DAVID FANSHAWE – AN ENRICHING LIFE OF LOVE AND MUSIC

David Arthur Fanshawe - born 19 April 1942; died 5 July 2010: sadly it was 12 September 2018 before this became evident. Why has the world has been so careless with David Fanshawe and his legacy? Reports cannot even get his name spelled correctly every time; yet this man was a great promoter, not only of music, but also of the human spirit, of love. He signed his name with florid flashes, scribbled scrolls and delicate dots, adding “I love the world.” He could not declare this enough. The gesture inspired more dots on my signature as a homage to this marvellous, free spirit that is recalled every time the hand makes its personal mark.

David Fanshawe

It was very many years ago in the 1970s that the vinyl record was discovered in the local music shop and purchased. It was not only the cover that was attractive: Africian Sanctus touched a nerve, suggesting a universal quality to spirituality and life; hinting that each religion was the same; that life held a basic, raw, searching spirit seeking recognition, delight in expression. Only Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Swansong has moved me so much# with its music and mystic CD cover text: . . . it was You, only You. It was not just this idea about emotions and feelings that was of interest, but the music was inspirational too. Sanctus was a stunning, a surprisingly brilliant interplay of the old and the new, of ancient and modern cultures, at a time before anyone had even heard or thought of Postmodernism. Fanshawe’s work was ground-breaking. Everyone who has ever attempted to do it knows how difficult it is to re-interpret something that is familiar to us, but Fanshawe gave us a wonderfully beautiful, new Lord’s prayer in his landmark African Sanctus. This remains his signature work that has been performed over a thousand times across the world.

I heard it in Brisbane when the local choirs presented the complete score at the Cultural Centre many years ago. It was on this evening that one realised how little was known of this man. Vincent Plush introduced the evening, saying, without embarrassment, that he knew not very much about him, giving Fanshawe a gloss of irrelevance. One does not know if he was trying to be funny, but he told a story of how his students were told to do some research on Fanshawe, posssibly for African Sanctus. His story was that one student telephoned Fanshawe’s wife in the UK and found out he was working on his Pacific Odyssey. Plush seemed to think this somewhat ‘lower class,’ perhaps carelessly ad hoc, maybe lacking in 'star' prestige, and added that Mrs. Fanshawe had said that David plans to present this Pacific work in the Sydney Opera House, mockingly asking if the Opera House knew about this. It was a shameful show of public disrespect for Fanshawe. Plush should have known better; but alas he did not. One wonders why he was asked to introduce the evening; or why he accepted. Was it all about self-importance?

If Plush had been interested, he could have heard Fanshawe speak in Brisbane at the Queensland University of Technology about twelve months prior to this evening, just before he packed everything up and travelled back to the UK. His talk was an enlightening experience. Fanshawe had spent years travelling the Pacific recording and filming traditional music and dance. He had thousands of tapes, videos, and slides that he had filed and turned into his ‘archive.’ He would have liked to have kept the material in the region, but no one was prepared to fund it: such is Australia. So Fanshawe was reduced to giving public talks to raise money to get back to the UK where he stayed for the rest of his life.

His Pacific Odyssey was inspired by his work on African Sanctus. For this African-based piece, Fanshawe had travelled down the Nile with detours that took the form of a cross on the map. This became the stimulus for his mass. For the Pacific work, his travels took the plan-form of the southern cross. His recordings are acknowledged as astonishing given the conditions he worked in. It is said that he had a skill for identifying the critical sounds in his recordings, their balanced interrelationship. Was it this work that led to his anonymity? Traditional art has no time to concentrate on the individual; the art was everything, the outcome was always critical, never the author – it had nothing to do with things personally intimate, or with personal ‘expression.’ Fanshawe kept his work in this genre when it would have perhaps been easier, and more lucrative, to have become more commercially heroic, more individually noticeable.

Yet his work was astonishing. He wrote scores for television programmes that leave him in the background where he liked to be. Fanshawe told that he was at the Royal College of Music at the same time as Andrew Lloyd Webber, and gently laughed at the difference in their different successes.

