- LONDON: David Fanshawe, a widely traveled musical explorer best known as the composer of "African Sanctus," has died at age 68, according to a statement on his website, which did not say where he died.
Carolyn Date, chorus manager of the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus, who had worked with Fanshawe, said Saturday he had suffered a stroke. His early musical education was as a chorister at St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, and later at the Royal College Music, where his studies alternated with travel.
"I am often asked which came first: the composing or the travels? All I can say is that as a composer, without my travels, I would have nothing original to say," Fanshawe wrote in Gramophone magazine in 2002. "African Sanctus," which premiered in 1972, was based on music collected during four years of wanderings in Egypt, Sudan, Kenya and Uganda.
