On An Overgrown Path

These collages by Florence Dabby are inspired by the Rubaiyat of Hafiz . They were exhibited in the Bahia Palace, Marrakech  in July 2026. More on Sufi mysticism in my Salzburg Festival programme essay  Listening with the ear of the heart .

That photo was taken by me as my wife handed out sweets to these young Senegalese footballers. (Football followers will appreciate the irony of my engagement with both Morocco and Senegal.)  During our recent travels in Senegal we were struck both by the physical presence and beauty of the people, and by the shocking poverty. 60% of the population is under 30 years old, which is at least partly due to a Senegalese husband being legally allowed up to four wives. 'The Youth's Magic Horn'  (Des Knaben Wunderhorn ) is the anthology of folk poems from which Gustav Mahler's  'Poor Children's Begging Song' ( Armer Kinder Betterlied ) for boy's and women's choirs and contralto soloist in his Third Symphony is taken. My recent listening has included returning to Jascha Horenstein's recording of this symphony. Horenstein (1898 to 1973) was a truly great interpreter of of Bruckner and Mahler, and his recording of the latter's Third Symphony is amon...

In his book Which Lie Did I Tell? the Hollywood script writer William Goldman explained the difference between entertainment and art. Entertainment either tells you lies or tells you comforting truisms that we know already. Whereas art tells you uncomfortable things that you perhaps don't want to hear, truths that you may not be comfortable hearing. My photos were taken a few weeks ago in the Moroccan oasis town of Skoura on the northern fringe of the Sahara. Listening to those local musicians playing under the stars and the next morning listening to Norman Del Mar's recording of Rubbra's Sixth and Eighth Symphonies highlighted for me again, if it needed highlighting, how right William Goldman was. There is growing concern about  the impact of algorithms  on the media we consume. But there is very little concern about the impact of algorithms on the arts. In fact algorithm driven art is the new poster child of contemporary culture. The prime example of this is BBC Ra...

These photos were taken by me last week in a village in the Ouirgane valley on the lower slopes of Morocco's Atlas Mountains. In the photo above a ruined house can be seen in the background, and this area was close to the epicentre of the terrible earthquake in September 2023 which killed around 3000 people. More than forty people died in Ouirgane village, and the impact of the earthquake is still only too evident.  For obscure reasons , almost two years later some villagers are still living in temporary accommodation. The shelters have a shiny silver finish to reflect the temperature extremes experienced at 3500 feet. On the day I took these photos the temperature was 32 degrees C. When I asked the lady living with her family in the shelter seen below if I could take a photograph, she asked me in for mint tea.  The title of this post is derived from the Missa 'Et ecce terrae motus' of Antoine Brumel (1460-1512). This work is known as the 'Earthquake Mass' becaus...

Celestial Harmonies' 17 CD boxed set Music of Islam ranks alongside Paul Bowles' Music of Morocco as one of the great achievements of cultural documentation. David Parsons was responsible for the project's field recordings, which took ten years to complete. In 1997 he travelled with his family to Karaj in Iran to record volume 12 of the Music of Islam . Here is an extract from the sleeve notes for the 1998 CD release:  Producer David Parsons and his family periodically suffered from stress in accomplishing the recordings for The Music of Series. This was mainly due to the preconceptions (in reality, misconceptions) they held about Islam and the Islamic countries they needed to work in. These fears, they feel, were largely brought about by the negative bias with which the Western news media have portrayed the Islamic countries over recent years....   It was with some trepidation, therefore, that they undertook this Iranian project, particularly because of the very ...

That photo was taken by me a few days ago in Morocco's High Atlas Mountains . My soundtrack for time spent at altitude was the reissue Music of Morocco recorded by Paul Bowles as archived in the Library of Congress. As my photo shows Morocco still has a unique ambience in the mountainous areas. But overall Morocco was a very different country when Bowles made his recordings in 1959. As the Italian writer and traveller  Tiziano Terzani  explains in  A Fortune Teller Told Me :    A country at the crossroads between modernization cum destruction and an isolation that would preserve its identity has no real choice: others have chosen on its behalf. Businessmen, bankers, experts from international organizations, officers of the UN and half the world's governments and passionate prophets of 'development' at all costs. They believe unanimously in a kind of mission not far removed from that of the American General in Vietnam who, after razing a Vietcong-occupied v...

