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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A Philippa Schuyler moment

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An earlier post painted a word portrait of child prodigy, pianist and composer Philippa Schuyler. Her music is rarely heard today and difficult to find. So we are very fortunate that John McLaughlin Williams agreed to record her Nine Little Pieces for piano specially for On An Overgrown Path . His recording can be heard via the YouTube video above, and in the article below he analyses her music Philippa Schuyler. Just hearing the name takes me back to a place in my childhood I have not revisited in memory more than a couple of times in decades. Philippa Schuyler’s name was but one of dozens lodged in my parent’s large sheet music library, occupying shelf space alongside the giants and talented lesser lights of our canonic music literature. Even among those lesser lights Schuyler seemed to me an odd duck a the time, for here peering at me from the cover of the sole piece of music by her in our possession was a picture of a seven year old girl of mixed race, rather than an aged, w...
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Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

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In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A...
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The truth about those French orchestras

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My article reporting Claudio Abbado’s negative views on French orchestras certainly generated a lot of attention, including a response from Parisian Antoine Leboyer which corrected the myth that Abbado hadn’t actually conducted a French orchestra. Too much attention is given to British and American orchestras here On An Overgrown Path and elsewhere, and I was delighted when Antoine offered to give an inside view on the musical health of the French capital. So here is a guest blog from Paris with the truth about those French orchestras that Claudio Abbado and Daniel Harding love to hate: Let us put things in perspective with a few words on French orchestras. Abbado may not have had the best of experiences, and he may still not find it perfect today but things are improving. Paris has many orchestras (I do not know those outside Paris well, and cannot comment on them; I do have regards for the Lyon Orchestra which played some great concerts when David Robertson was their music direct...
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You say Mariinsky - I say Mravinsky

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The Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra is the house orchestra of the the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, and is also known as the Kirov Orchestra. It dates back to the 18th century and was known before the revolution as the Russian Imperial Opera Orchestra. Today the Mariinsky is known for its association with Valery Gergiev . Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988) was a legendary Russian conductor who led a different orchestra, the Leningrad Philharmonic, for fifty years. Among the first performances given under Mravinsky's baton were Shostakovich's symphonies numbers 5,6,8,9, 10 and 12. But the story of Mravinsky and the Mariinsky are intertwined. Yevgeny Mravinsky was the nephew of the Mariinsky's star diva Yevgeniya Mravina. He literally grew up in the famous theatre where he worked as an extra while studying, and in 1933 made his debut there conducting Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty . Valery Gergiev's biography has him attending Mravinsky'...
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No flowers please for Herbert von Karajan

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Few musicians have generated such a mixture of respect and revulsion as Herbert von Karajan. It takes Richard Osborne 851 pages in his masterly biography to capture the essence of this extraordinary conductor, entrepreneur and opportunist, and it would be impertinent to even attempt to cover the same ground here. So instead, with the centenary of Karajan's birth falling on April 5, I offer this personal vignette from my time at EMI, which I hope in some small way illustrates the conundrum that was this extraordinary man. During the late 1970s the Machiavellian Karajan had carefully nurtured a deadly rivalry between EMI and his other contract company, Deutsche Grammophon. This meant that EMI had, at very considerable expense, outbid DG for the four act version of Verdi's Don Carlos with José Carreras and Mirella Freni , and Debussy's Pelléas et Méliande with Frederica von Stade and Richard Stilwell . Pélleas was a personal passion of Karajan, and because of this he ...
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The power of music blogs - and poetry

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Path finder - One of my regular ports of call is An Overgrown Path . If you want to see why, click here. One recent Overgrown Path post really caught my eye: Eric Whitacre outsells Mozart Lots of stuff about Mr Whitacre. Apparently, he is quite famous. I had never heard of him. Which says something about me, I suppose. Anyway, it's a good read. Toward the end of Overgrown Path's post, there is a link to an mp3 download. So, I downloaded. And listened. Nice. Go down the path some more? The CD is called Cloudburst . It's on the UK's Hyperion label. Hyperion: Cloudburst Fourteen poems set to music.Choral works. Choral, works.What works opens with a poem by E. E. Cummings: Posted on Mister Bijou from South China: Serendipity, Connections and Trends - Visiting On An Overgrown Path , I was introduced to contemporary classical music composer Eric Whitacre. (Just a few days ago I ‘discovered’ classical violinist Christian Tetzlaff, and classical music critic Jeremy Eichl...
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Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

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These photos were taken by me in 2008 at independent record retailer Prelude Records in Norwich. Jordi Savall's impromptu viol recital and signing session preceeded two performances at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. One was a solo recital by Jordi in Peter Mancroft Church ; the other was an immensely moving performance of his visionary Jerusalem multicultural project at the Theatre Royal*. As reported here Prelude Records closed earlier this year; it was a victim of predatory online retailing, and today its premises stand empty awaiting occupation by a mobile phone or E-cigarette retailer. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival has been the victim of savage funding cuts , but continues in a more modest form due to the dedicated work of its small management team. A few days ago I wrote about a two-thirds empty Snape Maltings concert and proposed that classical music's heartland is facing a perfect storm caused by the convergence of the shifts in consumer tastes and the r...
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Instruments of extreme beauty

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Let us praise the harpsichord. Heavens knows it needs praising, because the poor instrument is much maligned. Thomas Hobbes described its sound as “ poore, nasty, brutish and short ", while Sir Thomas Beecham more famously described it as like " two skeletons copulating on a tin roof." How unfair. The harpsichord is unique among musical instruments. Not only can it produce the most exquisite sound, but the appearance of the instrument can also be a thing of extreme beauty. Alan Gotto has been making harpsichords near where I live in Norfolk since 1976. He came to the craft after spending some time working for an organ builder. At university he studied music, and specialised in early keyboard studies. Self-taught as a harpsichord maker, he now offers a range of five types of instruments which include spinets and virginals (which is what the photo at the head of this post actually is). Additionally there is a beautiful Gotto portative organ for coninuo players. All...
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What is the link to Lady Gaga?

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'That inner spirit has been embodied very vibrantly in Benedictine monastic life and liturgy. This helps to explain the paradox of a music which when sung really expresses the spirit of silence; which with almost wordless vocalization really attempts to express the very word of God; which with the action of singing really is meant to be a vehicle of contemplation' - Abbot Marcel Rooney, O.S.B. The glories of Gregorian Chant, or "the mysticism of the octave" as Abbot Rooney describes it, have drawn me back again and again to the Benedictine L'Abbaye Sainte-Madeleine at Le Barroux near Avignon in France. The monastic community at Le Barroux are orthodox Catholics who celebrate the Holy Offices eight times a day in plainsong which respects the scholarship of Solesmes . This glorious liturgy is one of the reasons why I have stayed at the Abbey as a guest of the monks quite a few times over the years despite my discomfort with other aspects of Catholicism . As a resul...
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