Stanley Glasser

Stanley Glasser (1926-2018) was a South African composer.

Also known as Spike Glasser

Biography

Born in Johannesburg on 28 February, 1926, died 5 August 2018 in London.

Training

He studied music, first with Isador Epstein, then Adolph Hallis, and composition with S Hylton Edward and Professor Percival R Kirby. Glasser matriculated in 1945 from King Edward VII High School and graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a BCom degree in 1949. He went to England in 1950 to study music, first with Frankel at the Guildhall School of Music and then Seiber at Cambridge. In 1952, Glasser won a Royal Philharmonic Society prize, and from 1955 to 1958 read music at Cambridge.

Career

He returned to South Africa in 1958 to take up a lectureship at the South African College of Music (SACM), University of Cape Town and became assistant director to Professor Eric Chisholm (Director of SACM). He returned to England in 1963 having run into trouble with Apartheid legislation (under the immorality act which forbade sexual relations between members of different races) which caused him to flee South Africa. The accused couple first (Glasser and singer Maud Damons) fled into the then British protectorate of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), and from there went to Dar es Salaam (then Tanganyika, now Tanzania). From 1969 to 1991 he was head of music at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and was appointed to the first chair in Music in 1989. In 1997 he was awarded an honorary DMus from Richmond College, the American International University of London.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

His work includes:

• jingles for South African radio
• King Kong (1959), several numbers from this first African musical, for which he was also musical director
• The Square (1962), the first full-length South African ballet
• Mr Paljas (1962), a full-length musical
• The Chameleon and the Lizard (1970)

He was also the country's first composer of electronic music in his incidental music to Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones.

Several of his later works incorporate both the techniques of Western popular music and of African folk music, the latter reflecting Glasser's activity as an ethnomusicologist who has worked with the Pedi and Xhosa people of the northern Transvaal and Transkei. In The Chameleon and the Lizard (1970), based on a South African legend about the origin of death, the style is mostly direct and uncomplicated, and a strong element of music theatre is involved. Zonkizizwe (‘All the People’), an ebullient cantata sung in English, Zulu and Afrikaans, is reminiscent of Walton and Bernstein in its rhythmic verve and melodic appeal.

Glasser is the author of The A–Z of Classical Music (London, 1994).

Sources

Tucker, 1997;

http://phonoarchive.org/grove/Entries/S11263.htm

Stephanus Muller. 2018. "Stanley Glasser: a life of exile and bravely crossing musical boundaries", The Conversation, August 9, 2018[1]

Hilde Roos. 2010. 'Opera Production in the Western Cape: Strategies in Search of Indigenisation'. Unpublished PhD thesis. Stellenbosch University.

Avril Kinsey. 2009. 'Music for classical guitar by South African composers'. Unpublished Masters thesis. University of Cape Town.

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