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Showing posts from October, 2014

Jordi Savall's bold gesture leaves me puzzled

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Jordi Savall has refused Spain's national music award the prestigious Premio Nacional de Música - which is worth 30,000 euros - because of his objections to the Spanish government's arts policies. Readers will know that I am a huge fan of Jordi Savall , both as a musician and a humanitarian. But his refusal of the Premio Nacional de Música leaves me puzzled as well as pleased. In a few weeks time - as seen above - Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI present a specially commissioned musical tribute to the 14th century traveller and diarist - "voyager of Islam" - Ibn Battuta in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi. Jordi's concert is promoted by Abu Dhabi Classics, and his musical depiction of Ibn Battuta's from Morocco (where the traveller was born) to Afghanistan is being given just one gala performance at the Emirates Palace on November 20th . There appears to be an exclusivity agreement with Abu Dhabi Classics as Hespèrion XXI's schedule s

Listening with the ear of the heart

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Mysticism is older than religion; in fact it is as old as mankind. Listening to music can provide a range of experiences from the entertaining to the ineffable, and at the highest level listening to music can be a mystical - which is very different to religious - experience. There are many great traditions of mystical music, and the music performed at Sufi rituals is one of those great traditions. In recent years there has been a revival of interest in mystical art music, possibly as a reaction against the attempted annexation of Western classical music by the entertainment industry . Sufi music ranging from the chants of brotherhoods from al-Ándalus , through electro-Rumi in Istanbul and esoterically inspired jazz in Aleppo , to Qawwali at the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia in Delhi has featured On An Overgrown Path over the years. I was therefore delighted to be commissioned to write the programme essay accompanying two performances of Sufi chants by an Egyptian brotherhood a

How long can classical music ignore the glaringly obvious?

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Celebrated Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csiszentmihalyi argues that flow is a mental state of immersive and exclusive concentration that at the highest level can trigger mystical experiences - the state where nothing else seems to matter. Mihaly Csiszentmihalyi explains that music reduces psychic entropy by organising the mind of the listener, and he defines psychic entropy as the disorder generated by information that conflicts with and distracts from the carrying out of priority intentions. Extending his theory of how music reduces psychic entropy, Csiszentmihalyi proposes that greater rewards are open to those who learn to make music , and that even greater rewards can accrue to the great musicians who extend the harmony they create in sound to "the more general and abstract harmony that underlies the kind of social order we call civilisation". One of my own modest priority intentions was fulfilled recently when I heard one of the Chemiriani dynasty of Persian mus

We all make mistakes

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Norman Lebrecht recently asked * whether Forbes is aware that Barrett Wissman, who is writing arts reviews for the magazine, has a fraud conviction. Which prompts me to ask if Sinfini Music ( aka Universal Music ), to which Norman Lebrecht contributes reviews and interviews , is aware that subsequent to a civil action being brought in London's High Court of Justice in 2007 alleging "inaccuracies" in the text, Lebrecht's publisher agreed to recall and destroy all copies of his book "Maestros, Masterpieces & Madness"? Here are extracts from the New York Times report : The book, “Maestros, Masterpieces & Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry,” was released in Britain in July. [ Naxos founder Klaus Heymann ] sued the publisher, Penguin Books, in the High Court of Justice, saying the book wrongly accused him of “serious business malpractices” based on false statements. He cited at least 15 statements he called

What music was broadcast on the day you were born?

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That is Edmund Rubbra at the piano in the photo above. Mark Berry , who writes the authoritative Boulezian blog , has added a comment to my post about the first interview with designate BBC Radio 3 controller Alan Davey . In his comment Mark strongly disagrees with Alan Davey's view that the Third Programme - the predecessor of Radio 3 - had brought no 'context' to works. Coincidentally, I have been playing recently with the beta release of the addictive BBC Genome which lists the programmes for every day of broadcasting on the Third Programme/Radio 3 and all other BBC radio and TV channels. The game of choice on BBC Genome is to find out what was broadcast on your birthday; with auspicious synchronicity the Third Programme opened at 6.00 pm on the day I was born with a programme of unspecified new music played by the Rubbra-Gruenberg-Pleeth Trio comprising Rubbra with William Pleeth (cello) and Erich Gruenberg (violin). The main works of the evening were Purcell'

New BBC Radio 3 supremo is off to a bad start

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The first public statement by BBC Radio 3's new controller Alan Davey - seen above - offers little hope for the classical station's future. In an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme Davey dismissed the station's poor Q2 2014 listening figures saying: "It's one quarter's listening figures we are talking about". Which was a very unwise thing to say: as just hours after saying that the Q3 2014 figures were published and were even worse. Total listener hours for Radio 3 were down year-on-year in Q3 by a disastrous 9.2%, while benchmark station Radio 6 Music increased its listener hours in the same period by 15.5%. Alan Davey's faux pas is particularly surprising as his Today appearance was stage-managed by the BBC PR department, and the BBC would have been aware of the appalling Q3 Radio 3 performance before the interview, as they are briefed by RAJAR - who compile the audience data - ahead of its public release. Davey's statement th

Did he jump or was he paid to jump?

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The charm offensive by BBC Radio 3's new controller Alan Davey has started with the full support of the mighty BBC PR machine . But there are still important unanswered questions about the departure of his predecessor Roger Wright, who is seen above. Something was not right about Roger Wright's move from the BBC to Aldeburgh Music. The BBC press release gave no reasons for his departure; however by omission it gave the clear impression that the Radio 3 controller had found a better job and would be following the standard procedure of working his notice and departing. But much that I admire Aldeburgh Music it does not make sense: Roger Wright is an ambitious guy and his dual BBC role of controller Radio 3 and director Proms was far more powerful and prestigious than ceo Aldeburgh Music; in fact at the BBC he probably had the most important job in classical music. It was also difficult to understand the financials: Aldeburgh is one of the better funded classical institutions,

How many protests against the death of an orchestra?

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I find protests against the Metropolitan Opera's production of The Death of Klinghoffer disturbing. I also find the threatened closure of the Ulster Orchestra - an invaluable ensemble praised in posts including What price the Simon Bolivar roadshow? - disturbing. And I find the imbalance between the abundant coverage in both the music and mainstream media of classical music's problems in New York, Atlanta , Minneapolis etc and the sparse reporting of the looming tragedy in Belfast disturbing. 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).

Borrowed landscapes and borrowed music

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'Borrowed Landscape' ( shakkei ) is the Japanese garden design discipline that imports 'foreign' landscapes into local environments, and the borrowed landscape of Les Jardins du Loriot at Venansault in France featured in my 2012 post The sound of 4' 33" . Shakkei is also practised by architects to import landscapes that are foreign in geographic or temporal terms. My photos show the Medina in Agadir , southern Morocco created by the architect Coco Polizzi in the early 1990s to provide the city with a traditional artisan's quarter after the original kasbah was destroyed in the disastrous 1960 earthquake . Composers also utilise borrowed landscapes, among many notable examples are Britten whose Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra borrowed Purcell, and Stravinsky who borrowed music wrongly attributed at the time to Pergolesi for his ballet Pulcinella . Stravinsky's chamber concerto Dumbarton Oaks is an example of the neo-baroque, a style th

Change the celebrity musicians, not the audience

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Elsewhere the dead horse of changing concert hall conventions is being given another futile flogging . Has it not occurred to anyone else that concertgoers applaud between movements to add some spontaneity to the perfectly manicured and totally lifeless performances that are the stock-in-trade of the new generation of youthful maestros? Has it not occurred to anyone else that audiences bring drinks into concert halls because today's unadventurous and uninspired concerts are best experienced through an alcoholic haze? The sociologist Emile Durkheim posited that to redefine a convention you must first break that convention. Classical music revisionists preach that to attract new audiences, concert hall conventions must be broken. This doctrine may, or may not, contain some truth. But what is certain is that breaking existing concert hall conventions is simply part of Emile Durkheim’s process of redefinition, from which a new set of conventions - which coincidentally often serve

Keeping my head in the clouds

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Shall I share with the world the ten pieces of music I'd rather not hear again, or the ten pieces I'd like to hear more often? Should I widen my horizons by reading about the ten pieces a celebrity maestro won't conduct again? Perhaps I should boost On An Overgrown Path 's readership by starting a new thread about the ten most stupid things to do on social media? Or should I continue to sit here on a remote hillside drinking in the view of Mont Ventoux seen above - it has been a vintage year for mountains - while reading Satish Kumar's autobiographical You Are Therefore I Am . It's no contest: because as Satish Kumar , who was a Jain monk for nine years, explains: Most religions believe there is one truth, and the wise speak it in different ways. But the Jain perception is that reality is multi-centred. Each person, each tree, each flower, is a centre in an infinite universe. There can be neither one centre nor one truth. No monism . Also on Facebook and Tw

Noise kills thought

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'Don't crack your whip so terribly. Noise kills thought' - Nietzsche in Also Sprach Zarathustra My photos show Rudy Ricciotti 's new Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (MuCEM) in Marseille, which is where this post was written. Coincidentally, or maybe not, the museum, with its mix of Eurupean and Mediterranean visual cues, stands on the waterfront from where that great transcultural traveller Isabelle Eberhardt departed for Algeria . Travelling is currently taking precedence over blogging; so I won't be cracking my whip for a while. Also on Facebook and Twitter .

Technology reveals information but annuls perception

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No iPod and no headphones in that photo, instead I am listening to what Mahatma Gandhi so eloquently described as the Divine Radio . The photo was taken this morning and I am walking on the GR 4 hiking trail near Beaumes de Venise. Of course the scenery is breathtaking; but so is what R. Murray Schafer termed the soundscape - the sounds of the immersive environment. The very low ambient noise level in this unspoilt region means that sound carries for miles, and a distant dog barking becomes an aural event. Today we found ourselves on a ridge midway between Sainte-Madeleine and Notre Dame de l'Annonciation as the bells at both monasteries announced Sexte; the result was the camponological equivalent of the timpani duel in Nielsen's Fourth Symphony. No iPod and no music streaming is no problem at such a time, because as composer, educator and visionary R. Murray-Schafer tells us: "technology annuls perception as much as it reveals information". In 1973 Murray-Sch