Posts

Showing posts from November, 2013

On An Overgrown Path is taking a catnap

Image
Back sometime in December Insha'Allah . Photo of Sufi cat in the Essaouira souk is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2013. Also on Facebook and Twitter .

Britten looking forward

Image
To celebrate his 50th birthday Benjamin Britten, who was not a fan of anniversary celebrations, was invited to write an article for the Sunday Telegraph . However the result - titled Britten looking back - was not what the newspaper expected, because it was devoted entirely to discussing the creative current that arced between Britten and his teacher Frank Bridge . Transmission - the process by which eternal wisdom passes from teacher to student - has been likened to an electric current arcing from one conductor (electrical not musical!) to another. The master's role is to transmit the teachings that lead to enlightenment, and although transmission is usually associated with Buddhism , it also occur in classical music . In 1963 Britten expressed his dislike of anniversaries when he asked a friend "What's so special about being 50?". So to celebrate his 100th birthday I am not following the well-worn path of eulogizing the man and his music, but instead offer Britte

Everything you want to know about Amazon and Sinfini

Image
Cultural commentator Norman Lebrecht proclaims that he... "dislike(s) everything about Amazon, starting with its immoderation and ending with its dumpbins of good books at penny prices. It renders every writer altogether disposable". So it is worth noting that Sinfini Music directs buyers of its Norman Lebrecht Album of the Week to Amazon. Which renders every independent record store and many record labels disposable . 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).

How classical music painted itself into a corner

Image
My best personal example is that I seem to have developed a resistance to the latest "sensational" pianist/soprano/tenor/whatever. This item provides a convincing rationale. Do I miss something with this attitude? Perhaps ... but if the newest sensation lasts, you usually catch up with them sooner or later anyhow. That comment was added by a regular reader who is part of classical music's core audience to a recent post about classical music shouting too loudly . It highlights how classical music has painted itself into a corner - the core audience which classical music remains stubbonly dependent on is becoming increasingly resistant to the shrill hype of the PR machine, while the long-promised new audience that the hype is aimed at refuses to materialise . Reader Scott provides one example of the growing resistance to hype, On An Overgrown Path provides another. Press releases arriving in my inbox are treated with extreme suspicion and stories covered by Norman Lebre

Pizza and the Wolf

Image
'Peter was a sort of gourmet,' says Elizabeth Sweeting, 'but Ben always liked nursery food.' This consisted of 'herrings, treacle puddings and apple puddings - and his guests got things like that'. Benjamin Britten's gastronomic tastes are revealed in Humphrey Carpenter's authorised biography . The admirable Britten centenary celebrations in Norwich - Our Hunting Fathers was a 1936 Norwich and Norfolk Festival commission - include ' Pizza and the Wolf ', billed as "a unique informal evening of classical music, with pieces you will recognise and remember, including music by Benjamin Britten, enjoyed with pizza!" Given his penchant for nursery food I am sure Ben would approve. But shame about the Wolf/Wulf double entendre . 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 copyri

What classical music can learn from jumping fleas

Image
Received wisdom (though they back it up with figures) amongst the classical music marketers I know is that audiences are no longer persuaded to listen to an unfamiliar work by the presence of an old favourite in the second half - in fact, that the opposite effect now holds good: 5 minutes of new music in a programme will actually deter people from listening to music they already know and like. I have to say that my own observation seems to support this. My recent post about how audiences become what they listen to is given painful relevance by that comment which was added to the Facebook discussion on another post about falling attendances at classical concerts . Richard Bratby made the comment in a personal capacity, but as his day job is senior education and ensembles co-ordinator at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra his wisdom is worth noting. Of particularly concern is that the short-term fix of serving up only music that people already know and like now means that classi

The lost generation of composer sages

Image
News of the tragically early death of John Tavener is followed by an email from John McLaughlin Williams telling me that the neo-romantic composer Arnold Rosner , seen above, has passed away age 68. Rosner was of Jewish descent and lived on the East Coast of the States where his prolific output included operas, symphonies and string quartets. In 2006 John McLaughlin Williams recorded his Symphony No. 5 Missa sine Cantoribus super Salve Regina (Mass without Voices on the Salve Regina cantus firmus ) for Naxos . That lamentably overlooked symphony, which is dedicated to 1972 US presidential candidate George McGovern,  featured in a 2008 post . When asked why a Jewish composer wrote neo-Christian works Rosner replied "In the last analysis, my answer - if not too glib - is: Music is my Religion". Arnold Rosner is part of a lost generation of composer sages whose talents have been buried by venal forces . Let us hope their time will come . Also on Facebook and Twitte

Farewell to composer who championed the inner truth

Image
So much modern music is taken up with the construction of musical jigsaws. I'm not saying, of course, that modern composers do not think about anything other than music. But from my point of view, their music is an idolatory of systems, procedures and notes. If inner truth is not revealed in our music, then it is false. It is one thing to follow a spiritual inclination and another to suppose that the idolatory of 'art' is any sort of realization of the spirit. Those are the words of Sir John Tavener who has died age 69 . My personal measure of a composer's greatness is how often I listen to their music, and, quite unfashionably, in recent years I have spent a lot of time with Sir John's music. Recently I wrote of his links with the perennial wisdom tradition and his The Veil of the Temple - distilled from the eight hour original to a two hour recording - has travelled with me on my iPod effortlessly across state and cultural boundaries; I remember being particul

Why was Marin Alsop's London concert half empty?

Image
I have been attending concerts at the Southbank, recitals and orchestral, since 1969. I can attest to the fact the audience composition has changed little in terms of the preponderance of silver hair over that time... But the saddest thing is the sharp decline in total audience size over the last few years. I have seen this in concerts of all types. I was surprised to see a concert with the Suisse Romande Orchestra and Berekovsky in the Grieg Concerto less than half full. Similarly, the recent Berio/Bernstein concert with Marin Alsop and the Sao Paulo Orchestra again was less than half full. The Zimmermann Ecclesiastical Action concert [ with Vladimir Jurowski conducting and Ein deutsches Requiem in the second half - Pliable ] was less than a third full. These are just a few examples that spring to mind. That is part of a comment added by David Murphy to Does classical music really understand its audience . Elsewhere David describes the once prestigious Queen Elizabeth Hall as:

Concerto for fuselage of unfinished model airplane

Image
With a bow to conductor Leopold Stokowski, a bow to the Philadelphia Orchestra, a bow to the audience in Manhattan's Philharmonic Hall, stocky Kimio Eto adjusted his formal robes and settled before a 6-ft.-long stringed instrument that looked like the fuselage of an unfinished model airplane [see photo above]. He bowed again, and a kettledrum thundered to begin the premiere of modernist composer Henry Cowell's Concerto for Koto and Orchestra , the first concerto ever composed by a Westerner for the 1,100-year-old Japanese instrument. That report is from Time magazine in January 1965 . Japanese born Kimio Eto (1924-2102), who was blind from the age of five, was recognised as a master of the thirteen-stringed koto . Although, to my knowledge, there have been no recordings of Henry Cowell's two Koto Concertos, enterprising independent Cherry Red records has just released an excellent CD transfer of the 1962 Kimio Eto - Art of the Koto: The Music of Japan which includes thr

So you wanted a young audience

Image
Photo was taken at last night's Hare Krishna Festival in Cambridge's West Road Concert Hall, a venue more familiar as the University Faculty of Music's performance space and sometime home of the Britten Sinfonia . A few years ago I wrote about the success of the George Harrison produced Radha Krsna Temple records and suggested classical music could capitalise on the enormous mind, body and spirit market. Now in an admirably informative post about The Rest is Noise festival Jessica Duchen quotes Sofia Gubaidulina as saying "Art is always spiritual, because it springs from the subconscious, intuitive part of the mind... it reconnects us with a higher power, the higher part of our own spirit". More on this in Classical music's $11 billion market opportunity . 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

Classical music is living in cloud cuckoo land

Image
I grew up around the Boston Symphony because my father was in the orchestra. There was a time, believe it or not, when Boston audiences were more interested in music making than celebrity. The great soloists of the 1960s and 1970s were celebrated because of the way they played or the way they sang. People often went to concerts for the program, and the soloist was a special treat. I remember hearing Rudolf Serkin [seen above] play Brahms. There were people who loved the orchestra because they loved the principal wind players. Harold Wright and Sherman Walt, for example, mattered far more than "whomever" was conducting. Bernstein may have been heavily marketed (because he exemplified, at least on the surface, the possibilities of celebrity and the popularlizing of orchestral music), but he genuinely made music. He really was a musical giant. For the Boston Symphony his celebrity was worth the price. Hearing great pianists like Richard Goode and Alfred Brendel play Beethoven

Jazz giant jives to different tunes

Image
An impresario in the broadest and most creative sense of the word, the career of Quincy Jones [seen above] has encompassed the roles of composer, record producer, artist, film producer, arranger, conductor, instrumentalist, TV producer, record company executive, magazine founder, multi-media entrepreneur and humanitarian.. Quincy Jones has been nominated for a record 79 Grammys and won more Grammys than any living musician (27). He produced the best-selling album of all-time (Michael Jackson’s Thriller) & the best-selling single of all-time (We Are the World) and has produced, composed, conducted, arranged or performed on more than 400 albums... With a long history of humanitarian work which began in the 1960’s and 70’s, Jones was one of the key supporters of Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH. In 1985, he pioneered the model of using celebrity to raise money and awareness for a cause with “We Are the World...” - Qunicy Jones official website The Rainbow PUSH Coalition (RPC) is a mul

Classical music is shouting so loud people can't hear it

Image
'And like they say in the East, things have meaning outside the labels or descriptions you might give them. We've got to be conscious of that space. So words should not really be endpoints, but work best as doorways to understanding' - Robert Lax A comment on Classical music must move to the edge of the network asking What exactly is the edge? reminded me of the wise thoughts above. As for words, so for classical music; which too should not be an endpoint, but rather a door to understanding . Classical music can only open that door if it returns to the space at the edge of the network. Because the centre is filled to bursting point with celebrity musicians , entertainment envy , over-paid radio presenters , commercial intermediaries , wunderkind , rock music executives , ethically tainted music festivals , dumbing down , cultural commentators , low-res audio files , Lamborghinis , classical charts , pop-up restaurants , reality TV , avaricious agents , embedded journalist

American Cheese - the cat who never stops smiling

Image
As a counterpoint to reports that the Louisville Symphony Orchestra has appointed a 26 year old music director I offer the good news from Avignon that Wolfgang Zuckermann recently celebrated his 91st birthday and is in good health. Mr Zuckermann - who has become a legend in his own lifetime - played a central role in rehabilitating the harpsichord with his self-assembly kits and influential book The modern harpsichord . During his years in New York Wolfgang Zuckermann supplied instruments to John Cage and many other musicians from his workshop in Greenwich Village. Born in Berlin, he had become an American citizen in 1938 and fought with the Allies in World War II. But in 1969 he sold his harpsichord business and left America in protest against the Vietnam War. After settling in France he became a social activist, environmentalist and, eventually, bookshop owner, and it was in the latter role that I first met him . In the 1990s Wolfgang Zuckermann worked as an editor and research

Classical music must return to the edge of the network

Image
Don't let anyone accuse me of being a luddite when it comes to new technology. I have been professionally involved with the internet since the early 1990, created my first web site in 1995, contributed to the development of electronic commerce in the UK home entertainment market, worked closely with Amazon and other online retailers, consulted on intellectual property management, and have been blogging for almost ten years. But recent posts here have touched on how extended exposure to the internet is rewiring our brains and how online retailing has devastated the specialist independent retail sector . And don't let anyone accuse me of being a lone voice. My 2012 post Is there life after the Huffington Post? - a post incidentally I almost didn't write because I thought nobody would be interested in it - generated one of the largest readerships in the nine year history of On An Overgrown Path . Others believe the insidious influence of the internet goes even deeper and

How the intermediary has become the message

Image
Perfect sound forever was the promise of the digital age, instead we have compromised sound from low resolution audio files . Citizen journalism was the promise of the digital age, instead we have the trolling of crowds on user-generated content sites such as TripAdvisor. More choice in a long tail was the promise of the digital age, instead we have the hegemony of Amazon and iTunes devastating the vitally important independent specialist retail sector . And disintermediation was the promise of the digital age, instead the intermediary has become the message. There is no better example of how the intermediary has become the message than in music writing. After a few blessed years of blogs creating an almost level playing field, the arrival of Twitter and other micro-media platforms has imposed an intermediary layer that now largely controls what music writing is read. In July senior blogger Elaine Fine posted a perceptive piece titled The Gradual Fall of Music Bloggery . Since Ela