An anniverary howl for Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg (above) died on April 5, 1997 and Herbert von Karajan was born on April 5, 1908. I'm probably the only person to find a connection between the two, so it's not surprising that if you type "allen ginsberg herbert von karajan" into Google.com the first two results are currently from On An Overgrown Path. Which means you can read about them here and here.

Image credit Summer of Love. 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 the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Beatle to Berio to Boulez to birthday boy

Pierre Boulez was born on March 26, 1925. Quite obviously my photo is not of Boulez, but this path leads to him. The photo was taken at the Italian Institute in London in 1965, Paul McCartney is talking to Luciano Berio and between them is Barry Miles who was a key figure in the 60s counterculture. The photo comes from Miles' memoir In the Sixties which places Berio, Cage and others alongside better known icons of the decade and is one of the best books on the period. Like so many good books today it is out of print, but is still available if you search.

One of my favourite Berio CDs is the 1984 Erato recording of his Sinfonia with the New Swingle Singers and Orchestre National de France conducted by birthday boy Pierre Boulez. The Sinfonia is the composer's best-known work and blends Samuel Beckett, Martin Luther King, Claude Levi-Strauss and, of course, Mahler in Berio's unique style.

Barry Miles went to Cirencester Grammar School where his music teacher was Peter Maxwell Davies. In the Sixties describes how Max invited older boys back to the converted apple loft where he lived to drink claret from eighteenth-century goblets, and how, when required to play the piano for the hymns at morning assembly, Max placed a lighted candelabrum on top in the style of Liberace. Miles' other books include an excellent biography of another counterculture figure Allen Ginsberg, read more here.
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 the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Karlheinz Stockhausen - part of a dream

Karlheinz Stockhausen died on December 5, 2007. In tribute I will be playing his orchestral work Gruppen on my Future Radio programme on December 16, preceeded by Palestrina's Missa Brevis. My article below explains the connection between the two works, and also looks at Stockhausen's position within the bigger picture of mid-twentieth century culture.


This photo of Peter Orlovsky was taken in 1955, and he is the subject of the background portrait which was painted by Robert LaVigne. Orlovsky became beat poet Allen Ginsberg's lover and companion, and Ginsberg is listed as one of the thirty-six most influential people of the hippie era. Here is the complete list:

Bella Abzug, Muhammad Ali, Joan Baez, Helen Gurley Brown, Rachel Carson, Bob Dylan, Buckminster Fuller, Jerry Garcia, Stephen Gaskin, Allen Ginsberg, Berry Gordy Jr., Bill Graham, Germaine Greer, Dick Gregory, Tom Hayden, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, John Kennedy, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Timothy Leary, John Lennon, Malcolm X, Bob Marley, Thurgood Marshall, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, George Orwell, Les Paul, Gene Roddenberry, Jerry Rubin, Mario Savio, Ravi Shankar, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Augustus Owsley Stanley, Gloria Steinem.

This list comes from the quirky and wonderful Hippie Dictionary compiled by John Bassett McCleary. This is a compelling but fallible book, and I wonder how many readers will agree with all the thirty-six names in the list? Shouldn't contemporary classical music be represented by more than Ravi Shankar?

Look again at the header photo, there is a a Capitol Records LP of the Bach B Minor Mass (can anyone identify the actual recording?) visible bottom right. And in Barry Miles' biography of Ginsberg there is a description of Ginsberg tripping on LSD with Timothy Leary as Götterdämmerung blasted on the stereo.

The soundtrack of the hippie era crossed musical boundaries. In 1952 at the invitation of Lou Harrison a 'concerted action' was staged by John Cage and friends at Black Mountain College, North Carolina. This event is generally considered to be the forerunner of the multi-media happenings that defined the 60s. Later, in 1966, a Concert Happening at Aerospace Hall in Los Angeles included music by Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage. At the happening John Byrd performed a composition titled 'The Defense of the American Continent from the Vietcong Invasion'. This used chance techniques drawn from Cage's work, and concluded with a transition from improvisation to a chorale arrangement of 'America the Beautiful'.

There are links between Allen Ginsberg and John Cage. In the 1950s Cage (below) considered working with Ginsberg on a project based on the cycle of seasons, but it never came to fruition. Thirty years later, when the early IBM PCs became available, Cage used a computer programme to extract random pattern's (mesolists) from Ginsberg's epic poem Howl, which he then used to generate 'chance' music - these programmes are available for download.

Earlier, in 1970, Cage had lived in a flat in the West Village, New York, with Yoko Ono and John Lennon as neighbours. Lennon contributed a page of a Cage's collection of scores which was published as Notations, and which also included contributions by Igor Stravinsky, Milton Babbitt, Morton Feldman and Darius Milhaud.

