The Seven Last Words

My photograph was taken at the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham, Norfolk, and celebrates both the birth of Joseph Haydn 275 years ago, on March 31st 1732, and the start of Holy Week.

Now playing – Emerson Quartet performing Haydn’s ‘The Seven Last Words’. The cathedral in Cádiz commissioned Haydn, who was a devout Catholic, to write orchestral interludes for performance between the spoken parts of the service in the great Spanish Baroque church during Holy Week. The composer wrote seven adagios for the cathedral, and transcribed these for string quartet in the year of their first performance, 1787, and later made a choral version. The Emerson’s recorded ‘The Seven Last Words’ in New York in 2002 as part of their complete Haydn project.

Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, and ranks as one of the most important composers of all time. However, unlike Mozart's, today's important anniversary of his birth has passed virtually unnoticed. He was the first great Viennese composer, and is known as both the "Father of the Symphony" and the "Father of the String Quartet" in whose footsteps Mozart and Beethoven followed.

Meanwhile back in Cádiz, Manuel de Falla was buried in the crypt of the cathedral in 1946.

Now enjoy Easter at Aldeburgh
Photograph by Pliable. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "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

Peter Paul Fuchs - one path ends

Hello Pliable, No sooner than we speak of Weigl and a few of his students than I see this today:

In Wednesday’s (3/28/2007) Greensboro News & Record (NC), Dawn Decwikiel-Kane reports: “Peter Paul Fuchs, longtime conductor of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of the Greensboro Opera Company, died Monday night after a long illness. Fuchs, 90, died at Friends Home Guilford after a 17-year battle with Alzheimer's disease (follow this link for more on music and Alzheimer's - Pliable). The Vienna-born Fuchs brought his vast musical experience and pleasant temperament to the symphony and opera company from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s. Their leaders praised him Tuesday for his role in sculpting both organizations. ‘His expertise and talents led the orchestra to achieve the professional status and artistic excellence it enjoys today,’ said Dmitry Sitkovetsky, the symphony's current music director. Before arriving in Greensboro, Fuchs conducted at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, directed the opera and orchestra at Louisiana State University and had led the Baton Rouge Symphony. Fuchs served as the Greensboro Symphony's music director from 1975-87, then retired and became its conductor laureate.”

He was a talented man that I was honored to meet once and speak to at length. I still have a score or two of his in my library, though I was unable to convince anyone to perform them at the time. That was no reflection upon his music. Best, John McLaughlin Williams

* Now playing - Bach's Goldberg Variations transcribed for strings by current Greensboro Symphony music director Dmitry Sitkovetsky (below), and played by NES Chamber Orchestra. The sleeve notes of this 1995 Nonesuch CD are by none other than John Adams, and say: 'The opportunity to experience a new view of a familiar work such as the Goldberg Variations should not be grounds for a skeptical raising of critical eyebrows, but rather a cause for celebration. Arranging the Goldberg Variations is risky business, however. One is working here not with a melodic fragment of single song, but rather with one of the summas of Western music, specifically a work which is a compendium of all the principal developments in European keyboard up to and including Bach's time. ... John Cage, in his lecture "Composition as Process," defines form as "the morphology of continuity." The morphology of the Goldberg Variations' continuity is one of a perfectly shaped and harmonious continuity. Symmetry and unpredictability coexist in an environment of impertuable serenity. ' Nice CD as well.

Now read about a year at the symphony.
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The art of the mosque

No two modes of architecture could be more different from one another than the Muslim and the West Christian. West Christian architecture in its early phase is filled with the craving for weight and massiveness; and in its second phase, the Gothic, in that for a spectacular liberation from that weight in a skyward ascent ... Moslem architecture is quite the opposite. A mosque is to be a court, a square, a market-place, lightly built to hold a large concourse of people. Allah is so great that nothing human can vie with Him in strength or endurance ... Even the Moslem castles, large though they are, give the effect of being light and insubstantial. But a Mosque is also a place for the contemplation of the Oneness of Allah. How can this better be done than by giving the eyes a maze of geometric patterns to brood over? The state aimed at is a sort of semi-trance. (Pliable - See my reference to the Mevelevi Order below). The mind contemplates the patterns, knows that they can be unravelled and yet does not unravel them. It rests therefore on what it sees, and the delicate colour, the variations of light and shade add a sensuous tinge to the pleasure of cetainty made visible.

Gerald Brenan writes above in his 1950 book The Face of Spain about the art of the Mosque. This photo essay celebrates a sublime example of that art, the Rüstem Pasa Camii in Istanbul.


The mosque was built by Rüstem Pasa, son-in-law and grand vezir of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (1520-1566). Although Rüstem Pasa was one of the wealthiest nobles in the Ottoman Empire at the peak of its power he had to reflect his role as a servant of the Sultan by building a mosque that was subordinate in size, if not in beauty, to the sultan’s great mosque.


Mimar Sinan was the architect of the Rüstem Pasa Camii. Born a Christian in Anatolia, from either a Greek or Armenian background, Sinan was conscripted into Ottoman service in 1511, and converted to Islam. He was the chief Ottoman architect to four sultans, and his most famous buildings are the great Süleyman Mosque in Istanbul, and the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne. Sinan worked in seismic, as well as political, fault zones, and his buildings are famous for their earthquake resistance. His extraordinary output included 146 mosques and 57 universities, a track record that even Norman Foster can’t beat, although Mimar Sinan doesn’t have any airports in his portfolio


Rüstem Pasa chose a site alongside the Golden Horn in the Eminönü district of Constantinople, and at the foot of the hill crowned by Süleyman’s great mosque. Compact in size, but beautifully proportioned, Rüstem Pasa Camii is decorated with exquisite Iznik faience tiles which are notable for the use of red pigments, seen in my photo above, as well as the famous blue. Although in the popular spice bazaar area the mosque is not on the main tourist routes, and it takes some determination to find the entrance.


Rüstem Pasa Camii is one of the finest examples of the art of the mosque, and it was built at the peak of the Ottoman Empire. But sadly Rüstem Pasa was involved in the political intrique and murder that resulted in Selim the Sot - or drunkard (1566-1574) ascending to the throne on Sultan Süleyman’s death in 1566. Selim’s priorities were carnal rather than cultural, and his reign was the start of the long decline of the Ottoman Empire. We are very fortunate that many fine examples of the work of Mimar Sinan and other great Ottoman visionaries survive to remind us of this glorious period of Islamic art.


Now playing - Mevlevi Müzigi, the music of whirling dervishes. Mimar Sinan’s design for Rüstem Pasa Mosque follows the Ahaadith, and makes no provision for figurative art or the performance of music. But the exact position of the Qu’ran on this is not precise, and there are many fine examples of the creative arts from Ottoman culture. The Mevlevi is a Sufi Order founded by the followers of Mevlana Celalleddin-i Rum (left) in 1273 in the Konya province of Turkey. The Mevlevi Order is also known as the Whirling Dervishes due to their practice of whirling to celebrate Allah. During the peak of the Ottoman Empire the Mevlevi Order produced many musicians and poets, and much of the stereotypical “oriental” Turkish music heard in the West originated from the order. Islam is usually perceived to be repressive of women’s rights, but this period saw the emergence of women in the creative sector, with Ayat Sweid identified as the first female artist.

In 1925 the Mevlevi Order was outlawed at the start of the secular revolution in Turkey. But in the 1950s the government realised the cultural and tourist value of the Whirling Dervishes, and performances in Turkey and overseas were reintated. The Istanbul Music and Sema (Whirling Ceremony) Group was founded to bring traditional music and spiritual ceremonies to a wider audience. They perform Turkish classical music, Tasavvuf (mystical) music, and Sema ceremonies (Whirling Dervish rituals) in historically authentic performances. In striking contrast to the doctrines of Islamic fundamentalism these Mevlevi rituals are centred on "human love", "brotherhood" and "tolerance" as advocated by their founder 750 ago. Follow this link link for music and video samples from the Istanbul Music and Sema Group. Also recommended is Laleh Bakhtiar's book Sufi, Expressions of the Mystic Quest (Thames and Hudson ISBN 050081015).

Now read how music and books reflect the crisis in Islam
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Elitism on the world's great orchestral stages

A reader wrote yesterday and asked whether I agreed with everything I post here. The answer is an emphatic no. But I do try to provide food for thought. Which is why I offer an extract from, and link to this article in the current American Spectator. And for those arriving from Agonist.org I would point out that the words below are a quote (which is what an extract is) from the American Spectator article - not my words.

So what should orchestras do to increase the numbers of minority violists? Perhaps they should follow Nazi Germany's lead which set quotas on the number of Jews who could attend medical or law school in order to allow more goyim to become doctors and lawyers? Orchestras could limit the number of white male and female Asian-American orchestra members, and instead of calling it a quota system, they could call it "diversity."

Or orchestras could follow the lead of the professional athletic associations which 50 years ago stopped excluding athletes on account of skin color and now simply hire the best. Does any one really want to see boxing or the NBA adopt a quota system?

Traditionally government and academia have been the testing grounds where theories of social engineering are put into practice. Social engineers, however, have been less successful making inroads into professional sports, the arts and the military. Perhaps that is why our government and schools run like an Edsel, while the San Francisco Symphony and the U.S. Marines are beyond compare.

Certainly a good case can be made that black and Latino students should be exposed to classical music. I'm all for it. But a similar argument can be made for poor and middle class white kids in rural schools, and yet I do not hear Aaron Dworkin pushing for more hillbilly cellists.

If ever there was a case for elitism it should be made on the world's great orchestral stages, where perfection should never be held hostage to political correctness. If you want mediocrity, look to the government and the public schools. Plenty there to go round.

Now for an alternative view read here, here, or anywhere else on the blog.
Thanks to Bernard T for the heads-up. 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

He was in every sense a good man

Cormac Rigby (second from left above), who has died aged 67 of cancer, had two distinct careers: as a BBC radio announcer, and later as a Roman Catholic priest. Both called for an easy mastery of the spoken word, and to both he brought a naturally cultivated talent.

As presentation editor of Radio 3 from 1972 to 1985, Cormac set the tone of the channel, supervising the work of established announcers such as Patricia Hughes and Tom Crowe, engaging younger ones (among them Tony Scotland) and himself taking a full share of the announcing and presenting load. After leaving the BBC in 1985, he trained for the priesthood, served first in Ruislip, Middlesex, and then in Stanmore, north London, where he was specially happy and very well liked.

He was born in Watford, Hertfordshire; his mother had been born Grace McCormack, and his first name was a conscious recollection of her Irish maiden name. Baptised on May 21 1939, he was to be ordained on the very same day, 49 years later, by Cardinal Basil Hume in Westminster Cathedral. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' school, Northwood, Middlesex, and read history at St John's College, Oxford.

But the church beckoned, and in 1961 he went to the English College, in Rome, to train for the priesthood. There, however, he found the regime unacceptably narrow-minded, and returned to Oxford to complete a doctoral thesis on Edward Thring, the 19th-century preacher and headmaster of Uppingham. In 1965, he became an all-purpose announcer at the BBC, working for the Home Service and the Music Programme, which then preceded the evening Third Programme.

In due course he was permitted to announce for the Third Programme, and by 1968 Cormac was also engaged as a planner for that network. Here, he first tasted blood when an internal conflict arose over the relative artistic and financial merits of Solti's Die Meistersinger, from Covent Garden, and Goodall's The Mastersingers, from the Coliseum. Cormac's championship of the latter won the day and he confessed himself "jubilant". (All of us who were privileged to attend Goodall's Mastersingers can only confirm how right Cormac was - Pliable)

In 1969 the BBC published Broadcasting in the Seventies, a document that heralded the "dumbing-down" of the Third Programme. Early the following year, 134 BBC staff members - all in breach of their contract - signed a letter of protest to the Times, and Cormac's name was, characteristically, among them. In 1972, he was nevertheless appointed presentation editor of Radio 3, where his regime was distinguished.

