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Showing posts from November, 2014

Degenerate music writing

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Rated as a top 15 UK university, the University of East Anglia is also ranked among the elite 1% of higher education institutions worldwide, and its alumni include Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro . In the current edition of Concrete , the University's official student newspaper, there is an article titled What are you really listening to? It is written by the paper's music editor Myles Earle and "delves into how music is used as a propagandist tool". Here, complete with spelling, syntax and other errors, is an extract: Take a look at Germany in the 1930’s; Entartete Musik , or Degenerate Music, a well-known campaign during the Nazi regime, saw to the discrediting of artists and musicians, silencing their music and classing them as harmful by the Third Reich. Nazi sympathiser and Hitler’s preferred composer, Wilhelm Richard Wagner is just one example of someone who was assigned to create operas and music that walked the same path of the Nazi ideology. This anti-Sem

Classical music is peopled with Arabs, Persians and Turks

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Confronted with muezzins, Mecca pilgrims and houris, does anybody think of operas, oratorios and lieder? Yet European classical music is peopled with Arabs, Persians and Turks, and would sound quite different today had it not been influenced by the Orient … That is the opening paragraph from an invaluable essay titled Islam in European Classical Music . It appears on Fikrun wa Fann (Art and Thought) the cultural magazine of the Goethe Institut devoted to dialogue with the Islamic world, and it provides a welcome corrective to the current demonisation of Islam . But are we ready for an Islamic interpretation of Wagner ? Rimsky-Korsakov's Symphonic Suite after "A Thousand and One Nights" Scheherazade in the classic 1959 recording by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Fritz Reiner seen above first featured in a 2008 post . As I said then, it is easy to understand from this extraordinary performance why Reiner was feared and hated by members of his orchestra. It

Is retro really so sad?

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Composer Ivan Moody shared yesterday's post about the renaissance of vinyl on Facebook with the exhortation to "Discuss". To which fellow composer Dennis Báthory-Kitsz responded : "Discuss which? The excellent picture or the sad article? Retro makes me sad, but I like the pretty picture -- a kind of museum". So today I am posting another pretty picture taken on my visit to Holland showing the bike park at Leiden central station. Some may dismiss the scene as a sad museum. Others will see it as impressive evidence of how visionary support for a retro technology - the bicycle - by the Dutch government and populace has resulted in a massive improvement in quality of life. This morning BBC News has run the following story : More than one million vinyl records have been sold in the UK so far this year - the first time the milestone has been achieved since 1996. The figures mark a largely unexpected resurgence in an industry now considered to be dominated by d

Orchestras need to wake up and smell the coffee

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That photo was taken in Concerto Records - a candidate for the best record store in the world - in Amsterdam on Monday. It shows part of the extensive range of new and reconditioned ( Thorens etc) turntables on sale in the store, a range that is complemented by a wide selection of vinyl LPs. High end audio stores have majored on turntables for some time, but their appearance in mass market outlets is significant. The resurgence of vinyl can no longer be dismissed as a fashion fad. No one is suggesting that digital formats will be replaced by analogue LPs. But, as reported here recently , vinyl sales increased by the same percentage (40%) in the first half of 2014 as streaming, and vinyl presses are currently at maximum capacity to keep up with demand. Of course vinyl is fragile and non-portable. But let's drill down below the obvious. Consumers are embracing (re-embracing actually) a music format that defies the 'music to go' movement . They are voting with their wa

Never mind the music, feel the algorithms

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That header photo shows pianist Valentina Lisitsa performing at the 2014 Bristol Proms - yes, there is a piano in there somewhere. As the caption on the Classic FM website explains: "There ain't no party like a Valentina party! Chopin, Beethoven, a crowd-sourced programme, YouTube clips, a Classic FM live blog projected onto the back wall - it was all happening at the Bristol Proms". In a planning meeting for the 1969 Woodstock Festival the festival's co-ordinator of underground advertising Bert Cohen proclaimed : "It's got to be prevalent in your advertising; you're gonna hafta take some of the emphasis off the music and place it on the vibes". Woodstock became a legend, and the emphasis on vibes defined the direction of rock music for decades. Universal Music, which is led by ex-rock band manager Max Hole, is the driving force behind the Bristol Proms , and Valentina Lisitsa's concert (happening?) is an attempt to add rock vibes to classic

