THIS month's BBC Music Magazine presents a list of more than two hundred and fifty individuals in a Who's Who of classical music. Among the seventy composers listed is one Irish composer and it's not Kevin Volans. (It's Gerald Barry, former classmate and a friend for over twenty-five years). Volans is on the list but, crucially, representing South Africa, the country of his birth in 1949.

Mischievously curious about omissions, modest about his own inclusion and mildly amused by some of the categories within the composer list when I showed it to him, a stronger response is provoked from Kevin Volans by the fact that he is listed as South African and not Irish. 'I have lived here for over ten years. I am an Irish citizen. I am Irish. I left South Africa -- it's the one country in the world where my music isn't performed.'

The influence on Volans of his upbringing in South Africa was more cultural and geographical than musical. 'You grow up feeling European. South Africa is simply so isolated that it tends to overcompensate in terms of education and in servicing an extreme thirst for knowledge from Europe. For example, in Johannesburg we had a better record shop for contemporary music than I've ever come across anywhere else. And we had fabulous concert series: Stockhausen came, Stravinsky was there, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, and so on. More recently, I've just marked a thesis by a South African student on the complete works of Morton Feldman and it's the best piece of work on Feldman I've seen from anywhere in the world, which is very typical. Because of the geographical isolation, everyone knows that nothing is going to land in your lap and you have to make a big effort and work hard. But the natural assumption is that you will eventually go to Europe.'

Inevitably, the social and historical conflict which has defined and continues to define South African life is also a significant aspect of Volans' background experience. From a young age, he says, you learn that the world is simply not a just place and you take nothing for granted. But he also points out that South Africa is another instance, among many throughout history, of political turmoil producing much artistic and intellectual activity. Even the violence, which he has witnessed at first hand and deplores even more in his maturity and as a returning outsider, has the capacity to sharpen people's awareness. Ironically, it is post-apartheid Pietermaritzburg, a 'Sleepy Hollow' when he grew up, which is now so violent that he avoids going there when visiting South Africa.

Whatever of his intellectual development, Volans was impervious to any special musical influence in South Africa, at least until the mid-1970s when he discovered African music and underwent a conversion. 'As far as live music goes', he has said, 'I grew up with Handel and Bach. I never heard live African music. I had to go back and look for it.' In fact, he was asked to look for it. While studying in Germany, West German Radio sent him on several field trips to record the traditional music of Zululand and Lesotho. What began as transcription for performance on Western instruments evolved into a new style, a synthesis of African and Western music. One of the resulting works, Kwazulu Summer Landscape (1979), seemed to have special meaning once he was back in Germany. 'I was fascinated by the fact that these were very ancient sounds, probably unchanged since the time of earliest man. What you get in those environments is not merely a sense of space but a sense of time. Knowing that Germans live in these little slots of time and build these confined boxes of space, I thought: they need time and they need space.'

Volans came to prominence with White Man Sleeps (1982), five dances which feature African rhythms and non-European harmonic progressions, played on a retuned viola da gamba and non-African percussion. 'I didn't want to Westernise African music. I wanted to Africanise Western music.' When the Kronos Quartet recorded Volans' string quartet version of White Man Sleeps in 1989, the CD became the biggest selling string quartet recording of all time. It was outsold only when the Kronos re-released the work on their CD, Pieces of Africa, in 1992, going on to become the second biggest-selling classical CD in the US in 1993.

White Man Sleeps involved, for Volans, an element of rebellion against his avant-garde orientation. 'The idea', he said at the time, 'of doing a piece consisting of short dance movements seemed very wicked. And therefore I wanted to do it. Because there is only one subject in my music always, and that is freedom.' The constraints against which he was rebelling were those which evolved during nine years of study in Cologne, three of them in Stockhausen's class at his invitation.

'It was fantastic. Cologne was at that time the centre for contemporary music in Europe. There were well over one hundred professional composers of new music living there, and it's a small city. If you took all the German radio stations together, there were up to three hours of contemporary music on the radio every day. I'm not talking about Stravinsky -- I mean music written "this year". New music was prestigious, and the radio stations competed with each other for that prestige. The music school in Cologne was the biggest in Europe. There were two or three concerts every day. Two orchestras. After the radio station, the new music school had the best electronic studio, with a full-time sound engineer and over £5 million worth of equipment. It was all very impressive, a very exciting place to be.'

At the end of his second year, Volans became Stockhausen's teaching assistant, declining, a year later, an invitation to become his full-time assistant. In order to stay in Cologne, however, he had to enrol on another course and this time chose electronic music. Whereas the constant and high-speed development of his ideas had inhibited composition during his three years with Stockhausen, studio time on the electronic course was so over-subscribed that Volans found himself with lots of time to compose. 'You had only two weeks of studio time each semester. It suited me perfectly.' He was also able to take lessons with Mauricio Kagel and Aloys Kontarsky.

