David Fanshawe | Musical explorer, 68

David Fanshawe, 68, a widely traveled British musical explorer best known as the composer of African Sanctus, died Monday, 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 Dr. Fanshawe, said that 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 of 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," Dr. 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.

"He definitely thought of himself as a musical explorer, someone who would record music that he thought was in danger of extinction," Richard Blackford, a composer and friend of Dr. Fanshawe's, said of African Sanctus.

Dr. Fanshawe recalled nearly being bitten by a black mamba snake in Africa and being in a canoe that was overturned by a hippopotamus on a fast-flowing stretch of the Nile.

"I didn't see the hippopotamus. I was recording, at the time, a love song, being sung by the person paddling the canoe," Dr. Fanshawe said in an interview with www.thebeijinger.com before April performances of African Sanctus in China.

Recalling his travels among the Pacific islands, Dr. Fanshawe once said: "I have been to Paradise. It is there. I'm not telling you which one." - AP