Now we rise and we are everywhere

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Blake's poems were a great influence for Nick's lyrics, and the music of J.S. Bach inspired some of his songs. Nick loved the music of Bach, I used to play the 'Badinerie' on flute for him, but he also loved Mozart (the Clarinet Concert was one of his favourites and also the Piano Sonatas KV 331 and 333) and other composers like Schubert, Mussorgsky, Ravel, Strawinsky and Grieg. Apart from classic music we listened to John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Miles Davis, The Band (The Big Pink) amongst many others. That eclectic mix of influences* is the crucible in which Nick Drake's music was forged, and an LP of the Brandenburgs was on the turntable in his bedroom when he died on 24th November 1974 aged 26. That is Nick in the photo above; he was born a year before me, and our paths may have crossed in St. Tropez in 1967 . His music has been a constant in my life for many years: I first posted about him in 2005 and five years later made the pilgrimage to his

I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent

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I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my pursuit after Truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things. Old as I am in age, I have no feeling that I have ceased to grow inwardly or that my growth will stop at the dissolution of the flesh. What I am concerned with is my readiness to obey the call of Truth, my God, from moment to moment, and therefore when anybody finds any inconsistency between any two writings of mine, if he has still faith in my sanity, he would do well to choose the later of the two on the same subject' Those words by Mahatma Gandhi prefaced his writings published by the Navijan Trust . I am posting them On An Overgrown Path as I enter what Gandhi called old age, but which I more decorously call becoming a state pensioner. But the call of Truth still beckons, and in a few days I am off travelling on the path of a master musician and spiritual master who met Gandhi in London in 1914. Hazrat Inayat Khan taught that growing inw

When orchestras used the ash trays on their music stands

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That photo shows the composer Doreen Carwithen at a recording of her music. The image is held by Cambridge University as part of the William Alwyn Archive ; because as well as being a noted composer in her own right, Doreen Carwithen was the second wife of William Alwyn . The caption provides no further information about the - presumably BBC - session at which the photograph was taken, but the sign on the front of the podium asking the musicians to 'Please use ash trays on music stands' is clearly legible. There has been much pleading recently for a higher profile for women composers, so it is strange that a new recording of Doreen Carwithen's 1948 Concerto for Piano and Strings has slipped under the radar. A CD from the independent SOMM label couples Doreen Carwithen's Concerto with piano concertos by Gordon Jacob and Malcolm Williamson - the latter a now strangely forgotten composer who achieved some prominence during William Glock's tenure at the BBC .

Is this the world's most expensive cymbal crash?

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Vociferous complaints of inadequate funding by the classical music establishment are all too often justified . But sometimes it is difficult for outsiders to accept that classical music exists in a state of perpetual penury . An example is the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester's six concert tour to America which has just ended. On Twitter a player with the German orchestra has reported that one of the percussionists on the tour made the 9000 mile round trip to the States and spent ten nights in hotels to play in just two of the concerts. The percussionist's sole contribution at these two concerts was the cymbal crash at the climax of the Adagio second movement - see above - of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. Image of Bruckner score via Loeb Music Library , Harvard. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter .

Horizons untouched

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Sinfini Music - which is owned and controlled by Universal Music - is profiling and puffing the ECM label. Now ECM deserves to be profiled and puffed , but some background is missing from the Sinfini article. So here is my contribution to the ECM profile, taken from a post that first appeared On An Overgrown Path in April 2013 . Such is the degree of control exerted by global music corporations that the most unlikely parties have chosen - or been forced - to form alliances with them. One notable example is the charismatic ECM label which very successful portrays itself as a fiercely independent maverick in a corporate-dominated industry. Yet ECM has a contractual collaboration with Universal Music and its predecessors that dates back to 1976, and today Universal subsidiaries distribute ECM releases in the USA, Canada, France, Germany and Japan as well as in smaller territories. Which means that in many of the world's major markets Universal controls the crucial interface be

I read the news today oh boy

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Eight hours after the story above was published yesterday On An Overgrown Path , the one below appeared on Slipped Disc *. I now eagerly await Norman Lebrecht's exclusive on the performance by the Al-Tarīqah al Gazoulia Sufi brotherhood at this year's Salzburg Summer Festival. * Times of publication can be verified by hovering over the links on Classical Music Alltop . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter .

Does classical music really need a younger audience?

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F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone tells it like it is in Campaign Asia-Pacific magazine : Young kids will see the Rolex [watch] brand but are they going to go and buy one? They can’t afford it. Or our other sponsor UBS – these kids don’t care about banking. They haven’t got enough money to put in the bloody banks anyway. That’s what I think. I don’t know why people want to get to the so-called ‘young generation’. Why do they want to do that? Is it to sell them something? Most of these kids haven’t got any money. I’d rather get to the 70-year-old guy who’s got plenty of cash. So, there’s no point trying to reach these kids because they won’t buy any of the products here and if marketers are aiming at this audience, they maybe they should advertise with Disney.” Image via Uncylomedia . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter .

Pieces of Africa

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That tableau was photographed by me in the inspirational Nubia Museum in Aswan, Upper Egypt. The museum was opened in 1997 in response to UNESCO's appeal to preserve examples of the Nubian culture that was facing obliteration from flooding by the nearby Aswan High Dam. In a parallel mission Hamza El Din celebrated the Nubian culture in music. His iconic 1971 album Escalay (The Water Wheel) was released on the Nonesuch label and influenced American minimalist pioneers including Terry Riley . In 1992 Elektra released Pieces of Africa  by the Kronos Quartet which featured a twelve minute version of Escalay commissioned from Hamza El Din by the Kronos. Pieces of Africa was described by Time as a "potent new brew of folk influences, minimalism, and European forms by eight black, brown, and white African composers" and went on to become the first album to top both the classical and world music Billboard charts. Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo is (c) On An Overgr

That dead moose is back on the Simon Bolivar stage

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In the Guardian Geoff Baker previews his forthcoming book under the headline El Sistema: a model of tyranny? and the sub-head fills in the story: "Far from the shining example of how classical music can change vulnerable young lives many claim it to be, Venezuala’s El Sistema fails the country’s most deprived children". Now, a declaration of interest is needed*: I haven't read El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela as it isn't published until November 28th. But I know that Geoff Baker cites several of my numerouis critical posts about El Sistema in his book. Nine years ago I first raised concerns about the cultural/corporate agenda of El Sistema in a post titled No such thing as an unknown Venezuelan conductor . In this I said: "I also happen to know that fairytales just don't exist anymore in today's world of classical music - except in the minds of PR men and management agencies", and that view is echoed by Geoff Baker who explains that in Ven

Champagne for John Tavener

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That is John Tavener in the centre of a magazine cover from the 1960s . Towering over him* is Arianna Stassinopoulos, who around that time was an item with Bernard Levin . Later she was married to Michael Huffington and went on to found the Huffington Post; after which, happily, there is life . John Tavener left us for the Eastern Orthodox heaven on 12th November, 2013. I had been celebrating our daughter 's birthday that evening by imbibing rather too much good champagne, and only learnt of the composer's death after the party. I have no pretension to being a music journalist, and therefore do not feel obliged to write obituaries for every musician that passes on. But I do write tributes to those enlightened souls who have made my life a little brighter, and John Tavener certainly falls into that category . So, fuelled by Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin Yellow Label, I dashed off the personal tribute to him that was singled out for a special mention by Alex Ross and others. If t

Exotic and free, tight and complex.....

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Amazon reviews are a perfect example of the damage inflicted by citizen journalism . But one reviewer did get it right when they praised the Hadouk Trio's "exotic and free, tight and complex" mix of self-styled 'vegetal groove' jazz and world music. The Trio's name is a conflation of its unique instrumental line up - hajhouj (another name for the guembri of the Moroccan gnawa ) and doudouk ( Armenian flute ). Formed in 1996, the original line-up was Didier Malherbe (doudouk), Loy Ehrlich (guembri) and Steve Shehan (percussion). Didier Malherbe, who spent time in India and Tangiers in the 1960s and sessioned with Ravi Shankar , is the driving force behind the band, and four of their albums from 1999 to 2009 have been brought together by Naïve in the box set above , which retails for the price of four budget CDs. Sample the Hadouk's signature sound here , and Condona, another pioneering jazz meets world music combo, are showcased here . Just for fun I

Today everyone is in the music delivery business

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That photo of the Coptic Cathedral of Archangel Michael was taken when I visited Aswan in Upper Egypt last year. In her book Sufism, Mystics and Saints in Modern Egypt Valerie J. Hoffman describes how the Sufi spirituality of Islam has much in common with Christian Coptic spirituality. In a post last year I described how the Copts believe they are the direct descendants of the Pharoahs, and how the Coptic Church practices not only the oldest Christian music, but also the oldest music in the world. A chain of transmission links the Coptic Church to the Hermetic tradition and the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus. The Hermetic tradition has many links with music; these start with Michael Maier in the 16th century, and burgeoned in the late 19th century to embrace notable figures including Edward Elgar , Rutland Boughton , John Ireland , and Eric Saite . Satie's repetitious Vexations was an influence on John Cage , and the repetitious Sufi-inspired music of Hamza El Din from N

