Man in the Holocene

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Graphic by M C Escher


Birds that feed on fish; their excrement will form the beginning of an oasis in which human beings can live, until the next stream of lava smothers it all.


Max Frisch - Man in the Holocene

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Classical music shoots itself in the baton

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On An Overgrown Path has been preoccupied recently - some would say obsessed - with the absence of black conductors at the BBC Proms , and recently highlighted this Sunday's admirable concert at the Festival Hall by the Chineke! Orchestra, a professional orchestra made up entirely of black and minority ethnic musicians. So a big splash by Tom Service in the Guardian about Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the soloist in Sunday's concert, should be be good news. But instead it simply provides another example of how classical music is shooting itself in the baton. Tom Service is employed by both the Guardian and BBC . (Some would argue that the Guardian and BBC are one and the same ). So in his article Tom Service mentions the BBC in the sub-head seen above, in the opening paragraph, and four more times in the body copy. The immensely talented Sheku Kanneh-Mason is of course a BBC property as he won the 2016 BBC Young Musician competition and is the subject of a BBC Four TV document...
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Come to the edge!

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Twenty-one years ago I wrote about an article on NewMusicBox  that forecast the age of music streaming, and included the following quote from the article: A world where music is available via the latest technologies for a single monthly subscription charge. A world with unlimited access to a huge range of music. A world where the music business will explode and reinvent itself. A world where listeners are empowered, and the reach of new music is limited only by your own imagination. A world where the major record companies aren’t invited to the party. A world where music becomes a utility on tap, just like gas and electricity. A world where music is like water.  It can be argued that streaming has empowered consumers by offering instant gratification. But two decades ago, in my post I expressed concerns about the advent of 'music like water' with these words: "Music-like-water won’t bring a utopia where every recording, of every work, by every composer from Evaristo Abaco ...
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Exclusive - David Munrow on the record

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My Future Radio programme on Sunday December 30th takes an exclusive look at David Munrow on the record . In the early 1970s the scores for the BBC TV series The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elisabeth R brought David Munrow’s music to millions. His Pied Piper radio programme was broadcast four times a week for five years, he presented a successful TV series, and wrote the scores for several major feature films including Ken Russell’s The Devils and the film version of HenryVIII (sleeve below). David Munrow's interest in early music started when he taught in Peru before going up to Cambridge. He combined reading English at Pembroke College with independent studies of Renaissance and medieval music, and went on to form his famous Early Music Consort of London. Under his leadership the Early Music Consort became best-selling recording artists, and David Munrow’s records were considered so important that copies of them were sent to Saturn on board two NASA spacecraft in 1976. ...
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New music from the old world

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Interesting article in French over on ConcertoNet.com about twentieth century music in general and Alex Ross' new book in particular. (Flaky machine translation here .) The writer is sometime Overgrown Path contributor Antoine Leboyer who highlights some overlooked contemporary European composers, and particularly recommends exploring Philippe Boesmans (above right), Guillaume Connesson , and Pascal Dusapin . Connesson and Dusapin are both French, but Boesmans is Belgian. Today, Belgium has been without a government for 157 days, and as time ticks by the possibility of a permanent split between the country's Dutch and French speaking communities comes closer. It is a story that has attracted surprisingly little international media coverage, and that is not because Belgium is of little importance. It was the German invasion of the country in 1914 that caused Britain to enter the First World War, a conflict that changed the world political landscape for ever. Since 1831...
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Death on an unimaginable scale

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Dreadful though it would have been if 12 passenger jets had been blown up over American cities, how can this be described as death on an "unimaginable" or "unprecedented" scale? The daily kill rate over the first two months of the Rwandan genocide averaged 11,500. Is that more imaginable because the people were African? Letter from Rev Jenny Dyer , Coventry, in today's Guardian Image credit - BBC News: 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 other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to The act of killing from 20,000 feet
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Just Pärt of fiction

