Posts

Showing posts from March, 2013

If science and technology could eliminate our problems...

Image
If science and technology could eliminate our problems, we would need to question, why have religion? Especially as religion sometimes sows more hatred than the contrary. But material development alone cannot solve our problems, and so we need a religious tradition. But if a restaurant serves one kind of food at all times it would soon have no customers. Our task is to reduce conflicts between the traditions which already exist. His Holiness the Dalai Lama spoke those words at the opening of the Gethsemani Encounter in 1996 . This historic gathering brought together fifty Buddhist and Christian monks and nuns at the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Trappist, Kentucky. It was the Dalai Lama who suggested the meeting should be held at Gethsemani, the spiritual home of the celebrated advocate of inter-religious dialogue Thomas Merton , who he had met shortly before the latter’s death in 1968. Writing in his book Keeping Faith – A Skeptic’s Journey Among Christian and Buddhist Monks Fenton

My elaborate lie of soaring crosses and poisoned thorns

Image
Then let us compare mythologies I have learned my elaborate lie of soaring crosses and poisoned thorns and how my fathers nailed him like a bat against a barn to greet the autumn and the late hungry ravens as a hollow yellow sign. From For Wilf and His House by Leonard Cohen . My soundtrack is Sofia Gubaidulina's Sieben Worte (Seven Words) for cello, bayan and strings from the recommended Naxos CD of her chamber music . Exploring myths and telling stories are at the heart of both poetry and classical music... Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo of sunset at Agadir, Morocco 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).

Does it serve the music or does it serve the ego?

Image
On February 29th 1960 an earthquake destroyed the Moroccan city of Agadir killing more than fifteen thousand people. All the buildings in the old city ( kasbah ) near where I took this photo were destroyed, and there was extensive damage to buildings in the port area seen in the middle distance. But the domed 17th century mausoleum of the Sufi marabout (holy man) Sidi Bouknadel seen in the foreground miraculously survived, with the mosque and minaret being added after the earthquake . At the core of Sufism is the belief that when a person displaces the lesser, egotistically oriented self, the greater or Universal self is revealed, which in turn allows contact with the Divine, and there is much that Western art music can learn from this thinking. When critiquing the current debasing of classical music the epithet ‘dumbing-down’ is often used , a description that plays into the hands of the revisionists due to its connotations of elitism. In fact dumbing-down and the associated ob

Music to listener or listener to music?

Image
Taking the listener to the music via a seat in an acoustically satisfying concert hall or a high fidelity recording is central to the classical music experience. In the early 1930s Harvey Fletcher at Bell Telephone Laboratories anticipated stereophony and demonstrated the principle of listener to music using the multi-channel ‘curtain of sound’ seen above - left click to enlarge. The 'curtain of sound' worked on the theory that if multiple microphones are placed in front of an orchestra, and loudspeakers are placed in identical positions in a different room with each microphone feeding a corresponding speaker, the sound image captured by the curtain of microphones will be faithfully recreated by the curtain of loudspeakers. As the theoretical optimum of an infinite number of channels between microphone and loudspeaker was impractical, the minimum number of channels needed to create a credible stereo image was determined by experiment. Interestingly in view of the use of

‘Tis the gift to be free

Image
That photo was taken in Tamraght and shows yours truly with our friend Hassan from the ‘ free people ’. Away from the tourist honey pots Morocco still delights and seduces, but there is increasing evidence of political colonialism being replaced by cultural colonialism. Concern has been expressed here as to how “Western artists travel to countries in the East and the South that possess rich musical traditions… they collect music, repertories and musicians from there and return to fructify this godsend in the privileged world of the well-off West”. But the fructifying also works in reverse, with Moroccan musicians increasingly aping Western styles: just one example is the new CD Alwane from oud master Nahil Khalidi which deploys saxophone and string bass in a refined example of ‘elevator taqsim’. This cultural colonialism meant that, ironically, some of the most authentic sounds we heard on our travels in Morocco came from my iPod. These included Les Imazighen [Berbers or ‘free peop

Classical music as storyteller for the digital generation

Image
My photo shows a halaka , or storyteller, in the Jemaa el-Fna in Marrakech. Every evening there are several halakis continuing the time-honoured oral tradition of storytelling in this great public space. They are true performance artists who attract large local audiences of all ages in a society where adult illiteracy is still high, and in Morocco over the centuries halakis have played an important role in communicating knowledge traditions. Novelist Reynolds Price described how “a need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens … it is second in necessity after nourishment and before love and silence… millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence”. But, despite this, technology and cultural change are threatening the halakis of Jemaa el-Fna , and, in the same way, technology and cultural change are threatening classical music. In ancient cultures such as the Moroccan Amazigh words have magical powers, and classical music has the same m

Talking of dumbing-down...

Image
And there is a lot more that is Sinfini unbelievable . My image is remixed from a cartoon by Tim Bird that comes via the Sinfini website , while Tim's own website is here . 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). Also on Facebook and Twitter .

Essential sticky classics

Image
That image is an outtake from my recent post Why classical music needs to be sticky , and to create it I remixed the artwork for the LaSalle Quartet’s survey of the second Viennese school. This was originally recorded for Deutsche Grammophon in the 1980s, but has been re-issued at budget price by Brilliant Classics – the un-remixed artwork is here . Forget about Max Hole's snake oils of alternative venues, etiquette-free concerts, informal dress, cartoon websites etc etc . To enthuse a new generation of listeners, classical music simply needs to shout from the rooftops that £12.22 buys four hours of some of the greatest - and stickiest - music of the 20th century. But how ironic that although Universal Music owns these recordings, a smart independent label is left to do the shouting. No review samples were used in the preparation of this post. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis on