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Showing posts from January, 2013

The buildings in which you play are seen as forbidding

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Now let me try to understand this one more time... Universal Music’s chief executive Max Hole tells us that classical musicians “need to think about the way they dress, and to appear more excited and engaged” and “the very buildings in which they play are often seen as forbidding and not places many people think they’d be comfortable entering”. So to reach a new audience Decca TV promotes a CD of traditionalist nuns decked out in habits singing Gregorian chant in one of the most forbidding and difficult to enter places on earth, the monastic enclosure of a cloistered religious order - see image above from Decca promotional video . And the label then follows the best selling Voices: Chant from Avignon with the album below sung by a Franciscan friar in full fig . Is it me or is it them? If you want your music dressed-down, exciting and engaging but still with a monastic connection, you must look beyond Decca and the other corporate labels. French independent Editions Hortus has

The practice of engaged classical music

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The biomedical system, the predominant approach to illness in the West, has done an excellent job of making people believe that the most effective (and often the only) way to treat mental illness is with medications. But you don’t often hear about the horrific side effects of these medications, sometimes worse than the symptoms they are intended to treat, and the fact that drug prescribing is still essentially a guessing game. You don’t hear about the conflict of interest in having psychotropic drug research funded by pharmaceutical companies with a huge financial incentive to generate certain findings. The biomedical model, with its focus on biological causes, also tends to cut off dialogue on other conditions that can affect mental health. A number of ex-patients whom I interviewed found that medications were beneficial to them at some points in their life, but felt that there should be awareness that it may obscure the deeper, social dimensions of the problem. That is an extract fro

Remixing Japan

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When did Orientalia, the New York bookstore that fuelled the appetite of John Cage and many others for the Far East, close? Google, for once, fails to provide the answer , and I ask because in 1978 I stumbled across a store in New York that sold books about the Orient that were almost impossible to find in London at the time. Could the store have been Orientalia? Or had it long closed? Buddhist author and teacher Stephen Batchelor explains that "A Zen garden can say as much about what the Buddha taught as the most erudite treatise on emptiness", and in that New York store - Orientalia or other - I found a book on sharawadgi‏ - borrowed scenery - that started a longterm fascination with the 'pure land' of traditional Japanese gardens and the culture that created them. Like many in the 60s the counterculture had led me to Indian mysticism . But my searches led me further East to Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, which I visited in the 1980s. There I experience

Do classical music's big new ideas have real substance?

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Readers will know that On An Overgrown Path is not frightened of new ideas , and in the past I have travelled many of the paths explored in the recent presentation to the Association of British Orchestras by Max Hole, chairman and chief executive of Universal Music – the company that owns Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, EMI, ECM and many other classical labels. However I am coming to the conclusion that it is almost impossible to support persuasive rhetoric about dismantling concert hall conventions – which form the bulk of his recommendations - with case studies of successful implementation. Which doesn’t necessarily mean his ideas are wrong, but it does mean they must be treated with a lot of caution. My own journey has also brought me to the conclusion that the biggest and brightest idea we have is the music itself. So we should stop apologising for the way we present our sometimes challenging but always inspiring music, and instead be much more confident and bold in the way we p

Where late the sweet birds sang

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Visited post-administration HMV . Love high street record stores . But my local HMV is a harsh and uninspiring browsing environment. There is no evidence of personal musical journey, no shared dream, no positive progress and no satisfaction. Read Universal Music supremo Max Holes’ presentation to the Association of British Orchestras . Love new thinking . But he is advocating reactive innovation without support of statistics or successful case studies and oblivious to impact on vital core audience franchise . There is no evidence of personal musical journey, no shared dream, no positive progress and no satisfaction. Deeply moved by Where late the sweet birds sang with Magnificat directed by Philip Cave on Linn . Love Tudor church music. But these are little-known Latin settings from Robert Parsons, Robert White and William Byrd in new editions by Sally Dunkley . As Sally explains in her sleeve note: Considering and compiling this recording is something that has occupied my

