Classical music is shanghaied


My recent posts on classical music in China in general and Shanghai in particular were remarkably prescient. Header image is from my 2006 post about music in China.

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Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

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On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the Château d'Assas, Scott Ross gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos b...
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Racism disguised as patriotism must not prevail

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Hubert Parry’s inspired setting of William Blake includes the famous lines ‘Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant land’. Over the years Parry's Jerusalem has become associated with rabid nationalism , and racism disguised as patriotism is dominating the current political agenda both in Britain and the US . However the album artwork above is not there to illustrate the danger of nuanced racism, but rather to explode the beguiling myth surrounding Parry's Jerusalem. Because far from being the product of ethnic nationalism, Jerusalem started life as a rallying cry for a spiritual movement formed, to quote its founder, to appeal "to the whole of humanity... Hindus, Mohammedans, Buddhists... " And that is only the start of a long but remarkable story, because Sir Francis Younghusband, who commissioned Jerusalem in 1916, was an evangelical Christian Colonel who led colonial forces in a bloody invasion of Tibet. But in his mature years he became ...
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Sketches of Joaquin Rodrigo

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Was Joaquín Rodrigo, who died on 6 July, 1999, a composer out of step with his time? His most famous work, the tonal, tuneful and cheerful Concerto de Aranjuez , was completed in the spring of 1939 in Paris. While Rodrigo was composing German troops were approaching the Czech frontier and Moravia and Bohemia became 'protectorates' of the Third Reich. During that spring the Nazis annexed Lithuania, Arnold Schoenberg's Violin Concerto was published and Michael Tippett started work on his protest oratorio A Child Of Our Time . As Rodrigo's evocation of the glories of Spain took shape in March 1939 the Civil War in the composer's native Spain ended when Madrid surrendered after a siege lasting two and a half years and the remaining Republican territories capitulated to Franco's Nationalist forces. The total death toll in Spain was estimated to be around half a million. The rise of fascism and the spread of anti-semitism were hardly events that Rodrigo could ignore...
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Is Hugo Chavez really music to our ears?

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Venezuela, and its charismatic president Hugo Chavez , have featured On An Overgrown Path several times recently. Back in November I raised concerns about the objectivity of the Guardian's coverage (above ) of Venezuela's acclaimed music education programme, and only yesterday I highlighted human rights activist Harry Belafonte's support for Chavez . So today's Observer article Mr Chavez and the death of freedom makes interesting reading. Here is an extract: "Consider, for it's a looming headline event in 2007, the Hugo Chavez dilemma. On the one hand, many committed media freedom warriors in Britain - including Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists - vociferously support Venezuela's totemic president and all his egalitarian works. They raise money for his causes, pass NUJ conference motions of support and generally despise scribblers on the other side who think him a bit of a demagogue. On the other hand, Aidan White, gene...
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All that twitters is not gold

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That tweet saddens me. It was written by Jeremy Pound who identifies himself without disclaimer on his Twitter account - see below - as the deputy editor of BBC Music Magazine . I don't know Jeremy Pound, but presumably he is a very nice guy who holds a senior position in an influential publication which he reached due to his qualifications and experience. Of course all of us have blind spots in our music appreciation. But is it not the role of a writer to report with a reasonable degree of objectivity that a work fails to engage them, fails to move them, or is beyond their comprehension? And is it not also their role to explore why that vital connection has not been made? Karlheinz Stockhausen has been judged by others with far stronger credentials than Jeremy Pound to be an important if controversial figure in late 20th-century music. To publicly dismiss one of his seminal works as "a load of pish" - definition "variation of piss, most usually used in the nort...
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Shostakovich we'll allow, but take out Stravinsky

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One of the recurring themes On An Overgrown Path has been the control of agents , broadcasters and record companies over the music we hear. The question is a simple one - do we hear the music we want, or do we hear the music chosen for us by others? A very perceptive comment today on my Peteris Vasks article by Daniel Wolf (do visit his blog Renewable Music ) reminded me that hidden agendas among programmers are not new, and raised the interesting point that Shostakovich was actually promoted, rather than suppressed, by the Soviet authorities at certain times. As soon as I read Daniel's comment I located Stormy Applause, Making Music In A Worker's State by Borodin Quartet founder Rostislav Dubinsky in my library. The events in the extract below took place in 1955. Goskoncert was (and still is) the Russian state run concert agency, and the programs under discussion were for the Borodin's first ever overseas tour to the German Democratic Republic . At Goskoncert the pr...
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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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Winston Churchill 's surprising intimacy with Islam

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Morocco was a favourite destination for Sir Winston Churchill's painting trips, and as discussed in a post yesterday he stayed at La Moumonia Hotel in Marrakech. What is striking when reviewing Churchill's Moroccan paintings is the preponderance of Islamic subjects. An example above is his 1948 painting of the Ben Youssef Mosque - famous for its madrasa - in Marrakech. Of course Morocco is a Muslim country rich in visual wonders, so Churchill's preoccupation with Islamic imagery may not be surprising. But there is another more tantalising explanation. In a 1907 letter to Churchill his future sister-in-law, Lady Gwendoline Bertie pleads: “Please don’t become converted to Islam; I have noticed in your disposition a tendency to orientalise, Pasha-like tendencies, I really have. If you come into contact with Islam your conversion might be effected with greater ease than you might have supposed, call of the blood, don’t you know what I mean, do fight against it”. Surp...
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Revisiting the Master Musicians

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Two of the albums that I return to time and time again during my explorations of mystic turuq  are Brian Jones Presents the Pan Pipes at Joujouka from 1971 and Bill Laswell 's 1995 Apocalypse Across the Sky , both of which capture the literally entrancing sound of the legendary Master Musicians of Jajouka in their home village in Morocco's Rif Mountains. Six years ago I collaborated with Led Zeppelin biographer and Michael Jackson ghost writer Stephen Davis on a two-part profile of the Master Musicians. Between 1973 and 1989 Stephen made a number of visits to Jajouka, and he is therefore an important and reliable source on an important cultural tradition in which the music is sometimes drowned-out by the sound of axes being ground . When I asked Stephen to choose between the Brian Jones and Bill Laswell productions he plumped for the more atmospheric and authentic 1971 recording, but conceded that Apocalypse Across the Sky "sounds great". Personally I love Brian ...
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Classical music should exploit its healing power

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Classical music cannot stand still; so that means it must find new audiences. Western classical music has evolved into a highly dualist art form with clearly demarcated boundaries around its core offering of the orchestral and operatic repertoire. There is little debate that this repertoire must - and will - remain central to the art form. But it can be argued that to open up new markets the current watertight boundaries around that core offering must become porous. An example of a blurring of these boundaries would be an entry into the mind, body and spirit market; a market which a post here in 2011 pointed out was then worth around $11 billion annually in the US, compared with $200 million for classical album sales. It is tempting to dismiss the mind, body and spirit market opportunity as no more than 'Mozart for meditation' and 'Gregorian Chant for the soul', but that would be a mistake. As my earlier post noted , the spiritual dimension is found in many of cl...
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