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Showing posts from August, 2015

Awesome, what are you listening to?

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When I was a kid, one of my favorite pastimes was listening to music. Seriously, whenever a friend would call and ask what I was up to, more often that not I would say, “Listening to music.” and the response would invariable be, “Awesome, what are you listening to?” and the conversation would go from there. It seems as though listening to music as a ‘thing’ has lost its way. I’m noticing more and more these days that music has been relegated to background noise while cooking or cleaning or working. That extract is from an article on White Noise which echoes sentiments that have been expressed On An Overgrown Path in the past , and which chime with recent musings on changing the way we listen . My current foreground listening includes Decca's retrospective Neville Marriner & The Academy of St Martin in the Fields: the Argo Years . Many of these legendary recordings are familiar to me from their original LP release, and all I can say after auditioning the twenty-eight CD transf

I maintain that music is a pathless land

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I maintain that music is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any new technology, by any celebrity. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Music, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be made a commercial property; nor should any commercial corporation be allowed to control access to music. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to turn music into a mass market product. Music is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a museum exhibit. This is what global media corporations are attempting to do. Music is being dumbed down and made an ephemeral entertainment. Music cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountain-top to the valley. If you want to reach the mountain-top you must pass through the valle

The answer, my friend, is sitting on your shelf

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All the parties involved in music streaming are rapidly coming to the conclusion that it is no more than a short term fix that will not cure the record industry's long term problems. Record companies are realising that streaming means losing control of their precious intellectual property to predatory intermediaries such as Apple Music. Musicians are realising that streaming makes them wage slaves to the same corporate intermediaries. And consumers are expressing their disaffection by remaining loyal to legacy formats that, according to industry dogma, should now be extinct. Yes, streaming revenues have increased dramatically: but the remarkable resilience of CD sales is conveniently overlooked by crystal ball gazers. In the US in 2014 streaming revenues were $1.87bn (up 29% year on year) while sales of 'moribund' CDs were just a fraction less at $1.85bn (down 12.7%). Both of the formats were eclipsed by download revenues of $2.58bn; but sales of MP3 downloads - which w

Why embracing diverse musical traditions is so important

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My essay in the programme book for the Salzburg Summer Festival's celebration of Hindu music and dance contained this little piece of nuanced mischief alluding to a surfeit of Mahler in the mainstream festival: Indian musician Gita Sarabhai declared "the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences"; ragas remain devoted to this purpose, whereas Western classical music has increasingly become a way of expressing existential angst. But, in a powerful example of instant karma, since I wrote that a felicitous dusting of bluesy existential angst has been applied to the raga Vasundhara (Mother Earth) on ' Ragas From Dusk Till Dawn ', a new release from one of my favourite contemporary Indian musicians. I have had the pleasure seeing Debashish Bhattacharya in concert twice; the first time at Les Orientales Festival at Saint-Florent-le-Viel in France prompted a post back in 2009 . Pandit Bhattacharya plays a sel

Composers lost and found

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Audiences need permission to like unfamiliar music . So the typo in that headline is particularly appropriate .

Art in the age of digital reproduction

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You will be amused to hear of a musician who was once invited to play the veena . The musician came and was welcomed. He uncovered his instrument; then he looked here and there, and found some discomfort, some discord, so he covered his veena , saluted, and left. Those present felt disappointed and begged him to play, but his answer was 'No matter what you give me, I do not feel like playing'. This is quite a different thing from making a programme months ahead. The musician in the West is bound six months beforehand to play a certain programme; he is helpless. But in this way it is not music, it is labour, it is done mechanically, Those are the words of Hazrat Inayat Khan written in the 1920s. The veena (also known as vina ) is reputed to be one of the oldest musical instruments still in use, and that is one in my header photo. Hazrat Inayat Khan was a master veena player before becoming the spiritual leader and teacher who brought Sufism to the West. The quote comes from

A fable for our networked age

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A man climbed to the top of the highest mountain, and standing on tiptoe, seized hold of Truth. The Devil, who had suspected mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to follow him. When the demon reported with alarm the man's success in seizing hold of Truth, the Devil was unperturbed. "Don't worry" he yawned. "I'll tempt him to share it on Facebook" That sequel to yesterday's post ' Social media ate my music ' is an update by me of a fable told by the American investigative journalist Lincoln Steffens . The photo of the announcement of the dawn puja was taken by me at the Thiksay Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Ladakh, India. This was the venue for the Scriabin in the Himalayas concert in June, but in the past two weeks the area has been hit by disastrous flash floods .

