Stanley glasser and the making of King Kong: Introduction, interview and postscript

Abstract

This article presents an in-depth interview I conducted with Stanley Glasser, the distinguished South African composer who died in 2018. Though recorded in 1986, the interview has not been made public until now. It presents important reflections on the making of Todd Matshikiza’s epochal South African jazz opera, King Kong, in the creation and earliest performances of which Glasser played a crucial role. For a range of complex reasons, some of which are dealt with in the interview, controversy of various kinds has beset King Kong from the start. Because of Glasser’s detailed and fine-grained responses to the questions that were put to him, the interview includes fresh evidence that allows for careful re-examination of much of what has been said for six decades, often dogmatically, about the work and its accompanying controversies. As such, the interview both confirms and – more interestingly – disrupts some wellworn narratives, and does so in ways that will hopefully provoke further scholarship. An introduction lays out the context for the interview and sketches relevant aspects of Glasser’s biography, especially those aspects that, notwithstanding a celebrated career in England, relate to his lifelong involvement with the land of his birth, its people, and its musics. I offer some interpretive remarks in a concluding postscript.