The world's largest prison for journalists

Nice picture of the new head office for Chinese Central Television (CCTV) elsewhere. Read more about television and the media in China, not from me but from the BBC:

'With more than one billion viewers, television is a popular source for news and the sector is competitive, especially in urban areas. China is also becoming a major market for pay-TV; it is forecast to have 128 million subscribers by 2010. State-run Chinese Central TV, provincial and municipal stations offer a total of around 2,100 channels.

The availability of non-domestic TV is limited. Agreements are in place which allow selected channels - including stations run by AOL Time Warner, News Corp and the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV - to transmit via cable in Guangdong province. In exchange, Chinese Central TV's English-language network is made available to satellite TV viewers in the US and UK.

Beijing says it will only allow relays of foreign broadcasts which do not threaten "national security" or "political stability". Of late, it has been reining in the activities and investments of foreign media groups. The media regulator - the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television - has warned local stations that foreign-made TV programmes must be approved before broadcast.

The internet scene in China is thriving, though controlled. Beijing routinely blocks access to sites run by the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong, rights groups and some foreign news organisations. It has moved to curb postings by a small but growing number of bloggers.

An international group of academics concluded in 2005 that China has "the most extensive and effective legal and technological systems for internet censorship and surveillance in the world".

The media rights group Reporters Without Borders describes the country as the world's "largest prison for journalists".'

And yes, it even affects music blogs.
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It's good news week for contemporary music

To start the week two excellent reasons why this new release of Peter Maxwell Davies' chamber music is good news. First, it's great music passionately played by the chamber ensemble Gemini and vividly recorded in the slightly dry acoustics of Studio 1 at the Department of Sound & Recording at the University of Surrey. (The department is very highly rated and has offered a tonmeister course for many years). The main work on the CD is Ave Maris Stella from 1975 which lasts for almost 30 minutes. This is classic early Max, writing before he was seduced by the plush sounds of the symphony orchestra and string quartet. Strange isn't it how composers like Maxwell Davies and Ralph Vaughan Williams produce some of their best works on religous themes yet are non-believers? Worth the purchase price alone is Dove, Star Folded from 2001 which, unusually for Max, is based on a Greek Byzantine hymn; John Tavener had better look out.

The second reason why this CD is good news is that it comes from the Metier label which has been aquired by the enterprising small Divine Art Record Company (who have nothing at all to do with Falun Gong ). Metier have a back catalogue well worth exploring, Michael Finnisy Music for String Quartet, Roberto Gerhard String Quartets and Morton Feldman and Christopher Fox's Clarinet and String Quartet are just some of the riches while Divine Art has a future release of piano sonatas from Elliott Carter, Miklos Rosza, Charles Ives and Edward MacDowell.

And talking of Peter Maxwell Davies I'm playing his Missa Parvula on Future Radio on April 20 in a coupling with Edmund Rubbra's Symphony No. 6, which let's me give a heads-up to Dutton's excellent new recordings of Rubbra's chamber music. And it also means I can share some more good news. Future Radio's station manager told me today that the Overgrown Path programme page gets more hits than any other page on their website except for the schedule and webcam pages. That's more hits than the rock, hip-hop, electro and other programme pages. It must be all that Vaughan Williams I'm playing ... And more good news for the small guys/girls, leading independent record store Prelude Records in Norwich was packed on Saturday , the busiest I've ever seen. Is the tide turning away from the internet?

It's good news week, which is why music is good for you..
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New music ticks outside the box

'Box-ticking' gets short measure in an enterprising concert of new music from Germany and England at The Warehouse, London SE1 on April 10th with the Uroboros Ensemble conducted by Gwyn Pritchard. Here is the programme:

from Germany
Peter Helmut Lang - Dominoeffekt **
Karl-Heinz Wahren - A capricious and romantic meeting **
Johannes K. Hildebrandt - Bruchstück II *
Lothar Voigtländer - Salmo Salmonis *

from Britain
Ross Lorraine - end piece **
James Weeks - The Catford Harmony **
Gwyn Pritchard - Ensemble Music for Six
Joe Cutler - Three Quiet Pieces

** = World première * = UK première

It's an adventurous programme that's refreshingly free of the 'box-ticking' that sanitises so much programming today. And it's not just classical music that suffers from the 'little boxes synodrome'. Here is a thought-provoking extract from a Guardian article about art commissions.