These photos are of my guide Rashid and cook/muleteer Mohammed on my recent trek in Morocco's High Atlas. My listening while in the mountains included Norman Del Mar's recording of Rubbra's Second and Eighth Symphonies for Lyrita and Vernon Handley's Bax Second and Fourth  for Chandos . Both those discs will be familiar to long time OAOP readers, but less familiar may be Einojuhani Rautavaara 's symphonies. Since the 1990s I had known and admired Rautavaara's  Second and Seventh - Angel of Light - Symphonies for Bis and Ondine respectively. But his other symphonies in Ondine's complete cycle were new and very rewarding territory for me. In his booklet essay for the Ondine box set Kimmo Korhonen quite accurately describes Rautavaara's eight symphonies as "one huge journey through life, a voyage of the soul..."  My reading also produced a strong recommendation for like-minded readers. David Darling is an English astronomer, freelance scie...

Everything falls under the law of change,  Like a dream, a phantom, a bubble, a shadow,  Like dew or a flash of lightning;  You should contemplate like this.   - Conclusion of The Diamond Sutra Recent listening and reading: Body Mandala, Jonathan Harvey - BBCSO, Ilan Volkov & Stefan Solyom Muse, Odalisque, Handmaiden - Rose Simpson Toru Takemitsu, Complete Works for Solo Piano - Paul Crossley Monolithic Undertow, In Search of Sonic Oblivion - Harry Sword On the Threshold of a Dream - Moody Blues Moroccan Atlas, The Trekking Guide - Alan Palmer Zones, Drones & Atmospheres - Steve Roach An Ugly Truth, Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination - Sheera Frenkel & Cecilia Kang

That photo was taken when I visited the remote Tinmel Mosque in Morocco's Atlas Mountains. My visit prompted the post Is this Wagner's legendary Monsalvat? which highlighted the tenuous links between Wagner's Parsifal and the Islamic culture of al-Andalus. My further exploration of this subject has since uncovered some surprising and little known facts. Parziva l, the epic poem on which Wagner based his music drama, is a medieval romance by the knight-poet Wolfram von Eschenbach . In the poem Parzival's father, the knight-adventurer Gahmuret , served the caliph of Baghdad; which meant a Christian knight was serving a Muslim. While in the caliph's service Gahmuret married the Black pagan queen Belkane. She became pregnant with their child, but their mixed-ethnicity son Feirefiz was born after Gahmuret returned to Wales. On his return to Wales he won the hand of a queen called Herzeloyde, and that union resulted in the birth of Parzival. Which meant Parzival h...

Classical music is irrevocably and fatally tied to place. Geocentricity dictates that the only place to hear classical music is an acoustically perfect concert hall . It dictates that this concert hall must be in a city centre , and also mandates that city centres are the only place to hear classical music. And geocentricity dictates that the only music to hear in the acoustically perfect city centre halls is from the European classical tradition. New technologies have created a mobile generation - mobile computing, mobile communications, mobile listening , and mobile workplaces. Yet classical music remains wedded to immobility and geocentricity.  In his memoir Silences So Deep John Luther Adams explains how "I began to feel that my music was no longer about place, but had in a real sense become a place of its own". Aspects of the recent Arts Council England proposals may be wrong-headed. But the underlying message of the proposals was profound and, predictably, overloo...

Back in 2008 I curated what was probably the first and only broadcast of a complete lilal  night healing ritual performed by the sub-Saharan musicians known as Gnawa. As a result of that broadcast, eight years later I was invited to a Gnawa trance ritual in Essaouira on Morocco's Atlantic coast. That  lilal was a private devotional event which I was privileged to attend with a Moroccan Sufi friend. But like all musicians, the Gnawa rely on commercial performances for their income. That source of income was abruptly terminated by the Covid pandemic. Which has left many Gnawa musicians facing extreme hardship in a country where fiscal safety-nets are much more fallible than in the West, and as a result  a priceless cultural tradition is at risk. Now there has been a heartwarming attempt to alleviate, at least in part, the musicians' hardship. A UNESCO intiative led to 75 gnawan master musicians gathering in Essaouira in December for the filming of a two hour TV s...

These photos was taken by me at a music workshop for local women run by  Sufi adept Ahmed Abdelhak Kaâb in Essaouira on Morocco's Atlantic coast. Long-standing readers will know of my love for Morocco and the ageless wisdom  of its generous people . Recently TIME Magazine selected Elon Musk as its “Person of the Year” . Morocco World News put this gesture of vacuous sycophancy firmly in its place with a coruscating op-ed . Below is the conclusion from that exemplary piece of journalism which contains a powerful message not just for the classical music industry , but for all humanity.  'In the end, perhaps Elon Musk does deserve to be “Person of the Year.” He deserves it not for any contributions he has made to humanity, he deserves it as it serves as an apt example of our current world. Indeed, Musk's brazen adulation and celebration perfectly captures a culture where pandemic responses are limited by profit-making, where business booms amid economic crisis, where...