Cormac expected his colleagues to be cultivated personalities, at ease with musical terminology and correct pronunciation in whatever language was called for. He asked that their delivery be measured and accurately stressed. And he set an admirably urbane example.

He was also fiercely loyal to his staff and, as I discovered during the musicians' strike over the BBC plans, eventually dropped, to disband five orchestras in 1980, heart-warmingly supportive of those in conflict with the Philistine tendency. In 1985, he introduced his last Last Night of the Proms for television, on which he was seen regularly, then left the BBC and began, for the second time, to train as a priest.

Apart from his faith and his skills as a broadcaster, Cormac had a passion for ballet, in which he was knowledgable and discriminating. During the 1970s he devised and presented a Radio 3 programme, Royal Repertoire, which complemented the current programmes of the Royal Ballet. He also wrote for Dance and Dancers, using the pen-name John Cowan. Even after his ordination he contributed to Dance Now, and he was always glad, a friend remarked, "to get his dog collar off and go to the ballet".

In three attractive books of sermons, The Lord Be With You (2003), Lift Up Your Hearts (2004) and Let Us Give Thanks (2005), he related without self-pity how his prostate cancer had spread and he felt obliged to give up his Stanmore parish. During a longer-than-expected remission, he went to Ireland and enjoyed "the most beautiful reprise of some of my happiest journeys up and down the Irish fjords". He was in every sense a good man.

A wonderful obituary, by Robert Ponsonby in today's Guardian, of a truly wonderful man. Cormac Rigby was an inspiration to all of us involved in broadcasting - paragraph 6 says it all. Read an interview with Father Cormac here. The header photograph, with Cormac Rigby second left, was taken in the Broadcasting House control room at Christmas 1971. (There is a less flattering photo of me on the same site, taken a few weeks later just after I joined the BBC.)

Now listen to Cormac Rigby's 'easy mastery of the spoken word', this is what radio can be -

And now visit the Carmelite monastery where Cormac Rigby had his Christmas cards printed.
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A Karl Weigl photo album

Preparing articles about composers such as Elizabeth Maconchy, Elisabeth Lutyens and Karl Weigl is difficult bcause there are very few photographs of them available. After he read my Karl Weigl article today John McLaughlin Williams kindly obtained permission from the composer's grandson to make available the family photographs here. John explains: 'Weigl was a good athlete. I saw other pictures at his daughter-in-law's house that showed him to be quite muscular in the manner of a wrestler. The lovely portrait above is with his wife Vally.'














Now here is an exclusive picture of a very different kind.
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Mahler's forgotten assistant

John McLaughlin Williams has just added this comment to my post Young composers sit at their computers: How woefully true about what supposedly can and cannot be done on the pro conducting circuit. I had a meeting with a well-known manager at a premiere New York management agency. Said manager inquired about my predilections, to which I answered a number of composers including Karl Weigl. He responded matter-of-factly "you can't do Weigl". The incredulous look upon my naive visage probably explains the subsequent course of my musical life!

Karl Weigl (below) can't be done on the pro conducting circuit, but he can be done On An Overgrown Path - here is his story. Gustav Mahler was appointed director of the Vienna Court Opera in 1897, and in ten years there he transformed both the repertoire and performances. He brought a new focus on the classical repertoire including Gluck and Mozart, and in collaboration with Alfred Roller created revolutionary productions of Fidelio, Tristan und Isolde, and Der Ring des Nibelungen.

In 1904 Mahler appointed as his rehearsal conductor, Karl Weigl, the 23 year old son of a prominent Viennese Jewish family. Weigl’s teachers included Alexander von Zemlinsky and Guido Adler, and his circle included Webern and Schönberg. In 1903 the Vereinigung scaffender Tonkunstler was founded by Zemlinsky, Schönberg and Weigl under the patronage of Mahler, and was programmed much ‘new’ music, including works by Mahler, Richard Strauss, Zemlinsky, Schönberg , Pfitzner, Reger and Bruno Walter, as well Weigl’s own compositions.

In 1906 Weigl left the Vienna Opera to concentrate on composing, and his chromatic harmonies and imaginative orchestration, which did not follow the musical path of his friend Schönberg, achieved considerable success. His Phantastisches Intermezzo, was performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Furtwängler, and the Rose Quartet premiered several of his chamber works. Other champions of his work included George Szell and the Busch Quartet. In 1929 joined the music department of the University of Vienna, and his students included Hanns Eisler, Erich Korngold and Kurt Adler.

In 1933 the political, and cultural, map of Europe started to change. The rise to power of the Nazis saw the start of discrimination against non-Aryan musicians and music. After Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938 Weigl’s music was removed from publisher’s catalogues, and exile became inevitable. In October 1938 he arrived in New York with the conductor Kurt Adler and the cellist Emanuel Feuerman. His letters of recommendation from Schönberg, Richard Strauss and Bruno Walter cut little ice in America, and Weigl struggled to survive giving private lessons. Later he held several teaching posts on the East Coast, but these were a far cry from the post in Vienna that he had left. Karl Weigl died after a prolonged illness in August 1949, eleven years after he had arrived in New York.

After this denouement it would be pleasing to report a revival of interest in Weigl’s music, but sadly this has not been the case. Stokowski gave the premiere of the Fifth Symphony Apokalyptische in New York, and other performers including Richard Goode have performed his compositions. Admirably BIS have recorded his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies together with the Phantastisches Intermezzo. Both the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies were composed by Karl Weigl in America, and the poignant sub-title of the Fifth says it all - Apocalyptic.

* See also a Karl Weigl photo album and Peter Paul Fuchs - one path ends.
* Follow this link to the website of the Jewish Music Institute

Now playing – Karl Weigl’s String Quartets No 1 and No 5. Nimbus has done a wonderful job championing forgotten and suppressed music. This highly recommended 1999 recording by the Artis Quartett Wien is only the second recording of these two quartets. Schönberg urged Arnold Rosé to perform them, praising their “extraordinary qualities and inventiveness”.

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Now take An Overgrown Path to Holocaust opera's rare performance

Young composers sit at their computers ...

Mahler 9. Circuit training’ll be a dawdle after this. What a play. What a play-fest. Ilan (Volkov) (above left) skippered us through it in Glasgow and Leeds last week. The last time the band played it was 1976 – that’s the year Ilan was born. Christopher Adey conducted that time. It was one of his last gigs with us during his tenure as ‘Assistant Conductor’. He was desperate to do the piece, the producer couldn’t really budget for it, so they agreed (i.e. they forgot to discuss it with us down at the coal face) to do it on half the rehearsal time.

The next ‘Assistant Conductor’ was Simon Rattle, and he tried the same trick with Mahler 7, but he programmed two studio recordings instead of the quick bash for one. Surprise, surprise: when we got to the first recording he announced that we weren’t ready and cancelled the recording in favour of a day more rehearsal before the second session. And they docked his pay! Which didn’t leave much, considering the pay those assistants got. In his two year tenure, Simon introduced us to a number of the big expensive orchestral showpieces – fantastic times.

The Assistant Conductor post has disappeared now. It was a good enough institution for the likes of Simon, Alex Gibson, Bryden Thompson, Christopher Seaman, Andrew Davis and many others. As young conductors they got to do a whole load of stuff that wouldn’t be available to them on the open commercial conductor circuit. Can you imagine the auditions for the post? We had a day in which six hopefuls would turn up with the same repertory excerpts and an hour in which to prove their worth.

There’s a grim side to any audition process, but if the hopeful can’t keep his cool under that pressure, then he’d best find that out quickly. ‘Lesson one’ would be: can they beat through a series of complicated time-signature changes, e.g. the slow movement of Stravinsky’s Symphony in C? We knew the answer by the second bar, but we had to be very professional for the rest of the hour!

Nowadays, many young composers sit at their computers, having left their brain in the bathroom, and unthinkingly use the computer to churn out the most ridiculously complicated sequences of time-signatures, further complicated by speed changes at every bar and notation within those individual bars that contradict the time-signature anyway. We have to take this in our stride now, though you will have gathered from my tone that we might get a tad irritated. But a conductor who can’t take this in his stride – he’s a no no.

When do conductors get to ‘practise’ their instrument – which is a skilled professional band that can actually play the piece? Bear in mind that we, the players, don’t want to appear in public as cannon fodder for inexperienced or weak conductors. What’s the answer?

Cellist Anthony Sayer tells it like it is on the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra blog, and as I've said here several times before, they are a band on a roll, after a near-death experience.

My header photo, from NMC. shows Ilan Volkov, composer Stuart MacRae and violinist Christian Tetzlaff at the recording sessions in Glasgow City Halls in 2006 for MacRae's Violin Concerto, which was a BBC Proms commission. I hasten to add I am sure Anthony Sayer's comments about young composers don't apply to Stuart MacRae, it just happened to be a nice shot that fits the story!
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In search of the lost score

Hello, I have read with interest your posts about Russian composers and Stalin. Your blog is highly informative and entertaining as well, and on an amazingly wide array of topics. I've been trying to find scores by and information about Vavera Gaigerova and Valery Zhelobinski (Jelobinsky). These tantalizing figures have proven completely elusive, yet they were published by the Soviet houses during their lives. Do you know of any resources that I might consult that may lead to performance material? I've been asking folks around the world to no avail. What did the Soviets do with music by composers who fell out of favor? Did they destroy it or bury it within archives? If I can find material I am reasonably sure that I can get recordings made.

My apologies for bothering you out of the blue. Thanks for any info you might offer. Regards, John McLaughlin Williams.

Can anyone help John? Add Comments below, or email to me at overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk and I'll pass it on.
And while we are on the subject of lost scores read about Furtwängler and the forgotten new music.
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Berlin March 28th 1933

Berlin was thrown into great excitement last night by two fires - the one at the Reichstag building (the German Parliament) and the other at the former Imperial Palace. Fire broke out at the Reichstag shortly after 9 p.m., and burned so fiercely that within an hour the main hall in which representatives of the German people meet when Parliament is in session was completely destroyed. Flames leaping from the great glass dome surmounting the building could be seen for miles around, and attracted huge crowds to the scene.

Police in full force on horseback and on foot kept the crowd back, while all the fire brigades in Berlin poured water on to the flames. The building was surrounded by the fire-fighting appliances, and high ladders were run up the walls and illuminated by searchlights. Firemen directed streams of water into the burning building, and hoses were run in through the numerous entrances to the seat of the fire, in the main session hall. It is believed (says an Exchange Berlin telegram) that the fire was due to arson, as it commenced at five or six different points simultaneously. A man was arrested in the building . He was found clad only in his trousers.

A Reuter telegram says that the fire was started by heaps of documents which were set alight in six different places. The police assert that Communists are responsible, and apart from the man who was arrested there were several other people in the building, although the Reichstag is not in session. The wildest rumours were circulating in Berlin last night, adds Reuter. One was to the effect that secret orders had been issued to the Nazi Storm Troopers to create a Bartholomew night on Saturday, when all political opponents of renown were to be "disposed of." Although the police asserted the Communists are responsible, some people think that the fire might have bee started by irresponsible Nazis with the object of provoking trouble.

The fires were extinguished at 10.45 p.m. The session hall presents a scene of desolation with all the deputies' seats, diplomats', public, and press galleries destroyed, and all the iron pillars supporting the dome twisted out of shape. The fire brigade state that the fire must have started at several points. It developed with extraordinary rapidity and began to find its way downstairs to the rooms below.

The police, "suspecting the conflagration to be the first of a series of Communist acts of terrorism," have arrested a number of Communist leaders "in order to forestall any attempt to cover up tracks." The man who was discovered in the Reichstag building and arrested is stated to be a Dutchman named Van der Luebbe, aged 24 (photo left). He is said to have confessed that he started the fire, but denied that he was acting as anyone's agent. It is added that he said he used his shirt as firing material. The police found a rag steeped in petrol as they entered the building, and the arrested man's cap was found close to other firing material. He has been conducted to police headquarters, where he is being subjected to a thorough examination. His manner had been extremely calm and self-possessed throughout.