'Today it was announced that Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster will be the ninth artist in the Unilever series of new installations for the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Once again you can see the commission ticking boxes.

Free from macho tendencies? Tick. French artist Gonzalez-Foerster makes melancholy films that passively observe city life. Her art is consciously slight and the character she adopts is that of the "flaneur", the artist as sophisticated urban observer, an idea invented by the 19th-century poet and critic Charles Baudelaire. In other words there is no chance of her filling the Turbine Hall with, say, a massive slab of steel. Her contribution will, like those previous classics the crack and the slides, reject grandiosity in favour of the witty and ephemeral. That's a relief - I was scared they might commission a colossal statue of George Bush. But then again Foerster is also ...

Free from north-American tendencies - another box ticked. Apart from Bruce Nauman who's a sort of honorary non-American, the Turbine Hall commissioners strikingly avoid inviting some rather obvious US candidates. It is precisely in the US that artists tend to work naturally, and brilliantly on this scale - but we have to wait a bit longer, it seems, to see a torqued steel creation by Richard Serra in Tate Modern, or a Jeff Koons inflated toy, or a Claes Oldenburg penknife. "Americanness" seems to be one of the vices the series strains to avoid, perhaps in the curators' minds being a synonym for masculine arrogance.

Free from bad taste - tick. The appeal of the slight, Baudelairean gesture, and the minimal aesthetic, is that it is remarkably tasteful. The kind of art that gets selected for Tate Modern is guaranteed not to make you feel daft or silly for liking it - for all its modernity this art has a decorous style. In other words, it will not give critics anything to mock or audiences anything to be embarrassed by.

In the 1960s the French artist Nikki de St Phalle created a giant recumbent woman for an art museum, with a door between her legs. You can guarantee you will never see that in the Turbine Hall. Nor will you see the bad taste genius of Damien Hirst on display here - that would be ... so vulgar.'

Now read about how Benjamin Britten helped a composer closely associated with little boxes.
Header photo image is Jeff Koons' Lips, photo by David Heald from the Guggenheim Museum. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Favourite stoned listening

'Favourite stoned listening included electronic music by Luciano Berio; the IBM computer singing 'Daisy, Daisy'; John Cage's Indeterminacy - some stories were longer than others, but he read each one in two minutes, some speeded up, others very slowly; a two-volume Folkways recording of a Japanese Zen ceremony - on one track a bell rang once a minute, and it was always great when it finally rang; and lots of the latest squeals and shrieks from the ghetto: Albert Ayler's Bells and Spirits Awake; Ran Blake; Pharoah Sanders; Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra (photo above); Eric Dolphy's honking bird imitations; Free Jazz by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet: two reeds, two bassists, two drummers, two trumpets, thirty-eight minutes of spontaneous collective improvisation with no preconceptions' - Barry Miles recalls stoned listening with Paul McCartney in the out-of-print but not out-of-mind In the Sixties.

Now playing - The Brad Mehldau Trio's take on Nick Drake's River Man from Art of the Trio, Volume 5. Nick was no stranger to stoned listening, more here.
The book actually misspells Pharoah Sanders by adding a 'u' to his surname and also says Ron not Ran Blake, I've corrected the errors in the quote. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Carla Bruni's musical connections

French first lady Carla Bruni has some interesting classical music connections. Her mother Marisa Borini is an actress and classical pianist who is reported to have had an affair with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. Depending on your sources Bruni's biological father is Maurizio Remmert, an Italian businessman who now lives in Brazil Marisa or Marisa Borini's husband, the contemporary composer Alberto Bruni Tedeschi seen in my header photo. Alberto Bruni Tedeschi's distinctions included writing four operas and having one of them filmed with a cast including Charles Aznavour, his own daughter Valeria Bruni and Isabel von Karajan, the daughter of the conductor.

