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Showing posts from September, 2016

Elemental in effect - a great symphony of the 20th century

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That rock formation was photographed by me in the Zakros Gorge in the remote east of Crete where I am currently staying. The gorge is known as the Valley of the Dead because of the Minoan cave burials that have been discovered there. After hiking through the gorge yesterday I read John McLaughlin Williams' astute observation on Facebook that Arnold Bax's Fifth Symphony is “elemental in effect.... this is one of the great symphonies of the 20th century”. Bax's Fifth is clearly influenced by Shostakovich without being derivative, just as the symphonies of Malcolm Arnold – the tenth anniversary of whose death has just passed - are influenced by both Mahler and Shostakovich . Contemporary audiences appear to have an insatiable appetite for both Shostakovich and Mahler ; yet the cartel of celebrity musicians, agents and concert promoters that controls classical music does not give audiences the opportunity to hear Bax and Arnold. If classical music really wants to expand

Art music is going to the dogs

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An earlier post gave a heads up to Ross Daly and Kelly Thoma 's benefit for street dogs, and now here is the poster for the concert. For those in barking distance of Heraklion who don't read Greek, the concert is on October 4th at 21.00h in the Manos Hatzidakis Theatre and admission is just 5 euros. 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).

A dog is a musician's best friend

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That photo shows Cretan music legend and contemporary modal master Ross Daly with some of his five dogs. All are former street dogs that Ross and his partner in music and life Kelly Thoma have taken into their home – there is an ex-street cat as well. I took the photo a few days ago in the grounds of Ross' Labyrinth music co-operative in Houdetsi, Crete. At the beginning of October Ross and Kelly are playing a concert in aid of the street dogs of Heraklion. Two musicians at the top of their game play a fund-raiser for stray animals; it's a different world here on Crete, and sorry, but I think it's a better one . 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).

I design gardens with music

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Zen has cast its influences on figures as different as John Cage and Toru Takemitsu . Takemitsu was working in a Western musical language, but, like a Japanese novel translated into English, his compositions contain something different. Takemitsu said he only uttered 80 per cent of any idea, in what could be construed as powerful understatement; the rest is silence, the pregnancy of the unsaid, ma . Ma , a profoundly important concept in Japanese culture, is the silent understanding when friends are together, or when one is contemplating nature or art - when meaning is intense but nothing is expressed. That is Jonathan Harvey writing in his book In Quest of Spirit: Thoughts on Music . In Japan the silent contemplation of nature reaches its apogee in the art of Zen gardens. Buddhism came to Japan from China via Korea in the 7th century, and the first known garden designed on Buddhist principles was created in 618 by a Korean immigrant Roji-no-Takumi. In this pioneering garden

The music we write about deserves a wider audience

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It is ironic that my recent post on the decline of music blogging attracted a record readership. Unsurprisingly my trenchant post was assiduously ignored by the high profile blogs, despite generating so much interest elsewhere. But others ventured where the grandees feared to go. Cambridge University Library houses among its many riches the papers and manuscripts of William Alwyn , one of numerous neglected composers who have been championed On An Overgrown Path over the years. Writing on the Cambridge University Library blog MusiCB3 Margaret Jones observes that: "Blogging is dead? Well, perhaps not just yet. It can be an unexpected way into academia for music that is not mainstream, or is even considered 'dangerous'”, and Margaret punctuates her typically astute post with links to many useful and little-known music blogs. On Facebook world music maven Joshua Cheek agreed that my pessimistic assessment of music blogging "sadly hits it on the mark". Signif

Composer offers sound advice

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The Last Night of the Proms shenanigans presided over by Sakari - " the Proms should not be dumbed down " - Oramo brought to mind the following declaration by Gérard Grisey: 'We are musicians and our model is sound not literature, sound not mathematics, sound not theatre, visual arts, quantum physics, geology, astrology or acupuncture' That is Gérard Grisey (1946-98) in the photo above. Together with Tristan Murail he was a pioneer of the spectralist movement which used as its raw material the DNA of music - sound. Spectralism creates sound colours by exploiting the harmonics produced by combination of tones - sample via this link . Art music has evolved over the centuries through the combination of tones, starting in the East with the Vedic belief in the sacred power of the harmonically complex chanted OM , and in the West with the move from the monody of plainsong to the harmonic complexity of polyphony. Because spectralism has been central to the development

Last Night thoughts on the future of music

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Culturally, humanity is presently living through an extremely important transitional period. A process is in motion which slowly but surely is bringing together the different cultures of the world to find one terrestrial culture. It seems that this movement is headed more towards an impoverishment than an enrichment. More and more the non-Western cultures are literally being drowned by Western culture without any exchange of culture which would have been desirable for human thought. What we want is the conscious man, who carries with him all the traditions that the earth has brought us. We want a human being who by his/her uniqueness can truly unify the rest of humanity. The future of music cannot be seen without the essential contribution of other cultures. The human spirit can only be cosmic when implementing the whole of its cultural heritage. I offer that wisdom on the day when Hubert Parry's inspired setting of William Blake will once again be torn out of its context at the L

Never do as others do

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'In life never do as others do. Either do nothing... or do something nobody else does'. That advice was given to G.I. Gurdjieff by his grandmother*. The Music of G.I. Gurdjieff is on the ECM label. * Quote comes from Gurdjieff - The Anatomy Of A Myth: A Biography by by James Moore. 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 .