Herr Hitler, Herr Göring, Herr von Papen, and other prominent persons including Prince August Wilhelm, entered the building whilst it was still burning, and Herr Goring, President of the Reichstag and "Commissarial" Minister for the Interior in Prussia, took command of the police and issued orders to keep the crowds at a distance. If the new Reichstag is summoned after next Sunday's elections it is unlikely to be able to meet in the Reichstag building owing to the extensive damage done by the fire. The fire at the former Imperial Palace broke out earlier in the day in an attic, and was quickly subdued by the fire brigade before any damage had been done. The police suspect arson, as burnt matches were found in the attic.

Report from the Guardian. Now visit the rebuilt Reichstag.
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The essence of the music itself is there

When does a recording become a forgery? How much can be added that wasn't created by the musicians on the label before it is a fake? My post on a 'recreation' of Glenn Gould's 1955 Goldbergs raises some interesting questions, and so does the following story.

By chance I bought last week the excellent transcriptions of Handel's recorder sonatas for cello and harpsichord played by Tatty Theo (cello) and Carolyn Gibley (harpsichord). The girls are part of the local baroque ensemble, The Brook Street Band. The recording was made a few miles from here in Raveningham Church in Norfolk, the label is Avie, and the producer and engineer is Simon Fox-Gál.

Now here is the first interesting point. The sleeve contains the following message: 'Reverberation included in this recording from Classical Reverberations Impulses produced by Ernest Cholakis for Numerical Sound'.

Research reveals the Toronto based Numerical Sound: 'develops low level manipulations of sound's primary elements. Essentially, we deconstruct, analyze and separate sound by recognizing individual events, elements, or spectral properties, and depending on the situation use the resulting components to modify existing sounds or reconstruct new ones. For example, we might separate a tone into its harmonic or partials or percussive components, and then rebuild those elements into something new.'

A number of high profile classical recordings use Numerical Sound's technology, which shapes sounds to pre-determined profiles in a similar way to the Loft Recordings Tournemire project that I wrote about here. The Numerical Sound website includes some musical examples before and after reprocessing.

I don't want this to get out of proportion. Artificial reverberation has been added to recordings for decades (although why it is needed in the acoustics of a church is a puzzle). On the Handel sonatas disc we are told the sound shaping technology has been used for the reverberation only. But this technology can also reshape instrumental sounds, and this is where the story gets very interesting.

Producer and engineer Simon Fox-Gál of the Handel disc is the grandson of the Viennese born composer Hans Gál (photo below), and he has created recordings of his grandfather's orchestral scores using another technology that has featured here before - Vienna Symphonic Library - which synthesizes music using digital samples of real instruments. Here are Fox-Gal's words about the Hans Gál project: ' It's not a real orchestra, but the essence of the music itself is there, time and our imagination being the only limits to the extent to which we can achieve perfection in the smallest of musical details.' You can listen to the 'not a real orchestra' playing Hans Gál's Symphony No 2 here.

Yes, all perfectly above board, and just the wonders of technology. But let's not forget these words - 'He thinks he began editing “ambience” in the late 1980s.'

Now wonder How much is Stravinsky, and how much is Craft?
Fractal sampled from Jing-reed with many thanks. 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

Dresden February 13th 2007

Nazi numbers were down to 1,600 – among them extremists from Hungary, the UK, Austria and France – for the 2007 annual fascist commemoration of the Allied air raids on Dresden in February 1945. For several years the event has been a key date in the German and international nazi calendar. Two years ago more than 7,000 fascists attended.

As usual the nazis marched with the slogan “No bombing Holocaust ever again”, ridiculing the victims of the real Holocaust, Hitler’s industrialised mass murder of Jews, Roma and Sinti. This year the demonstration was accompanied by an “action week” organised by an alliance of all Dresden’s rightwing extremists outside the National Democratic Party (NPD) under the leadership of “Free Nationalist”. The NPD’s leaders attended the march.

The nazis were faced with a strong protest from 1,000 mostly young anti-fascists who repeatedly blocked their path, delaying them and finally forcing them to shorten their demonstration. Some of the more militant nazis tried violently to break out of their own demonstration but ran into conflict with the police and anti-fascists. To some extent they succeeded but ended up fighting with police and anti-fascists.

Scandalously, however, the police this time allowed those nazis who had not already gone home in frustration at the anti-fascist blockade to demonstrate directly opposite the New Synagogue. Nevertheless, anti-fascists, encouraged by their success in ruining the nazi’s evening, are optimistic about preventing next year’s demonstration.

Frank Buschmann reports from Dresden via Antifaschistisches Infoblatt, Antifa-Net , and International Searchlight.

Now read about, and see, Dresden, 13th February 1945.
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Classical music flowers in springtime Britain

Academy of Ancient Music, Chief Executive - £na
The Conservatoire, Director of Music - £32k
Scottish Ballet, Head of Development - £32 - 38k
Music at Oxford, General Manager - £na
London Symphony Orchestra, Head of LSO Discovery - £38 - 43k
Britten Sinfonia, Marketing Director - £na
London Sinfonietta, Development & Marketing Managers - £na

It's a beautiful spring day here, and the header photo was taken five minutes ago in our garden. On BBC Radio 3 this afternoon was a stunning performance by Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra of that British masterpiece, Elgar's Symphony No 2 in E flat major. Today's Media Guardian lists the music vacancies above. Last Saturday we heard the Pergolesi Stabat Mater and Rachmaninov Vespers in Norwich Cathedral. On Friday it's Prokofiev and Stravinsky at Snape, and on Saturday Schütz and Pärt in Blythburgh Church.

But it's all a mirage. Read here about the death of live classical music, and here about the death of the recording industry.
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Albert Baez, scientist, pacifist and parent

Albert Baez (left) has died age 94. A remarkable scientist and pacifist, he was also father of folk singers Joan Baez and Mimi Fariña. Follow this link to the San Francisco Chronicle for an excellent celebration of a remarkable life.

Now read why we aren't marching in the streets anymore.
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Now that's what I call music blogging ...

So much quality music had been unfairly forgotten and so much tat put on a pedestal. Top of my tat-list is Dmitri Shostakovich. I personally can't wait for his flatulent 'sarcastic' bubble to burst. A close second and third on the tat-list are two more po-faced Soviet gits, Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina (left). When will that old witchy bore Gubaidulina shut up? When, EH? And when will the quieter craftsmen composers, Edison Denisov, Valentin Silvestrov and Dmitri Smirnov, get their dues?

Igor Toronyi-Lalic reminds us what music blogging should be about on the Telegraph website. And he links to my Elizabeth Maconchy article. Priceless, but I'm not so sure about Silvestrov.

Now read how Soviet blacklist fatigue sets in.
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Happy Birthday Maestro Toscanini!

Arturo Toscanini was born on 25th March 1867 in Parma, Italy. My photograph shows him celebrating while on tour in the US in May, 1950. The photo was taken at Sun Valley, Idaho, where the maestro conducted an impromptu band of toy guitars, wash-tubs, and a clarinet for a refreshingly multi-cultural audience.

Now listen as the maestro conducts a real orchestra (after a brief Finnish introduction) in the complete Prelude to the third act of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg in November 1951. The orchestra is Toscanini's own NBC Symphony, and the recording was made in Carnegie Hall, where the orchestra and its conductor can be seen in my picture below -


Toscanini's Wagner may have been sublime, but his opposition to fascism was trenchant, read about it here. And for another Toscanini download take An Overgrown Path to Schoenberg on Toscanini Audio file credit YLE Radio 1, NBC Symphony from Wikipedia/NBC TV. 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

Click here for a Glenn Gould forgery

Or is it a forgery? Read here how digital technology helps build a virtual concert hall.
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Maconchy, Schubert, and synchroncity

Superb response to my article on the recordings of Elizabeth Maconchy's string quartets. Superb article in today's Guardian on Schubert's symphonies. Serendipitous synchronicity that Misha Donat produced the 1989 recordings and wrote the Guardian article this week.

Now read about serendipity, synchronicity and Bernstein
Fractal sample from Geodeomp.com. 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

Music’s unmerry widows

Recent reports that Sergei Rachmaninov's great-great-grandson is a control freak will come as no surprise to anyone who has read John Drummond's autobiography - it seems to run in the family.

John Culshaw’s first foray into music, not long after leaving the RAF in the late 1940s, had been to write a very short book on Rachmaninov – at that time a deeply unfashionable figure, very little of whose music was played. The book was a triumph over the unavailability of material, and when the typescript was completed Culshaw went to see the composer’s widow in Switzerland. Ferried across Lake Lausanne in a private launch by a liveried servant, he was graciously received and asked to come back a week later, when Madame Rachmaninov would have read the typescript. Limited to twenty-five pounds ($48) in foreign currency, Culshaw had to explain that he could not wait that long. Grudgingly, Madame Rachmaninov agreed to a shorter time.

When he returned, he was told to wait in the hall. Shortly afterwards she appeared holding the typescript in an outstretched hand before dropping it on the floor. ’I have spoken to my lawyers in New York, Paris and London’, was her only comment. Yet the book is entirely favourable. It is one of the many examples of the disastrous influence of some composer’s widows - Die Unlustigen Witwen, as Boulez calls them – ‘The Unmerry Widows’. He has had to cope with Frau Schoenberg, Frau Mahler and worst of all Frau Berg, who for forty years spoke daily with Alban’s spirit and blocked the completion of Lulu.

Now read more about Rachmaninov’s music here.
Extract above from John Drummond's autobiography Tainted by Experience (Faber, ISBN 0571200540). Graphic sampled from an original by Jeff Ostrowski. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "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

Lebrecht's only show in town

November 8 2006: Norman Lebrecht writes - Classical blogs are spreading but their nutritional value is lower than a bag of crisps. Unlike financial blogs, which yield powerful and profitable secrets, classical web-chat is opinion-rich and info-poor. Until bloggers deliver hard facts and estate agents turn into credible critics, paid-for newspapers will continue to set the standard as only show in town.

March 15 2007: Norman Lebrecht becomes a blogger.

Now read how blogs bloom as Lebrecht blusters
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Meanwhile, in the real world ...

I've been doing some very rewarding media training with young victims of crime for the charity Victim Support Norfolk. Here are the results from BBC TV News. You can catch a glimpse of me in the middle of the human knot, which is kind of appropriate.

I am weary of the constant US bashing

Hi Pliable, I just need to confess: I've enjoyed so much of your writing and reporting on music and humanity, and your postings have added much to my enlightenment and delight in life. But I may be coming to a point where I won't go there much anymore.

I happen to live in the US, and I am getting very weary of the constant bashing of mostly anything US - politics, composers, music, morals, etc. I am a decent person, a pacifist (Quaker), to a degree a political activist (I attended my first anti-war protest *since* the Viet Nam war when Bush II invaded Iraq, and have continued)... you get the picture. But I just don't need to be constantly told how bad I am, how little I do, etc.

I hope you understand my perspective. For those of us who fight regularly, and have for a good long time, to retain the best qualities of our country while attempting to contain or diminish the bad, it is hard to see ourselves - because we are here, not there - perpetually painted in very bad light.

Yours in music and light, Jon

Now read some of my US bashing articles here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and ...
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I am a camera in East Berlin

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed." (from Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, 1939)

The remarkable photo above was developed, carefully printed, and fixed in the 1970s, but has never before been published. It shows two of the feared East German Vopos (Volkspolizei) whose job it was to guard the Berlin Wall. The photograph was taken across death-strip from the West side of the Wall using a powerful telephoto lens. The original print was passed to me recently, and I scanned it to create the image above. The photographer tells me it has never been seen in public before.

For long periods both sides in the Cold War stand-off exchanged nothing more than shots from cameras across the Wall. But for short periods the shots came from guns. Estimates vary as to how many died trying to cross the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989. The official figure from the German Federal Prosecutor's office is 86 dead at the hands of the Vopos and others. The German Government supported website Chronik der Mauer puts the figure at 125. An even higher figure of 227 is given by Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13, an organisation linked to the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie museum, and known for its strongly anti-communist stance.

Fortunately Berlin is no longer divided, and for pictures of the city today see I am a camera - Berlin re-unified. A united Germany, including the former East Germany, is now one of the member states of the fast-growing European Union. This weekend the EU is marking its 50th anniversary with a celebration of its many achievements. These include creating the political climate that allows democracy to flourish in 27 member countries. Among these are Spain, Portugal, Greece and ten former Communist countries, none of which were truly free in the decades following the Second World War.

In 2005 the European Union and its member states paid out more than €43bn in 2005 in aid to developing countries. This is 0.32 per cent of GNP of the 25 member states, and is approaching double the per capita aid level paid out by the United States, which currently spends 0.2 per cent of GNP. The expanded EU is developing common foreign and defence policies, and these are starting to provide a much needed counter-weight to the global power of the US and China.

Europe loves a party, and we also love music. Centrepiece of the EU anniversary celebrations are an all-night bash in a rejuvenated Berlin,and a birthday party in Brussels where Zucchero, Axelle Red, Simply Red, Hooverphonic, Carla Bruni, The Scorpions, Helmut Lotti, Kim Wilde, Las Ketchup, Nadiya (left), Lou Bega and many others come together for an evening of rock at the Atomium. Across town, the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra will be performing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, while some of Europe's best jazzmen will be dotted around the city performing at ‘Jazz in Europe now!’. The Jacky Terrasson Trio, Aka Moon, the 18-year-old sensation Gabor Bolla and his quartet are just some of the top bands in Brussels.

In Portugal, more than 220 'bandas' will open their concerts throughout the country by playing the Europe Anthem all at the same time. In Germany, musicians from all 27 EU countries take to the road to play in 50 German cities. Were you born on 25 March? If so, you are invited to a special concert of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in Luxembourg. The EU is not new to supporting musical events. The Brxl Bravo Festival (Brussels, 2-4 March) and the European Border Breakers Award (EBBA) are just two recent examples. Most of the financial support comes from Culture 2007.

* I Am a Camera is the title of the play by Christopher Isherwood that became the hugely successful musical and film Cabaret (right). The play was based on Isherwood's Berlin novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). During his time in Berlin in the 1930s Isherwood lived in a tenement block in Schöneberg, which after the war was in the American Sector to the south of the Wall.

Now read about contemporary music from 1930s Berlin in Furtwängler and the forgotten new music.
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They were demanding jazz and rock and roll

"There is no doubt that On the Road was the seminal book of my coming of age. What I didn't know then is that it had turned millions of others around the world on to Whitman's America. During the Cold War it was not the so-called Voice of America, Treasury-hemorrhaging military expenditures, Foggy Bottom's diplomatic cunning, CIA cloak-and-dagger derring-do, or even democracy American-style that fueled the young intellectual radicals and freedom fighters of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The voice of America they heard was Walt Whitman's - the voice of the Mississippi Delta blues, spontaneous jazz, reckless rock and roll, Bob Dylan protest songs, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and Jack Kerouac's (photo above) On the Road supplemented with images from Hollywood and later from MTV.

From the Molotov cocktail-throwers of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, to the underground legions of young radicals avoiding jazz police during the Prague Spring of 1968, to East German John Henrys swinging their sledgehammers for freedom in 1989 as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in our CNN living rooms, the Eastern European youth movement against totalitarianism was not seeking democracy per se: They were demanding jazz, rock and roll, Hollywood, and Beat poetry, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road was an important catalyst. "Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million Levi's to both sexes," William Burroughs has said: "Woodstock rises from his pages." So does the Velvet Revolution. Indeed, as columnist George Will has commented, it was John Lennon - a student of American pop and culture - and not Vladimir Lenin whom these young people emulated.

I find it incredible that the CIA was caught by surprise when the Berlin wall was struck down in August 1989, for that June in New York's alternative East Village music clubs, such as CBGB's and the Continental Divide, young underground poets and rockers were matter-of-factly discussing the August teardown over beer, wondering if they had enough cash to lend a hand. What Bob Dylan (right) sang in 1965 applied in 1989: "Something is happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?" Even the teenage tank resisters of Tiananmen Square had traded in Mao's Red Book for smuggled copies of Ginsberg's poetry and recordings of Thelonius Monk's Mysterioso and Charlie Parker's Ornithology:" - from Douglas Brinkley's 1993 book The Majic Bus.

The Majic Bus recounts the maiden voyage of Hofstra University's travelling course, "An American Odyssey: Art and Culture Across America." At the prompting of his students, Professor Douglas Brinkley arranged to teach a six-week experimental course aboard a fully equipped sleeper bus. The curriculum would call on them to visit thirty states and ten national parks and read twelve books by great american writers. They attended a Bob Dylan concert in Seattle, gambled at a Las Vegas casino, danced to Borbon Street jazz in New Orleans, paid homage to Elvis Presley at Graceland, experienced a Californian earthquake, and Brinkley was mugged at gunpoint in Georgetown.

They also visited Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, Abraham Lincoln's Springfield, Harry Truman's Independence, and Theodore Roosevelt's North Kakota Badlands. And they had the unforgettable experience of meeting some of their cultural heroes including William S. Burroughs and Ken Kesey, with the latter taking the class for a spin in his own psychedelic bus. In more than five hundred pages Majic Bus never ceases to inform and entertain, and serves as a timely reminder of the rich history and culture of the US which is so overshadowed today by the humanitarian disasters of Iraq and elsewhere. Above all this remarkable travelogue is a dazzling reminder of how education really should work.

Now listen to Allen Ginsberg live via streamed audio
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Just one email makes it all worthwhile

mister bijou has left a new comment on your post "Flattery will get you everywhere":

Thank you so much for the post about Elizabeth Maconchy (above)-- of whom I'd never heard of before. Having now listened to the first programme about her on BBC Radio 3, and read the Pliable words, I went to Regis Records and ordered via their online service. Pliable readers may be interested to know their retail price is 12 pounds sterling for the 3cds. Cheers!

Posted by mister bijou to On An Overgrown Path at 6:00 PM

Now read how blogging is doing it for our time
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The rest is downhill

Good to see fellow blogger Alex Ross' forthcoming book listed on Amazon. Good also to report that my much more modest volume (left) is still selling well on Amazon.com after quite a few years. Yes, it is a cycling book, but one with a difference. I bet it is the only cycling guide that recommends, among other things, a Naxos CD of E.J. Moeran's chamber music.

Moeran grew up here in East Anglia where his father was Rector at the Parish Church in Bacton, a village now overwhelmed by a massive natural gas terminal. The composer's 1937 Symphony in G minor is well worth exploring. Which allows me to turn what could have been been a gratuitous plug for my own somewhat tangentical book into a topical CD recommendation. Just this week Lyrita has re-issued Sir Adrian Boult's classic recording of Moeran's Symphony on CD. I haven't heard the CD release, but as I write my original LP pressing from 1975 plays on the trusty Thorens TD125, and if the remastered CD sounds half as good it would still be a strong recommendation. Pity thought that the gorgeous LP sleeve with Turner's 'Storm Clouds: Sunset' didn't make it onto the CD.

Boult was a true gentleman, and a great conductor. His repertoire was wide-ranging, including the first British performance of Schoenberg's Variations in 1931. He was unflagging in his commitment to new music, but I can't help but end with this description by Constant Lambert of Boult's interpretation of Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces - 'played with the touch of embarassment and circumspection shown by a really polite Protestant who has found himself involved in a religous ceremony of some totally different creed.'

Now read why the rest is downhill.
And yes, those are my daughter and son on the book cover. 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

How important is a composer’s music?

Why a String Quartet? What is it that has given it its exalted reputation and mystique? Why have so many composers regarded it as the perfect medium of expression, though it is perhaps the most demanding to write for? And why do distinguished artists often prefer to work as a team in a first class quartet rather than make bigger money as, say, orchestral leaders? Music means different things to different people: but for those to who music is an intellectual art, a balanced and reasoned statement of ideas, an impassioned argument, an intense but disciplined expression of emotion – the string quartet is perhaps the most satisfying medium of all.

These words are by Elizabeth Maconchy (photo below) who was born one hundred years ago, on March 19th 1907. She has been described as the greatest ever English composer for strings, irrespective of gender. She wrote a remarkable cycle of thirteen string quartets, and three one-act operas. Her music is lean, sinewy and uncompromising, and develops from the central European styles of Berg, Bartok and Janacek. But, despite all these attributes, the neglect of Maconchy’s music is breathtaking. She is ignored by the mainstream. Her music is absent from our concert halls, and in the classical departments of London's two largest record stores her name does not even appear on the CD racks. And she is ignored by the cognoscenti, with neither William Glock nor John Drummond mentioning her in their autobiographies.

The neglect of Elizabeth Maconchy does raise the question, how important is a composer’s music? Comparisons with another twentieth century composer, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, are interesting. Korngold was born in the right place, mainland Europe. He had the right teachers including Zemlinsky, and moved in the right circles, including Mahler and Richard Strauss. He was forced to move to the right place, Hollywood, for the right reasons, political persecution. He worked in the right genres, film scores and neo-romantic orchestral music. And Korngold is rightly recognised with browser space in the CD stores, two biographies, and concert and broadcast performances.

Elizabeth Maconchy was born ten years after Korngold, in the wrong place. Her birthplace, Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, is one of the few towns in the world that doesn’t even merit a Wikipedia entry. She had the wrong teachers. Ralph Vaughan Williams, who remained a close friend but not a musical influence, is forever branded an English pastoralist, while her teacher in Prague, Karel Jirak (left), remains as neglected as his pupil. She had the wrong life changing event. TB claimed her sister and father, and she contracted and recovered from the illness herself. This experience contributed to the development of her individual musical voice, and her single minded and painstaking focus.

She also lived in the wrong place. Essex is a creative no-go area between the musical honey-pots of London and Aldeburgh. She didn’t network with musical movers and shakers, although she was the first woman to sit on the influential BBC music panel, and was also the first woman President of the Society for the Promotion for New Music. She was married to a historian for more than sixty years, and bore two daughters, one of whom, Nicola LeFanu, is a notable composer in her own right. And she wrote for the wrong genre. The string quartet stubbonly refuses to fit into the sound-byte culture of radio stations such as BBC Radio 3, where a single movement is rapidly becoming the largest acceptable single unit of musical currency.

Let’s make one thing clear, I am a big fan of the music of Korngold. In the 1970’s I discovered him through the three pioneering LPs of his music. First the RCA Red Seal LP of his film scores, The Sea Wolf conducted by Charles Gerhardt. Then, the still unsurpassed, recording of the Symphony in F-sharp with Rudolf Kempe and the Munich Philharmonic (nla), followed by Jascha Heifetz's recording of the Violin Concerto (below). But around the same time I discovered the music of Elizabeth Maconchy. First there was her unrepresentative overture Proud Thames on an adventurous Lyrita LP of 1972 (SRCS 57) that also included music by Geoffrey Bush, William Alwyn and Lennox Berkeley. But the record that got me hooked another Lyrita LP (SRCS 116) with Vernon Handley conducting her Symphony for Double String Orchestra, and Manoug Parikian playing the Serenata Concertante for Violin and Orchestra. It is very sad that the Lyrita re-issues on CD have not included these wonderful recordings in the composer's centenary year.