President Sarkozy seems to appreciate ladies with musical connections. His divorced second wife, Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz, is the great grand-daughter of Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz. Which, interestingly, means the families of both the President's second and third wives are of Sephardic descent.
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Inside the musical avant-garde

Britain is having a love affair with all things French. As well as hosting the current state visit by President Sarkozy and his new wife we have the first IRCAM academy in the UK in April. Is it a sign of these devolved times that the event is not in London, but is being hosted by the BBCSSO and led by Jonathan Harvey in Glasgow on April 7-12? Or is it because, as I've said here before, the BBCSO is on a roll? Read more in today's Guardian, including the inside track by Jonathan Harvey on new IRCAM technologies.

One of the few books to explore IRCAM is the snappily-titled Rationalizing Culture, IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization and the Musical Avant-Garde. Anthropologist and Cambridge don Georgina Born spent a year in IRCAM in Paris producing her ethnographic analysis and if both the title and the book itself reads like a Ph. D. thesis it is not surprising as that is how the book originated. Which means that, unlike Joan Peyser, Georgina Born leaves Boulez's private life off-limits; although it is not all the stuff of dissertations and Michael Jackson receives no less than five mentions.

The 1995 publication date means that the avant-garde is today rather more avant. But, nevertheless, Rationalizing Culture is a brave attempt to get inside the culture of an important and little-understood creative hot-house. Quite appropriately the book is published by the University of California Press using the latest print on demand technology.

More on Jonathan Harvey here.
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What price the music of an unsung master?

1968 was a year of upheaval. It was the year of sex and drugs and rock and roll and saw the assasination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the accidental death of Trappist monk and social activist Thomas Merton, the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the rise of the anti-war movement, the student rebellion that paralysed France, and the growth of the civil rights and women's movements. Stockhausen composed Stimmung, Hair opened on Broadway, the Beatles released their White Album and a Lindsay Anderson film put an African version of the Latin Mass at the top of the UK charts. Finally, as a reminder that history rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away, in October 1968 Tommie Smith and John Carlos made their controversial protest in support of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) on the podium at the Mexico Olympics.

While society was in upheaval elsewhere Dom Charles was completing the remarkable work of art seen above in the Abbey church of the Benedictine community at Buckfast in a peaceful Devon valley. The huge east window (judge the size by the altar visible in lower foreground of my photo) is in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel at Buckfast Abbey. It uses the technique known as dalles-de-verre in which ‘tiles’ of coloured glass are chipped to shaped and laid mosaic-fashion in a matrix of resin. The window was made by the monks in the Abbey's workshop, and since its completion in 1968 windows have been made by the Brothers for more than 150 other churches using the same technique. One of the most recent commissions has been a window commemorating the New York firefighters who died in 9/11.

We had travelled to Buckfast to hear a concert of choral works by the unsung master Philippe de Monte. The music of this 16th century Flemish composer is very rarely performed today (although it is recorded), which is surprising as he wrote 1,073 secular and 144 spiritual madrigals, 45 chansons, 319 motets and 38 mass settings - eat your heart out Leif Segerstam! The intelligently planned and beautifully delivered concert was given in the Abbey church (Lady Chapel seen in my photo below) by the vocal ensemble Voces directed by Martyn Warren. There may still be many voices to a part in choirs in Devon and the men may still wear suits, ties and white shirts, but in other ways they are right up there with Radiohead. Here is an extract from the free programme book which included texts:

Concerts are normally free, allowing you to make your own decision about the contribution you make to the retiring collection. After expenses this will be split equally between the Abbey and the Voce music fund. Neither singers nor conductor take a fee. As a rough guide, a ticket for a concert like this would normally cost you at least £8, and we hope you will give generously with your money as the performers have given of their time in preparing and performing.


Masses of early music on iPods here.
My wife and I stayed in one of the Buckfast Communities splendid retreat houses on the edge of the monastic domain - recommended. Photos (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Know the score?