Far from the twittering crowd

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Nicholas Kenyon in the Guardian declares God save The Last Night of the Proms post-Brexit and the Telegraph reports that Anti-Brexit campaigners to hijack Last Night of the Proms with EU flags . When will classical music finally realise that until it stops taking the Last Night of the Proms seriously, classical music will not be taken seriously? A usual I am steering well clear of that annual gathering of the twittering crowd, and instead am off to Crete off to sample some contemporary modal music . A post last year described how exciting and overlooked music was evolving in Crete under the visionary leadership of Ross Daly . Recent listening that has set my pulse racing has included two outstanding new CDs from Ross' pupils. On Thrace lyra prodigy Sokratis Sinopoulos teams up with virtuoso percussionists Bijan and Keyvan Chemirani , and - strange but true - Ensemble Intercontemporain cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras . The programme includes Lutoslawki 's Sacher Variation,

Sacred drift - music on the margins of Islam

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The cover blurb for the 1993 City Lights ' first edition of Peter Lamborn Wilson's Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam explains how the book proposes a set of heresies, a culture of resistance that dispels the false image of Islam as monolithic, puritan, and two dimensional. It then describes how Peter Lamborn Wilson takes a 'romantic' view of Islam to radical extremes, to an exotic viewpoint that may not be 'true', but is certainly a relief from academic propaganda and the obscene banality of simulation. The essays range from a scathing critique of 'authority' and sexual misery in puritanist Islam, to exploring the Sufi tradition of travel. Peter Lamborn Wilson (occasional pen name Hakim Bey) describes how "this is my brand of Islam: insurrectionary, elegant, dangerous, suffused with light - a search for poetic facts, a donation from and to the tradition of spiritual anarchy". Those false and two dimensional images extend to the

With the eyes of a child

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Listen, hear the sound The child awakes Wonder all around The child awakes That sketch was sent by schoolchildren to thank David and Gill Munrow for an early music workshop*. It appears in Margaret Jones' thoughtful essay titled ' In a child's mind ' for the MusiCB3 blog on the importance of exposing young people to classical music. My interview with David Munrow's mentor and record producer Christopher Bishop can be read via this link . The verse is taken from John Lodge's Eyes of a Child on the Moody Blues 1969 album To Our Children's Children . As the Sōtō Zen master Shunryu Suzuki told us: In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few... This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner. * Sketch is ( c ) Music Department of the Cambridge University Library. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyri

Music blogging #itsover

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In April 1963 the Third Symphony of Robert Simpson - who is seen above - was given its first performance by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hugo Rignold - an unjustly forgotten figure today - and its London premiere by the same forces followed less than a month later at the Festival Hall. The account by Donald Macauley in his biography of Robert Simpson of those first two performances puts the state of music journalism today into sharp perspective. Eight reviews of the new symphony are quoted in depth, ranging from national publications such as the mass market Daily Herald and up market Financial Times , through the Musical Times to regional titles such as the Wolverhampton Express & Star . Simpson's Third Symphony was reprised at the Festival Hall a year later by the London Philharmonic and Charles Groves and then in 1970 by Jascha Horenstein - who championed Simpson's music - and the London Symphony Orchestra, and no less than twelve rev

In music there is no East and West

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That exotic and rare instrument is a chitravina. The venerable fretted vina is rare enough , but its fretless cousin the chitravina is only played today by a handful of musicians around the world. In the photo the chitravinist is Vishwanath Sankaran; his guru (teacher) is  Ganesh Sudarshan  who has loaned him the 120 year old instrument. The header image is taken from a video of his performance of contemporary Carnatic music in Cambridge last Sunday , which also featured Ranjan Vasudevan on electric guitar and Prasanna Sankaran on mridangam . Watch the video via this link and do stay with it through the flaky start. Playing the chitravina involves sliding blocks of different materials - they can be seen under the instrument - along the strings. This sequeing between pitches without the constraints of frets produces sounds remarkably similar to electronically generated tones. The instrument of master musician and Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan was the vina, albeit the frette

Classical music shoots itself in the baton

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On An Overgrown Path has been preoccupied recently - some would say obsessed - with the absence of black conductors at the BBC Proms , and recently highlighted this Sunday's admirable concert at the Festival Hall by the Chineke! Orchestra, a professional orchestra made up entirely of black and minority ethnic musicians. So a big splash by Tom Service in the Guardian about Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the soloist in Sunday's concert, should be be good news. But instead it simply provides another example of how classical music is shooting itself in the baton. Tom Service is employed by both the Guardian and BBC . (Some would argue that the Guardian and BBC are one and the same ). So in his article Tom Service mentions the BBC in the sub-head seen above, in the opening paragraph, and four more times in the body copy. The immensely talented Sheku Kanneh-Mason is of course a BBC property as he won the 2016 BBC Young Musician competition and is the subject of a BBC Four TV document

What would it take to invite a black conductor to the Proms?

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There have been more than 500 BBC Proms since 2003, but not one has had a black conductor on the podium. As a recent Guardian editorial declared about the paucity of women conductors "It wouldn’t be acceptable in other professions. It isn’t acceptable here either". Kevin Scott added the comment below to my post We also need more black conductors at the Proms . I am publishing it separately because it provides valuable information on the talented black conductors that are being shamefully overlooked. Another post highlighted the unhealthy level of control over artist appearances exercised by a few large management agencies. A comment from John McLaughlin Williams echoes that view in these words: "I've said before that if administrations and managements want to find someone of color, don't call other admins and managements; they don't possess the resources. They need merely to call one of us, for we know far more qualified individuals than they and are ha