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Showing posts from December, 2015

Why do we still not believe in Negro symphony conductors?

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Four years ago an Overgrown Path post recounted how in the 1950s classical music super-agent Arthur Judson told the African American conductor Everett Lee " I don't believe in Negro symphony conductors ", and another post described how Rudolph Dunbar died in 1988 a forgotten and marginalised figure, despite becoming the first black conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic . That is Rudolph Dunbar in the photo; the Guyanese musician - who was a friend of the controversial child prodigy Philippa Schuyler - was a talented conductor and an outstanding clarinetist, who in 1939 wrote the standard work on the instrument, the ' Treatise on the clarinet (Boehm system) '. Despite achieving considerable success on the podium, Rudolph Dunbar's career faltered and stalled, and another post discussed allegations that a senior figure in the BBC had derailed his career , allegations that were subsequently supported by an authoritative source . Arthur Judson stigmatized Negr

That’s the state of the record business

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And as Norman Lebrecht tells us in another post, that’s the state of the record business , end of 2015. Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Classical music and the catastrophe of abundance

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Examples of what Andrew Keen in The Internet is Not the Answer terms 'the catastrophe of abundance' abound in classical music. Incontrovertible statistics show that demand for classical music is declining . Despite this, supply continues to increase - orchestras and record labels offer more and more free music via downloads and streaming , London wants to build a new concert hall a few hundred metres from a perfectly serviceable hall built in 1982, and anniversary composers are programmed in catastrophic abundance . The problem is obvious - there is too much classical music *. Yet there is not the slightest recognition within the classical industry that increasing supply in a declining market is a recipe for disaster. If any more evidence is needed of this lemming-like march to the abyss, it is the agenda of the forthcoming Association of British Orchestras' conference . Not a single mention of oversupply or excess capacity in the supply chain, but a presentation by th

Reddit before going to bed

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In a crowning irony, what should have been the first day of unremarked hibernation for On An Overgrown Path turned out be by far the biggest readership day in the eleven year history of the blog. Reddit - which promotes itself as 'The front page of the internet' - is an entertainment, social networking, and news website curated by its readers. On Christmas Day my post from January 2006 about - of all things - the concert given by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra on 28th March 1945 in beleaguered Berlin was featured in ' Today I Learned ' on Reddit. The result was truly spectacular - in 24 hours that single article was read almost 11,000 times. Above is the header image from the featured article showing Berlin in 1945, below is the blog's readership graph. Those 24 hours of social media fame should have me chaffing at the bit to repeat my triumph; but I am afraid that isn't the case. In Web 2.0 the network rules; which means the network judges. Rereading

Roll up! Roll up for the magical mystery tour!

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The first regular coach service from Europe to Asia started in 1957. For almost a decade the ‘ Indiaman ’ made the 10,000-kilometre journey from King’s Cross in London to Bombay and Calcutta. It was soon joined by the legendary ‘Magic Bus’ , leaving from Dam Square in Amsterdam, and by other coaches running from the Porte d’Italie in Paris via Frankfurt, Munich and Salzburg and across the Middle East to India. In the 1960s and 70s these transcontinental coaches provided the route to the Orient for a new generation of independent travellers who were variously called the Beats, Intrepids and Hippies. There were two main motivations for these 20th-century Intrepids to undertake the long and sometimes hazardous overland journey to India: the first was a growing disenchantment with Western values; the second was a fascination with the spiritual traditions of the East. One of the legacies that the Intrepids left was musical, with Bob Dylan, the Byrds, the Beatles and the Grateful Dead amon

Mawlid at Abbey Road

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This year Mawlid - the Muslim festival celebrating the birth of the Prophet Muhammad - falls just before Christmas*. It is a Muslim tradition to perform nasheeds - sacred vocal music - at Mawlid. In 2004 the British nasheed group Shaam recorded the album seen above in the famous Studio 2, Abbey Road , which was the venue for historic recordings by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush and many others. Other nasheed albums in my library include Chants du Mawlid by the Sufi group Taybah from a city close to my heart, Avignon . Both albums are notably well presented: Taybah's Chants du Mawlid has extensive French documentation which includes exquisite Arabic calligraphy - see artwork below - while Shaam's Mawlid at Abbey Road is accompanied by an erudite essay by the British Muslim Timothy Winter (Shaykh Abd’ al-Hakim Murad), who is dean of the Cambridge Muslim College , and director of studies, Wolfson College, Cambridge . In his essay Timothy Winter draws parallels between

A synthesiser orchestra of Wagnerian scale

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Because On An Overgrown Path is not a slave to the review copy treadmill , my listening and reading is not fixated on new releases*. However, several books that I read this year were new publications. Given Philip Glass' high profile, it is surprising that his autobiography Words Without Music has not received more attention. Glass writes very well, and his syncretic take on art music with its memories of Ravi Shankar and other cross-tradition musicians is refreshing. However, I found the later chapters like much of Glass' later music - too repetitive and predictable to hold my attention. Unlike several other commentators, I found the anthology The Other Classical Musics edited by Michael Church disappointing. Its attempt to cover all the world's music in one book using different authors is worthy; but, like a taster menu in a Michelin restaurant, it tantalises but frustrates in equal measure. Why an overview of the other classical musics should devote a chapter to Euro

Why you should never believe music industry experts

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Writing my recent post about David Munrow brought back amusing memories of the Indian summer of analogue sound. When I was at EMI in the late 1970s a respected critic repeatedly criticised the sound balance of new classical releases that we knew were sonically top-notch. So an engineer was despatched from Abbey Road Studios to check out the critic's system. When he arrived at the hack's house he found two long speaker leads from the stereo amplifier. One loudspeaker was in the study, the other in the adjacent living room, so the journalist "could write reviews in either room". Critics were not the only culprits: a senior figure in EMI's classical division complained of distortion on white label pressings. When an engineer checked out the home system of the senior executive - who wielded a lot of power in the classical industry - he found a large lump of plasticine stuck to the tone arm headshell "to keep the needle in the groove". Then there was the

