World premiere for post-music symphony

My photo was taken yesterday evening in the darkness of the new Britten Studio at Snape during the premiere of Longshore Drift created by experimental electronic musician Chris Watson. In the foreground and around the perimeter of the studio are the blue-illuminated monitor speakers used for by the third order 64 channel Ambisonics surround sound system which conveyed height as well as lateral information. In the centre of the photo at the system's controls is Tony Myatt Director of the Music Research Centre at York University who built the Ambisonics system specially for the event. My rehearsal photo below shows the layout of the studio more clearly.

Chris Watson's 35 minute soundscape was part of the output of a week long Faster Than Sound residency at Snape which explored the natural soundscape around Britten's Aldeburgh. Birdsong was the staring point for Longshore Drift's, but this was layered with a range of 'found' sounds including the low frequency beat of wind turbines and the the rhythm of the waves breaking on Aldeburgh beach captured by underwater hydrophones. This cornucopia of environmental sounds was reproduced on a sound system the like of which will not be heard again for a long time.

Longshore Drift follows John Cage's path by making music can be made from ambient sounds, and builds on works such as Jonathan Harvey's IRCAM inspired Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco with its electronic manipulation of the great bell of Winchester Cathedral. In its exploration of spatial relationships Longshore Drift allows us to focus on the neglected relationship between sounds and place, both in the macro context of the fragile Suffolk coast and in the micro context of the soundfield created by the Ambisonic system in the Britten Studio. It also poses many questions, not the least being what is music? Is the continuo of a tuned string instrument any more 'music' than the pulse of a wind turbine?

Aldeburgh Music's visionary residency allowed Chris Watson and his colleagues to create a post-music symphony of great relevance, impact and beauty. Longshore Drift speaks in a language of change both in the musical and the environmental sense, and that is something we desperately need right now.


Photos are (c) On An Overgrown Path 2009. Our £10 tickets for Faster Than Sound - LISTEN were bought at the Aldeburgh box office. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

A radical traditionalist

Good evening, and welcome to this Britten Sinfonia pre-concert event, at which I am delighted to be joined by tonight’s conductor and pianist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and soloist Tamara Stefanovich.

Tonight’s concert, which has the theme Dialogues, is a celebration of the music of the contemporary American composer Elliott Carter who will be 101 in a few weeks time. We will be discussing his music a little later; but first, and rather perversely, I want to talk about a composer whose music does not appear in tonight’s concert.

Benjamin Britten gives his name to tonight’s orchestra and Pierre-Laurent Aimard is the artistic director of the festival Britten founded at Aldeburgh here in East Anglia. In the speech that he gave when accepting the Aspen Award in the Humanities in 1964 Britten set out his vision of a holy triangle of composer, performer and listener.

Today, particularly in modern music, that holy triangle sometimes becomes a profane duo of composer and performer, with the listener left as a bemused spectator on the touch-line. My objective with tonight's event is to make sure that you the listener are firmly located at the apex of Britten’s holy triangle, and to do that I will be asking Pierre-Laurent and Tamara to include you in the Dialogues by tuning your ears to Elliott Carter’s unique and rewarding sound world.

It is very easy to set the bar too high at events like this. We are very fortunate to be hearing the music of Elliott Carter in Norwich, but we must also remember that for many in tonight’s audience this will be the first time they have heard Carter’s music in a concert hall. Indeed for some it may be their first ever hearing of his music.

We also cannot ignore the fact that Elliott Carter has a reputation for being a ‘difficult listen’. Not unsurprisingly the composer himself disagreed with that assessment and said:

‘One thing I can’t understand is why people have such trouble with modern music. It seems to me to be perfectly intelligible. When I hear one of my pieces again, or listen to the record, I don’t see why people could find this perplexing in any way. Yet audiences can’t make head or tail of it’.

