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Showing posts from October, 2011

The moderate man is contemptible

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It will surprise many to learn that my headline is supplied by Ralph Vaughan Williams. He was one of a group of composers, which included Gustav Holst, John Ireland and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who met in the late 1890s to discuss William Morris' brand of socialism , and Vaughan-Williams' proposition that 'the moderate man is contemptible' was the subject of one of their debates. Vaughan Williams was a leading figure in the English folk music revival and the pentatonic scale, which is the common foundation of folk music around the world, links the English rural tradition to African American spirituals. The presence of the Afro-English Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in Vaughan Williams' circle indicates that at the time racial prejudice was less virulent in Britain than in America, which is why that peerless exponent of the African-American spiritual Paul Robeson chose to live in England from 1928 to 1939 where he was able both to perform and pursue his radical politics.

Is world music really bourgeoisation in disguise?

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EJ Moeran remained suspicious of the 'bourgeoisation' of folk, impatient with 'those who set about the teaching of folk-songs in schools, or the organising of garden fêtes etc... Well-intentioned as these efforts may be, they evolve something quite apart from the art of those who have it in their very bones, handed down from father to son'. Nowhere is bourgeoisation more in evidence than in gypsy music, which has evolved via folk, classical, jazz and world music into something quite apart from the art of those who have it in their bones. The recording featured in my header image is a notably bourgeoisation-free zone. Titled De Sant Jaume Son - The Sound of Saint Jacques - it features musicians from the gypsy enclave of Saint Jacques in Perpignan on the Mediterranean coast near France's border with Spain. The Saint Jacques neighbourhood in the centre of the city remains almost unchanged - compare the archive photo on the CD sleeve to the one below that I took in

$1 million music prizes are not a good idea

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Olivier Bétoin was once asked who his heroes were. 'I don't have heroes,' he replied. 'I respect those who do good without any recognition'. My header photo is from the early 1930s and shows the isolated farm of La Coûme in French Catalonia . Opened in 1933 as a vacation centre for young people, La Coûme went on under Quaker stewardship to become an important shelter for refugees from the Nazi regime. La Coûme continues today as a youth activity centre with a strong musical component and is managed by Olivier Bétoin, who is the son of one of the founders. There are many paths leading from this quintessentially thin place . One goes to the nearby holy mountain of the Catalans, Mount Canigou and on to the Cathar castle of Quéribus with its Gnostic connections , while another leads to Prades where Pablo Casals lived in exile . And talking of the balance between doing good and recognition, 86% of readers who voted in my recent poll said that $1 million dollar music

Classical music must come clean on toxic patronage

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Manipulation by the mainstream media reached new heights in yesterday's BBC News coverage of the latest radio audience trends. Here is what BBC News said about Radio 3's performance : Classical station Radio 3 maintained a listenership of above two million in the new figures. By contrast this is the Guardian's somewhat more accurate report : Radio 3 suffers biggest BBC radio audience fall - It traditionally enjoys a surge in summer listening on the back of the Proms, the world's greatest classical music festival. But BBC Radio 3, which recently introduced changes to its schedule in a bid to broaden its appeal, lost more listeners than any other BBC national radio station in the three months to 18 September. Radio 3 had an average of 2.05 million weekly listeners across the quarter, down 5.6% on the previous three months and 4.3% year-on-year, according to official Rajar statistics published on Thursday. It is generally accepted that impartiality is a thing of the past

Classical music's enlightened new concert series

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My thanks go to Alex Ross for making the connection between my recent post on marketing the spiritual aspect of classical music and the White Light Festival which runs at the Lincoln Center in New York from October 20 to November 19. Here is the positioning statement from the White Light Festival website: In our technology-driven and distracted world, authentic encounters with one’s interior self and its inherent potential are increasingly infrequent. Throughout human history remarkable works of music and art have helped show us the extraordinary dimensions of human experience and life that lie within all of us—if only we pause in our rush to the finish line and turn our gaze inward. The White Light Festival hopes to provide moments to pause and explore the spaciousness and breath within. If someone was silly enough to let me direct an arts festival the result would bear a striking resemblance to the White Light Festival. In the mix is Britten's War Requiem and the finale at t