It took years for anyone to do anything like his Sanctus work. Paul Simon’s Graceland attempted a similar integration of African and modern sounds, cleverly intertwining rhythms, sometimes smartly in reversal, with new words. While interesting and ‘catchy,’ Graceland is not as ‘pure’ as Sanctus that remains a unique piece that has stimulated similar interests in all other arts. Architecture went through a stage of interpreting the world in the same way as Sanctus touches and treats its sounds, with the old inspiring and being sensitively integrated into the new era that became known in the publications promoted by Charles Jencks as ‘Post-modern.’

That Fanshawe could have such energy and enthusiasm for his work and life in general is astonishing. One can now get some of his recordings that have been released on-line and on CD. The sounds seem as fresh as the day they were recorded. Fanshawe did get good publicity for his Sanctus when the BBC talked him into returning to Africa, and travelled with him as he retraced his journey, seeking out those people he had recorded. In particular, it was the man whose face filled the beautiful cover of the record jacket that became the core search, and the greatest celebration. Fanshawe wore his ‘spirit’ cap in remembrance of this occasion. After this BBC programme was played, African Sanctus became a best seller. It was a first and a last for Fanshawe who continued on enthusiastically with his writing and recording. His was a commitment to music in all of its forms, not to merely becoming a ‘star.’

Fanshawe’s genius lay in his modesty that was concealed by his exuberance for life and its expression in music, a richness in expression that could be seen by some as ‘over the top.’ A video showing his work in Paul Gaugain’s Tahiti, Musical Mariner 1986, typically reveals his energy and interest. He speaks to people as though he cares for them, truly interested in learning about their understanding of their music rather than grabbing it and turning it into his ‘top-of-the-tops’ version. In this way he is approaching traditional art exactly as Ananda Coomaraswamy said it should be. The modern world is only too quick to make its own judgement and to use other ‘art’ material that is rooted in specific spirituality and symbolism; assessing it blindly with its own careless parameters and individualistic measures.

That Fanshawe’s death could pass without any public primal scream is astonishing and promotes exactly the attitude that Plush pushed, making nothing but scornful fun out of the work of a man who knew he was, in some cases, recording the very last sounds from some traditional life that the world would ever hear: but no one could care. The Fanshawe archive holds significant material, but the world could not care about this as it races ‘forward’ regardless of any circumstance or outcome, believing this is ‘progress.’ The lack of any interest in Fanshawe’s death seemed similar to the Australian media’s interest in both of the fires in the Mackintosh Glasgow School of Art: see - http://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2014/05/glasgow-school-of-art-burns.html

The archive

We will learn that we will have to care about the past if we are to have any future beyond mind-numbing AI which clearly defines itself as ‘artificial’ intelligence. We have to be beware of things artificial, and superficial, no matter how astonishing they may appear. Life itself, its experience, that expression and understanding that lingers at the heart of all cultures, needs to find itself a place and form in modernity, and be respected, celebrated anew. Without this we will be as superficial and artificial as the AI that technology seems certain to push on to us: to, one might say, ‘Plush’ us.

We must do better than this. No matter what tools are developed, what games we might play, we remain flesh and blood; breathing and feeling in a universe that remains, at its heart, as mysterious to us as it was to all other times, if we pause to consider it. This needs celebration in its understanding, not domination by things that concentrate on and tell only about ME, and MY bespoke, ‘selfie,’ importance in the universe. Fanshawe’s music can give us a clue on where to start. It is invigorating, enlivening; full of shared joy and hope, and commitment, qualities that are sadly fading in our hateful world of quick self-interest.

David Fanshawe (Hon Degree of Doctor of Music)

Fanshawe and his work needs to be remembered, not just ‘Plushed’ away as an irrelevance. Seek it out; be enriched – it still lives: see -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Fanshawe

https://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/artist/plush-vincent

Spitfire Audio gives access to some of Fanshawe's archive material

# ON BEING MOVED
Writing in the introduction of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali, (Macmillan, London, 1913), William Butler Yeats noted how he had ‘carried the manuscript of these translations (of ‘Song Offerings’) about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.’

Song 17 I am only waiting for love to give myself up at last into his hands. (p.14)