^{Scenes from Collision by Clare Loveday and Gerhard Marx in the Substation Gallery, Wits School of Arts, October 2006. Photos by Christo Doherty}

The young South African composer, Clare Loveday, has recently been making waves with  her innovative compositions for saxophone orchestras.  Her works for 12 saxophones, Duodecet I & II were played at the International Society for Contemporary Music World New Music Days in Sydney and premiered at the Royal College of Music in London.  Loveday credits her experience of interdisciplinary collaboration, while she was a Music Lecturer at The Wits School of Arts, as a catalyst for the emergence of her mature compositional style. As she describes the experience to M&G journalist, Gwen Ansell, her early compositions were "fairly structured, conservative modernism" but her "breakaway from conventional composing`"  came through her collaboration  in 2006 with visual artist (and then WSOA Drama Lecturer) Gerhard Marx on the work entitled Collision. The work  used a wrecked car as a bizarre kind of a musical instrument, with Music students playing on fragments of cellos and violins that had been grafted onto the body of the wreck, "setting up  a relationship between sound and image that challenged the boundary between ’seeing’ and ‘hearing’."  Loveday concludes that the "Wits School of the Arts was promoting interdisciplinary work and we quite consciously wanted to push that as far as it could go." 

In varying ways, all of Loveday’s works represent Johannesburg.  In the same interview, she explains: "Jo’burg’s a place non-South Africans find hard to understand. It’s cosmopolitan, rich, poor, edgy, shiny, energetic, rough, dangerous and changing faster than you can blink. And it also has a neglected gentler, tender, more beautiful side.  I’m trying to represent all those aspects, mixed up and layered on top of one another."

^{Scenes from Collision by Clare Loveday and Gerhard Marx in the Substation Gallery, Wits School of Arts, October 2006. Photos by Christo Doherty}