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Showing posts from September, 2009

Music and place

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In this quiet room above the sea I've just played the fourth [Beethoven Piano Concerto] again. I know it now - every stitch of it - more intimately than I know Nancy [LD's wife]. I've got it in my bowels. Sort of empathy. I've been it, I act it, sleep it, shit it, sleep it - everything. And I can tell you that compared to it, the Emperor is a collection of musical platitudes written for a lavatory-paper musical box by a deaf mute. So There! Lawrence Durrell wrote those words in Corfu in 1935. I took the photo above at the Lac du Der Chantecoq in the Champange-Ardenne region of France last week. During the three weeks we spent on campsites in remote locations in rural France I was struck once again when listening to my iPod , as to how place affect the way music is heard. Just as light determines the way we see a landscape, so the aura of a place seems to change our perspective on a familiar piece of music. The mystical relation between music and place is nothing new

Conductors and gnawing infantile megalomania

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Readers expecting one of my trademark rants about the new Gustavo Dudamel video game are in for a disappointment. I have to confess that news of Bravo Gustavo brought back happy memories of RCA Victor's 1959 LP Music for Frustrated Conductors which came complete with authentic wooden baton and an illustrated do-it-yourself conducting booklet written by Deems Taylor . Rather than the Symphonie Fantastique featured on Bravo Gustavo the LP included Khachaturian's Sabre Dance , a movement from Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, the waltzes from Die Fledermaus , and, my personal favourite at the time, extracts from Richard Rogers' score for the TV documentary series Victory at Sea , which can be sampled in the video below. Arthur Fiedler , Morton Gould and Robert Russell Bennett were the un-frustrated conductors of the disc, which can be seen in the American market packaging above. If my memory is correct the UK release came in a much more sombre white box. When the 12 i

Music exists within silence

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The five seconds of silence that precede the music on any ECM album may be the most important statement a record company could make. The pause is a recognition that music exists within silence; only by acknowledging it can a listener become wholly involved. Manfred Eicher is the author of that silence, and of the silence that appears to surround all the recordings produced on his remarkable label. The quality of that silence is intended to lead us towards a heightened awareness, a contemplative state where we are encouraged to listen harder and more acutely to the music, and to the spaces between it. When he was asked, almost forty years after founding ECM, if he had any patterns or models in mind when he started the label, Eicher's answer was straightforward: "A very good model, all the time, was for for me the sound of Miles' Kind of Blue and Bill Evans, how he sounded there". Richard Willams writes in The Blue Moment , a new book which seems to have slipped under

Where have all the flowers gone?

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I hardly dare go on another of my extended jaunts. In 2007 while I was away Sir Malcolm Arnold passed on , and last year it was Esbjörn Svensson . This year while I was travelling we lost the two remarkable ladies of music seen in these photos. Back in September 2006 I ended a post on James Simon Kunen's 1968 novel The Strawberry Statement with these words: * Now playing - The Great Mandala , yes I know that Peter, Paul and Mary are about as unfashionable as you can get, but this is one of the great antiwar songs of the era. Composer Peter Yarrow's explanation that the song 'says our lives present us with a choice, in this case, the choice was to either serve in a war that ran counter to basic American principles, or to take the consequences of refusing to do so; for young men called to service, it was the preeminent ethical dilemna of our time ' is a stark reminder that relevance never becomes unfashionable. In response longtime reader SFMike commented: Peter, Paul a

La rentrée

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More art of typography here . Photo of Vandeness en Auxois , France is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2009. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Chichester Psalms

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This magnificent tapestry forms the reredos for the high altar in Chichester Cathedral . It was commissioned in 1966 by Dean Walter Hussey from John Piper . Piper's wife, Myfanwy Piper , was librettist for three of Benjamin Britten's operas , and John Piper designed the Britten memorial window in Aldeburgh Church. Walter Hussey was a prolific patron of the arts , and among his many commissions was Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, which was composed for the 1965 Chichester Festival. The work received its premiere in New York with the composer conducting on July 15th 1965, and was performed two weeks later in Chichester with the cathedral's organist John Birch conducting. My lower photo shows the tapestry titled The Reconciliation Gobelin by the German artist Ursula Benker-Schirmer which hangs in the cathedral's retro-choir. This magnificent work, which was made in Bavaria and England, was commissioned after Dean Hussey retired and was installed in 1985, t

The battle against the bland

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What ties these experiences together is this: in each case, something distinctive has been replaced by something bland; something organic by something manufactured; something definably local with something emptily placeless; something human scale with something impersonal. The result is stark, simple and brutal: everywhere is becoming the same as everywhere else. The small, the ancient, the indefinable, the unprofitable, the meaningful, the interesting and the quirky are being scoured out and bulldozed to make way for the clean, the sophisticated, the alien, the progressive, the corporate. It feels, to me, like a great loss, which seems to suck the meaning from the places I care for or feel I belong to. It matters. Once again two paths converge. I have been reading Real England: The Battle Against the Bland by the environmental campaigner Paul Kingsnorth . In this chilling book, which supplies my opening quote, Paul Kingsnorth paints a vivid picture of how, due to the ever increasing