Michael Blake (born Cape Town, 1951), composer, pianist, writer, and teacher, studied in Johannesburg (BMus) and London (MMus) and received his doctorate from Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Dodging the draft into South Africa’s border war in 1977, he moved to London where he was based before returning to South Africa in 1998. There he taught composition at Rhodes University, established the New Music Indaba, and negotiated South Africaʼs re-entry into the ISCM after an absence of nearly four decades. 

In 2000 he set up “Growing Composers”, a project to empower young black composers, and in 2012 its successor, the annual Sterkfontein Composers Meeting. From 2002-2010 he devised and curated the “Bow Project”, 1 commissioning string quartet responses to traditional uhadi bow music, and resulting in a CD production. 

His musical language is partly the result of an immersion in the materials and playing techniques of African music, also drawing on virtually any found material, and is influenced by both experimental film and African weaving.

Michael Blake’s works have been widely played, in Toronto, New York, Havana, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Australia, India, Japan, and throughout Europe and Africa, and now appears on some 15 CDs. He has collaborated with artists and filmmakers including Willem Boshoff, Emma Willemse, Aryan Kaganof and Christo Doherty. His most recent CD release is Afrikosmos on the Divine Art label. 

In December 2023 his Symphony will be premiered in Germany by the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra. He lives in rural France with his wife, music historian and writer Christine Lucia, and their Breton spaniel Dolly, but spends part of each year in South Africa, where he is honorary professor in the Africa Open Institute at Stellenbosch University.