Leonard Bernstein's Sufi dream

On October 13, a friend came to visit him and, at Bernstein's request, he read out loud Coleman Barks's translations of a number of poems by the thirteenth-century Persian mystic Jelaluddin Rumi, in particular some lines from Rumi's deathbed poem:

Last night in a dream I saw an old man in a garden
It was all love.
He held out his hand and said, Come toward me.

 Leonard Bernstein died at 6:15 the following evening.
That extract is from Jonathan Cott's Dinner with Lenny. The valedictory choice by the 'Kaddish' Symphony's composer of poetry by one of the most senior figures in the Sufi tradition takes us beyond syncretism to synchronicity. Deutsche Grammophon has recently re-released Dream of the Orient (that is the original 2003 Archiv CD above) on which Concerto Köln directed by Werner Ehrhardt and transcultural ensemble Sarband - celebrated for their Arabian Passion According to J.S. Bach - mix European classical and Sufi influenced Turkish music from the 18th century. Musical East meets West encounters continue to be fashionable, but their appeal is all too often multicultural rather than musicological. But, as you would expect from the musically impeccable Concerto Köln and Sarband, Dream of the Orient throws fresh light on Turkish indebted Western masterpieces such as Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail when performed with refreshingly uninhibited Turkish percussionists. It is hardly surprising that 18th century Western classical music absorbed Eastern influences as the Turkish army reached the gates of Vienna in 1683 before being defeated. Leonard Bernstein also reached the gates of Vienna late in his career; but he avoided defeat and, predictably, the polyamorous conductor went on to have a passionate love affair with the Vienna Philharmonic. One of the fruits of this was the recording with them of his own transcription of Beethoven's op. 131 String Quartet which he cites in Dinner with Lenny as the record he was most proud of making. When once asked how he could love Wagner, Bernstein replied, “I hate Wagner — on my knees.” Despite this Lenny's performances of Wagner were acclaimed, which takes this post full circle as last year I asked Was Wagner a Sufi?

Also on Facebook and Twitter. No freebies were used in this post. Any copyrighted 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).

Comments

Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

Does it have integrity and relevance?

Image
Shortly after it was released I bought the young Finn  Klaus Mäkelä's new complete cycle of Sibelius symphonies recorded for Decca. Sibelius symphonies are very well represented in my large CD collection , in fact I have more Sibelius symphony cycles than for any other composer. Yet I have returned to Mäkelä's interpretations a surprising number of times. No, they will not replace the accounts of Sanderling , Colin Davis,  Barbirolli , and others. But they are not worse or better: because subjective dualist judgements of better or worse, like or dislike, good and bad, definitive or otherwise, etc etc no longer mean anything to me . There is no concrete reality in a music performance, only what we individually perceive as reality. A performance is an endless flow of constantly changing conditions. The score is not the performance, and the performance is not the score. Between score and performance lie an infinite number of overlapping variables - tempi, dynamics, performanc
Read more

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
Read more

Why new audiences are deaf to classical music

Image
One important reason why classical music is failing to attract a new young audience is being ignored - today's much sought-after digital natives are fast becoming tomorrow's hearing loss natives. As the Clínic de Barcelona explains , until recently, hearing loss had always been related to age: the older you are, the worse your hearing is. This situation, however, has changed in recent years, as increasingly younger people are suffering from hearing loss. There are many reasons for this widespread hearing loss. There are now high levels of ambient noise - for instance the average daytime ambient noise  without PA announcements inside a US airport terminal is 66 decibels which approaches that of a a washing machine. Then there is the noise from the headphones, earbuds, etc used for long periods with digital devices. In addition the overlooked widespread  use of ototoxic drugs , including macrolide drugs and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), contributes to hearin
Read more

Colin McPhee - East collides with West

Image
'It seems to me certain that future progress in creative music for composers of the Western world must inevitably go towards the exploration and integration of elements drawn from more than one of the world's cultures. ' This remarkably accurate prophecy was made by Henry Cowell in 1947, and was prompted by a radio broadcast of Colin McPhee's gamelan inspired Tabuh-Tabuhan which had received its first performance eleven years earlier. Carol J. Oja's exemplary biography (jacket below) describes Colin McPhee as a 'composer of two worlds'. He was born in Toronto in 1900, and established a dual career of pianist and composer at an early age. He started his studies at the Peabody Conservatory in 1918, and spent two years studying in Paris before settling in New York in 1926. He quickly established himself as a one of a new generation of American composers, and his music was presented at a concert of Edgard Varèse's International Composer's Guild. At
Read more

Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

Image
In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A
Read more

Your cat is a music therapist

Image
A recent post told how a cat crossed my path at the Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi. Cats are cherished in Islam , and in response to my post a friend who is an adept of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order sent me a link to an article on a Sufi resource . This is about the healing power of cats, and I thought it worth sharing an edited and annotated extract with my readers. The article can be read at two levels. At one level it can be taken as an amusing mix of fuzzy science and New Age babble, as indeed can this whole and many other Overgrown Paths . But drilling down further reveals another level. The power of music to nourish and heal the human spirit and body has been conveniently forgotten in the headlong rush to turn classical music into just another tawdry entertainment . Classical music is not about snackable access , celebrity maestros , live tweeting , self-promotion , free streaming , and all those other big new idea . It is about only one thing - sound. Ancient wisdom te
Read more

David Munrow - more than early music

Image
'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities.
Read more

Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

Image
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
Read more

If classical music is not live it is dead

Image
'We are the children of our landscape; it dictated behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsible to it. I can think of no better identification' - Lawrence Durrell writing in Justine Over the years I have been fortunate to travel extensively, but my recent extended visit to Morocco was the longest time I have spent on a different continent and in a different culture. With me went an iPod loaded with an eclectic mix of classical, world, jazz and folk music, plus high quality headphones and a pair of the wonderfully portable XMI X-mini II speakers . Now here is the interesting point - as my trip progressed and as I became more atuned to both the physical and cultural landscape of North Africa, I found myself listening to less and less western classical music, and to more and more from other genres. There were exceptions, most notably Bach who transcended landscape. But I was surprised at the change in my listening pattern, and it was a change that had no
Read more

A Philippa Schuyler moment

Image
An earlier post painted a word portrait of child prodigy, pianist and composer Philippa Schuyler. Her music is rarely heard today and difficult to find. So we are very fortunate that John McLaughlin Williams agreed to record her Nine Little Pieces for piano specially for On An Overgrown Path . His recording can be heard via the YouTube video above, and in the article below he analyses her music Philippa Schuyler. Just hearing the name takes me back to a place in my childhood I have not revisited in memory more than a couple of times in decades. Philippa Schuyler’s name was but one of dozens lodged in my parent’s large sheet music library, occupying shelf space alongside the giants and talented lesser lights of our canonic music literature. Even among those lesser lights Schuyler seemed to me an odd duck a the time, for here peering at me from the cover of the sole piece of music by her in our possession was a picture of a seven year old girl of mixed race, rather than an aged, w
Read more