Classical music is an infinite multi-dimensional labyrinth. The accompanying photos taken from Overgrown Path posts show just three examples of that labyrinth. Seen above are players from L'Orchestre Philharmonique du Maroc performing al fresco in the medina at Essaouira, Morocco as part of the town's 2016 Printemps Musical Des Alizés festival. My second photo shows members of the Britten Sinfonia using classical music to bring positive change to the lives of young people at Larkman Primary School in Norfolk. While in the third photo, senior Tibetan Buddhist monk Kenrap-la is introduced to Jonathan Harvey's Body Mandala for the first time, listening via my iPod as we approach his monastery at Thiksay in the disputed Indian region of Jammu and Kashmir in 2014.  Sub-atomic physics tells us that all phenomena consist of multi-dimensional energy waves that defy our conventional understanding of space and time. At the heart of quantum theory are the concepts of non-local...

As an antidote to the saturation visuals of face masks and Zoom I offer striking graphics from two young Moroccan pop artists. Casablanca based Sarah Addouh (b.1993) created 'Tajine Vinyl' seen above and also the topically relevant middle image*. The third graphic 'Gnawi Boy' is by freelance graphic designer Ilyesse Nouhi (b.1994) who uses the nom de art Iriessu. This graphic is based on a photo by the late French–Moroccan photographer and video artist Leila Alaoui (1982-2016) who was killed while working for UN Women and Amnesty International on an assignment about women's rights in Burkina Faso. These graphics come via an article on a Moroccan news website about how pop art is transcending borders and finding a large audience in the Middle East and North Africa. The work of Sarah Addouh, Ilyesse Nouhi, and other young Mahgrebi artists challenges cultural comfort zones by breaking down established barriers between fine art and commercial art, and between W...

Unsurprisingly the evil Chinese Government would not allow Martin Scorsese to film Kundun in China, as the movie depicted the 1959 escape to India of the Dalai Lama from the murderous Chinese invaders in Tibet. Instead Scorsese used the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco for his location shooting. This was an obvious choice as not only is the landscape of the two regions similar, but both are 'thin places' where the spirit world is close to that of humans*. The closest I have been to Tibet is the border region of Ladakh in remote northern India. But, as regular readers will know, I have been privileged to visit Morocco and the High Atlas on many occasions. Like every country COVID-19 has hit Morocco hard. Morocco is strategically important in the battle against the virus as it provides the main entry route from hard hit Europe and Spain in particular into Africa. But by prompt and strict lockdown and closing of borders Morocco has done a remarkable job of containing the vi...

There is a craving for the post-COVID normal to mimic the pre-COVID normal. That craving for the return to familiar and secure comfort zones is understandable but must be treated with caution. Because we must beware of the porous boundary between societal expediency and personal identity being crossed. Controls on movement and contact tracking technologies may be valid as tactical expedients. But comfort zones are about control, and the terrible pandemic has opened many opportunities for personal freedom and privacy to be eroded by centralised controls in the long term. It is striking that that none of the rabid anti-Brexiteers who constantly bleat about curbs on freedom of movement post-Brexit have voiced concerns about the UK government's contact tracing - i.e. movement tracking - app. which  holds personal data centrally . Have they conveniently forgotten Cambridge Analytica ? Comfort zones are the enemy of creativity and progress , and any 'normal', whether old or ...

In Buddhism 'monkey mind' refers to the restless, agitated, incessant chatter and movement of the untrained mind. This restlessness leads to the confusion and dissatisfaction of dukkha , and the aim of meditation is to silence this incessant chatter. In recent decades the 'monkey mind' has morphed into the 'monkey lifestyle'' where incessant virtual and physical chatter and movement have been made possible by new mobile technologies and easy geographic mobility. Now, with geographic mobility curtailed by global lockdowns, the 'monkey lifestyle' has become even more frantic in the virtual world. We are no longer comfortable in our own skin. Instead we seek shelter and approval under a synthetic skin woven from social networks. One example is in classical music where the pandemic has triggered a deluge of live streaming as the lockdown generation compete for fifteen minutes of coronaviral fame . Regular readers will know I have an affinity with the...