The peak of Elizabeth Maconchy’s achievement are the thirteen quartets, and these span more than fifty years from 1932 to 1984, from the youthful exuberance of the first, to the ultimate concision of the thirteenth (Quartetto Corto) which lasts for just eight minutes. The ghosts of Berg, Bartok, Janacek, and Jirak hover over the opus, and Maconchy's uncompromising approach to composition is expressed in her own notes about the Sixth Quartet: ‘Writing music, like all creative art, is the impassioned pursuit of an idea … The great thing is for the composer to keep his (sic) head and allow nothing to distract him. The temptations to stop by the way and to be side-tracked by felicities of sound and colour are ever present, but in my view everything extraneous to the pursuit of this central idea must be rigorously excluded – scrapped’.

We are very fortunate that the neglect of Elizabeth Maconchy’s music is not total. In 1989 Unicorn-Kanchana had the vision to record the complete quartets with three young string groups, the Hanson, Bingham and Mistry Quartets. The performances are committed, energetic, and exemplary. The recordings were produced by Misha Donat, and two church venues were used with the legendary sound engineer Tony Faulkner balancing nine of the quartets, and Anthony Howell the others. These are performances and recordings to die for, and the even better news is that the complete string quartets are now available on 3 CDs on the Regis label for the price of a single CD, and they come with an excellent 24 page booklet of notes by the composer and Nicola Lefanu.

But despite this wonderful recorded legacy we are still left with the conundrum of Elizabeth Maconchy - vital and astringent music combined with an unassuming personality. My header photo expresses this conundrum perfectly. When Erich Wolfgang Korngold died in 1957 he was buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery just a few steps away from another film composer, Walter Jurmann, who is famous for writing the song "San Francisco". When I started writing this article I did not even know where Elizabeth Maconchy was buried. To my astonishment, my research uncovered that the unassuming final resting place she shares with her husband, shown in the photo, is a few miles from where I write these words, at Eaton Parish Church here in Norfolk.

But in the end it is the music matters. I started by asking the question ‘How important is a composer’s music?’ The string quartets of Elizabeth Maconchy are important twentieth century music. £15 ($28) is a very small price to pay to find out how important.


Good to see the BBC doing their bit. Elizabeth Maconchy (above) is the Radio 3 Composer of the Week starting March 19th, and you can also download audio files of her talking about her art. And read here about another scandalously neglected Elizabeth.
Header photograph by Pliable, February 2007, copyright On An Overgrown Path. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "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

Flattery will get you everywhere

More F1-related dopiness here. The author writes one of the very best classical-music blogs out there-- in his lucid intervals between spells of fellating Hugo Chavez and bemoaning the training of armed guards - from Australian Tim Blair's blog.

But I can think of more pleasurable experiences than this.
Illustration by Jeff Smith. 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

New positions for a string quartet

Vanessa Lann emails - Today is the world premiere of my string quartet, Landscape of a Soul's Remembering. In this work there are six separate locations on the stage where the musicians will stand or sit throughout the performance, changing to new positions between each of the four movements. At each spot there is specific music to be played, consisting of recognizable, repeated patterns that the players will interpret in turn - on their respective instruments - during each movement. As these patterns emerge again and again in new contexts, played on different instruments by different performers, they will each be heard in a new light.

Rather than this being a string quartet where the discussion exists in real time between the players, this is a study of the discussion, or realization, that takes place in one human soul - between the present, the future and one's understanding of Memory.

The premiere of Landscape of a Soul's Remembering is being given by the Doelen String Quartet, in the Eduard Flipsezaal, Concertgebouw De Doelen, Rotterdam on Sunday, March 18, 2007, 8:30 pm. The concert also includes the first performance of a work by Giel Vleggaar, and John Adams' John's Book of Alleged Dances.

Now read about another contemporary chamber work.
It is a Vanessa day - the sculpture is Sad beaver by Vanessa Pooley, bronze 13" high. 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

Iggily buff

'Iggily buff' by Vanessa Pooley, bronze 16" long. Do visit the artist's website and blog.

I don't write about women composers or women artists, just as I don't write about men composers or men artists. But this is the first in a sequence of three posts featuring very interesting artists and composers, and by a coincidence they are all women.

Now read how the eternal feminine follows the musical path
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Formula 1 takes Guardian for an organic spin

The Formula 1 season gets under way in Australia this weekend with the corporate spin machines reaching peak revolutions, and the paid-for-media are swallowing it lock, stock and barrel - literally. Today's Guardian is gushing in its praise of Jody Scheckter (left) - "Formula 1 driver turned farming evangelist in Hampshire" and journalist Matthew Fort promotes Scheckter's latest business enterprise with this purple prose:

There are other great organic farms in the country, but Laverstoke Park is more than just a place of agricultural production. It's a kind of university of organic production, a centre for experiment and knowledge. Jody Scheckter stands in front of his long barrows of compost. In the background, the sun dances on the grass on the gentle curve of a green field on which fat, healthy-looking sheep stand nose down, placidly lunching away.

I guess the Guardian simply didn't have space to write about South African born Scheckter's other business ventures, which include founding FATS Inc. Do take a trip over to their website, here is the executive summary from it:

FATS, Inc. (Firearms Training Systems) is a leading provider of simulated training solutions that improve the skills of military, law enforcement and security organizations around the world. FATS provides judgmental, tactical and combined arms training experiences, utilizing quality engineered weapon simulators.

The U.S. Postal Service purchased the first FATS training solution in 1984. FATS has created more than 1,200 training scenarios and 300 distinct simulated weapons. FATS has sold approximately 5,200 training systems in more than 50 countries worldwide.

The company serves U.S. and international customers from headquarters in Suwanee, Georgia, with branch offices in Australia, Canada, Singapore, Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

Elsewhere the website tells us FATS Inc "provides firearm training systems for law enforcement, military, and hunters," so all those "fat, healthy-looking sheep .... placidly lunching away " down on Scheckter's farm had better look out.

Now read about the Zeitgeist of the YouTube generation.
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The excruciating boredom of pure fact

Sir Edward Elgar would have been wryly amused by the current fuss over the removal of his image from the £20 note in his anniversary year. The original letter above is from my personal collection. It is from Mrs Richard Powell, friend of Elgar and Variation No X, "Dorabella" in the composer's Enigma Variations. It was written to the composer and writer Harold Rutland in 1950 about the mystery of the dedication in Spanish on the Violin Concerto - “Aquí está encerrada el alma de . . . . .” (Here is enshrined the soul of . . . . .) The middle paragraph reads:

What a curious fact it is that people seem to prefer a mystery to a fact. Having kept my promise to Lady Elgar for 40 years not to reveal the 'Secret of the 5 dots,' I find that no one cares to know the truth, and I have even heard something about 'pricked bubbles'. A writer to The Times once alluded to "the excruciating boredom of pure fact"!

Now read Elgar versus Adams in BBC anniversary lottery
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Taking the sting out of the lute

‘Jakob Lindberg was born in Djursholm in Sweden and developed his first passionate interest in music through the Beatles’ - programme note from Lindberg’s recital last night at The King of Hearts in Norwich.

The venue - the Tudor music room at the King of Hearts in Norwich. This centre for people and the arts is located in a restored medieval merchant’s house. The music room seats just 80, and its beamed ceiling and oak floor give it superb acoustics.

The instrument – Jakob Lindberg’s lute was made circa 1590 by the prolific luthier Sixtus Rauwolf who lived and worked in Augsburg, southern Germany. Dendrochronology confirms that the soundboard is original and dates it from 1418-1560, making this the oldest playable lute with its original soundboard. Lindberg bought the lute at a Sotheby’s auction in 1991, and it has been painstakingly restored including replacing of the 19th century neck.

The composers – Robert Ballard (c. 1575-1650), Gregory Huwet (c. 1550-c. 16160, Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger (1580-1631), Albert Dlugoraj (1557- after 1619), Nicolas Vallet (c.1583- after 16420, Prince Mauritius, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel (1572-1632), Robert Johnson (c.1583-1633), and John Dowland (1563-1626), plus of course Anon.

The encore – the Beatles.

Now read about more Dowland with contemporary connections, and it's not what you think.
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Now that's what I call a concert

Cappella Romana directed by Alexander Lingas perform luminous choral music by contemporary composers steeped in the Byzantine tradition. Featured works include: Radiant Cloud and the world premiere of A Woman Clothed with the Sun, a setting from the Book of Revelation, by Michael Adamis and the "Benedictions" from the Requiem by Mikis Theodorakis who featured on these pages recently. Portland: Fri, Apr 20, 2007, 8:00pm @ St Mary’s Cathedral, 1716 NW Davis St, & Seattle: Sat, Apr 21, 2007, 8:00pm @ Holy Rosary Church, 4139 42nd Ave SW

Now read about more imaginative concert programming.
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Lebrecht wrong

Norman Lebrecht has a new book, Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness published on April 5th.

The Penguin press release tells us: ' Norman Lebrecht is Assistant Editor of the Evening Standard and presenter of lebrecht.live on BBC Radio 3.'

Hope the facts in the book are more accurate than the press release.

As was revealed here Lebrecht Live was dropped from the BBC Radio 3 schedules in January.

Now read how Lebrecht blusters as blogs bloom
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I'm at the Pudding Shop

Modern Istanbul's complex geography renders it all but unmappable: three dozen districts swelling over seven hills, no single centre, fingered by water, jumbled in time. Age dilutes its fluidity. I can't keep a grip on its currents of slippery politics, of chaotic transport, of residents drawn together to argue, talk and trade. Its light is maritime, a sea lies over each shoulder, yet the city is 2,000 miles from any ocean. A ten-minute stroll takes me from a sleepy Greek fishing village to a Hapsburg cul-de-sac reminiscent of a Klimt painting. Across the horizon surge waves of new world tower blocks. In the shifting expanding spiral of my wanderings, I find its anarchic streets, its shifting colours, its millions of voices, its dreams of a legendary past at once foreign and familiar.

I'm at the Pudding Shop, the first meeting point on the hippie trail to Kathmandu. In 1957, two brothers from the Black Sea, Namik and Idris Çolpan opened the Lale Pastanesi across from Istanbul's Blue Mosque. For a couple of years, well-to-do Turks stopped by for frothy black kahve and honey-soaked baklava topped with green pistachios. Then, the tiny, open-fronted patisserie attracted the attention of the early overlanders, both because of its central location and their sugar-craving munchies. Overnight, the travellers made the Lale their place, renaming it the Pudding Shop. Outside its door, London double-deckers and fried-out Kombis parked along the Hippodrome. Pop music played in its garden. The well-to-do Turks stood outside, their mouths agape, watching their sons and nephews drink coffee with paradise-bound freaks in Apache headbands and paisley waistcoats.

Today, the cafeteria is indistinguishable from a dozen of its neighbours, apart from a few faded sixties photographs tacked on the rear wall. Beneath them, a handful of Lycra-clad Danish civil servants procrastinate over dessicated pizzas and köfte meatballs. At the next table, a sunburnt Englishman nurses an early Troy Pilsner.

An extract from the highly recommended Magic Bus by Rory MacLean, (Penguin ISBN 0670914843). The photo above shows my wife surrounded by children from a Muslim school near the beautiful church of Kariye Camii. Contrary to received wisdom the pupils were encouraged to talk to us and ask about Western life, and their teacher was happy for me to talk to the 13 year-olds about the Armenian genocide.

Turkey has many problems, but the open faces of those young people and their delight in asking and answering questions are quite a contrast to Western schools today. Here in the UK the children are taught not to speak to strangers, and attitudes are moulded by the paid-for media, not face-to-face debate. Travelling for our teenagers means a Health and Safety approved £7199 ($14000) Gap Year package, complete with personal travel adviser. Yes, we certainly found Istanbul refreshing. Unlike some, this blog is normally 100% animal-free. But here to end this section is a happy hound in a Beyoğlu street who hasn't yet found the need for a personal travel adviser ...


