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Showing posts from February, 2016

Who's afraid of the big bad wordsmith?

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Kudos to Tommy Pearson and Simon Toyne for speaking out against Norman Lebrecht's irresponsible publication of the candidate shortlist for the directorship of the BBC Symphony Chorus. Following an outcry this Slipped Disc 'exclusive' was subsequently deleted without explanation, and without public apology to the candidates whose careers may have been compromised by this audience-whoring indiscretion. I am now waiting for reaction to Lebrecht's impropriety from the industry PR executives and other attention seekers who feed him with the oxygen of exclusives, and the reaction of his erstwhile employer the BBC. I also await comment from his colleagues in the UK music bloggers' mutual admiration society, and from the rest of the classical music establishment. But I am not holding my breath . 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

Where have all the varieties of musical experience gone?

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Much of my recent listening has been devoted to the 17 CD anthology The Music of Islam . It is a measure of the ideological traps surrounding art music that my opening sentence and header graphic will have sent many readers clicking off to safer ground. And the danger of those ideological traps is highlighted by the sad fact that this post would have reached a far wider audience had it been devoted to one of the more fashionable causes currently preoccupying music's champagne activists . But for those readers that remain, I would point out that in an interview Alex Ross explained how he kept William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience on his desk for philosophical guidance, because the book "shows the way out of ideological traps and abysses". And it is surely no coincidence that at this desk Alex wrote The Rest is Noise , the seminal guide to avoiding the traps associated with the appreciation of 20th century art music. William James ' was a leading pr

We're black the other eleven months of the year as well

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On Feb 20th Kirk Smith conducts the Houston Symphony in a Black History Month concert celebrating the African American contribution to music. Which is good news . But, as John McLaughlin Williams comments in an email: "Kirk Smith is to be congratulated on helming a concert with a major American symphony this month. But the only thing detracting from this is that it is a Black History Month concert. I hate it when they trot us out in February for obligatory lip-service to diversity, as I like to say that we're black the other eleven months of the year as well. A concert in any other month would be true diversity ". In the video Kirk Smith conducts the the St. Petersburg State Symphony in the Andante cantabile from Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. 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 .

Classical music must connect with the head-fi generation

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In the editorial for the February 2016 edition of Stereophile John Darko describes how headphone listening has taken the audio market by storm. In the early-adopter Japanese market headphone-only retailers now dominate the hi-fi market: the bi-annual Fujiya Avic Headphone Festival fills six floors of a Tokyo hotel, and the leading retailer ' e-earphone ' - that is their store in the photo - is rolling out an ambitious store opening programme. In fact headphone listening is now so big that industry talk of 'hi-fi' has been replaced by talk of ' head-fi '. Even the terms 'headphones' and 'ear buds' are passé, with the neologism 'in-ear monitors' (IEMs) highlighting that quality and not portability defines this new category, and the importance of the big-spending and young head-fi generation is reflected in Sony spinning off an IEM offshoot Just Ear . As has been discussed here previously , headphones provide a totally different - more in

Who needs a designer concert hall?

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A recent post suggested that anyone who thinks I am overstating the disruptive impact of technology on classical music should use journalism as a case study. This view was vindicated by the announcement a few days later that the Independent newspaper will cease publication of a print edition . I also pointed out that the response of the London Symphony Orchestra to disruptive technology, surplus capacity, and faltering demand is to increase capacity by building an expensive new concert hall - aka museum of sound - for their designate music director Simon Rattle. Debate continues as to how Sir Simon should be provided with the hall he feels he deserves ; which reminds me of this story about one of his illustrious predecessors in Berlin. Herbert von Karajan was conducting at the same Bayreuth Festival as Hans Knappertsbusch. Backstage in the Festspielhaus there were just two lavatories at the end of a long corridor. Karajan's personal secretary, it is said, put a notice on one

Nusrat dropping ecstasy

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That image by the Indian graphic artist Dharmesh Prajapati is titled Nusrat Dropping Ecstasy 2 . It is one of the visuals referenced in a new biography of the great qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan by ethnomusicologist Pierre-Alain Baud . Far more than a chronological biography, Nusrat: The Voice of Faith is a valuable exploration of how art can interact with culture. Above all, as the title tells us Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (NFAK) was the ecstatic voice of faith, with a programme note for a 1993 concert in Paris describing his art as "religious fervour taken to the highest level of musical madness". He was an adept of the Chisti Sufi order , and his music blazed with Sufism's ecstastic love for the Divine. But there was no fundamentalism in his faith: his beloved Qawwali has its sources in a synthesis of Islam and Hinduism, and his musical madness crossed all geographic boundaries. Pierre-Alain Baud describes how, despite supporting the Muslim League during the Part