The Beatles connection leads us to Karlheinz Stockhausen (below), who joined the soundtrack of the 60s when he was a visiting professor of composition at the University of California, Davis. Paul McCartney says he was influenced by Stockhausen's music, although you wouldn't guess it. And Stockhausen became part of the era's iconography when Peter Blake (who, himself, is a candidate for the list) included him on the sleeve of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band at McCartney's request. Stockhausen is fifth from left in the top row in my footer image. You can find out who the other icons are here.

Philip Glass, of course, has lots of links with Allen Ginsberg, although most of these post-date the hippie era. I wrote last year about Glass' 2002 Symphony No 6, which sets Ginsberg's Plutonian Ode. Glass' Wichita Vortex Sutra for solo piano was the result of a chance meeting between Glass and Ginsberg, in St. Mark's Bookshop, in the East Village, New York. "We decided on the spot to do something together and chose the poem,'" Glass recalls. He explains "I composed the music to match the rhythm of Allen's reading", a technique which has echoes of John Cage's mesolist writing.

Wichita Vortex Sutra was first performed in 1988 at a benefit for a group of Vietnam veterans, with Ginsberg reading his poem and Glass playing piano. No excuses for not knowing it - you can hear it on Jeroen van Keen's ulta-low priced Minimal Piano Collection which I reviewed here recently, and it is incorporated into Glass' 1990 chamber opera Hydrogen Jukebox.

The links between Philip Glass (below) and Allen Ginsberg continue ten years after the poet's death. At the October 2007 London performance of Glass' Book of Longing Patti Smith joined the composer on stage to invoke Ginsberg's spirit. In a wonderfully circular path Book of Longing is a setting of Leonard Cohen's poems, and Cohen is surely a candidate for the list of thirty-six hippie movers and shakers?

Leonard Bernstein is also missing. I am sure that Lennie would have felt his Black Panther connections meant he was a shoo-in for the list. But despite West Side Story and Mass I'm not sponsoring him, with, or without clothes. But one priceless Bernstein story is worth repeating. The infamous radical grouping the Weatherman hijacked the West Side Story lyrics for revolutionary purposes. 'The most beautiful sound I ever heard' was not 'Maria' in their extreme left utopia. Instead Stephen Sondheim's lyrics were morphed to 'I've just met a Marxist Leninist named Kim Il Sung, say it soft and there's rice fields flowing, say it loud and there's people's war growing'.

Difficult to follow that one. But it is not just in music that John Bassett McCleary's list can be challenged. The visual arts are not well represented. Where is Andy Warhol for instance? And if Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry is on the list, why not Stanley Kubrick? He, of course, famously used György Ligeti's music in the ultimate 60s trip, the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange became a leitmotif for the death of the hippie dream, and featured music by Wendy Carlos (credited as Walter Carlos) who might just make the list herself. And, of course, Wendy (left) plays the Moog synthesizer, which provided the cantus firmus of the Hippie era, which means Bob Moog just has to be among the thirty-six as well. And Bob Moog's path crossed with John Cage in 1965 when Moog created a movement triggered sound system for Merce Cunningham's performance of Cage's Variation V.

A Clockwork Orange was based on Anthony Burgess' novel (Burgess was also a prolific composer), and writers are not well represented either. George Orwell is a perverse inclusion as he died in 1950. Instead I would argue for some who were not enrolled in what the artist Robert Crumb called the 'army of the stoned'. How about Marshall McLuhan, Hermann Hesse, J.D. Salinger, but above all the monk, writer and thinker Thomas Merton?

Merton's 1948 book The Seven Storey Mountain was an unexpected best-seller through the 1950s and 1960s, and the story of his search for faith resonated with many of the hippie generation. Despite being a member of the strict Trappist Order Merton worked for peace with leading activists, politicians and theologians until his tragic death in 1968, the turbulent year that also took Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F Kennedy from us.

The last page of Stockhausen's score for his 1957 masterpiece Gruppen carries the words Deo gratias (Thanks be to God). This response occurs three times in the Latin Mass and frequently in the Breviary and in Catholic prayers. Like Stockhausen, Thomas Merton (below) was profoundly influenced by Catholicism. But also like John Cage (and Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg and many others) Merton's late inspiration was Buddhism. In fact the paths of Merton and Cage crossed, they were both disciples of the great Zen teacher Daisetz T. Suzuki.

