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Showing posts from September, 2014

Why classical radio must change or die

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Reaction to Alan Davey’s appointment as controller of BBC Radio 3 has been predictably facile. The Guardian fulfilled its role as part of the BBC PR machine with a sycophantic piece by arts editor Charlotte Higgins titled Alan Davey: why Radio 3 have hired well in this former punk enthusiast . It takes a lot to reduce me to tears of laughter, but Ms. Higgins assertion that “Within the BBC itself, audience figures are not the main priority for Radio 3” certainly had tears of mirth rolling down my cheeks; as did her assertion that Alan Davey’s appointment was justified by the size of his CD collection. In the opposing camp, Norman Lebrecht’s outpouring of vitriol suggests that the designate Radio 3 controller dented Lebrecht’s Rolls Royce in the Arts Council car park at some time in the past; either that or Lebrecht craved after the post that Davey was appointed to. Among the fence sitters, the self-styled Friends of Radio 3 used the appointment of a new controller to express - fo

Thought for the future

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When one comes to think of it one cannot help feeling that nearly half the misery of the world would disappear if we fretting mortals knew the value of silence. Before modern civilisation came upon us at least six to eight hours of silence out of twenty four were vouchsafed to us. Modern civilisation has taught us to convert night into day and golden silence into brazen din and noise. What a great thing it would be if we in our busy lives could restore into ourselves each day for at least a couple of hours and prepare our minds to listen to the Voice of the Great Silence . The Divine Radio is always singing if we could only make ourselves ready to listen to it, but it is impossible to listen without silence … ~ Mahatma Gandhi Photo was taken by me in Ladakh on the Bailey bridge crossing the Indus river approaching the Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Stakna which can be seen on the hill ahead. The bridge is so narrow that cars have to fold in their mirrors to cross it! Any copyrighted m

When classical music danced to the rhythms of Mother India

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Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Kaikhosru Sorabji and John Foulds may seem unlikely bedfellows. Elgar and Holst have achieved global recognition if not acclaim, Sorabji has a small but select cult following , but Foulds lingers in the twilight zone between cultism and global acclaim. However, as recounted in an earlier post , the four composers are brought together in Nalini Ghuman's newly published Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination,1897-1947 , because they share the cultural influence of colonial India. The accompanying photos capture the exotic and esoteric mysticism of a sacred tantric ritual in northern India, and the culture of pre-partition India permeated the English musical imagination via Theosophy, an esoteric philosophy that made this kind of exotic Eastern mysticism fashionable for Western dilettantes long before the Beatles visited Rishikesh. Among those attracted by Theosophy were John Foulds (1880-1939) and his wife the violinist Maud M

In concert halls expectation and experience must diverge

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That header image comes from Fritz Lang 's 1943 film Hangmen Also Die! which was scored by Hanns Eisler . My recent observation that classical music needs to see the light attracted a lot of interest. A useful perspective on that exploration of how in an increasingly multi-sensory age, classical concerts remain a mono-sensory experience, is provided by R. Murray Schafer 's observation that to plot a sensory experience such as classical music accurately, the use of two senses is necessary. To date the laudable experiments with adding a visual component to classical music have focussed on making the imagery compatible with the music - Grand Canyon vistas to accompany Grofé etc. But R. Murray Schafer suggests that visual counterpoint, rather than visual compatibility is the way forward: In discussing the prospect of the sound film Sergei Eisenstein noted in 1928: 'Only a contrapuntal use of sound in relation to the visual montage piece will afford a new potentialit

Doggie mandala

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Photo was taken by me at the Tibetan Buddhist Hemis monastery in Ladakh . The visual link to Jonathan Harvey 's Body Mandala can be found here and the esoteric link to Le Sacre du Printemps can be found here . Photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2014. Also on Facebook and Twitter .

What is the sound of no audience clapping?

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Of the Akhmatova Requiem of 1979, I certainly thought when I wrote it, 'this is the best of me' (as Elgar said about The Dream of Gerontius ). I do not think that now, but I still think it's a key piece... The Akhmatova Requiem is extremely monumental in character. It lasts an hour, with soprano singing almost uninterruptedly throughout, with the exception of the bass solo intonings of Orthodox prayers for the dead... Gennadi Rozhdestvensky conducted it superbly at the première... He chose to perform it for his last concert as chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, first at Edinburgh on 20 August 1981 and then seven days later at his farewell concert at the Proms in London. In the event the tomblike structure of the piece was just too much for the audience and there was a mass walk-out. I was sitting there beside Father Sergei Hackel [who collaborated on the text] feeling extremely uncomfortable as many of the audience walked past me. Curiously, although it was u

Ravi Shankar's embryonic opera is surprise success

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Our tradition teaches us that sound is God- Nada Brahma . That is, musical sound and the musical experience are steps to the realisation of the self. We view music as a kind of spiritual discipline that raises one’s inner being to divine peacefulness and bliss. An auspicious coincidence meant that after writing about the teaching of Nada Brahma a few days ago, I heard Ravi Shankar speaking the words above yesterday evening in an archive film. The footage was part of David Murphy's introduction to excerpts from Ravi Shankar's unfinished opera Sukanya . David Murphy was a pupil of Leon Barzin , assistant to Sir Charles Mackerras at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and English National Opera, and a longtime collaborator with Ravi Shankar. His technical credentials in both Eastern and Western music may be impeccable , but David Murphy's involvement with Eastern traditions has stll earned him t he sobriquet of the 'yogic conductor' . In 2010 David Murphy conduct

Spare us Lebrecht's Scottish fantasia

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John Purser's book seen above tells the story of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (BBCSSO) from 1935 to 1987, and covers in detail the attempt in 1980 by the BBC's London management to disband the orchestra. The story of how that decision was overturned following a strike by all the BBC orchestras and support from leading musicians including Colin Davis, Pierre Boulez and Carlo Maria Giulini has been told here before . Over the years I have also recounted how , when I lived in Scotland during the 1980s, the BBCSSO played its heart out for its Stirling audiences at the Macrobert Arts Centre. Among the memorable performances I heard there was a Sibelius Sixth Symphony with Charles Groves, a Walton Viola Concert with a very young Nigel Kennedy and Mahler's First Symphony, conducted, if my memory is correct, by Jerzy Maksymiuk. More recently, as readers will know , I have spent much time with the BBCSSO recordings of music they commissioned from Jonathan Harvey, includin

Assume all technology guilty until proven innocent

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The photo above generated quite a bit of interest when it first appeared here a couple of months age. It was taken at 15,000 feet on one of the highest roads in the world and shows the Tibetan Buddhist monk Kenrap-la listening to Jonathan Harvey's Body Mandala . When I took the photo we were approaching Kenrap-la's monastery at Thiksay at the end of the 800 km drive across the Himalayas from the Gangetic Plain of northern India to Ladakh on the border of Tibet. Body Mandala was playing on my iPod Classic, and it had been ripped from an NMC CD bought in independent retail store Prelude Records . As readers will know , my listening model is a large CD/vinyl collection that is selectively ripped to portable media for mobile listening. It is a hybrid model that is used by a lot of people, and the listener is not the only winner, because the musicians get a fair royalty, independent record stores stay in business , and the listeners have control over the music they listen to

Nada Brahma - Sound is God

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It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig

Beware of classical music's new silly conventions

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Speaking at the recent Salzburg launch of Deutsche Grammophon's Discovery classical music streaming app DG president Mark Wilkinson asserted that "The digital audience is our audience". If we leave aside concerns that the Discovery app - £2.59 a month to access more than 450 albums - will destroy rather than creates financial value , Mark Wilkinson's sound bite requires closer study. Speaking in a 2010 radio interview with me , the composer Jonathan Harvey said, quite rightly, that "nobody should be deprived of classical music, least of all by rather silly conventions, which we all tend to think are sacred". But in the intervening four years since that interview, the debate about classical music's silly conventions has been hijacked by a small but vociferous lobby that advocates abolishing a narrow range of concert hall conventions to further their own commercial agendas . This lobby is led to Universal Music's Max Hole, who has been dining out fo

Confused by music streaming? So is the record industry

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In my post Classical music sales - separating fact from fiction I made the appeal that "there is a shortage of objective data on this subject... if the professional analysts know better please tell me, and I will publish corrections". Dave MacDonald, whose activities include the excellent SoundNotion.tv , responded to my appeal with some very illuminating inside information which highlights how fact has become inextricably fused with fiction in the music industry. Below is my further commentary prompted by Dave's input, and, once again, expert corrections are welcome. My earlier post attempted to identify how important music streaming by services such as Spotify is in relation to sales of albums in conventional CD/download formats. Nielsen SoundScan reported 118 billion music tracks accessed by paid-for streaming in the US in 2013, and I applied the download average of ten tracks per album to convert this to an equivalent of 12 billion albums accessed by streaming

This digital fixation is damaging live classical music

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A personal view: the fixation to "digital" solutions in the world of (performing) classical music continues to be a damaging distraction - partly because the economic realities are so little understood or examined. Digital streaming has been shown to destroy, rather than create, financial value in recorded music: and when I read comments from "music lovers" describing how they'd rather spend money on the Berlin Phil digital concert hall than on tickets to hear their own local live performances, I start to wonder if it isn't damaging the financial value of live performance as well. And yet it's received opinion in the sector that "digital" is the miracle technology that will save the finances of flagging promoters and ensembles - though no-one can say precisely how. It stems from incomprehension: I'm reminded of the adage about "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". In parts of the classical musi

Introducing Britten's heir apparent

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Some of us received news of Roger Wright 's appointment as chief executive of Aldeburgh Music with trepidation . The PR photo released announcing his arrival in Aldebugh has done little to change that. Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

What if it's really avant-garde and rubs me the wrong way?

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Defending the decision to cut new music from television relays of Proms, a BBC spokesperson has explained that : "...the Proms team and the commissioning editor have to bear in mind the audience and that newer works are often less familiar to them". Which reminds me of the following passage from Jesse G.L. Stewart's biographical quest R. Murray Schafer and the Plot to Save the Planet . The conductor, Kazuhiro Koizumi , takes to the stage. From the audience's reaction, it's clear that conductors enjoy celebrity status in Japan. I'm interested to see how this conductor will handle Murray's music. And how will I handle it? I was moved by his music in last summer's forest production but Murray's symphonic work is new to me. I like classical music but what if it's really avant-garde and rubs me the wrong way? What would I say about it? What would I say to Murray about it? I suspend my worry and remind myself of words once spoken to me by a teache

Classical music sales - separating fact from fiction

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Sales of recorded classical music are an important measure of the health of the art form. Yet, despite this, there is a paucity of informed and objective commentary on the sales trends. Instead industry commentators such as Norman Lebrecht offer quick and dirty comments such as: "Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s Bach on DG follows with 211 sales... that’s in the whole of the US market of 314 million people". Predictably, Alex Ross offers a more level-headed commentary in his New Yorker article The Classical Cloud , but it strikes me that some background data would usefully complement coverage of classical music sales elsewhere. So this post presents an objective analysis using data for the US market, in an attempt to separate fact from fiction. In the US total album sales - all genres - increased by 7.7% from 2012 to 2013. This category of 'total album sales' includes physical product, downloads and streamed content from outlets such as Spotify, with streamed tracks conver