Classical music as an antiques roadshow

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’In Spring 2013, as part of the BBC’s commitment to music programming, BBC Radio 3 and the [National] Trust will present six live concerts and a live drama placing baroque performance in its historical context. The concerts will be presented by Radio 3’s Katie Derham , who will be joined by the Antiques Roadshow’s Lars Tharp during intervals to offer a fascinating insight into the Baroque connections at each house.’ 'Incredible as it may seem, melody, the absolute essence of Western music, has long been a mere relic for the immense majority of modern composers. This observation, obvious to any self-respecting music lover gives a fairly reliable idea of the tack taken by Contemporary Music Art, in significant accordance with one of the darkest periods humanity can remember in reference to Art and Culture. The indisputable fact that, nowadays, melody is nothing more than a scarecrow in contemporary musical creation shows the very decadence of Contemporary Music, which judging by t

Before mobile ringtones there were air raids

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That archive document from my collection details the concert played by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler on January 22 and 23 1945. It was held in the Admiralspalast theatre in Berlin which the orchestra had moved to after the Philharmonie Hall was destroyed by bombs in November 1943. The footnote explains that on January 23 only the first two movements of the Mozart symphony were played. This was presumably due to interruption by an air raid as Berlin was under heavy attack at the time. In an age when a mobile phone ringing in a Mahler symphony causes a Twitter firestorm it is impossible to imagine what concert going was like for the audience and musicians at the time. Below is a 1944 British intelligence map from my library used by Allied bomber aimers for their night raids - the strategically important buildings are marked in black. I have added the Admiralspalast as a red square to show its vulnerable position: directly across Friedrichstraße is a major ra

Why louder classical music is better classical music

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In the frantic search for classical music’s new audience the importance of dynamic range – the variation between quiet and loud passages – has been curiously neglected, possibly because the mechanism of hearing is little understood. If a listener is played the same piece of music twice on identical replay equipment at two different levels (volumes), he/she will judge the louder of the two auditions to be “better” quality. The explanation lies in the non-linear frequency response of the human ear which is plotted on the diagram below (source J.Crabbe Hi Fi in the Home ). The curved shape of the lower line in the diagram marked ‘Threshold of hearing’ shows how as the replay level increases the range of the human ear increases, meaning that extreme highs and lows become audible; this gives the music more impact and makes it sound “better”. The human ear’s non-linear frequency response is why rock music is compressed. Applying compression to music decreases the dynamic; this both raise

Who needs a conductor?

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Not the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment according to that listing in the Independent's i edition. And if you think the omission of a conductor credit is down to a sub-editor take a look at the BBC Radio 3 website listing below. This presumably originated from the same misguided BBC marketing department which still believes that minor media celebrities wearing candy striped shirts attract new audiences . Presenter Martin Handley not only receives the fashion shoot photo treatment but he is also billed above the musicians, while conductor Adam Fischer is literally bottom of the pile. Principal artist at the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is a certain Simon Rattle and I have been wondering for a long time if classical music is asking the right questions . Instead of debating who will conduct the Berlin Philharmonic in 2018, shouldn't we be speculating on which BBC Radio 3 presenter will front the new maestro's broadcast concerts and what they will be wearin

A symphony a day keeps the doctor away

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Prescribed self-help books are an effective treatment for depression is the conclusion reached after a field trial in Scotland. BBC News reports how patients offered books, plus advice on how to use them, had lower levels of depression a year later than those undergoing conventional medical treatment. A consultant in adult psychiatry states that the results show that guided self-help is effective and the health care sector should be investing in it. With music therapy gaining acceptance and advocacy for guided self-help increasing, classical music must seize the opportunity. In July 2011, following emergency hospitalisation and surgery , I wrote about the CDs that should be in every medicine cabinet , while another post that year linked classical music and the feel good factor , and a more recent one discussed how music therapy and other non-chemical tools can build neurochemical bridges between spiritual guidance and conventional psychotherapy . There are a number of composers whose

I find no evil - but causes and conditions aplenty

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Mali , Algeria and other North African countries have featured On An Overgrown Path many times over the years. The CD above from Tuareg-Berber band Tinariwen featured in a March 2012 post about the music of the region and the new unrest in Mali , and at the time I wrote “Despite widespread coverage of the Libyan and Tunisian uprisings, events in North Africa are otherwise neglected by the North American and European media”. More recently in a post about Algeria I wrote "But outside France there has been little interest in the anniversary [of the Algerian civil war], despite the link between the failed colonial ambitions of Western European countries in North Africa and the topical Arab Spring". Now the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson has written “Until a few days ago, the vast majority of British voters had never heard of Mali (let alone the Sahel) nor could they - or indeed I - have placed it on a map. Now, I suspect we are all going to have to learn a great de

Niche work if you can get it

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Contradicting yourself is healthy, or at least that is what I am going to plead. So, having made an Olympic sport out of denigrating Twitter I will now read much significance into the level of Twitter activity generated by yesterday’s post about Claude Vivier . Rightly or wrongly Vivier is a marginal figure, yet the Twitter activity triggered by my piece surpassed that generated by articles about more mainstream composers. And it was not just the quantity that was impressive, the Twitter users that spread the word about Claude Vivier carry considerably more weight in my book than the self-styled cultural commentators who earn a living biting the industry that feeds them . But I really should not be surprised at the level of interest in that marginal post, because it simply confirms the mass market fallacy. Classical music is just an agglomeration of niches , and the smart way to sell it is to target the niches and forget about the non-existent mass market . And talking of niches,

Claude Vivier - disorder, chances and momentary beauty

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It is fair to say I am not a huge fan of composer anniversaries , but one such event in 2013 does need highlighting. In these sensitive times I presumably should recount how French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier – seen above - passed away on March 12, 1983. But instead I will use plain English and say he was murdered on that day by a male prostitute who he had invited into his Paris apartment. At the time of his death Claude Vivier was exploring a new and important world of sound - he was a pupil of Stockhausen but came increasingly under the influence of the French spectralists . However it is unlikely we will see celebratory cuff-links or very much of his music programmed this year. But the good news is there is some, and on May 2 the Philharmonia Orchestra are giving a concert of Vivier’s music comprising two works - Et je reverrai cette ville étrange and Trois airs pour un opera imaginaire . On the podium is the multi-talented and multi-cultural Kwamé Ryan and the pres

Bach triumphs over bite

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Our outside thermometer here in Norfolk, UK plunged to minus 10.9 degrees Celsius last night. But with Jordi Savall's heart-warming new recording of the B minor Mass on the stereo who cares? Also on Facebook and Twitter . No review samples were involved in the preparation of this post. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Goodbye HMV and hello digital era

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People long for the light, and that’s what the books in my store do. They shed light in time of darkness. That’s why a bookstore is the place where heaven and earth meet. Those are the words of George Whitman , founder of the famous Shakespeare & Co bookstore in Paris, and I took that photo of his store a couple of years ago. Today comes the news that the HMV music retail chain in the UK is appointing an administrator . In recent years HMV stopped taking classical music seriously, but for many of us serendipitous discoveries in their flagship Oxford Street store were part of our musical education. As self-appointed cultural commentators speculate on who will head the Berlin Philharmonic in 2018 we are told to step into the digital era and stop buying CDs . But what will classical music look like in 2018? Are we right to accept the loss of bricks and mortar retailers and the death of the CD as an inevitable consequence of new technologies? Are we confusing progress with intellectu

Listening with the ears of the heart

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The room in which this book is being read is filled with radio waves bearing every kind of programme from all parts of the world. To become aware of what is present one must construct an efficient receiver, select adequately, and receive in an unadulterated form which is not complicated by alien oscillations . That quote from Husein Rofé's The Path of Subud dates from 1959 but provides food for thought in our age of mobile computing. Rofé was an early advocate of the Subud Movement, a tradition founded by the Indonesian teacher Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo in the 1920s. Subud sprang from esoteric Islam - as did Sufism - but it also embraces elements of Buddhism and shares aspects of Gurdieff's 'Work'. Today Subud is a global ecunemical movement following the ancient tradition of seeking internal enlightenment - gnosis - as opposed to depending on externally imposed dogma. Recent experiments with fine tuning my personal receiver and selecting adequately have le