BBC shows the world how not to do classical radio

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Whichever way you look at it the news is bad. Independent data released today shows that classical network BBC Radio 3 lost 4.3% of its audience year on year and 5.6% of its audience from Q2 to Q3 2011. Average hours per listener have dropped during the course of the year from 6.1 to 5.8 and the station's audience loss is the biggest for any BBC national radio station. None of which will be a surprise to Overgrown Path readers . But it will be a surprise to BBC News readers who are disingenuously told no more than "Classical station Radio 3 maintained a listenership of above two million in the new figures". It should also be noted that the dramatic audience loss occurred in the quarter covering the Proms, which as seen above, were spun by the BBC press office as "Record breaking". One again, whose hand is on the BBC Radio 3 balance control ? Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the p

Koan for the day

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Can any reader solve the following koan? Why in a culture that values accessibility above all else is Lou Harrison's genuinely accessible Piano Concerto almost inaccessible both on CD and in the concert hall ? * Photo shows Lou Harrison with his adored gamelan . More on the composer, his Buddhist faith and his Piano Concerto, which incidentally was composed for Keith Jarrett, here . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Classical music's $11 billion market opportunity

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Rock music in the 1960s was celebrated for its wackiness, but the single that charted in the UK in September 1969 out-wacked them all. Recorded in EMI's famed Abbey Road Studios by members of the Radha Krsna Temple, produced by George Harrison (see photo below) and released on the Beatle's Apple Records, Hare Krishna Mantra reached number twelve in the charts and made two appearances on the BBC TV's iconic Top of the Pops programme. In early 1970 a second single from the Radha Krsna Temple charted and in May 1971 the LP seen above was released on the Apple label. The Radha Krishna Temple is the London headquarters of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness . For many the Krisna Consciousness movement means sandals, saffron-dyed sheets, tambourines and the Hare Krishna Mantra in Oxford Street. But the Krishna Consciousness movement, although only dating from 1966, uses the 5000 year old Bhagavad Gītā as a primary source to offer a refreshingly comprehensible mo

In search of the lost journalism

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Alex Ross' collection of New Yorker writing Listen to This , recently published in paperback , is a salutary reminder of the depths to which music journalism has sunk elsewhere in the mainstream media. But where to find an alternative to the standard diet of reheated press releases other than in The New Yorker ? Well, Amazon customer reviews may seem an unlikely source, but most professional music journalists could learn a thing or two from this contribution from Paul Magnussen : This album forms one of a pair on the Nimbus label (the other being Cante Flamenco ). Among Nimbus's laudable qualities at this time were first-class recordings, first-class (though not necessarily famous) artists, and careful attention to acoustics. Especially notable, however, was an almost obsessive preoccupation with performances that were whole and 'live' -- not sewn together, Frankenstein fashion, from the usable parts of corpses. In accordance with this objective, the present albu

We're just not ready yet for a black conductor

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It is October 19 and I have just now seen your July 25 post re Everett Lee . I represented Everett for a couple of years while I was in the artist management business in New York and I ran into the same attitude as Arthur Judson's when I presented him for open music director positions with major symphony orchestras (including Oakland!!): "We're just not ready yet for a black conductor." Ironic because one of the catchwords of African American life, from the white perspective, was "You people just aren't ready yet..." Anyway, I did manage to get Everett a couple of opera conducting gigs, and 2-3 guest engagements with major orchestras, but then I moved away from NYC and away from the artist management business. I believe he later went on to run an opera company in Philadelphia and perhaps also formed or at least led another orchestra in New York (possibly that is the St. Luke's Orchestra you refer to). Before I met Everett, I had actually met the late