Which work, composed in the first decade of the twentieth-century and still in the repertoire today, has a score that calls for chorus, soloists, organ and a large orchestra including small and large gongs, antique cymbals, glockenspiel, tambourine, triangle and an ancient Jewish instrument with religous connections?
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Beatle to Berio to Boulez to birthday boy

Pierre Boulez was born on March 26, 1925. Quite obviously my photo is not of Boulez, but this path leads to him. The photo was taken at the Italian Institute in London in 1965, Paul McCartney is talking to Luciano Berio and between them is Barry Miles who was a key figure in the 60s counterculture. The photo comes from Miles' memoir In the Sixties which places Berio, Cage and others alongside better known icons of the decade and is one of the best books on the period. Like so many good books today it is out of print, but is still available if you search.

One of my favourite Berio CDs is the 1984 Erato recording of his Sinfonia with the New Swingle Singers and Orchestre National de France conducted by birthday boy Pierre Boulez. The Sinfonia is the composer's best-known work and blends Samuel Beckett, Martin Luther King, Claude Levi-Strauss and, of course, Mahler in Berio's unique style.

Barry Miles went to Cirencester Grammar School where his music teacher was Peter Maxwell Davies. In the Sixties describes how Max invited older boys back to the converted apple loft where he lived to drink claret from eighteenth-century goblets, and how, when required to play the piano for the hymns at morning assembly, Max placed a lighted candelabrum on top in the style of Liberace. Miles' other books include an excellent biography of another counterculture figure Allen Ginsberg, read more here.
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Peter Paul Fuchs - musician in exile

When composer and conductor Peter Paul Fuchs died on March 26, 2007, I marked his passing with two tributes written with John McLaughlin Williams. At the end of the second article I wrote the following - We now have information on Fuchs’ music, but don’t have any photographs of him. Any photos for publication would be very gratefully received.

After writing that a student of Fuchs, Adrian McDonnell, who is now conductor of the Orchestre de la Cité Internationale in Paris, emailed me. He is in contact with the composer's widow Mrs. Elissa Fuchs in North Carolina who kindly supplied the photographs and biography that I am publishing to mark the first anniversary of his death. This is the only comprehensive resource on Fuchs on the internet and I am very grateful to Mrs. Elissa Fuchs, Adrian McDonnell and John McLaughlin Williams for making it possible. I have ported the article to Wikipedia so it will reach the widest possible audience.

Peter Paul Fuchs was born on October 30, 1916 in Vienna, Austria, son of Dr. Adolf Fuchs, a well known heart specialist, and Marianne Rusicka, a piano teacher. His grandfather was Alois Rusicka, a prominent Viennese lawyer, originally from the same hometown as Gustav Mahler, and who had encouraged Mahler’s father to further young Gustav’s musical studies.

After his academic studies in the “gymnasium”, he graduated in 1935 from the Vienna Academy of Music where his mentors were Felix Weingartner and Joseph Krips in conducting, and Karl Weigl in composition. In 1936 Fuchs was engaged as conductor and repetiteur for the German Theater in Brno, Czechoslovakia. The volatile politics of the period and the imminent Nazi invasion meant he was forced to leave Brno. Without a valid passport or job he spent two years living in exile in Switzerland and Italy until he received a US visa.


In 1938 he sailed for America with a letter of recommendation from Felix Weingartner, a tooth brush, $5.00, and a basic change of clothes. When he arrived in the US he supported himself by accompanying singers and instrumentalists, and playing for ballet classes. He toured with a small Ballet company in 1939-40 and in October 1940 he was hired as accompanist for the Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera.

Fuchs arranged for his parents to leave Nazi occupied Austria in 1940, and brought them to America; two years later he was inducted into the army and automatically became an American citizen. Following the end of hostilities in 1945, he returned to the Metropolitan Opera as a full time staff conductor until 1950 working with Bruno Walter, George Szell, Fritz Reiner, Erich Leinsdorf and Ettore Panizza and others. He also conducted at the San Francisco Opera, the Cincinnati Summer Opera, the Central City Opera, and the Berkshire Summer Music Festival where he was assistant conductor to Leonard Bernstein.

He left the Met in 1950 to become professor of music and opera at Louisiana State University, first as conductor and teacher, then as head of the opera department in 1952. His responsibilities later in the decade when he became the conductor of the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, an appointment he held for the next 16 years, and also conductor of the Birmingham Opera in Alabama and of the Beaumont Opera in Beaumont Texas, In Beaumont he was conductor and stage director for 13 years.

He also developed an international career and guest conducted in Holland, Greece, Germany, Romania, Portugal, and in his native Austria, appearing with such orchestras the Vienna Tonkuenstler Orchestra, the Aachen Municipal Theatre, the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Bucharest Opera. Louisiana State University awarded Peter Paul Fuchs an honorary Doctorate when he retired in 1976, and he then became Music Director and Conductor of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra where he remained until 1988 and was also Artistic Director and Conductor of the Greensboro Opera Company from 1981 to 1992.


Fuchs translated several operas into English for American editors, notably Verdi’s “Masked Ball” for the Metropolitan Opera. His writing included two notable books, The Musical Theater of Walter Felsenstein (W. W. Norton) and The Psychology of Conducting (MCA), which has become required reading in many universities.

Fuchs had been composing chamber music, symphonies and opera since he was a teenager in Vienna. In Baton Rouge in the 1960’s he conducted his opera “Darkness at Noon” at Louisiana State University. Then, in the late 80’s and early 90’s, excerpts from his opera “White Agony” were produced at the Komische Opera in Berlin (where Felsenstein had directed). In 1992, the Greensboro Opera produced a staged version of “White Agony” staged by his wife, Elissa Minet Fuchs, former ballerina of Ballet Russe and the Metropolitan Opera who is seen in the photo below together with the composer.


As well as his three operas (Darkness at Noon, The White Agony, and The Heretic), his other compositions include a symphony, a Concertino for Piano and Orchestra, Inventions for Wind Instruments, string quartets, a violin sonata, works for piano, and many songs. (See this note by John McLaughlin Williams on Fuchs' music). He directed many opera workshops notably at the Manhattan School of Music where, in 1962, he conducted the premier of Jan Meyerowitz’s “Godfather Death”. Both his daughter Debora Porazzi and son in law Arturo Porazzi work production roles on Broadway. I am currently working on a project that may result in the webcasting of private recordings of Fuchs' compositions.

Fuchs' conducting students included:
Bill Conti, composer and conductor mostly active in Hollywood and television.
Milton Crotts, former conductor of the Guam Symphony Orchestra and currently Professor at Davidson College.
Janet Galván, professor of music and conductor at Ithica College, New York
Adrian McDonnell, conductor of the Orchestre de la Cité Internationale in Paris and professor of conducting at the Conservatoire Frederic Chopin.


Peter Paul Fuchs, born Vienna October 30, 1916, Vienna, Austria. Died March 26, 2007, Greensboro, NC.

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Meredith Monk out of focus

Regular readers will know that monastic orders are one of my interests, so it will come as no surprise that I have been greatly enjoying ECM's new release of music by Meredith Monk. Impermanence is a moving meditation on the transitory nature of life that expands Monk's distinctive vocal writing to embrace a range of instruments including piano, elephant bells, marimba, vibraphone and, my favourite, a bicycle wheel. A beautiful CD that is recommended. But am I the only one that now finds ECM's signature out of focus monochrome cover art an irritating cliché?

More on ECM cover art here.
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Investors on the fiddle

Today's Guardian reports - 'One of London's most successful violin restorers and traders, Florian Leonhard, is hoping to attract investors to his alternative investment syndicate as more conventional assets look increasingly vulnerable to an economic slowdown.

The Fine Violins Fund, which counts cellist Julian Lloyd Webber among its directors, has so far raised €16m (£12.5m) towards what it hopes will be a €60m syndicate investing in the most precious pre-19th-century violins, mainly from Italy.

Leonhard intends to invest in 50 violins valued at about $1.5m each - many of them beyond the means of the musicians who play them. The instruments will not be locked away in a bank vault; they are to be loaned out, without charge, to promising musicians, 30 of whom have already been identified.

The syndicate claims to benefit not only because the instruments' quality is maintained by regular use, but also because violins that are linked to the early career of performers who grow in reputation can soar in value'.

More fiddlers here.
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A day to celebrate freedom

Arturo Toscanini was born on March 25, 1867, in Parma, Italy. Happy birthday Maestro! March 25 is also Independence Day and a national holiday in Greece commemorating the 1821 uprising against the occupying Turks that ended with the birth of an independent modern Greece in 1832. It is wonderfully appropriate that Toscanini's birthday and Greek Independence Day fall together as he was a conductor who hated compromise.

Sadly the Greek struggle for independence did not end in 1832, and in the twentieth-century it had to endure invasions by the fascist forces of Italy and Germany, the subsequent Civil War and a military junta. Here are the words of that great folk hero, activist and composer, Mikis Theodorakis, who fought on the side of right in all three conflicts.

So far death has only been defeated by art. All those who tried to reach immortality through violence, power or money have failed. There is no temporal dimension to immortality. Its distinguishing mark is one of quality, a strong sensation. Only art can convey the feeling of being immortal for three seconds.

My header image is the poster for Constantin Costa-Gravas' legendary 1969 film 'Z' which was a barely fictionalised account of the assassination in 1963 of the Greek socialist politician Gregoris Lambrakis. The film and its soundtrack by Theodorakis, became an international symbol of opposition to the Greek military junta, read more about it here. Although out of print copies of Theodorakis' important book Journals of Resistance can still be found. Read it together with Thomas Merton's Passion for Peace, then wonder where are the twenty-first century equivalents?

Now playing - Mikis Theodorakis' own recording of his Requiem (below), which is quite appropriate as March 25 is also the Feast of the Annunciation. My quote above is from the composer's notes for the CD release. More about Theodorakis' Requiem here.


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Goodbye Western art music

The storm was so bad even Peter Grimes would have stayed at home and watched BBC TV's repeat of a Steptoe film on its so-called culture channel. But a good-sized audience braved the worst Easter weather for decades to travel to Snape Maltings on Good Friday for a celebration of something more multi-cultural.

The collabaration between between early music group The Dufay Collective and the Spanish-based Al-Quimia was the outcome of one of Aldeburgh Music's pioneering artist residencies. This musical exploration of the multi-cultural society that flourished in Andalucia seven hundred years ago was a high risk project; this isn't exactly mainstream repertoire and hybrid projects such as this are rarely box-office hits. But that's not what Aldeburgh is about. Britten and Pears created Snape to celebrate the holy triangle of composer, performer and listener and on Friday evening, despite the stacked odds, the spirit of place prevailed and the vital electricity sparked from composer through performers to listener.

In fairness it wasn't so much a collabration as a triumph for Al-Quimia. When the two groups played in concert the collabaration really added no more than a strengthened rythym line. But when the players of the Spanish group took centre stage the music soared, and the Dufay musicians were quite content to join the audience in silent admiration. And what a vindication of Britten and Arup Associates' acoustic vision for Snape, even from our seats at the back of the 830 seater hall the nuances of the oud, dumbek, nay flute and kanun were crystal clear.

I have written here before about adventurous programming such as the celebrated concert comprising an Ockeghem Mass and a Mahler symphony in Berlin in 2000, while none other than Philip Glass has said that world music is the new classical. So, now Aldeburgh Music has seen what electifying musicians Al-Quimia are, please can we have a concert with a set by them in the first half and the Britten-Pears Orchestra playing Messiaen's might multi-cultural Turangalila Symphony in the second? Yes, I know there are boring problems like the platform lay-out. But I live close to Aldeburgh and will happily help swap the oud for the ondes Martenot and oboes in the interval.

Now see the art of the mosque.
Header image is Al-Quimia's only CD to date, available from Samsaoui in Spain. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

There is no difference between life and death

This photo shows John Cage and Daisetz Suzuki in 1962. Now playing is Cage's 36 Mesotics re and not so re Marcel Duchamp which is dedicated to the Japanese video artist Shigeko Kubota and includes this quote from the Zen teacher Daisetz Suzuki: 'There is no difference between life and death'. In the Harmonia Mundi recording the text is sung by Paul Hillier and spoken by Terry Riley. More on Daisetz Suzuki here and here.