Goodbye to Berlin

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‘A master of Balinese dance once expressed the idea that a performer must consciously see himself as a channel between the world within and the world outside. If the ego gets in the way, the channelling is reduced.’ That will most definitely be my only comment about Simon Rattle’s departure from the Berlin Philharmonic and the speculation surrounding his successor. The quote comes from Living Presence by Kabir Edmund Helminski ; the author is a Sufi teacher but his wisdom spans several esoteric traditions – as Jan Garbarek observed “I live in a spiritual neighbourhood around the world”. Benjamin Britten was one of a number of musicians whose spiritual neighbourhood included Bali, and I wrote about that connection in Britten’s passion for the East . Another was Colin Mcphee who took the header photo of a child dancer in Bali. McPhee was a friend of Britten and the two composers recorded McPhee's transcription of Balinese ceremonial music for two pianos in New York in 1940. Four

Pricey Grimes

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Monday 17 June 2013 Aldeburgh Festival Grimes on the Beach ... Tim Albery directs an outdoor realisation of Peter Grimes that places the audience directly in its setting – on the beach... The same musical team as the concerts will perform with the singers amplified and the orchestra recorded from the earlier Festival concerts ... Please note this performance is outdoors, uncovered and most of the audience will be seated on the beach. There will be limited bench seating... In the event of severe weather, the performance may have to be postponed to the following evening... Bench seating £75 Sitting on the shingle £50, £40, £20 - from 2013 Aldeburgh Festival brochure . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Header photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2013. Any other 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 etc to

Messiaen takes a trip

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Examples of erroneous classical music metadata abound. In a recent post I noted how Amazon categorises Edith Canat de Chizy’s lyric drama Tombeau de Gilles de Rais as ‘Classic Rock’. And now I notice that Keith Jarrett’s improvisations for solo organ Hymns - Spheres is listed by them under ‘Concertos for orchestra’ . In a 2011 post about ECM’s CD release of Spheres I wrote “it is a mystery why the label have never transferred the complete original [LP] release to CD as, for me, it is one of the best things Keith Jarrett has ever done”. Now ECM have done the right thing and re-released the complete Hymns - Spheres on 2 CDs , restoring the English Hymnal meets Gurdjieff Hymns that bookend Jarrett’s ‘Messiaen takes a trip’ improvisations in Spheres . Recorded in 1976 on the larger of the two Joseph Riell baroque organs at the Benedictine Ottobueren Abbey in Bavaria, Hymns - Spheres saw Jarrett breaking all the rules and creating new sounds by pulling organ stops part way out. Son

The lady is a record producer

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EMI's Vernon Handley Icon five CD set is truly a box of delights. Among the many and varied pleasures is the appearance of Beatrix Musker as producer of Tod's recording of Sir Arthur Bliss' Edinburgh overture with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. There have been some notable women producers working in classical music - Mercury's Wilma Cozart Fine immediately springs to mind. But, like much else in the industry , producing and engineering classical records remains male dominated. Beatrix Musker was assistant to illustrious EMI staff producer Christopher Bishop in the 1970s and worked with him on many great recordings with artists such as Sir Adrian Boult . After Christopher Bishop moved on to manage the Philharmonia and then Royal Scottish National Orchestra Beatrix produced a number of recordings for EMI including the Bliss. Tod was something of a lady's man and would have approved wholeheartedly of her appearance in EMI's retrospective of his

The silences of sound

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'A biologist has suggested that dolphins communicate with each other not through sound itself but through the length of the silences between individual sounds.' That comes from Toru Takemitsu's programme note for his November Steps for biwa , shakuhachi and orchestra, which was a New York Philharmonic commission in 1967. More silences of sound here . 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