Gideon Fagan’s Late Style: the Suite for Strings (1974)

Abstract

Gideon Fagan’s (1904-80) position in South African music history has not yet been thoroughly established despite his illustrious career as  a conductor, music administrator, teacher and composer. This is a remarkable gap in South African music scholarship. The present article  is an attempt to highlight Fagan’s importance specifically as a composer by discussing his compositional output from the perspective of  its possible division into three creative periods and by examining a representative work from the last of these periods, the Suite for  Strings (1974). Besides offering penetrating analyses of the six movements of this work, the article poses the question whether the Suite  – together with other works from Fagan’s last creative period – can be approached from the perspective of what has become known in  music, art and literature scholarship as ‘late style’. These considerations are contextualised by discussing the tradition of writing  biographical studies on important artists, and against the backdrop of investigations into the phenomenon of late style by Theodor W.  Adorno, Carl Dahlhaus, Edward Said, Nikolaus Urbanek, Gordon McMullan, Sam Smiles, Michael Spitzer and Robert Spencer.