In his development as a composer Elliott Carter became increasingly uncompromising. Early in his career Carter followed the path taken by Aaron Copland and others and wrote music that was deliberately accessible. But Carter’s attempts at writing music that would achieve popularity failed dismally, forcing him to declare –

'I finally said the hell with that whole point of view and decided to write what I really always hoped to write, and what I thought was most important for me. I’ve taken that point of view ever since.

What Elliott Carter always wanted to write was music that was cerebral as opposed to emotional. Just as it is more difficult to read someone’s thoughts than their emotions, so it is more difficult to understand music that is cerebral rather than emotional. Elliott Carter’s music is also atonal, which means the familiar reassurance of a tonic key is absent.

But please do not be too frightened by all this. In many ways Elliott Carter was a radical traditionalist. He rejected the unpredictability pursued by John Cage and his peers, and Carter’s masterpieces conform to the traditional concept of a work of art. This means that, unlike Boulez and Stockhausen, Elliott Carter has written, for instance, a Violin Concerto with a conventional three movement structure.

I have described Elliott Carter as a radical traditionalist. He has always considered himself to be an American composer. He was born in New York in December 1908 of wealthy parents and studied at Harvard where, rather surprisingly, one of his teachers was our own Gustav Holst. Carter’s music benefitted from being championed in Europe in the 1950s by the American Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organisation that was later found to be CIA funded.

But for a radical traditionalist Elliott Carter has had a remarkable impact on contemporary music. His most notable innovations, which we will hear in tonight’s concert, revolve around changes of metre, and now I am now going to ask Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich to help us understand how Carter manipulates musical time ...

This was my introduction to last night's Britten Sinfonia event before their concert of Haydn, Eliott Carter and Mozart in Norwich. The programme of recessional music proved that if you have faith the crowd will follow you, and 43 minutes of Carter's music attracted an audience of 400; although for a university city with a high-profile music department there were disappointingly few young faces among them. Lots of young faces in the band though, but my wife did observe that Elliott Carter's music is clearly more masculine than Osvaldo Golijov's as the female/male ratio among the musicians swung from 80/20 at the recent Britten Sinfonia Eight Seasons concert to 64/36 for Elliott Carter.

There was a fascinating example of old meets new in Carter's Inner Song for solo oboe; Nicholas Daniel used a high-tech digital music stand from MusicReader, but needed a human page turner to push the buttons. Speaking of technology, I have previously written in praise of the Theatre Royal Norwich's CARMEN® digital sound enhancement system. But there was an unfortunate intermittent low frequency intrusion at last night's concert; was it a malfunction in the technology?

But just a minor reservation, and the music and performance were gorgeous with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich behaving like angels in the pre-concert event. The London performance of the Haydn, Elliott Carter and Mozart programme tonight (Nov 7) is being recorded for later broadcast by BBC Radio 3. There is a further performance in Cambridge on Nov 9. This is the future of classical music.

Elliott Carter is 101 on Dec 11th 2009. My sources included:

* Elliott Carter - A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents published jointly by the Paul Sacher Foundation and Boydell Press. My header image, which shows Elliott Carter with Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein at the recording of Carter's Concerto for Orchestra in New York's Philharmonic Hall in 1970 comes from this inspirational book, as does the lower image.

* A Concise History of Western Music by Paul Griffiths, who was librettist for Carter's 1999 opera What Next?

* Stephen Heinemann's excellent sleeve notes for the CD Early Chamber Music of Elliott Carter on Cedille Records.

Copies Elliot Carter - A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents and A Concise History of Western Music were supplied for review at my request. Two concert tickets were made available by the Briten Sinfonia for chairing the pre-concert event. My CD of Early Chamber Music of Elliot Carter was bought online. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The art of activism

This arresting print by the young South African artist Nandipha Mntambo uses cowhide moulded to fit the human body to -

'challenge and subvert preconceptions regarding representation of the female body ... to disrupt perceptions of attraction and repulsion'.

