Refused permission to record in Tanzania, David was caught redhanded recording the king's sukuma drums. We were strip-searched and imprisoned. Released two days later and pronounced "persona non grata", we returned to Kenya, where we met Jonathan Leakey, then director of the Nairobi Museum, who realised the enormous value of the tapes David had collected.
He was a slow writer and found composing to deadlines an agonising business. After the births of each of our children, David decided he could not do nappies and babies. In , after retracing his African travels for the BBC, he hitchhiked to Sudan to continue recording alone, and returned months later with tick typhus. These journeys were brutally punishing, but he loved the thrill of the chase.
His eyes shut, he spun a globe, his finger landed on Fiji, and in , when our second child was born, he vanished to the Pacific. After nine months he returned, buzzing with the possibility of attaching himself to the University of the South Pacific to set up a Pacific music archive; a dream which would come true.
He travelled to more islands than Captain Cook, but found that recording in the Pacific was far harder than Africa. The distances were enormous and communication extremely difficult.
A memorial website has been set up at www. A memorial service will be held later this year. Your email address will not be published. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. While based in London between trips during the s, he also pursued a successful parallel career composing scores for over 30 films and television programmes, including Tarka the Otter, When the Boat Comes In, Three Men in a Boat, England their England and Softly, Softly.
However, the travel bug bit again in , when he began to explore the Pacific region. By , with his then wife Judith and their two young children, Fanshawe relocated to Fiji, which he used as a base for his travels. Back in London and divorced by the middle of the decade, he remarried and resettled in Australia, from which he continued his journeys through Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. He eventually made around 2, recordings. The family returned to the UK in , settling in Wiltshire, where Fanshawe established his archives and continued to compose.
This remained an issue for Fanshawe throughout his life but his subsequent studies remedied any technical deficiencies and enabled him to set down his music with increasing sureness of touch, whether in the moving Requiem for the Children of Aberfan for orchestra and tape , the popular orchestral pieces Dover Castle and La Dame Etrange , his beautiful piece for cello and piano, The Awakening , written for Steven Isserlis who recorded it with Fanshawe as accompanist , or his not inconsiderable output for television for film over 30 scores , including Flambards, When the Boat Comes In and Tarka the Otter.
Fanshawe was born in Paignton in Devon. After leaving Stowe School in Buckinghamshire in , he studied with the composer Guirne Creith while working in London at the Film Producers Guild at which he learned the art of sound recording. Fanshawe was twice married, first in , to Judith Croasdell Grant, with whom he had two children, Alexander and Rebecca.
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