Now playing - Ahmet Kanneci plays Turgay Erdener. Born in 1957 Turgay Erdener studied at Ankara State Conservatory. He has written for a wide range of forces, and his output includes a symphony dating from 2003. This Sony CD features four works for solo guitar, all played by their dedicatee Ahmet Kanneci whose studies included both architecture and music. My photo shows Erdener at the piano with Kanneci standing. Modern but accessible music, the three folk tunes are particularly beautiful. If you like the seriously under-rated Preludes and Fugues for guitar by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco you will enjoy the music of Turgay Erdener. A great discovery, but the problem is buying it if you aren't travelling to Istabul. The best I can offer is this Turkish online retailer.

Now follow me on the hippie trail in 1967, then chill with a visit the Pudding Shop website for a virtual kahve and baklava, and end with a massage at our favourite hammam (Turkish bath).
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Dark Side of the Moon

In advance of tomorrow’s vote in parliament on replacing Britain's Trident independent nuclear deterrent I offer this strange, but true, story.

Sometime in 1956, an analyst at RAND came up with a really clever way of getting a jump on the Russians. W. W. Kellog decided that an atom bomb could be attached to a rocket and fired at the Moon. Timed to explode just before hitting the lunar surface, it would send an outstanding visual display back to Earth. Within RAND, the idea didn’t go very far, since analysts were busy with more important matters and, in any case, the United States at that point couldn’t put a grapefruit into orbit, much less send an atom bomb to the Moon. But the idea didn’t go away.

Two years later, William Pickering at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory argued that such a stunt would have valuable scientific merit, given that it would “shower the Earth with samples of surface dust.” This dust (radioactive, it should be noted) could be studied, yielding valuable conclusions about the origin of the Moon. Pickering also thought that the mission would have “beneficial psychological results,” namely scaring the crap out of the Russians by demonstrating the range and accuracy of American missiles. Pickering insists that it was never more than “coffee table talk,” yet some very intelligent people spent valuable time exploring the possibility.

Unbeknownst to those who had originally proposed the idea, a secret government study was conducted at the Armour Research Foundation in Illinois. The physicist Leonard Reiffel was asked to look into feasibility. From May 1958 to January 1959, Reiffel’s team (which included the young Carl Sagan) studied the likely effect of a Hiroshima-sized bomb on the Moon’s surface, and the visual display of such an explosion, if seen from the Earth. “As these things go, this was small,” Reiffel later confessed. “It was less than a year and never got to the point of operational planning. We showed what some of the effects might be. But the real argument we made, and others made behind closed doors, was that there was no point in ruining the pristine environment of the Moon. There were other ways to impress the public that we were not about to be overwhelmed by the Russians.”

From Gerard J. Degroot’s excellent Dark Side of the Moon, New York University Press, ISBN 9780814719954

Now read The winter's tale and For unto us a child is born.
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Requiem for grandson of Hitler’s pianist

My recent article on Ernst Hanfstaengl, court composer and pianist to Hitler, and Harvard alumni, attracted a lot of readers. But the final paragraph left a mystery unsolved:

Peter Conradi's excellent life of Hanfstaengl (right) ends with his death. But there is a fascinating coda to this extraordinary story, where fact is often far stranger than fiction. On the penultimate page of Conradi's book the author writes: '(Hanfstaengl) took great pride in his grandchildren - especially Eynon, the eldest, who had inherited his grandfather's musical talent, taking an impressive twenty-fourth place in the prestigous Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in June 1974.' The pianist career of the junior Hanfstaengl seem to have been obscured by the mists of time, and my researches found no further information on this. But tantalisingly my search found a German German film actor and writer called Eynon Hanfstaengl. One of his acting roles was Count Durkheim in the 1972 movie Ludwig - Requiem Fur einen jungfraulichen Konig. The film is a cinematic requiem for Wagner's patron Ludwig ll of Bavaria, and the music credits include excerpts from Furtwängler's Tristan, and Karajan's Siegfried and Gotterdammerung. Is this Ernst Hanfstaengl's grandson?

But now the mystery is solved, thanks to this email from On An Overgrown Path reader Marie-Françoise Bourgoin:

Bonjour, thanks for your interesting article on Peter Conradi's book. I had the opportunity to practise music with Eynon Hanfstaengl in the 70s, so I am able to give you some information. Yes, Eynon was Putzi's grandson and Egon's son. Although a very fine cellist (not a pianist), he turned to cinema and studied film making in Munich after making Werner Schroeter's acquaintance in the 80s. He played a small part in Der Tod der Maria Malibran, appeared in Syberberg's Ludwig, ein Requiem für einen jugfräulichen König, and wrote scenarios for TV. He committed suicide in 1987. Interestingly, Putzi also considered taking his life in the late 30s.
Regards Marie-Françoise Bourgoin, Révisor, Translation & Interpretation Section, Secretary of the Pacific Community (SPC). B.P. D5 - 98848 Nouméa Cedex (Nouvelle-Calédonie).

Now read how another Overgrown Path reader helped uncover the past of Karajan’s court photographer.
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Joyce Hatto - the other story

Last week a reader contacted me with a story to tell about Joyce Hatto. I said I would publish the story without comment or editing. Here it is:

It is necessary to cast a slightly different light on the facts and myths, some of which even cast doubts on Hatto’s very existence (The Times). Joyce Hatto was a brilliant pianist, a great teacher, a very highly informed and well-read person, but above all an inspiring human being. I first encountered her purely by chance when, as an immigrant fresh off the boat from India, desiring to make a career as a pianist, badly trained, impoverished, alone and penniless, she took me on as a pupil in 1965.

As her pupil, I lived from one encounter with her to the next. Each encounter was, for me, a fresh experience – reflecting her constantly repeated admonition, “You may have played this a million times, but for the audience, it has to be as though it is the first listening.” Her ability to impart her knowledge – both of technique and of interpretation – were beyond question. And she knew how to draw out of each pupil what she saw as his or her latent qualities. The series of Pupils’ Concerts that she set up in the Purcell Room attest to this: the range of performances, from Claire Walton’s ephemeral performances of Impressionist composers, to Jacqueline Fairhead’s brooding Schumann and Gail Buckingham’s dramatic flair (Lizst), only served to reflect the chameleon-like qualities that later detractors now ascribe to her. This can be verified by listening to Gail Buckingham’s Lizst “Early Works and Operatic Transcriptions” recorded under Joyce’s encouragement for RCF (005).

Joyce achieved this by rarely speaking of herself, but by always looking closely into the hearts of her pupils. When playing the first two notes of the Lizst Twelfth Rhapsody at one lesson, she stopped me, looking into my eyes and asking, “Tell me, is God dead?” Shocked, I replied, “As a matter of fact, he is.” This opened up a long discussion on literature, of which she clearly knew much.

Joyce was a devoted teacher who cared deeply about every pupil. The only time I saw her looking at all distressed when was a pupil had disappointed her. When she learned of my own intention to go into teaching, she hammered one sentence in: “You have no right to teach, unless you believe deeply in the ability of every pupil.” This is something that has echoed through my mind throughout my own long (and generally considered successful) career as a teacher both in London and in Israel.

As I read of the family history, one of the things that strikes me sharply is that despite the distress she must have encountered in the late 60’s over Barrington-Coupe’s difficulties, she never displayed a sign of it. Just as, at the audition with her, she had said, “Do not come and spill the beans over my carpet,” (my playing was “emotional” but totally lacking in discipline), she never gave the slightest clue as to what was going on in her personal life. Rather, she always looked her best, smiled warmly and welcomed one with a befitting elegance and grace.

She did make occasional references to the music world – whether referring to the cut-throat atmosphere that exists between competing artists, the cruelty of certain critics, the “philistine” attitude to Art in some establishments, the difficulties of recording when building works might be taking place nearby or when an aeroplane flew over during a session. But such critical comments were few and far between. On the contrary, when I had told her of how worthwhile it had been to hike all the way to Edinburgh in order to hear Annie Fischer play at the Festival, she received the comment as though it was a compliment to her own playing.

Although I had tried, in vain, to get in touch with some of my fellow-pupils from the late 60’s in order to see what had come of them musically, although I have not been able to communicate with them since the Hattogate Affair made the headlines, I am sure that my fellow pupils will relate to her in the same vein. If there is only one thing that makes me glad about her demise, it is that she has not been exposed to some of the statements now being made about her.

In fact, if there is anything to be learned from the affair, it is that the commercialization of music-making has taken on such proportions that there are innumerable potential Ashkenazis who live a life of oblivion because of marketing and purchasing practices that now dominate music making. If Joyce Hatto suffered in her lifetime, she never showed it, but would have suffered from this.

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Now I’m a believer ……

Fellow blogger Jessica Duchen has an interesting piece about Barry Wordsworth’s decision to pull out of conducting the premiere of a new work by Andrew Gant because Wordsworth (left) ‘did not believe’ in the piece. This prompts Jessica to asks: ‘Can you imagine the works that would never have been performed if their conductors had decided not to believe in them?’

Yes, quite. But it is also worth taking a minute to consider exactly what caused Barry Wordsworth’s disbelief. Was it the alleged lack of inspiration, or was it something else? The title of the work itself, A British Symphony, may stretch belief for some. But let’s give it the benefit of the doubt, the symphony could be a celebration of our wonderfully multi-cultural country.

Well, it could be. But it was commissioned by Rodney Atkinson who was due to attend the cancelled premiere with a group of friends. Now neither the Times article which broke the story nor Jessica give anything more than a passing mention to Rodney Atkinson, who is brother of actor Rowan. But there is an interesting story about the political beliefs, and friends, of the work's patron. He founded The Campaign for United Kingdom Conservatism in 1994, wrote Fascist Europe Rising in 2002, and co-authored with Norris McWhirter the book Treason at Maarstricht. McWhirter, who died in 2004, himself formed “The Freedom Association” in the 1970’s, which went on to mount legal challenges against the trade union movement (notably in the bitter Grunwick dispute) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the UK, and the EEC in Brussels, and is still active.

But I am sure that is just interesting background, and has nothing to do with what Barry Wordsworth describes as his "concerns from the start". As Jessica says: "Can you imagine the works that would never have been performed if their conductors had decided not to believe in them?". So let’s end by celebrating all those musical masterpieces where the conductor sang “Now I'm a believer. Not a trace of doubt in my mind” before launching in to the premiere. Here is my list for starters, additions welcome:

* The Decembrists by Yuri Shaporin premiered in 1952 by the Bolshoi Opera. A reworking of Meyerbeer’s Les Hugenots with a revised plot to meet the ideological requirements of the Communist Central Committee’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop). To make the story more believable history was rewritten, and the officers who, in December 1825, demonstrated and were massacred on Senate Square, became working class radicals.

* Junge Marschiert (Youth Marches), which was played to the true believers as the combined forces of the dreaded SA and SS paraded down Wilhelmstraße in Berlin on January 30th, 1933 to celebrate Hitler's appointment as Chancellor. The march was composed by the subject of my recent article, Harvard alumni Ernst Hanfstaengl.

* The Great Friendship by Vano Muradi, which had as its hero Stalin’s best friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Unfortunately the Communist Central Committee did not believe the plot, and it turned out that Ordzhonikidze had been eliminated by Stalin himself. In a piece of political Monkee business the opera was branded as Formalist in a 1948 decree, together with the works of several rather more talented composers. This infamous decree had profound impacts on the careers of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Myaskovsky and Shebalin.