Part of a diptych titled Mlwa ne Nkunzi, it is one of the exhibits in Life Less Ordinary at the Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham. This exhibition uses photography, performances, videos and installations by young artists to look at how race-based dynamics continue to shape society in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Earlier this year I discussed William Goldman's wise words that -

'the difference between art and entertainment is that entertainment either tells you lies or tells you comforting truisms that we all know already, and art tells you uncomfortable things that you perhaps don't want to hear, truths that you may not be comfortable to hear.'

We live in a time when the boundaries of art and entertainment are being shamelessly blurred. So it was quite a revelation to view an exhibition curated quite expertly by Anna Douglas with the express objective of making the viewer uncomfortable. While visiting Life Less Ordinary I was struck by the use of the term 'visual activism' to describe the art on display, and I wondered who the parallel activists are in classical music. Musical activists of the past are easy to identify, and Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich are just some of the names that spring to mind. But who are today's musical activists in the moral, rather than stylistic, sense?


One candidate for the role of musical activist is the little known composer of the Spiteful Prelude With A Grenade Splinter. Croatian born Josip Magdić wrote this memorably named prelude for piano during the Yugoslav conflict in 1992 to highlight the brutality of war, and the photo above shows him standing in front of a Sarajevo apartment block damaged by Serbian artillery fire. Other examples of Josip Magdić's musical activism are his organ cycle Dominus Conterens Bella /The Lord Who Crushest Wars (1994) and War Picture Postcards of Sarajevo (1993) for piano which portrays the fate of the war-stricken the city.

There are mentions of a Sony CD (SK 66619) of Josip Magdić's music, but I can no trace of it in the catalogue. But fortunately we do to have both the Spiteful Prelude With A Grenade Splinter and War Picture Postcards of Sarajevo in transcriptions for organ played by the composer on an Ad Vitam CD which is also available as a download from iTunes.

In fact the Ad Vitam CD is a work of musical activism in its own right, as well as an extraordinary expression of music and place. It was recorded in the cathedral of Sarajevo in the bitter winter of 1994 during the siege of the city, and the producer Jean-Yves Labat de Rossi brought his recording equipment into the city through the famous tunnel dug by Bosnian volunteers to allow food and humanitarian aid into the city.


The CD is simply and movingly called Sarajevo, and also contains choral works sung by the Trebevic Choir of Sarajevo which was made up of Croatian voices supplemented with those from the warring states of Serbia and Bosnia. The photo above shows the Trebevic Choir returning to Split airport on their way home to Sarajevo in December 1994.


That is the sleeve for Sarajevo above. The story of Ad Vitam records is here, contemporary music in Albania is here, and the embers of chaos are here.

* Writing this post brought back many personal memories. What was then Yugoslavia was my summer pasture of choice when I was a student in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Dalmatian coast was cheap, hot, hospitable, totally undeveloped, and Tito's benign dictatorship presented an alternative to patronising the hated regime of the Colonel's in neighbouring Greece. I have many powerful memories of Yugoslavia before it was devastated in the name of national identity. These include time spent in Split, where the photo of the Trebevic Choir of Sarajevo was taken, and on the surrounding islands. I remember reading Sartre on the terrace of a disco on the island of Hvar and watching a sunset of indescribable beauty while Led Zeppelin played outrageously loud on the sound system. Pretentious and self-indulgent? - yes, most definitely. But probably no worse than spending my vacations watching what passes for coverage of the arts on TV today. Now please can you hand me my bus pass?

Header image via Art South Africa, other images from Josip Magdić's website and Sarajevo CD booklet. The costs of attending Life Less Ordinary were paid by me. I bought Sarajevo in the shop of the Cistercian Mother House of Citeaux in France. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

No banal chatter day

BBC Radio Scotland is having its annual 'no music day' on November 21st, which is the day before Benjamin Britten's birthday. 'No music day' is an interesting concept, but I have a better idea. BBC Scotland's sister network BBC Radio 3 should have a 'no presenter day' when they play music without the classical jocks in between. I guarantee Radio 3's audience will increase by at least one on November 21st if they take up my suggestion.