Merton, unlike Ginsberg, understood that the use of any kind of drugs was utterly contrary to the spirit of Zen. But, despite this divergence, Thomas Merton's writings were uniquely inclusive, as this extract from his posthumously published Asian Journals shows:

In speaking for monks I am really speaking for a very strange kind of person, a marginal person, because the monk in the modern world is no longer an established person with an established place in society, We realise very keenly in America today that the monk is essentially outside of all establishments. He does not belong to an establishment. He is a marginal person who withdraws deliberately to the margin of society with a view to deepening fundamental human experience. Consequently, as one of these strange people, I speak to you as a representative of all marginal persons who who have done this kind of thing deliberately. Thus I find myself representing perhaps hippies among you, poets, people of this kind who are seeking in all sorts of ways and have absolutely no established status whatever.

That link between Thomas Merton and Allen Ginsberg brings this meandering overgrown path full circle. So many strange, marginal, and anti-establishment people to celebrate, and this really could go on for ever. The Hippie Dictionary is a wonderfully entertaining and stimulating book, and debating who were the most influential people of the hippie era could just be the new Trivial Pursuits. But don't take it all too seriously - understand that this is a dream.


Now, continue the trip on the majic bus.
Hear Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen on my Future Radio programme on Sunday December 16 at 5.00pm UK time (convert to local time zones here) I will also be playing Lou Harrison's 1985 Piano Concerto. Listen by launching the Radeo internet player from the right side-bar, or via the audio stream. Convert time to your local time zone using this link. Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream very much and takes ages to buffer. WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. If you are in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM.

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 the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

They were demanding jazz and rock and roll

"There is no doubt that On the Road was the seminal book of my coming of age. What I didn't know then is that it had turned millions of others around the world on to Whitman's America. During the Cold War it was not the so-called Voice of America, Treasury-hemorrhaging military expenditures, Foggy Bottom's diplomatic cunning, CIA cloak-and-dagger derring-do, or even democracy American-style that fueled the young intellectual radicals and freedom fighters of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The voice of America they heard was Walt Whitman's - the voice of the Mississippi Delta blues, spontaneous jazz, reckless rock and roll, Bob Dylan protest songs, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and Jack Kerouac's (photo above) On the Road supplemented with images from Hollywood and later from MTV.

From the Molotov cocktail-throwers of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, to the underground legions of young radicals avoiding jazz police during the Prague Spring of 1968, to East German John Henrys swinging their sledgehammers for freedom in 1989 as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in our CNN living rooms, the Eastern European youth movement against totalitarianism was not seeking democracy per se: They were demanding jazz, rock and roll, Hollywood, and Beat poetry, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road was an important catalyst. "Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million Levi's to both sexes," William Burroughs has said: "Woodstock rises from his pages." So does the Velvet Revolution. Indeed, as columnist George Will has commented, it was John Lennon - a student of American pop and culture - and not Vladimir Lenin whom these young people emulated.

I find it incredible that the CIA was caught by surprise when the Berlin wall was struck down in August 1989, for that June in New York's alternative East Village music clubs, such as CBGB's and the Continental Divide, young underground poets and rockers were matter-of-factly discussing the August teardown over beer, wondering if they had enough cash to lend a hand. What Bob Dylan (right) sang in 1965 applied in 1989: "Something is happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones?" Even the teenage tank resisters of Tiananmen Square had traded in Mao's Red Book for smuggled copies of Ginsberg's poetry and recordings of Thelonius Monk's Mysterioso and Charlie Parker's Ornithology:" - from Douglas Brinkley's 1993 book The Majic Bus.

The Majic Bus recounts the maiden voyage of Hofstra University's travelling course, "An American Odyssey: Art and Culture Across America." At the prompting of his students, Professor Douglas Brinkley arranged to teach a six-week experimental course aboard a fully equipped sleeper bus. The curriculum would call on them to visit thirty states and ten national parks and read twelve books by great american writers. They attended a Bob Dylan concert in Seattle, gambled at a Las Vegas casino, danced to Borbon Street jazz in New Orleans, paid homage to Elvis Presley at Graceland, experienced a Californian earthquake, and Brinkley was mugged at gunpoint in Georgetown.

They also visited Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, Abraham Lincoln's Springfield, Harry Truman's Independence, and Theodore Roosevelt's North Kakota Badlands. And they had the unforgettable experience of meeting some of their cultural heroes including William S. Burroughs and Ken Kesey, with the latter taking the class for a spin in his own psychedelic bus. In more than five hundred pages Majic Bus never ceases to inform and entertain, and serves as a timely reminder of the rich history and culture of the US which is so overshadowed today by the humanitarian disasters of Iraq and elsewhere. Above all this remarkable travelogue is a dazzling reminder of how education really should work.

