On An Overgrown Path

One of the most accessible explanations of the teachings of the Armenian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff is Colin Wilson's book ' The War Against Sleep '. Gurdjieff (1866-1949) is together with Osho and Krishnamurti one of a select group of flawed but perennially relevant teachers. Central to Gurdjieff's 'Fourth Way' teachings  is his use of music and movement to reawaken the life force within us. There is a major corpus of music composed for this purpose by Gurdjieff in collaboration with Thomas de Hartmann, and recordings of this by Keith Jarrett, Frederic Chiu , Cecil Lytle , Alain Kremski , Wim van Dullemen and the Gurdjieff Folk Ensemble have featured here over the years. One of Gurdjieff's disciples Max Gorman explained that true mystics are not culture-bound - they have gone 'beyond'. And in the spirit of going 'beyond' the boundaries of orthodoxy comes a valuable new addition to the small but select Gurdjieff/de Hartmann discography in t...

Below is a useful contribution to my meditation music thread . It comes from the much-missed Pauline Oliveros writing in her book Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice . It is of particular interest because not only does it legitimize the link between serious listening and meditation, but it also extends that practice to sounds beyond those conventionally considered 'musical'. This opens meditative listening to genres that received wisdom places outside the 'classical' canon such as the ambient electro/acoustic compositions of Robert Rich and Steve Roach which featured in earlier posts . (I will return to the thorny question of what is classical music? in the near future). Deep listening is a form of meditation. Attention is directed to the interplay of sounds and silences or the sound/silence continuum. Sound is not limited to musical or speaking sounds, but is inclusive of all perceptible vibrations (sonic formations). The relationship of all perceptibl...

That is Alain Kremski in the photo above. Some time ago I decided not to note everyone of the all too frequent deaths among our great musicians. Posting, as others do, hastily contrived and thinly disguised tributes scraped from Wikipedia and larded with a YouTube clip hardly does justice to great departed talents. Instead I decided to write tributes only to musicians who have meant something to me personally. Which is why today I am writing about Alain Kremski who has died at the age of 78 . I first encountered Alain Kremski's music at a pro-Tibet rally in France many years ago, and, as a result, he has featured several times On An Overgrown Path . His teachers at the Paris Conservatoire included Nadia Boulanger, Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen, and early in his career he received an award from the American William and Noma Copley Foundation . At the age of 22 Alain Kremski won the prestigious Prix de Rome for music composition using the pseudonym Alain Petitgard: other rec...

Frederic Chiu 's new recording of the piano music of G. I. Gurjieff/T. de Hartmann Hymns & Dervishes was recorded at Manifold Studios , Pittsboro, NC. In Russia Gurdjieff's circle included Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Nicholas Roerich , while in America Frank Lloyd Wright was an early enthusiastic evangelist for the multi-faceted mystic. The music of Gurdjieff/Hartmann has a number of distinguished advocates including Keith Jarrett . But Frederic Chiu gives a refreshingly different interpretation that emphasises the music's lyrical rather than calisthenic nature. I already have many recordings of Gurdjieff's music, but I will be returning to Hymns & Dervishes frequently, thanks I suspect in part due to the Tao of acoustics*. Photos 1 to 4 show Manifold Studios, which was designed around the sound and dimensions of a concert grand piano by Wes Lachot , who based his design on the acoustic architecture theories of Gurdjieff's student Frank Llo...

'A brilliant student, encouraged by Stravinsky, Boulanger, Milhaud and Messiaen, Alain Kremski abandoned the more obvious musical route to pursue the mystical universe of temple bells, gongs and bowls. He won the Prix de Rome for composition and was in residence for three years at the Villa Médicis where he established a firm friendship with Balthus, built on a shared passion for painting, sculpture, literature and travel... His compositions do not seek to evoke the sacred music of the Far East and its ritualistic codes, but find their place in the context of contemporary music where East and West coincide. Kremski would, modestly, consider them as an homage to Tibetan civilization and the its precious spirituality which Western culture must preserve at all costs ' - source Cezame music agency . Alain Kremski's unique music has featured here before and in Exils (Exiles), which is dedicated to the Dalai Lama, Tibetan singing bowls are scored as equal partners with a piano...

From Bell's theorem , which asserts that one subatomic 'object' can affect another such object without even the slightest interval of time or space separating them, to Zen archery , in which archer, arrow, and target are so tied up together that the shot has really been fired before it leaves the bow, wisdom manuals of all stripes bring us the news that everything in life is connected with everything else. Not just connected in a nuts-and-bolts, superficial kind of way, but more deeply and subtly than we can perceive and even imagine. Subject and object, cause and effect, the events of yesterday and of tomorrow: all of these things float in a vast "synchronicitous" soup that we play a part in whether we know it or not. No apologies for returning to Ptolemy Tompkins' The Beaten Path for that quote. No apologies either for venturing into what some will dismiss as New Age bad science : because, as anyone who has contacted a call centre in India will know, the a...

A reader has noted that BBC Radio 3 has been making some last minute additions to the published schedules for their Breakfast programme . Today a track by the German early music group Sarband was added at the end of the programme, and yesterday, at the same time, a recording of Buddhist chanting was added. By complete coincidence, two days ago I uploaded an article about Sarband, and said I would be featuring them on this Sunday's Overgrown Path radio programme , while last week I wrote about the Buddhist inspired compositions of Alain Kremski. My server logs have record several visits from the BBC IP address to my article about the Afro-French composer Le Chevalier de Sainte-George. Watch this space . Picture is of an anechoic chamber , where, of course, there are no echoes. Credit National Metrology Institute of Japan . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at...

My photo shows a Buddhist monk creating a sand mandala at the recent Free Tibet event which we attended in Malaucène , France (poster below). Buddhist monks and nuns have fought for human rights in Tibet since the Chinese invasion in 1950, and today are demonstrating against the military junta in Burma. Our thoughts are with them, here is a playlist for this disturbing time: * Le Boudha de la Compassion from La Montagne de la Grande Pureté played by Alain Kremski on sacred percussion instruments collected from Tibet, Burma, Nepal, India and China. Composer Alain Kremski (below) studied with Darius Milhaud and has been influenced by Igor Stravinsky , Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen . Kremski is best known for his percussion works, but is also a noted pianist who has transcribed the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony for piano, has recorded the piano music of G.I. Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann , and orchestrated Gurdjieff's sacred dances for Peter Brook's...