Header image is sampled from Binghampton Review. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Recessional music

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 14 in E flat, K.449
Elliott Carter First Diversion
Elliott Carter Riconoscenza
Elliott Carter Enchanted Preludes
Elliott Carter Inner Song
Elliott Carter Second Diversion
Elliott Carter Dialogues
Haydn Symphony No. 83 in G minor (La Poule)

This programme is being given by the Britten Sinfonia with Pierre-Laurent Aimard piano/conductor and Tamara Stefanovich piano in Norwich Nov.6, London Nov. 7 & Cambridge Nov 9. In Norwich I will be giving a pre-concert talk with Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich. Kate Kennedy is giving the Cambridge talk.

Creating a spectacular habitat of sounds...

Curated by audio and visual artist Russell Haswell, who has presented installations for both art gallery and concert hall internationally, this promises to be a pioneering residency that brings spectacular sounds from the natural world to the Hoffmann Building. Chris Watson and Bernie Krause are both electronic music pioneers and leading sound recordists in their fields; whether consciously or not, we have heard their work in recordings for David Attenborough, or for the world's largest collection of recordings of (now destroyed) rain-forest. But there is more to them.

They are bio-acoustic and natural history specialists and, as an electronic musician, Krause is also known for bringing the Moog synthesizer to Europe, and was also a 'synthesist' on Apocalypse Now. Chris Watson was a member of 'Cabaret Voltaire' from 1972-81, and also of 'The Hafler Trio' from 1981-84. With the assistance of Tony Myatt and interference from Russell Haswell, they will present an acoustic habitat in the Hoffmann Building, a fully immersive ambisonic/surround sound event that will astound and amaze!

Curated by Russell Haswell with Bernie Krause, Chris Watson and surround recording and diffusion support from Tony Myatt.

Faster Than Sound: 'LISTEN' is taking place in the Hoffmann Building, Snape, Nov. 7.

Do you chase the crowd?

'I finally said the hell with that whole point of view and decided to write what I really always hoped to write, and what I thought was most important for me. I've taken that point of view ever since ' - Elliott Carter

Or do you have faith the crowd will follow you and ...


The Aldeburgh Music flyer above says it all, and the dying art of listening is a topic I will return to in future posts. Travel faster than sound here.

Header image is based on Elliott Carter - A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents published jointly by the Paul Sacher Foundation and Boydell Press. This book is a thing of beauty in every respect.I am receiving two tickets for the Britten Sinfonia concert in return for presenting the pre-concert talk. Tickets for Faster Than Sound - 'LISTEN' will be bought at the box office. A copy of Elliott Carter - A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents was supplied by Boydell at my request. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Are you connected?

Online social networks are the new big thing. So it is great to see classical music social networking site Dilettante Music making a big splash in the mainstream media with support from BBC Radio 3 and names like Nico Muhly. As the Dilettante website says:

We’ve harnessed the latest web tools to break down the barriers to classical music ... so you can discover who’s who, what’s what, and what people are saying about it ...

Regular readers will know I'm always keen to discover 'who’s who, what’s what, and what people are saying about it' in the classical music world. So I followed the social network to find out a little more about Dilettante Music.

My starting point was an article on the Guardian classical music blog in February 2008 enthusiastically headed 'Love classical music? Head for Dilettante'. Unfortunately this piece omits to explain that Dilettante's founder is Canadian entrepreneur Juliana Farha. Or that Ms Farha is a sometime Guardian contributor, although her profile elsewhere on the paper's website does identify the Dilettante connection.

My next source was a Times article in February 2008 headlined My Big Idea - Dilettante which identifies Juliana Farha as founder. But this article does not explain that Ms. Farha is married to Kit Malthouse who, as well as being a director of Dilettante Music is a contributor to the Times. Kit Malthouse is also deputy mayor for policing of Conservative controlled London with responsibility for the capital's law enforcement agency, the Metropolitan Police, and a director of several financial businesses including hedge fund Alpha Strategic PLC.