During this time Volans, who had always taken his European-ness for granted, began to realise that he was not, in fact, European. 'I found that I missed Africa: African culture, African sounds.' There followed the field trips to Zululand and Lesotho, a personal transformation, his synthesis of African and Western music. He wanted to go back, and returned to South Africa in 1982 to teach composition at the University of Natal in Durban. But it wasn't to last. By 1984, a combination of the political situation and the need for artistic survival convinced him to leave South Africa for good. Although he had become her most widely and internationally acclaimed composer, Volans' music was receiving neither broadcasts nor live perfomances in South Africa. 'I can't get concerts', he told the Natal Witness at the time. 'Unlike Europe, there's simply no money for the freelance composer.' Money was invested only in efforts to maintain South Africa's position in a distorted perception of mainstream Western culture: the Natal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Opera House in Pretoria, the Playhouse in Natal which opened with The Pirates of Penzance ('that 100-year-old piece of Victorian kitsch!'). Monuments to the past: an orchestra playing no contemporary music, an opera house staging no African operas. 'All because, largely, the white man doesn't want to admit that he's an African.' For Volans, the only way forward for South African culture was to accept, as he had, that it was a synthesis of cultures, African and European, but as long as there was a determination to cling to an obsolete notion of Europe, there was no space for a contemporary composer. It was what finally brought Kevin Volans to Ireland.

He had been to Ireland in 1981 to give the premiere of Sur les Pointes by his friend and colleague from Cologne, Gerald Barry. As so often happens with those of artistic temperament, he loved Ireland at once. 'I loved the liveliness and character of the people. The creative use and flexibility of the English language was also a great attraction. And I needed to go somewhere English-speaking, but not Britain.' After a year in Paris he moved to Cork in 1986, eventually settling in Dublin after stints in Belfast (as composer-in-residence at Queen's University) and Donegal, and taking out Irish citizenship.

His experience of the contemporary music scene in Ireland is somewhat restricted by the fact that composing limits the amount of music he listens to himself. 'When I'm working on something, I don't want to hear other music. There was never any music in Stockhausen's house -- you had to use headphones.' He has opinions, nevertheless, believing that there are good composers in Ireland, some of whom, particularly the younger ones, come to him for private tuition. He wonders if a different approach to sponsorship and commissioning might be a good idea. 'In Cologne you were given money, not to write music but to put on a performance. I always feel that, when you're starting out, it's more important that your music gets performed than that it gets paid for. That's how you build up a public. Performances of contemporary music were always sold out in Cologne, and the audience was always a cross-section of society.'

Volans fully subscribes to the concept of professionalism advocated in Cologne. 'Stockhausen taught us how to walk on stage. Every aspect of a concert was organised in advance, down to the people needed to remove music stands or move a piano. Every piece was lit in advance. At those concerts, the changeover between pieces took seconds. A swarm of locusts would enter stage left and transport things off stage right. The whole platform would be transformed. I think it makes a huge difference. But that degree of professionalism isn't taught. 'Studying in Germany, the assumption always was that we would be professional composers. Not Sunday composers. Not teaching in university. You were going to compose. And this means being completely professional in everything: music has to be perfectly, accurately written, perfectly legible, it must be playable. It's got to be checked, double-checked and re-checked. You have to be the first person there at the rehearsal and the last person to leave. As the composer, you are the dogsbody. That's the way you gain respect from performers. The composer is responsible for everything.'

He goes on to describe the vital importance of the first performance, comparing some of his premieres in Cologne, where the performers often played from memory, with some less successful premieres in Britain where performers sight-read the music, having sent deputies to the rehearsals, and felt satisfied to get 80 per cent of it right. 'A jumble of approximations. It creates a very bad impression of new music.' He prefers the German system of a lump sum paid for both rehearsals and performance.

Like all Irish composers, he laments the passing of the Dublin Festival of Twentieth Century Music. 'It was a major point on the international circuit. The timing was good, in January. It meant you had time to practise. I played in a lot of different festivals but loved coming to Dublin because it was so well organised and you were so well looked after. It's a great shame that such an important feature on the European contemporary music scene has just disappeared. It should be reinstated. Contemporary music doesn't live unless there are people listening to it.'

Outside Germany and other places where contemporary music is an accepted part of cultural life, he feels strongly that audiences could afford to do a little homework, as should every aspiring composer. 'You can't write out of ignorance and try to reinvent the wheel. A composer must know intimately the music written since the Second World War, the 1950s and 1960s in particular: Cage, Feldman, Boulez, Pousser, Stockhausen, Nono, Ligeti, Xenakis. It's terribly important to know what they were doing and why.' The fact that his pupils at Queen's knew little of these composers and somehow thought that the mainstream was represented by Lutoslawski and Gorecki, he blames on an unfocussed approach to contemporary music on the part of the BBC. Volans himself ranks Iannis Xenakis as the greatest living composer and believes that, before he died, the American Morton Feldman had surpassed not only Cage but also, in terms of intellect and sophistication, both Boulez and Stockhausen.

What remains of 1997 is to be very eventful for Kevin Volans. On December 12, his Cello Concerto (a co-commission between Bayerischen Rundfunk and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society) receives its premiere in Munich from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and soloist Wen-Sinn Yang. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic gives the UK premiere in October of next year, and an Irish cellist has already expressed an interest in performing the concerto here. Meanwhile, the latest in a long line of CDs is due for release this month. His first on the Chandos label, it features his music for wind ensemble including the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1995) played by Peter Donohoe and the Netherlands Wind Ensemble.

Pondering the extensive travels in forty-something Kevin Volans' career, I ask if he plans to stay in Ireland for the long haul? 'I'm here to stay,' he answers.