Some things need to be challenged

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Seeing that spike in Overgrown Path site traffic triggered by yesterday's post Classical music has more than one glass ceiling reminded me of this quote: Rebellion is not always bad. Some things need to be challenged. The minority is often right. There is something built into us that should not be quenched - something that won't always go along with the status quo . Creativity is sometimes born of rebellion. Yes, there is the well-known negative side to rebellion; but complacency in the context of abuse or exploitation is unacceptable. And if we constantly squelch in others and within ourselves that quality of rebellion, the results are stunting . Quote comes from the idiosyncratic self-published memoir God Helped Us Smuggle Hash by Pepper Sweet. No review sample involved in this post. 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 .

Classical music has more than one glass ceiling

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Two things depress me about classical music's treatment of musicians of colour. One is that they are so seriously underrepresented. The other is that there is so little concern about that underrepresentation. Many posts have appeared On An Overgrown Path about this lamentable situation . The most recent was titled Why do we still not believe in Negro symphony conductors? It pointed out that in more than 2500 Promenade concerts in London there have been just three black conductors, giving a 0.002% minority representation. These statistics generated virtually no interest, yet alone righteous indignation. Which contrasts very sharply with the media feeding frenzy that surrounds the appointment of women conductors. And please don't accuse me of political incorrectness. The historic underrepresentation of women in classical music is also a cause for great concern. This blog was one of the first to raise this issue in a post ten years ago titled BBC Proms 2006 lacks the eternal

Classical music has a new audience but nobody noticed

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Yesterday's post described how the tanbur master Ostad Elahi was lavishly praised by Yehudi Menuhin and Maurice Béjart, despite never appearing in public or making a commercial recording. There is a strong case for arguing that the power and purity of Ostad Elahi's music came about because of, rather than despite, a lack of commercial exploitation. It can also be argued that Western classical music can learn much from this Persian jurist, spiritual seeker and master musician who died more than half a century ago, and who never performed before a conventional audience. Art music and its cousin Western classical music evolved from sacred music created by Hildegard of Bingen and other early composers for no audience other than God. Over the centuries classical music morphed from being a privileged means of communicating with the Divine, to communicating with a less-Divine and more human audience. By the 20th century it had become accepted that this human audience would exhibi

Master musician who never performed in public

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Any musician whose playing prompted Yehudi Menuhin to declare "Never had I heard anything like it... I could hardly believe my ears", and who was described by Maurice Béjart as "The greatest musician I had ever encountered in my life" deserves our attention. And they are even more deserving of that attention when we realise that this remarkable musician never performed in public and never made a commercial recording. It was Ostad Elahi who prompted these accolades. He was born in western Kurdistan in 1895, and his father was a senior figure in the Ahl-e-Hagg [Fervents of the Truth]. This mystical order is found among the Perians, Kurds and Turkmen of Iraq and Iran, but is also found as far afield as the Yemen. The order is related to the Yazidis of Iraq, who are currently in the news because of their persecution by ISIS, and to the 'Alawis , to which the beleagured Assad regime in Syria adheres. The Ahl-e-Hagg is categorised as a heretical strand of Isl

Wanted - an audience of innocent ears

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That is Cecil Lytle in the photo above. In any discussion of the piano music composed jointly by Georges I. Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann, the focus invariably falls on the mercurial Gurdjieff , with de Hartmann consigned to the role of amanuensis. But in Cecil Lytle's essays that accompany his recordings of the complete piano music of Georges I. Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann made in the late 1980s while he was on the music faculty at University of California, San Diego , Lytle turns the spotlight on Thomas de Hartmann. Born in Khoruzhivka, now part of Ukraine, Thomas de Hartmann was a graduate of the Russian Imperial Conservatory of Music, and studied conducting under Felix Mottl in Munich. In 1906 his four-act ballet La Fleurette Rouge  [The Pink Flower] was performed in Moscow and St. Petersburg, with Vaslav Nijinsky, Anna Pavlova, and Michel Fokine dancing principal roles. A close friend of Alexander Scriabin, Thomas de Hartmann was also close to Wassily Kandins

In search of the lost orgasm

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"It’s great when patrons share your content and events on Facebook but if you don’t have an image that conforms to Facebook’s recommended practices, you can end up lowering your conversion rates thanks to the share dialog pulling an ill-suited image" ~ orchestra business expert Drew McManus explains how orchestras can level up their Facebook share dialog game . "I have one question, will it give me an orgasm ?" ~ Leonard Bernstein explains his criteria for deciding whether to conduct Mahler’s reconstituted Tenth Symphony . 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).