for all its attractively unpretentious use of musical found-objects on tape, from Bach to pop, over-indulges itself in laboured play on the Shakespeare line begun by the title. I have no complaints about the quality of the recording.'