David Fanshawe, a widely traveled musical explorer best known as the composer of African Sanctus, has died at age 68.
Fanshawe died on Monday last week, according to a statement on his Web site, which did not say where he died. Carolyn Date, chorus manager of the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus, who had worked with Fanshawe, said on Saturday that he had suffered a stroke.
His early musical education was as a chorister at St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, and later at the Royal College Music, where his studies alternated with travel.
“I am often asked which came first: the composing or the travels? All I can say is that as a composer, without my travels, I would have nothing original to say,” Fanshawe wrote in Gramophone magazine in 2002.
African Sanctus, which premiered in 1972, was based on music collected during four years of wanderings in Egypt, Sudan, Kenya and Uganda.
“He definitely thought of himself as a musical explorer, someone who would record music that he thought was in danger of extinction,” Richard Blackford, a composer and friend of Fanshawe, said of African Sanctus.
“His idea was to collate it into the format, the structure of the Catholic mass, but to have a universal expression of those experiences that the mass covers: life, death, celebrations and in particular the Lord’s Prayer, which has now become a standard,” Blackford said in an interview with BBC radio.
Fanshawe estimated that he had been present for nearly 600 performances of the work, never conducting but handling the recorded sounds used in concert, playing piano and trying to communicate his passion to the singers.
He recalled nearly being bitten by a black mamba snake in Africa, and having his canoe overturned by a hippopotamus on a fast-flowing stretch of the Nile.
“I didn’t see the hippopotamus. I was recording, at the time, a love song, being sung by the person paddling the canoe,” Fanshawe said in an interview before performances of African Sanctus in Beijing and Tianjin in April.
In an interview with reporter Mary Campbell in 1989, Fanshawe recalled early journeys in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran, and how he was inspired by hearing pearl divers sing in Bahrain.
“It was more than beautiful. It was guttural. It was of the earth,” Fanshawe said. “It was the work chants of these pearl divers that made me rush back to England and come back with a tape recorder.”
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS