Born 3rd December 1953 in New York to South African parents, Dr. Jacques de Vos Malan was educated at schools in England, Portugal and South Africa. He graduated as Bachelor of Music (Composition) at the University of Cape Town (1976), winning the Van Huylsteyn Scholarship, the Universal Edition Prize for composition and the Composition Class Medal, three years in succession. He pursued post-graduate work in London, studying composition with Nicola LeFanu (and informally with David Lumsdaine) and reading musicology with Arnold Whitall and palaeography with Pierluigi Petrobelli. He graduated as Master of Music (Composition) at King's College, University of London (1979) and returned to South Africa to complete the degree of Doctor of Music at the University of Pretoria (1983) under Stefans Grové. On several occasions, he studied informally and collaborated with Morton Feldman. De Vos Malan worked as a radio and television music producer for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) and subsequently as an independent arts documentary filmmaker. He has lectured in ethnomusicology at the University of the Witwatersrand and in composition and twentieth-century aesthetics at the University of Cape Town. His career as an arts administrator has included the roles of Manager of the National Symphony Orchestra, Johannesburg; Executive Director of the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra; Music Director of the Musica Reservata chamber orchestra; and founder of Fine Music Radio, Cape Town. De Vos Malan migrated to Melbourne in 2000, where he is currently responsible for the major festivals portfolio at Arts Victoria. De Vos Malan's works are published by Musications (Cape Town) and Seesaw Music (New York). Several works have been commissioned by the SABC and Adcock-Ingram Ltd, while numerous works have been performed, recorded and broadcast in Belgium, Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, the UK and the USA and - most recently - at the Banff Festival 2003 in Canada. De Vos Malan's work is substantially influenced by the music of John Cage and Morton Feldman, the theoretical writings of Umberto Eco and the composer's own studies of Japanese aesthetics. For the past decade, he has written almost exclusively for small chamber groups and has conducted numerous performances of his own and other living composers' music. De Vos Malan's works are typically quiet and sparse and often include a narrator, dealing with abstract questions of signification, meaning and memory, using multi-lingual, loosely autobiographical texts.
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