Bravo Barry Wordsworth! - and now read about another musician who was not afraid to stand up for his beliefs
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... is back from Istanbul

Calligraphy by Yazi Sanatcisi

Now playing - Su by Mercan Dede. Contemporary culture in Istanbul is really jumping ahead of becoming European City of Culture in 2010. We ate at restaurants like Amedros in Sultanahmet that would not be out of place in London or New York. The new Istanbul Museum of Modern Art in a converted military warehouse on the waterfront with its exhibition of work from the Magnum Photos agency is sensational. And there is a music scene to match. If you don't know Mercan Dede's contemporary take on Sufi music here is an introduction in his own words, or even better listen to his music on his website, and on YouTube:

Mercan Dede (photo below) believes that when you put digital, electronic sounds together with hand-made, human ones, you can create universal language, capable of uniting old and young, ancient and modern, East and West. It’s a bold claim, but the Turkish-born and Montreal-based musician/producer/DJ has the career and the music to back it up. When he takes the stage with his group Secret Tribe, he hovers at the side behind his turntables and electronics, occasionally picking up a traditional wooden flute, or ney to float in sweet, breathy melodies, while masters of the kanun (zither), clarinet, darbuka (hand drum) and whatever other instruments he’s decided to include that night, ornament his grooves and spin magical, trance melodies to match the whirling of the group’s spectacular dervish dancer, Mira Burke (follow this link for video).

This contrast between electronica and classical or folkloric arts cuts to the core of the Sufi philosophy that guides this one-of-a-kind artist. “Those things are not really separate,” says Dede. “The essence of Sufism is counterpoint. Everything exists with its opposite. On one side, I am doing electronic music. The other side of that is this really acoustic, traditional music.” Dede doesn’t just bring in any traditional sounds and sights as adornment to his techno beats. He is ever on the lookout for new collaborators, and they might come from any tradition, any country, any generation. For Secret Tribe’s U.S. debut in January, 2004, he flew in three, teenage prodigies of Turkish classical music from Istanbul and two of the pieces they played were improvised during the concert.

Now read Philip Glass predicting World Music is the new classical.
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Books and music reflect the crisis of Islam

A report on Arab Human Development in 2002, prepared by a committee of Arab intellectuals and published under the auspices of the United Nations, reveals some striking contrasts. “The Arab world translates about 350 books annually, one-fifth of the number that Greece translates. The cumulative total of translated books since the Caliph Mamoun’s time (the ninth century) is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in one year” …

Islam is one of the world’s great religions. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught men of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world. But Islam, like other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune that we have to confront part of the Muslim world while it is going through such a period, and when most – though by no means all – of that hatred is directed against us.

Two reflections from The Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis,(Phoenix ISBN 0753817527). This concise book is an expansion of a New Yorker article first published in November 2001. Bernard Lewis is the Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University. His books have been translated into more than twenty langauages, including Arabic, Persian and Turkish.

Now playing – The Fall of Constantinople sung by a veritable fixture On An Overgrown Path, Cappella Romana directed by Alexander Lingas. The ancient capital of Byzantium was caught between Latin West and Islamic East, and this CD captures the peak of that civilization with Byzantine chant and polyphony from the majestic ceremonies in the great Christian cathedral of Hagia Sophia. But the music also reveals the paradox of the Near East as it triumphantly asserts the dominance of the west, while fervently pleading for the healing of religious divisions.

It was this very paradox that was the downfall of Byzantium, and on 29th May 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, and that jewel of Eastern Christianity, Hagia Sophia, became a Muslim mosque. The fall of Constantinople is recognised on this inspirational CD with laments by Manuel Chrysaphes and Guillaume Dufay. Chrysaphes was the Lambarios at Hagia Sophia at the time of the fall, and he expressed his desolation by setting the verses from Psalm 78 using kalophonic chant, which are sung on the CD by Cappella Romana. My header picture, from the excellent Byzantine.net, shows Hagia Sophia as it might appear today, had it not become a mosque, and later a tourist attraction. In this visual reconstruction the minarets have been removed and the life-giving cross restored to the dome.

Professor Lewis’ book and Cappella Romana’s CD shed much needed light on the crisis of Islam. But before anyone gets too self-righteous about those thought-provoking statistics on book availability in the Arab world, they should dwell on the fact that this important CD from Cappella Romana’s is not available in Europe, I had to import my copy from the US.

Tonight the Overgrown Path literally leads to Constantinople and we fly out to Istanbul. Tomorrow I will be standing under the great dome of Hagia Sophia. There will be a few day's break in posts while we revel in the legacy of Byzantium, so please visit some of the other excellent music blogs in my sidebar until I return.

Now, read about the composer who set the psalms in Ottoman Turkish, and hear the result
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News from the European music morgues

Greg Sandow appeared on BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters at the weekend to remind us that classical music has been certified dead. Judging by today’s Media Guardian there are a lot of exciting jobs being created in the European music morgues:

Opéra National du Rhin (Strasbourg) – General Director, £na
BBC – Tours Administrator BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, £na
Scottish Opera – Touring Manager, £na
London Symphony Orchestra
- Grants and Friends Assistant, £18k
- Development Assistant, £18k
- Digital Projects Manager, LSO Discovery, £27k
Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool – Performance Manager, £24k
Southbank Centre London (Festival Hall)
- General Manager, Learning and Participation, £43k
- Events Producers, £30K
- Assistant Events Producers, £25k

But we always welcome guidance from friends across the pond.
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This new CD demands blind listening

Composer Vanessa Lann's email proposing we listen to music 'without pre-judging its merits because the composer happened to be male or female, young or old, living or deceased, famous or unknown, European or non-European, etc' arrived the day after I bought the Maggini Quartet's (left) new CD of Sir Malcolm Arnold's two string quartets.

This excellent new Naxos CD just demands blind listening. Play it to a knowledgable friend and I wager they will tell you it is Bartok or Hindemith, but certainly not Arnold. The First Quartet dates from 1949, and the Second from 1975. The masterpiece is the Second, which was written during an Indian Summer of British string writing, a period which also produced Elizabeth Maconchy's quartets which I will return to in a future article. The Maggini are persuasive advocates of the Arnold quartets, and the sound recorded in Potton Hall here in East Anglia by producer Andrew Walton and engineer Eleanor Thomason is demonstration quality.

Arnold's Second Qartet was well received at its Dublin premiere, and was then performed at the 1976 Aldeburgh Festival. But since than both the composer, and the string quartet as a genre, have slipped out of fashion. If you need any proof of how stupid, and damaging, musical fashions are, go out and buy this new Naxos CD.

Now read about Arnold's neglected 20th century masterpiece
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Why aren't we marching in the streets?

It took me more than three decades to see Joan Baez live, but the wait for tonight's concert in Cambridge was well worth it - what an artist! Here are some thoughts prompted by the concert we've just returned from:

Three decades later, it’s terribly clear that my generation hasn’t changed the world very much. The question is, how much has the world changed us? As young “radicals,” we considered ourselves the conscience of the nation. To us, the Vietnam War was a moral offense, not a question of politics; and we reacted to it in primarily moral, rather than political, terms. Somehow, by the strength of our youth, the nation would be wrenched from the grip of death, cleansed, made new. A “movement” without politics or program, we were defined largely by our shared lives on the campus – millions of us getting stoned and listening to the Beatles – and by our opposition to the war. Now that war is long over, and we inhabit private worlds.

Still when I speak with my old “radical” friends – none of whom are leading noticeably radical lives – I find that our basic values haven’t changed that much. We’re dismayed by the country’s swing to the right and appalled by slashes in social programs. Why then aren’t we heard from? Why aren’t we marching in the streets?

Paradoxically, we felt a more excruciating responsibility for the acts of our nation as 18-year-olds who couldn’t even vote than we do now. We took things more personally. We felt that we were bombing Vietnam, and we were allowing the less well-connected of our generation to die there. Now, we say, it’s those Republicans who have declared all-out war on the poor and powerless.

We no longer believe that we can remake the world. Instead we adapt to it and act cautiously, because we have much more to lose. We have our careers. In the booming economy of the ‘60s, the affluent youth’s greatest concern about a career was how to avoid one. A career was part of the System, within which success and exploitation, work and war, were inextricably linked. ( “Work! Study! Get ahead! Kill!” we used to chant at demonstrations.) Also, embarking on a career meant accepting the constraints of adulthood. I thought if I’d settle down, I could stay young forever. I was wrong. You get old whether you’re wearing a necktie or not.

When I was a “kid” – a word we applied to ourselves well into our twenties – I avowed a profound aversion to wealth. All I wanted, I used to say, was to raise a family in a decent home and be able to spend a few weeks at the beach. That’s all I want now, but I find that these modest ends require massive means. It’s hard to renounce materialism when materialism is renouncing you.

Our middle-class instinct (subliminal, unshakable) to “make something of yourself” and contribute to society, has led almost all of us down the Establishment road – what we used to call selling out. We like to think that our careers give us more effective ways to act on our values than we had as students. We try to do good and do well at the same time.

Meanwhile, people sleep on the streets. We know we really ought to find the time and courage to do something about it. (Things to do today: call insurance broker, add to Individual Retirement Account, smash the state.)

At least we have a past to live up to. We helped end one war, and the continuing effect of our action restrains our country from getting into new ones. It’s good that there was a time when we stood up for what we believed in – which, as you get along and go along, is not something you do every day.

From James S. Kunen’s pre-Iraq 1995 introduction to his 1968 book The Strawberry Statement, Notes of a College Revolutionary. After writing the Strawberry Statement Kunen registered as a conscientous objector and worked as a counsellor at a group home for young offenders in Lancaster, Mass. He graduated from New York University Law School, and became a public defender in the criminal courts of Washington, DC, an experience retold in his book "How Can You Defend Those People". He then left the practice of law and returned to journalism. Kunen's 1994 book "Reckless Disregard" was an exposé of the Ford Motor Company's role in a Kentucky school bus fire which killed 24 children and three adults.

Now playing - Joan Baez's 2006 release Bowery Songs. This album is a product of the 2004 Presidential election. In July and August, conventioneering and electioneering fever grew more heated in the US, as a pall of desperation seemed to grip the country. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 stirred the pot, and Baez joined Rage Against The Machine's Tom Morello for the West Coast leg of Moore's 'Slacker Uprising Tour.' The tour's ad hoc appearance at Cal S U. San Marcos outside San Diego was banned by the administration. The result was that the students rented the nearby Del Mar Fairgrounds and attracted ten times as many to the event, upward of 10,000 people. The album, which was recorded live at the Bowery Ballroom on New York City's Lower East Side, is classic Joan Baez. Stand-out track for me is Steve Earle's 'Christmas in Washington' ('So come back Woody Guthrie/ Come back to us now ...'), which Baez sang in her concert in Cambridge tonight.

I can only agree with Ezra Pound when he wrote - 'One of the pleasures of middle age is to find out that one was right, and that one was much righter than one knew at say 17 or 23'.

And I was 23 in 1972, so I will end by taking you back to when The Year is '72

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The adventures of Mr Belohlavek

This week saw a rare London appearance by the peripatetic new chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Jiří Bělohlávek (above) flew into town to conduct Janacek's obscure opera The Adventures of Mr Broucek with an imported Czech cast. Many of us wondered what prompted the visit? Now all is revealed. The concert performance was recorded for commercial release by Deutsche Grammophon. I wonder if anyone negotiated a royalty for the BBC license payers?

Forthcoming dates for maestro Bělohlávek include Dvorak with the BBC Symphony later in March, Jenufa with the Washington National Symphony and Opera in Washington in April, Brahms with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in May, and Tristan at Glyndebourne in August while the BBC Proms are in London. But while the BBC Symphony Orchestra awaits rejuvenation after the dismal reign of Leonard Slatkin, their new chief conductor is promoting an 'ecologically sound' hotel in the Czech Republic. Do you really want to read more about jet-set maestros?
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Music that knows who the real enemy is

'Vote for Enoch Powell,' came the counsel from a stage in the West Midlands. 'Stop Britain from becoming a black colony ... Get the foreigners out ... I used to be into dope, now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man.' Not some ranting nutcase from the National Front, but an inebriated Eric Clapton (now CBE), formerly of Cream and latterly of Hello! magazine. Yes, Clapton - who played the blues, but whose outburst in August 1976 came hot on the heels of another from David Bowie, proclaiming Adolf Hitler to be 'the first rock star' and urging that what Britain needed was a 'right-wing dictatorship'.