Liszt de-arranges Beethoven

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The Liszt bicentennial is well served elsewhere. But a brief heads up for a body of work that happens to be my favourite Liszt and which has been strangely neglected in the birthday junketing. The complete edition of Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's Symphonies dates from 1865 and is dedicated to Hans von Bülow. Transcription is technially the wrong term as Liszt summarises and embellishes Beethoven with the aim of recreating for piano the spirit and not the notes of the symphonies. Writing of his transcriptions Liszt said "they ought more properly be called dérangements " - which takes us down an interesting semantic path. Most readers will have made the literal jump, as I did, from dérangement to 'de-arrange', making Liszt a very early deconstructionist. But, quite deliciously, my Oxford French/English dictionary offers the following translations of dérangement - 'bother, disorder, upset'. Fortunately you can decide for yourself whether Liszt

A social networking game too far

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' Always about the new ' Aldeburgh is hosting its second TEDx (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference on November 4th. I attended last year's conference but will be passing on this year's event. The über cool TED movement positions itself as a thinking person's Twitter and if talking heads peddling 18 minute solutions to problems that defy 18 minute solutions is your thing here is the conference link . Thomas Dolby, seen above, is chairing the TEDx conference and is also performing a gig the night before promoting his new album which, according to the puff, "is accompanied by a web-based social networking game" - another prospect that I find eminently resistible. At least the Aldeburgh Music TEDx website raises a laugh with its promise of "performances and discussions from groundbreaking guests." More on new music's sandbox here . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Image credit Wikimedia Commons . Report broken links, missing imag

Ascending the Heaven Ladder

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At 9.15 am on Friday, October 21, 1966 a waste tip slid down a mountainside into the mining village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. 144 people died in the disaster: 116 of them were school children. Ascending the Heaven Ladder is the first movement of Terry Riley's Requiem for Adam , which was inspired by the tragic death of a young person. In 2005 I wrote an early Overgrown Path post which coupled the Aberfan disaster with Terry Riley's Requiem . Today I offer a link to that post in memory of those who died in Aberfan forty-five years ago . Photo of Aberfan disaster credit Nuffield College, Oxford University . 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 .

Are $1 million music prizes a good thing?

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My nuanced sarcasm about the award of the $1 million dollar Birgit Nilsson prize "for outstanding achievement" to Plácido Domingo in 2009 and Riccardo Muti in 2011 prompted the following comment from Andrew Patner : 'The "they" here is Miss Nilsson who wanted, with her own money, to create a prize for mature opera and concert artists and institutions. She chose Domingo herself to be the first winner, to be named in 2009 after her death. A jury, following her criteria, selected Muti as the second recipient. Her foundation also supports young artists, several of whom performed at the gala dinner following the award of the prize in Stockholm last week. There is plenty of information (as well as video and audio material, recent and archival) at the foundation's website: http://www.birgitnilssonprize.org/ ' Unlike Andrew I did not have the benefit of a trip from Chicago, where Muti is the orchestra's music director, to Stockholm to file an exclusive rep

Riccardo Muti's cover story

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News that Riccardo Muti has been awarded the $1 million Birgit Nilsson Prize prompted me to dig this path out of the archive . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Hi-fi good enough for Herbert von Karajan

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That header graphic shows Herbert von Karajan endorsing Acoustic Research AR-3A loudspeakers. Edward M. Villchur, founder of Acoustic Research, has died aged 94 . Read more in When the sound really mattered . Also on Facebook and Twitter . 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

Is the next step to occupy classical music?

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Tuesday's post Classical music needs to confront its money habit attracted a record number of readers due to being picked up by Musical America and others. That spike in the graph of Overgrown Path readership underlines two points. First, there is a real demand for music journalism that values criticism above cronyism . And secondly, there is widespread concern about the distorting effect of the greedy 1% on classical music's increasingly fragile business model . Hopefully the debate has now started. But remember, while classical music debates nothing changes . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Portrait of the blogger as a young man

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Alex Ross has a piece on The New Yorker website titled Worst College Essays 1989 in which he exhumes one of his early and less memorable literary efforts and invites other bloggers to contribute similar justly neglected masterpieces from the "dustiest corners of their hard drives". Never one to resist a challenge I dug out the literary sin of youth seen above which appeared in the October 1974 edition of Hi-Fi News and Record Review . Fortunately it dates from the time when a hard drive was the journey from London to Aldeburgh, which means there is no text file and readers are therefore spared an extract. But the heading 'Quad-wrangle in perspectice - a discourse on the importance of directionality in live and recorded music' says it all. In his exquisitely turned piece Alex recounts how "Later, we rediscovered the virtue of a simple sentence". As my readers will know, I am still searching . * Eagle-eyed Wagnerians will recognise the photo. It is the Sc

Classical music must confront its money habit

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'Bravo - It's a form of culture-washing. Oil companies on the Public Broadcasting System in the U.S. pioneered the whole idea of "we're sponsoring high culture for free for you, we can't be bad." Well, yes, they can.' Yesterday's post, which pointed out that four of the main sponsors of the Lucerne Summer Festival have been linked to financial malfeasance , prompted that pertinent comment from SFMike . Last week's London concert by the Lucerne Festival Orchestra drew a three line whip from the liberal leaning elements of big media, yet there was not a single mention of the funding behind the orchestra. Yes, the music making was sublime. And no, boycotts and demonstrations are not on the agenda. But classical music has its very own greedy 1% and keeping them in the style to which they have become accustomed by replacing dwindling public funding with toxic sponsorship is not the solution. Classical music must confront its serious money habit. This c

Music matters, but so does transparency

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BBC and Guardian journalist Tom Service is a very persuasive champion of classical music in Lucerne. Last week he was waxing lyrically on BBC Radio 3 about the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, in September he enthused about the Lucerne Summer Festival in a Guardian feature , in 2008 he sang the praises of the Lucerne Festival Academy on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters programme after a visit to Switzerland, while in 2007 he snagged an interview for the Guardian with Lucerne Festival Orchestra founder Claudio Abbado on board the maestro's private jet. With all that proselytising it is hardly surprising that Tom has not found time to mention the sponsors of the Lucerne Summer Festival, so I will fill in the blanks. The Festival has three resident sponsors . One is Credit Suisse, a multi-national providing private banking and corporate financial services which is currently the subject of a tax evasion enquiry in the US . Another sponsor is Zurich Insurance Company Ltd, which was

Composing for dummies

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'Say what you have to say as simply as possible and then leave before they have a chance to figure you out.' That was Paul Simon's advice to a songwriting class he taught at New York University and the quote comes via David Browne's disappointingly earthbound chronicle of the music of 1970 Fire and Rain . Elsewhere Simon and Garfunkel are beyond cool . 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 .

How faith and idealism triumphed over ratings

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Radio 3's profile of Philippa Schuyler Colour of Genius can now be heard on the BBC iPlayer . As explained in an earlier post I had no involvement with the programme other than encouraging the BBC to develop it from the articles and recordings that I created with John McLaughlin Williams in August, which meant I heard the finished result for the first time last night. Doing justice to a personality as multi-layered as Philippa in a twenty minute interval talk is a massive challenge and everyone involved rises magnificently to the challenge. BBC Cardiff producers Michael Surcombe and Martin Williams deserve credit for steering a sensitive, in more ways than one , subject through the production process. Ella Spira's presentation is fresh and engaging, the participation of biographer Kathryn Talaly is a coup, while John McLaughlin William's pro bono home recordings bring Philippa to life - let us hope we hear more of John's music making on the BBC. Finally, kudos t

Young, gifted, female and finally trending

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We live in a society that is fixated on success and for too long maverick musician Philippa Schuyler and cultural nomad Isabelle Eberhardt have shared the fate of being dismissed as eccentric and marginal figures who failed to live up to their early promise. Philippa Schuyler’s reputation as a composer and pianist has been conveniently buried in the wreckage of a military helicopter in Da Nang Bay while Isabelle Eberhardt’s literary ambitions have been scattered in a wadi in southern Algeria. But attitudes are changing, and, quite appropriately, that change has been sparked not by the mainstream media, but by voices that are themselves often considered eccentric and marginal. In a remarkable example of cultural miscegenation a chance coupling between this blog and the BBC has spawned a Radio 3 profile of Philippa Schuyler which is being broadcast this evening. A few months later a multi-media chamber opera based on the life of Isabelle Eberhardt composed by Missy Mazzoli , whose cre