The Times article does explain that Dilettante 'is supported by All Media Guide (AMG), the musical archive that offers expert editorial content via articles and reviews'. But the piece does not give the background to AMG, who are owned by Rovi Corporation (formerly Macrovision Solutions) which has extensive interests in copy control software and media metadata, including owning the Muze database used in most music and video stores.

All the above information is quite correctly in the public domain and is available online in a few minutes to anyone who wants to know 'who's who and what's what'. Classical music desperately needs innovation and promotion. In a world where connections are everything Dilettante Music looks set to succeed.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Globalisation is nothing new

Music and place again provide some fascinating linkages. My upper and lower montages use photos taken in September at the 12th century cathedral in Autun, which lies south-west of Dijon in central France. When we returned from our exploration of Burgundy I found a new CD waiting for me from Joglaresa, an ensemble I had written about enthusiastically in my August post about improvisation. Not only is the new release from Joglaresa and Belinda (I do not sing soprano!) Sykes of French medieval songs contemporaneous with the building of the great cathedral at Autun, but the first song on the disc is by the Burgundian trouvère Guiot de Dijon.

Douce Dame Debonaire is another example of an independent label going where the corporates fear to tread. A major label's marketing department would say forget about French medieval song, because David Munrow cornered that market with his definitive 1973 project The Art of Courtly Love and the only opportunity for this repertoire today is in quasi-smooth jazz arrangements. And, in fact, Douce Dame Debonaire almost did get written off. But not by a marketing department; through no fault of Joglaresa it was nearly victim of one of many financial failures currently decimating the classical music supply chain.


But thank goodness Douce Dame Debonaire is available, even if it has slipped into the shops without a single crumhorn being sounded. Arguments about early music authenticity have always struck me as redundant for the simple reason that no one really knows what the reference for measuring authenticity is. For me, good early music should sound honest, atmospheric and spontaneous while still respecting its origins. Which is exactly what Douce Dame Debonaire does.

Sacred and secular medieval French songs by Guillaume de Machaut and others are performed not in conventional bel canto style, but 'off the voice' using just one or two female voices (Belinda Sykes and Jennie Cassidy) and accompanied by Gothic harp and mey, a traditional reed instrument from Mesopotamia. The use of the mey has some historic justification as in 725 the forces of Moorish al-Andalus captured Autun. This marked the easterly limit of the great Islamic conquest of Europe from al-Andalus, and in 732 the army of the Umayyad Caliphate was defeated by the Burgundian and Frankish forces at the Battle of Tours following which the Moorish invaders started a slow withdrawal westwards.

By taking a multi-cultural viewpoint Douce Dame Debonaire provides a fresh perspective on the songs of the troubadours and trouvèresto and reminds us, that, in music at least, globalisation is nothing new. Full marks to Belinda Sykes and Joglaresa for this thought-provoking new CD which looks far beyond geographic, religous and cultural boundaries to allow us to hear these songs for what they really are, music without borders.


Now bring on the medieval avant-garde.
A review copy of Douce Dame Debonaire was supplied at my request. All photos were taken by me at Autun Cathedral and are (c) On An Overgrown Path. More photos of Gislebertus' stunning Autun carvery here. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

You have been warned

Holy health and safety at Mount Saint Bernard Abbey, in Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire. The Aeolian String Quartet's recording of the complete Haydn quartets, which featured in Unlocking the Sound Of Vinyl, includes The Seven Last Words interspersed with readings by Peter Pears.

Using spoken texts with The Seven Last Words follows the historical precedent of the first performance in Cádiz Cathedral in 1787. The sources for the readings by Peter Pears are John Donne, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Edith Sitwell, Edwin Muir and David Gascoyne, and the texts were selected by Reginald Barrett-Ayres. Photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2009. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk