The society which is not diverse is less beautiful

'Complexity is a beautiful thing... the society which is not diverse is less beautiful. I cannot know myself if I do not know the Other - the Other is a condition of my existence.'
September 10th brings the last night of the BBC Proms at which Wagner rubs shoulders with the Sound of Music. Will the Proms director be sentenced to four years in prison for using social media to publicise the event and will rubber bullets be used on the audience when they sing Jerusalem? My header quotation comes from the liberal-leaning Shiite cleric Sheikh Hani Fahes and I leave it with you while I follow Other paths until the Albert Hall has emptied. If you only buy one CD while I am travelling, make it the one above. A small piece of social media trivia; On An Overgrown Path enters its eighth year of blogging in a few days and thank you for supporting the Other point of view during that time. Until I return follow this path for a chance selection of Gurdjieff posts, and this one for meetings with remarkable musicians.

Header quote comes via Alex Klaushofer's recommended Paradise Divided, A Portrait of Lebanon, which featured in a path that led to many other - Is a miracle maestro worth £20,000 a concert? 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 Also on Facebook and Twitter.

Comments

Philip Amos said…
I have eight discs of Thomas de Hartmann's transcriptions for piano of Gurdjieff's music -- four on Wergo, one on Naive, and three on Celestial Harmonies. On the list of that last, he is also one of the composers on a very interesting, and enjoyable, disc called Earth Answers. It is wonderful to have these, but to have the music arranged in a grounding of its ethnomusical roots must be wonderful indeed. I must hear it.

I'll also mention, partly because it made me laugh, a label called Russian Compact Discs. That is indeed what they are, with some Czech here and there. I think of it now because of your post referring to Russian church music. The RCD list has quite a few discs of choirs singing in Russian monasteries and shrines. There are also many discs devoted to Russian instrumentalists past (Neuhaus and his pupils dominate), and some more Furtwangler reissues. But what made me laugh and rather boggle was that in the middle of this there are discs of Jack Hylton and his orchestra, Henry Hall and ditto, and a few more of the same. Where they turned up and how and they came to be in the RCD catalogue might well be an interesting story in itself. The label says it aims to be eclectic, but I didn't think that meant including discs of British dance bands they probably nicked during the 'thirties.
9:16 pm
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