homeland due to apartheid strictures which largely prohibited the intermingling of black and white cultures. It wasn't until he was commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) to undertake a number of field trips between 1976 and 1979 to South Africa to record various kinds of indigenous African music that he began to actively take an interest in this music. These field trips alerted him to aspects of indigenous African culture, both musical and visual, which he had previously overlooked. He thus set about planning a series of works in which he attempted to reconcile African and European aesthetics. At the start of the series Volans envisaged that the African source material would be quite recognizable but as the series progressed he would gradually exercise more and more intervention into it so that by the end of the series the African material would be fully assimilated into his own style: As a political statement, Volans, as a white South African, felt that the series might lend some sort of contribution to the struggle against apartheid and some performances were met with protests from the musical establishment in South Africa. The most well-known piece from the series is White Man Sleeps (1982) for two harpsichords, viola da gamba and percussion. In this piece Volans attempted to "Africanize" Western European art music by transferring paraphrases and transcriptions of Venda, San, Nyungwe and Lesotho music, as well as his own material, onto re-tuned period instruments. The subsequent reworking of the piece for a recording by the Kronos Quartet became one of the biggest-selling string-quartet releases of all time. The works immediately following White Man Sleeps, such as the second and third quartets, continue to use some African references, but display an increasing preoccupation with non-directional narratives influenced by the uneven and often random patterns present in African textiles, as well as the open approach to time present in the late works of Morton Feldman. Towards abstraction Despite the success of the African series, Volans began to find himself increasingly categorized as an "African" composer—a label which he found creatively restricting. In the late 1980s he began to pursue a new direction, developing a style characterized by an overall tendency towards increasing abstraction occasionally punctuated by works where literal African elements once again re-emerge. This is clearly seen in works such as Chevron (1990) and One Hundred Frames (1991), as well as his opera The Man