Whereof one cannot speak, Thereof one must be silent

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The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered. For doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only when something can be said . Whereof one cannot speak, Thereof one must be silent. That photo of the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing was taken by me a few weeks ago when driving home across the Somme battlefields in northern France. The Thiepval Memorial was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, and the quotation is from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which was set as a motet by the architect's daughter Elisabeth Lutyens. Nicknamed 'twelve-tone Lizzie', Elisabeth Lutyens is another candidate who meets Alex Ross' criteria of "Instead of trying to invent a female Bach in prior centuries, let’s seek her in the present". Her Excerpta Tractatus Logico-Philosophic

This new CD demands to be listened to time and time again

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' ...our discontentment over being human, with its inherent limitations, is boiling over. Case in point: music is now routinely given a slick, post-production shove toward hyperreality. ...Media have altered musical perspective (e.g., stage perspective, podium perspective, audience perspective, stereo hifi perspective, and in- or over-ear perspective) to such a degree that acoustics developed intuitively over generations (and hardened into convention) to enhance natural sound must now be supplanted by subtle (or not so subtle) amplification and digital processing to satisfy a generation that may never have stepped inside a concert hall and is instead acculturated to the isolating, degraded sound of earbuds and headphones playing back mp3s. Reorienting concert soundscapes and recordings to model immersive, inside-the-head experience (VR tricks the eye in a similar fashion) is promulgated as inevitable if music presenters wish to attract new generations of concertgoers and thus retai

The first prerequisite for listening to music is so obvious

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'The first prerequisite for listening to music is so obvious that it almost seems ludicrous to mention, yet it is often the single element that is absent: to pay attention and to give the music your concentrated effort as an active listener ' That is Aaron Copland writing in What to Listen for in Music back in 1939. Today, advocating tweeting in concerts is considered über-cool, but advocating mindfulness in concerts is considered über-uncool. Which is strange: because icons such as Copland and Cage who are revered by the new, younger target audience, advocated mindfulness. Norman Lebrecht recently disingenuously suggested * that as 100,000 people had read Baldur Brönimann’s proposals for changing classical music , 100,000 people were in favour of tweeting and drinking during concerts. I am not foolhardy enough to suggest that as a Google search for the term 'John Cage mindfulness' returns 991,000 results , there are 991,000 people who believe that mobile phones and d

While Mrs Bach was composing the Cello Suites...

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This little known portrait of JSB in role reversal mode adds weight to the fashionable theory that Anna Magdalena Bach composed the Cello Suites. (For the image's provenance see my 2009 post Bach - an intimate portrait ). However, writing of the Mrs Bach brouhaha, Jessica Duchen asks "Do we really need more tales about women in music who didn't really do things, when there are so many who did, provenly so, but are not recognised for it?", while in the New Yorker Alex Ross expresses the admirable sentiment that "Instead of trying to invent a female Bach in prior centuries, let’s seek her in the present". Among Bach's many glories is his (her?) organ music; so in response to Jessica and Alex, and in justification of my participation in the Mrs Bach clickbait fest, I am drawing attention to the music and life of Jeanne Demessieux. Born in Montpelier, France in 1921, Jeanne Demessieux was a child prodigy who at the age of twelve was appointed principal

It's official - mindfulness increases audience engagement

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'Attention can be modified. It doesn't have to be done chemically or by changing the environment. Human beings have the capacity to learn to self-regulate their attention, and when you do that it increases the quality of typical, everyday experiences. Listening to music mindfully can be a powerful way of increasing your quality of life. We really found significant increases in the participants' aesthetic and flow experience. Some were intense. They were really in the zone.' That quote comes from University of Oregon assistant professor Frank Diaz . A link to his research was added by a reader to my recent post about how all the fashionable audience engagement initiatives do precisely the opposite to what is intended, because they generate distractions and degrade the listening experience. In a paper that appeared in the journal Psychology of Music last year, Frank Diaz reported how he empirically measured an increase in focused engagement among student participants wh

Run Before Lightning

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This is why the internet connection was so painfully slow in the house that we rented in France recently. Run Before Lightning is a work for flute and piano by Jonathan Harvey which provides the title of an excellent CD of Jonathan's music by the Dynamis Ensemble . No review samples involved in this post and the snail was not eaten.Despite the escargot we thoroughly recommend the gites at Le Clos St Michel outside Malaucène. Also on Facebook and Twitter .