Cage Talk, dialogues with and about John Cage is available from Boydell Press. Photo credit Yashuiro Yoshioka. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The Rite of Spring Eastern style

The Rite of Spring is celebrated today in another culture. March 22, 2008 is the start of the Hindu spring festival of Holi (Phagwa in Bhojpuri). My photo was taken last week at the gorgeous JAS Musicals shop in London which make the sitars seen in the photo.

Now playing - Tarun Bhattacharya santoor with Shiv Shankar Ray tabla on The Art of the Indian Santoor on the wide-ranging ARC label. The santoor is a hammered dulcimer (photo below) related to the Hungarian cimbalon and Chinese yang qin and is used for Hindustani raga, four of which are heard on the CD. Now read about the perils of Eastern tuning.


Header photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

A Love Supreme

'A man who has never seen the world, never lived as a stranger among foreigners, who has never known a life and culture other than his own is in some way limited. He cannot help but feel his own way of life to be superior, to be the only way. This was one of the poisons I saw seeping into my company in Iraq from the beginning: parochialism, ignorance, knowing nothing about Islam or the Middle East, or any other society outside American cities like Tampa or St. Petersburg...


Many people believe in good and evil. Just that, that simple: good on one side, evil on the other. By default, we are always on the good side. This means that any who oppose us must logically be evil. Buddhism tends to take a circumspect view of good and evil, avoiding that distinction entirely and instead speaking of "positive" and "negative" actions as measured by their effect in the world. It is never as final and absolute as good and evil. Yet duality invades every level of society, from religous sermons to the political rhetoric that drove us into the Iraq war.


The absoluteness of good and evil is an incredibly dangerous doctrine, dangerous in the wrong hands and without proper restraint. I believe that experience demonstrates that never in life is anything wholly good or evil. Good and evil are metaphors, signposts to guide us in the right direction. To render good and evil as actual physical truth is to render an infinitely complex moral world into absurd black and white. Further still, to hold that truth out to the mass of humanity and invite them to act upon it is to invite disaster and fanaticism' - from The Sutras of Abu Ghraib by Aidan Delgado. The author spent a year with the U.S. Army Reserve in Iraq where he worked in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, and the book charts his progress from soldier to Buddhist and conscientous objector and it is essential reading. My quote is verbatim. I am only too well aware that Telford and St. Albans in England can be substituted for Tampa and St. Petersburg without in any way altering the message.


I will be celebrating the Western Easter this Sunday (March 23) on Future Radio with A Love Supreme, and the main work in the programme is John Coltran's legendary 1964 four movement jazz suite of that name. Before Coltrane's 'gift to God' I am playing music by the Yuval Ron Ensemble. This group has been working since 1999 to break down national, racial, religious and cultural divides using the sacred and folk music of the Middle East. The Ensemble includes Jewish, Arabic and Christian Armenian musicians, and they are all actively involved in building musical bridges between people of different faiths and cultures. In the programme they will be playing music and song, appropriately, from Iraq, and also from Muslim and Jewish Andalucia. Listen online at 5.00pm UK time Sunday March 23 with a repeat at 12.50am on Monday morning for transatlantic listeners.


Now visit the green hill far away seen in the photo above here.
Photos are of five great manifestations of A Love Supreme, the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham, Norfolk and the Neue Synagogue, Berlin (both copyright On An Overgrown Path 2008), the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, Istanbul, the Potala Palace, Lhasa and the Taizé Community, France. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Stravinsky and Walton are opera's poster boys

Back in 2006 my article about Mahogany Opera's excellent production of Britten's Curlew River was followed by a discussion about operatic double-bills. Nice to see it wasn't just an academic discussion, the company is presenting a double bill of Walton's The Bear and Stravinsky's The Fox at Aldeburgh and London in April. Also good to see the art of poster design isn't dead. More details here and another classical music poster boy here.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Stockhausen off the wall

After John Cage in Bruges Stockhausen has been happening in London. Take a leading rock music venue with no seats and a bar across the back wall, pack in three hundr