The unacceptable and arbitrary control exercised by Google

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Yesterday's post about the removal from YouTube of John McLaughlin Williams playing Philippa Schuyler's music lamented the totally unacceptable and arbitrary control that Google exercises over our lives. My online protest against the removal of the video - which was accompanied by a formal appeal to YouTube - quickly received significant support. Within twelve hours of the protest going online the message above was received from YouTube. No apology or explanation has been offered by YouTube for what John McLaughlin Williams described on Facebook as "an embarrassingly craven and undeserved act of censorship". In one of the supportive comments added to my protest, composer Kevin Scott describes Philippa Schuyler as "a complex and intriguing American woman". The frightening thing is that John McLaughlin Williams' important contribution to the study of Philippa would have remained arbitrarily censored if On An Overgrown Path - and that includes its rea

Young, gifted, black and inappropriate

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Since 2011 two posts about Philippa Schuyler On An Overgrown Path have reached a very wide audience. One is a portrait by me of the controversial child prodigy, pianist and composer and the equally controversial treatment of her by the American establishment. The other post featured an embedded audio file of a performance of Philippa Schuyler's Nine Little Pieces for piano recorded specially for the blog by John McLaughlin Williams , together with a written analysis of the pieces by John. Unfortunately the hosting service used for the audio file has become defunct. So yesterday I uploaded the nineteen minute audio file to YouTube, together with the image seen above, an edited version of the introductory paragraph to my biographical article, and links to the two posts. Within an hour I received an officious email telling me that the YouTube community had flagged the video as inappropriate, and, after reviewing the content, they had determined that it violated their Community G

What makes a good performer?

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'A bad performer wants people to say how good he is. Good performers want people to say how good people are' - Robert Lax Kurt Masur, who said “I don’t want to be called a ‘wonder', the wonder is the music” died on December 19th 2015 aged 88. The quote comes from Robert Lax's introduction to his poetry cycle The Circus of the Sun . 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 .

Is this Mahler's Eleventh Symphony?

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Back in 2005 a post here looked at the 20th century music that Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted with the Berlin Philharmonic. Among the forgotten composers that Furtwängler programmed was Walter Braunfels, whose music featured in two Berlin Philharmonic concerts in the pre-National Socialism years of 1924 and 1925. Walter Braunfels was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1882. He studied music in Vienna and Munich, and converted to Catholicism in 1918. In the 1920s he achieved considerable success both as a pianist and composer; with the opera Die Vögel (1920) among his early successes, followed by a Te Deum in 1922. His Grosse Messe , modelled on Beethhoven's Missa Solemnis , followed in 1927, and received frenzied applause and lengthy ovation at its premiere in Cologne. But Braunfel was soon to fall from favour: his half-Jewish bloodline marked him out when Hitler became Chancellor, and in 1933 he was dismissed from all official offices and denounced as a composer of Entartete Mu

Another composer from the twilight zone

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Any Bernstein performance from the archives is noteworthy. But what makes this 2008 double CD from Radio France's Ocora label particularly noteworthy is the coupling of the premiere of '24 Préludes pour Orchestre' by the Romanian composer Marius Constant (1925-2004). Olivier Messiaen, Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger were among his teachers, and he was a member of Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète . Today, Marius Constant is remembered, if at all, for the title theme for the TV series 'Twilight Zone' . Audiences need permission to like unfamiliar music and classical's twitterati should be playing a much more proactive role in granting that permission for composers such as Marius Constant. Those who have hijacked social media for self-promotion should note Leonard Bernstein's wise words* that: "We don't sell music, we share it". Audition Marius Constant's '24 Préludes pour Orchestre' via this link

Sinfini Music and collateral damage

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Seen above is an August 2013 post On An Overgrown Path. Now comes the following news from Norman Lebrecht*: "[Sinfini Music] has told contributors it will cease commissioning new material from the end of this month. Past material will remain online, but we understand from sources within Universal that the site will migrate to Berlin in the New Year to become the English-language component of the Deutsch Grammophon [ Lebrecht's misspelling ] site. The idea of an independent online classical magazine hosted by Universal [ Lebrecht's oxymoron ] quietly expired". Sinfini Music brought native advertising - removal of the crucial Chinese wall between editorial content and advertising - to music journalism. It gave journalists permission to remorselessly promote both corporate and personal interests under the cover of independent writing . And it was a major force in turning music journalism into a cesspit reeking of self-interest. Unlike Sinfini contributors Norman Leb

Early musician who could have become a great conductor

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Hopefully at least a little of the content from eleven years of On An Overgrown Path transcends the virtual noise that is the staple fare of online music journalism today . For me the most rewarding projects have been the Philippa Schuyler and Master Musician of Jajouka doubleheaders, the profile of Guyanese conductor Rudolph Dunbar , the exploration of contemporary modal music , and interviews with Jonathan Harvey , Jordi Savall , Ali Keeler , and with David Munrow's recording producer Christopher Bishop. Although the latter interview has been available as a sound file it has not to date been transcribed as text. So while tidying up loose ends I have transcribed the interview below. (The photo at the foot of the article was taken during the radio interview and shows me with Christopher Bishop). Although David Munrow is best known as an early music authority the interview ranges widely. Christopher Bishop mentored both Riccardo Muti and Andre Previn early in their careers