Now listen to Allen Ginsberg live via streamed audio
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 the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Allen Ginsberg live via streamed audio

Philip Glass' Symphony No. 6 - Plutonian Ode was co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall and Brucknerhaus Linz to celebrate the composer's 65th birthday. The work's libretto was written by his late friend, Allen Ginsberg, and Glass takes up the story: 'During the last ten years of Allen's life we had performed frequently together in poetry/music collaborations. Allen was a superb reader of his own work and I was often inspired to compose new piano music for these occasional collaborations. In the case of Hydrogen Jukebox, we developed an evening length opera which was designed by Jerome Sirlin and directed by Ann Carlson. We presented that work in over 30 cities as part of an international tour. It had been our plan to make a new, major collaboration based on his epic poem Plutonium Ode (1978). Before he died in 1997, Allen had made several recordings for me of the poem in preparation for the new work. At that time I had in mind simply an extended piano work to accompany Allen in live performance. I put aside the project in 1997, feeling that I wouldn't want to go ahead without Allen. '

But the opportunity then came to make the present recording as Philip Glass explains: 'A few years passed and the commission of a new symphony from Carnegie Hall and the Brucknerhaus Linz reawakened my interest in the project. I felt, then, that Plutonium Ode was unfinished business between Allen and myself and this would be the opportunity to complete it. By then, the piano music I had originally imagined had grown to a full orchestra and Allen's resonant speaking voice to a lyric soprano. The three movements of the symphony follow the three parts of the poem, and follow, also, the passage of the poem -- the first movement is a passionate outcry against nuclear contamination and pollution, the second a turn towards healing, and the final movement an epiphany arrived at through personal transformation.'

The new world-premiere recording from Orange Mountain (photo below), performed by soprano Lauren Flanigan accompanied by the Bruckner Orchester Linz conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, brings this powerful work to life. The set includes a disc of Allen Ginsberg reading the original poem. Here to complement this excellent new release is Ginsberg's poem America (with parental warning on lyrics). But the words are only part of the story, for the full impact follow this link to hear Allen Ginsberg himself reciting the complete poem in nine minutes of streamed audio. Do listen to it, it is the most powerful performance you will hear for years. Just one of the free streamed recordings available on the wonderful new Poetry Archive web site which celebrates the music of words.

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and twentyfive thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

America is published in Collected Poems 1947-1980 (Harper & Row, 1984), and the version here is taken from the web site Modern & Contemporary American Poetry

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) is a non-partisan international grouping of medical organisations dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons. They work with the long-term victims of nuclear explosions and accidents from Hiroshima to Chernobyl, and their work has been recognised with the 1984 UNESCO Peace Prize, and 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. For the last 21 years IPPNW-Concerts has been working from its Berlin office with top musicians world-wide to raise funds for their work. The organisation is run by medical practitioner Dr Peter Hauber and his wife.

As well as being a fantastic cause there is some music well worth exploring available on IPPNW-Concerts' own CD label, and in co-productions with Swedish label BIS. These are all live recordings of concerts promoted by IPPNW over the years. There are forty-nine CDs in the catalogue with composers ranging from Monteverdi to Elliot Carter. Of particular relevance to this article is Wort und Musik - 60 Jahre nach Hiroshima. This is a live recording made at the March 2005 'Nuclear Weapons Inheritance Project' which mixes readings in German from a range of authors including Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein and Sadako Kurihara with relevent music including the aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Shostakovich's String Quartet No 8 and Schubert’s Quartettsatz. On 24th April IPPNW have a fund raising concert in the Philharmonie Berlin with the Grammy winning baritone Thomas Quasthoff singing Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. All proceeds from this concert and the sale of their CDs benefit those in dire need as a result of war, industrial and natural catastrophe. Need I say more?

Text on Glass' Sixth Symphony and cover shot from Orange Mountain. Image credits - Allen Ginsberg Trust. Image owners - if you do not want your picture used in this article please contact me and it will be removed. Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post follow An Overgrown Path to The Winter's Tale * For unto us a child is born * Farewell to Stromness * 'Tis the gift to be free * The radiance of a thousand suns *

Poetry to your ears

A new web site offering free streamed audio with a difference is launched today.

The Poetry Archive was created to make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.

Launched online today (1st December) the Poetry Archive is a treasure-trove of English-language poets reading their own work. Some are historic recordings, some have been made specially for the Archive - which means its range is the widest possible: from Tennyson at the end of the 19th century, through poets such as Allen Ginsberg (picture above) and Langston Hughes in the middle of the 20th century, to contemporary poets including Seamus Heaney, Ruth Padel and Kathleen Jamie.

No more words are needed. Just click over to the Poetry Archive, or open the links above, and enjoy a fantastic aural feast. This is one of the most important internet resources to appear for years, and its free.

Picture credit - Alan Ginsberg from Barcelona Review
Report broken links, missing images, and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to The road less travelled