Social media ate my music

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For some time I have been contemplating writing about the future of music blogging, but a post by Kenneth Woods spares me that onerous task. Although a year old his post ' Facebook ate my blog ' tells it exactly as it is, and it isn't a very rosy picture: Nowadays, what I publish here does little to help other bloggers and instead drives more people through Facebook, Twitter and Google. If I want to promote a new post, the best way to do it is to buy an ad... on Facebook. The game is rigged- the house always wins. All of this has happened without debate, discussion or strife. There has been no resistance because resistance is futile. A revolutionary tool for empowering humanity has been gobbled up by the Borg. Ken laments how Facebook ate his blog. But that is only part of the problem, and I will add to his eloquent critique a lament for how social media ate my music. In his post Ken describes with total accuracy how "Blogging these days is NOTHING without Facebo

That’s because Mozart did not know what a tabla was

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Tabla virtuosos Zakir Hussain is seen playing with the Symphony Orchestra Of India , and the photo comes from a well-informed article titled ' Alaap in C minor ' in the Indian online magazine Live Mint . A very useful perspective on the artificial borders imposed on art music is provided by this story in the article: Last year, Hussain’s brother Fazal Qureshi played the tabla along with a string quartet in a rendition of Mozart’s Divertimento in D, perhaps the first time an Indian instrument had been used in a canonical Western classical piece. “The Western musicians I was playing with were concerned because they said Mozart did not write this with tabla in mind. I told them that’s because Mozart did not know what a tabla was,” Qureshi says. Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo credit Narendra Dangiya. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Let's start a conversation about concert hall sound

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Until recently the reference that reproduced sound was measured against was a live performance, because historically live performances were the way most people listened to music. But today most people listen to music via portable devices using earbuds or headphones. Which means the references have been inverted, and today live performances are judged against reproduced sound . And that is causing a major problem: because reproduced sound differs significantly from that heard in a live classical concert : earbud/headphone sound is louder, has better bass transmission and the sound image is binaural - inside the head - rather than stereophonic - outside the head. This variance between live and reproduced sound may well be a significant factor in explaining why classical music is struggling to engage with contemporary - particularly young - audiences: because audience engagement is the name of the game, and subjectively the sound a newcomer hears in the concert is less engaging than they

What is a performance?

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In January 2013 when raising the problem of metadata quality , I queried Is classical music asking the right questions? Since then the situation has worsened, and classical music has become a community of busy fools who run around asking irrelevant questions about the sex lives of celebrities and whether the Berlin Philharmonic's new conductor has enough media appeal, while ignoring questions crucial to the art form's future. One of these crucial questions is What is a performance? Classical music is not about discrete objects such as celebrities, audiences, and streaming services. It is about a performance, something so intangible, so interconnected and so precious as to be almost indescribable. However, in my view the following passage comes very close to capturing the essential nature of a performance: A master of Balinese dance once expressed the idea that a performer must consciously see himself as a channel between the world within and the world without. If the ego get

One picture is worth a thousand words

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That photo* of Ture Rangström will probably do more to bring his music to a wider audience than anything I can write. However I will offer some nuanced advocacy, but keep it to considerably less than one thousand words. Ture Rangström was born in Stockholm in 1884 and died in 1947. He came to composing late and did not have a formal musical training, although Hans Pfitzner was among those who he turned to for guidance. At the age of 26 he was awarded the Swedish state composer's scholarship and Jean Sibelius considered him "head and shoulders above any other Swedish composer". The young composer met and was influenced by the ageing August Strindberg ; Rangström's three hundred songs include settings of Strindberg and his First Symphony is sub-titled "August Strindberg in Memoriam". Despite the feline-friendly photo, Rangström was considered to be the enfant terrible of his generation of Swedish composers. When his early orchestral work Dityramb was c

Music at the edge of the network

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An old tech adage tells how intelligence moves to the edge of the network. So I propose a new aphorism that in the music industry, as celebrity and money migrates to the centre of the network, so intelligence in the form of creativity and innovation moves to the edge. My recent travels on the network edge have taken me to Milton Keynes to hear Andalusian Sufi music from the Al Firdaus Ensemble , and this weekend to the Southburgh Festival deep in rural Norfolk to hear Gambian kora virtuosos Sefo Kanuteh - see photo - and to take part in a sacred drumming workshop. This summer it was my pleasure to contribute the programme essay for a series of concerts celebrating Hindu music and dance at the Ouverture Spirituelle , the new festival-within-a-festival at the edge of the mainstream Salzburg Summer Festival . One of the Ouverture Spirituelle events was a sold out performance of morning ragas ; those in the UK who like me could not travel to Salzburg can sample similar delights this