People may feel grateful to Bowie and Clapton for their own reasons, but perhaps the most gratifying contribution this duo made to music was to detonate the revulsion at their sentiments and clear the stage for Rock Against Racism, the first edition of whose fanzine, Temporary Hoarding, appeared on May Day 30 years ago. 'We want rebel music,' it proclaimed. 'Crisis Music. Now Music. Music that knows who the real enemy is. Rock Against Racism.'

Essential reading from today's Observer. Which does prompt the question, is classical music really a multicultural community?

Header photo is the Clash performing at the 1978 Rock Against Racism event, when 100,000 people marched the six miles from Trafalgar Square through London's East End - the heart of National Front territory - to a Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park, Hackney. Photo credit the Combative Clash Page. 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

Mothers of Invention

It's amazing where An Overgrown Path leads. My Theremin and Variations article is linked on a Frank Zappa blog, which also yields these gems:
* A composer is a person who goes around forcing their will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
* A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it's not open.
* Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
Which can only lead to Dead '72
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My friends pictured within

Articles locating MP3 downloads, including historic performances by Dinu Lipatti, Pablo Casals and Arturo Toscanini, by Leopold Stokowski, and of Russian opera, are among the most popular On An Overgrown Path. Regular readers will know that most of these articles originate from web research by retired broadcaster Walt Santner. News has come that Walt has had a few medical problems that have required surgery, but the good news is that he is now recovering back at home in Maplewood, New Jersey. I know everyone who has enjoyed Walt's cyber detective work here will join me in sending our very best wishes for a speedy recovery.

I guess Walt will be spending even more time listening to music via the internet, so here is a timely heads-up from another 'friend pictured within'. Music from Other Minds is a programme of new and unusual music by innovative composers and performers around the world. Produced for KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco by Other Minds the presenter is fellow blogger (and Sun Microsystems guru) Richard Friedman who has been adding to my recent my theremin post. You can listen online to Music from Other Minds on Friday nights at 11pm (Pacific Time), and the latest programme is available via streaming - just follow this link. Other recommendations of innovative music webcasts are very welcome via the Comments icon below.

My header photo shows Sir Edward Elgar about to enjoy the 1930s equivalent of an MP3 download. 'My friends pictured within' was the description Elgar used for the musical portraits in his Enigma Variations, and to finish, here is an interesting, and exclusive story about the composer's Violin Concerto.
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New technology meets new music

Prompted by my recent Theremin and variations article a regular 'pathfinder' in Europe has sent me a link to a wonderful article on Edgard Varèse and Léon Theremin. Varèse is seen here together getting to grips with the new technology. The article is in French, but it is a fascinating document well worth translating with Babel Fish.

Now read about contemporary composers and the theremin.
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Don't let's prejudge music

Some interesting reactions to my story The hoax that fooled the music critics for 30 years, including this email:

As co-founder of the Newt Hinton Ensemble in the mid-90's (unconventional performances of exciting music - with players from The Netherlands, France, Germany and the UK), one of our practices was to hand out programme books/notes AFTER our concerts. That way the listeners would open their minds to the "experience" of a piece of music, without prejudging its merits because the composer happened to be male or female, young or old, living or deceased, famous or unknown, European or non-European, etc. It was amazing how the works on the programmes were appreciated for their intrinsic musical power, rather than for the biographical or historical contexts into which one otherwise might have placed them - Vanessa Lann (photo above)

Now open the New music lunchbox
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Hoax that fooled music critics for 30 years

The front-page headline in the New York Times on 8 February 1935 rang down the curtain on one of the longest-running musical hoaxes in history. Years before most of his fellow violinists had rediscovered the pre-Classical repertoire, Fritz Kreisler (right) had been in the habit of featuring a group of short pieces by seventeenth and eighteenth-century composers in his recitals. Critics and even a few scholars duly applauded his modest contribution to the early music revival. Little did they suspect that more than a dozen of the pieces by sundry 'old masters' that Kreisler had popularized over the years had been penned by the great violinist himself.

Why did Kreisler dissemble? He explained, unapologetically, that he had needed pieces to fill out his recitals as a young man and adopted various pseudonyms because he considered it 'impudent and tactless to repeat my name endlessly on the programmes'. Certainly he made only a half-hearted attempt to mask his fraudulent identities and readily pleaded when Olin Downes of the Times accidentally stumbled onto the secret. (Several of Kreisler's friends had apparantely been in on it for years.) But Kreisler was not above having a bit of fun at the expense of the experts, and he obviously relished thumbing his nose at the 'snobs ... who judge merely by name and who draw upon musicians' lexicons for their enthusiasm for us'.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of the Kreisler affair was that it was deemed newsworthy at all. When Fétis practiced what Weckerlin indulgently called his 'innocent deceptions' almost a century earlier, no great hue and cry was raised in the musical world, let alone the popular press. Nor was Berlioz censured for facetiously passing off the Shepherds Chorus in L'Enfance du Christ as the work of a fictitious seventeenth-century composer. (One had to be 'as ignorant as a fish', Berloz said, to believe the date he assigned to the piece.) Kreisler, like Berlioz, was both amused and aghast to find his bogus compositions accepted at face value by people who should have known better, especially in his frank admission that he 'made no endeavour to stick closely to the style of the period to which they were alleged to date'. While most critics took Kreisler's prank in good part, Ernest Newman indignantly attacked the violinist's behaviour as unethical and likely to discredit bona fide arrangeemnts of old music. The virulence of Newman's accusations caught Kreisler by surprise. On the contrary, he retorted, he had done the musical world a service, for 'who ever had heard a work by Pugnani, Cartier, Francoeur, Porpora, Louis Couperin, Padre Martini or Stamitz before I began to compose in their names? They lived exclusively as paragraphs in musical reference books, and their work, when existing and authenticated, lay mouldering in monasteries and old libraries'.

From Harry Haskell's excellent 1988 book The Early Music Revival, A History, Dover Publications ISBN 0486291626.
Now read more about music history rewritten
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Theremin and variations on the moon

The total lunar eclipse on March 3 2007 will be visible over the eastern Americas, Europe, Africa, and western Asia. So here, to celebrate, is An Overgrown Path exclusive on a lunar story that has fascinating musical connections.

Notoriously taciturn first man on the moon Neil Armstrong reveals his choice of fly-time music in a recently published book. And his musical tastes open up undreamt of connections to Russian government research projects, Soviet agents and Communist propaganda films. Moon Dust by Andrew Smith is a new study of how the lives of the Apollo astronauts were changed by their lunar experience. Most of the nine surviving astronauts agreed to be interviewed for the book, but true to form the first man on the moon did not. But in an email exchange Armstrong identified the cassette of ' strange electronic-sounding music' that fellow Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins had reported him taking to Luna.

The cassette in question was transcribed from Neil Armstrong's own LP of Music Out of the Moon featuring Dr Samuel Hoffman. Author Andrew Smith decribes the theremin played by Hoffman on this album, and gives a short history of this unique instrument which mainly relates its use in rock music. But he completely misses out on a fascinating Russian connection. The story is too good to miss, so here it is.

The theremin was an early electronic instrument invented by a young Russian physicist called Léon Theremin, and came about as a side-product of Russian government-sponsored research into proximity sensors shortly before the outbreak of the Russian Civil War in 1919. The theremin (left) is the original 'hands free' instrument and requires no physical contact from the player. The player moves his hands close to two antenna, the right hand controls the pitch and the left hand determines volume. A variety of effects can be produced ranging from glissandi to staccato, but the instrument needs to be played from memory as notation is impossible.

The invention was enthusiastically received in Russia, and was personally demonstrated to the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin who went on to take lessons. But America won the ideological struggle and Léon Theremin moved to the US where he patented his invention, and it was put into production by RCA with limited success. But fact then gets stranger than fiction. Theremin was alledgedly kidnapped from his Mannhatan apartment by Soviet KGB agents who returned him to Russia where he was imprisoned for years, apparently for political reasons. After his release Theremin developed military and espionage devices for the KGB (logo to right), before going to work at the Moscow Conservatory of Music, where he built theremins and taught music for ten years. He did not return to the US until after the collapse of Communism.

Shostakovich's second film score Odna (1931) uses a theremin among the huge orchestral forces. The film was made shortly after the declaration of Stalin's first five-year plan, and it embraces the positive aspects of Communism including teaching, collectivism and modern technology. The theremin had other exponents in the classical field, most notably Clara Rockmore who was famous for her transcriptions for the instrument which included Bach and Bloch's Schelomo. Mrs Rockmore's recording of the Concerto for Theremin and Orchestra by the American composer Anis Fuleihan conducted by Leopold Stokowski has been reissued on CD, as has her The Art of the Theremin which was produced by Robert Moog in 1977.

The Ondes-Martenot, which was invented in 1928 and used so effectively by Olivier Messiaen, as well as Pierre Boulez, Edgar Varèse, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Bohuslav Martinů and André Jolivet (who wrote a concerto for it in 1947), is a cousin of the theremin that uses similar heteroyne oscillators controlled by a keyboard.

The theremin was popular in America for a time after the Second World War, but it was then eclipsed by the new generation of electronic instruments. The best known of these is the Moog synthesizer, whose inventor Robert Moog started his career selling theremin kits. Despite technology improvements the theremin continued to have its advocates. These included Brian Wilson (left) who had to accept a hybrid Electro-Thermin for the recording of the Beach Boy's 'Good Vibrations' in 1966 due to the non-availabiltiy of the real thing. Three years later the best selling album 'Led Zeppelin ll' featured a theremin solo on the opening track 'Whole Lotta Love'.

The other-wordly sound palette of the theremin makes it a natural for film scores. Probably the best known film appearance is in Bernard Herrmann's 1951 score for The Day the Earth Stood Still. The unusual scoring is for a small orchestra combining the acoustic and electric sounds of brass, reed organ, Hammond organs, pianos, percussionists, electrically amplified strings, and cello, and bass and two theremins which play in opposition to create disorienting swirls.

Dr Samuel Hoffman, who recorded the theremin album which started us down this fascinating Overgrown Path, was an American chiropidist turned musician. He met Léon Theremin while playing in a dance band in the 1930s and became an enthusiastic exponent of the electronic instrument. Among Dr Hoffman's claims to fame are playing the theremin part in Miklós Rózsa's score for Hitchcock's Spellbound. His Music Out of the Moon is a Capitol album dating from 1947, and was written by classically trained light music composer Harry Revel, with arrangements and conducting by easy listening king Les Baxter.

Apollo 15 Commander Dave Scott and his crew were permanently grounded by NASA for the $6000 trust funds for their children paid for by a German stamp dealer as a reward for carrying unauthorised first day covers to the moon. I wonder what the FBI would have done had they known about the Russian connections of Neil Armstrong's on-board music? Fortunately Music Out of the Moon has passed the test of time better than J Edgar Hoover, and it is still in the Basta catalogue. So here to end is a 30 second audio sample, which is probably quite enough ....

Now read about contemporary music for the theremin, and about the early music that travelled on the Voyager space craft.

Theremin web resources * Wikipedia theremin article * New book on the history of the theremin - Theremin Ether Music and Espionage from University of Ilinois Press (ISBN 0252025822), there are also more theremin audio files on this site * Dr Samuel Hoffman * Clara Rockmore * Moon Dust by Andrew Smith * DVD Theremin - An Electronic Odyssey * Moog's history of the theremin *

First published On An Overgrown Path on March 26th 2006. Audio file from Amazon.com. Image owners - if you do not want your picture used in this article please contact me and it will be removed. Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Click here for this week's classical music scandal

A previously unpublished letter by Richard Wagner to a firm of Milanese couturiers offers the intriguing possibility that the great composer was, in fact, a cross-dresser reports today's Guardian.

And I thought Bayreuth already had a Phantom of the Opera
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