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It had been performed in the great barn at Snape Maltings , of course ... Arvo Pärt, who was present only because his own work was being premiered the following day, sat in the row in front, dressed in a long, brown raincoat like a seedy French detective. He’d leaned forwards, a thumb buried in his huge dark beard, his balding head shining above the long hair, hunched and concentrated. He was all elbows, a lot thinner than Jack had expected, and kept nibbling the ends of his long fingers, too restless for an Old Testament prophet. His wife sat next to him, looking owl-like behind huge spectacles. She often spoke for him in interviews and Jack was more nervous about what she might say than of Pärt himself ... Jack took a bow afterwards and then, once the clapping had subsided and the house lights had gone up, surveyed members of the audience from the side. Among the silvery, distinguished heads there was a lot of winking, a lot of confiding of patient fortitude and thin-lipped smirks, p...
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As a Wagner conductor he has no equal

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The Guardian 's recent obituary of the great Wagnerian bass-baritone Norman Bailey linked to my 2007 post  'Reginald Goodall – the holy fool', which prompts me to revisit that article. My appreciation was written while YouTube was in its infancy, and in the intervening years some invaluable Reginald Goodall resources have been uploaded. These include an excellent full-length 1984 BBC Omnibus documentary ' The Quest for Reginald Goodall ', a complete English National Opera 1973 Siegfried , and a 1954 Die Walküre Act 1 . Also on YouTube is Act 3 of Parsifal from the 1987 Prom s; this was Reginald Goodall's last public concert and David Cairns' review of it is quoted at the start of my original post and provides my headline for this article. Did Reginald Goodall really deserve the sobriquet ' Holy Nazi conductor '? Of course some of his personal views were abhorrent. But so were those of other classical folk heroes including, of course...
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Inside the musical avant-garde

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Britain is having a love affair with all things French. As well as hosting the current state visit by President Sarkozy and his new wife we have the first IRCAM academy in the UK in April. Is it a sign of these devolved times that the event is not in London, but is being hosted by the BBCSSO and led by Jonathan Harvey in Glasgow on April 7-12? Or is it because, as I've said here before , the BBCSO is on a roll? Read more in today's Guardian , including the inside track by Jonathan Harvey on new IRCAM technologies. One of the few books to explore IRCAM is the snappily-titled Rationalizing Culture, IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization and the Musical Avant-Garde . Anthropologist and Cambridge don Georgina Born spent a year in IRCAM in Paris producing her ethnographic analysis and if both the title and the book itself reads like a Ph. D. thesis it is not surprising as that is how the book originated. Which means that, unlike Joan Peyser , Georgina Born leaves Boulez'...
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Piano music from a contemporary icon

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While Deutsche Grammophon brings us " The Gustavo Dudamel album the world has been waiting for" and the NY Times confirms things can get worse at EMI it is left to savy labels like Naxos to challenge and inspire. Released this week is an album that challenges and inspires quite magnificently - the piano music of John Tavener played by Ralph van Raat . If you think Tavener is just 'holy minimalism' this Naxos CD will make you think again. The influences range from Chopin to the Orthodox Liturgy. No requirement for marketing-speak from me, at budget price the best thing to do is buy it . Tavener's music and Ralph van Raat's performance are magnificent, as is the sound captured by producer and engineer Michael Ponder in Potton Hall , Suffolk, just down the road from where I write and, ironically, a venue for many fine EMI recordings . A credit is also needed for the excellent sleeve notes by the pianist. But one small moan if I may. I know I am the only pe...
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In the shadow of Chopin

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The music police are already telling us how we will be celebrating the Chopin bicentennial this year. So, never one for musical correctness , my header photo honours another giant of the piano, in status if not in stature, who is buried literally in the shadow of Frédéric Chopin. Michel Petrucciani, compositeur - pianiste de jazz , died in 1999 aged just 36. He is buried alongside birthday boy Chopin in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and his pianistic genius has featured several times On An Overgrown Path . Père Lachaise has more musicians per acre than any other burial ground, and they include Georges Bizet whose headstone is seen below. Bizet's grave is surprisingly understated for France's most famous musician and the dates on it are a sobering reminder that he was the same age as Michel Petrucciani when he died. Adjacent to Bizet is the more contemporary resting place of Georges Enescu who died in 1955. Enescu (Enesco in France) taught Yehudi Menuhin , Arthur Grumiau...
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