Then you win

First they ignore you,
Then they laugh at you,
Then they fight you,
Then you win.
-Mahatma Gandhi, who was born Oct. 2, 1869.
A peace symphony here.
Photo taken at the Lac du Der Chantecoq, France is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2009. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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Life's a bitch and then you reincarnate

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Mixed wisdom traditions inspired by recent travels. My photos below were taken last month at the Theravada Buddhist temple of Wat Khongkha Kha Phimuk in a very hot Thailand. Then a repeat of my 2020 post about the Mahayana Buddhist view of what happens between bitching and reincarnating. Music from between heaven and hell   Why is the between so underrated? We live in a binary age which is defined by 0 or 1, and anything in between is dead meat. So we think only in terms of good or bad , right or wrong, masterpiece or minor-piece , and black or white . One of the main drivers of this dualism is social media where narratives are defined by like or dislike, friend or unfriend, and the ultimate sanction of follow or block . But life is not defined by absolutes. We actually live in an infinitely nuanced analogue world which digital technologies compress to just two binary options. Which obliterates the priceless legacy of the between created in the millennia before we became ad...
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The purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness

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Two contrasting responses from America to my post Third rate music on Naxos' American classics? Flinging merde - ' Granted some of the stuff that Naxos has packaged in that series has been less than distinguished but operating in a cultural establishment where critics treat every cow patty ever dropped by the likes of Alwyn (above) and Bax and Finzi and Michael Tippitt (sic) as if it were fois gras, Clements is hardly in a position to fling merde' - from Sequenza21 , and I'm sure Norman Lebrecht would approve of that misspelling of Tippett. The true beauty of the effort - ' Personally speaking I expect listener reaction to concert music is heavily dependent on emotional mood and cultural/historical context . The concept of "ratings" and "tiers" for composers is pretty much an over-rated specialization of critics, which serves the purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness. My father is the American composer George Frederick McKay (photo be...
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All aboard the Martinu bandwagon

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A vintage year for blasphemy and heresy

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2010 was a vintage year for blasphemy and heresy. A post on Salvador Dali drew attention to his forgotten audiovisual opera-poem Être Dieu inspired by the Cathar heresy, Jonathan Harvey stirred things up on my Chance Music programme by saying "the future must bring things which are considered blasphemous like amplifying classical music", while yet another path took me to new heights of heresy. In fact the path reached 2400 feet, which, as the photo above shows, is a serious challenge for anyone who, like me, who has a vertigo problem. I took the photo from the fortress of Quéribus in Languedoc, France and the view is towards Mont Canigou, the holy mountain beloved of Pablo Casals and Thomas Merton . Quéribus castle was the last Cathar stronghold to surrender in 1255 and Jordi Savall's The Forgotten Kingdom had led me to Languedoc and Catharism and on to Gnosticism. The Cathar heresy has its roots in the "dualist" religions in the Indus basin which origina...
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Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

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In the 1950s a number of prominent jazz musicians converted to Islam, including - to use their adopted names - Ahmad Jamal , and Sahib Shihab , Yusef Lateef . One of the most notable converts was the drummer Art Blakey , while the very personal heterodox cosmology of the most celebrated jazz musician of that period John Coltrane was influenced by the beliefs of his first wife Naima, who was a Muslim convert . Many of the musicians who converted were African Americans endeavouring to escape from the shadow of Western colonialism ; they saw Islam as an attractive alternative to Christianity within the Abrahamic tradition, and jazz at that time was heavily influenced by music from cultures beyond the Judeo-Christian world. These circumstances were unique to the 1950s, and fewer jazz musicians have taken the path to Islam since. But those who have include the bass player Danny Thompson who converted in 1990; he has played with many great musicians, including Nick Drake on the legendary...
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Audiences need permission to like unfamiliar music

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Third rate music on Naxos' American Classics?

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