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Monday, January 15, 2007

Where I'm coming from.

I've decided to move my blog to from my MySpace profile to Blogger. Old blogs can still be read at MySpace. This blog will contain any ramblings I may have regarding music. But it's probably worthwhile to begin with some sort of introduction to myself:

My name is Anthony Haenen. I was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, where I still live. I was reading human physiology and psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand when I decided to change degrees and study music, which I did at the Wits School of Arts. My focus has always been on composition; my principal instrument is guitar. I studied classical guitar with Darryl Rule and Reza Khota and spent most of my time looking at South American repertoire, particularly Heitor Villa-Lobos (Brazilian) & Leo Brouwer (Cuban).

The majority of my creative work has been through the WSOA scoring and working on sound design for film and theatre. Most notably, I was awarded Best Sound Design at the M-Net Edit Awards (a national competition) in 2006 for work on a short film called Still Moving (written and directed by Luke Carstens). At the end of 2006 I collaborated with fine artist Nina Barnett in creating a sound installation for an AIDS-themed exhibition hosted by Alliance Francaise. I am also interested in songwriting, and am in the process of re-recording some demos and putting an ensemble together so that I can begin performing these songs.

My compositional interests center on questions of perception and cognition, always with the ideal in mind that work should be effective in the ears of the audience. Although I understand the merit of experimental/new/contemporary composition, I wonder if the chasm between this primarily academic work (which is generally unavailable in recorded form and seldom performed) and popular music needs addressing. That issue will certainly crop up in later posts.

1 comment:

choirgirl said...

Congratulations on the new blog. It looks good. I have just updated my link to you. :)