To expel those who do not have the right to stay

'For this purpose the Roma – those with Italian nationality and those without, EU citizens and those from outside the Community – will all have their fingerprints taken. And the rule will even apply to Gypsy children – for reasons that to many of Mr Maroni's supporters must have sounded obvious: "to avoid phenomena," as he put it, "such as begging". The new measures, he said, were indispensable "in order to expel those who do not have the right to stay in Italy"' - no not in Italy in 1938 but in Italy today. Read the full story in the Independent. I fear it is the shape of things to come, and not just in Benito Mussolini's old stamping ground.

Now playing - Bela Bartók's Roumanian Dances with Antal Dorati conducting the Minneapolis Symphony on vinyl LP (SRI75105) in glorious Mercury sound in those wonderful days before the 'benefits' of digital encoding, multi-tracking, multi-miking, multi-editing and multi-promoting. The seven movement dance suite was originally written for piano, and uses tunes transcribed by Bartók from Gypsies in Máramaros in Northern Transylvania. Bartók researched Gypsy folk music in the field travelling with an Edison phonograph. Like the Roma Antal Dorati was forced to migrate by political forces. Born in Budapest, he worked in Dresden before he moved first to Monte Carlo, and then to the US where he recorded this wonderful album with the Minneapolis Symphony, whose music director he was for eleven years.

The header photo of Roma is from an excellent photo essay in Catalyst magazine that I featured here last year. Now read more about the forgotten Holocaust victims, who were expelled, and worse, because they did not have the right to stay.
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

It is impossible to live without inner peace

On 11th March 2008 Madrid marked the fourth anniversary of the terrorist bombings (above) that claimed the lives of 191 people and wounded 1,856. It was the biggest terrorist attack in the history of Spain and, indeed, Europe, with 10 simultaneous explosions on four of Madrid’s district trains at the height of the morning rush hour. It happened a few minutes before 8 a.m. Later, the police exploded another two bombs that had failed to go off and a third was defused, leading to the identification of those responsible.

The ceremony of remembrance for those who were killed began at twelve noon in front of the monument inaugurated last year which stands in Plaza de Atocha. It was led by their majesties King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia, who laid a wreath at the foot of the monument. After a minute’s silence in memory of the victims, there was a rendition of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s “Da pacem, Domine”, a work commissioned by Jordi Savall for performance at the Barcelona Forum of Cultures in June 2004. Inspired in the Gregorian chant Danos la paz Señor, the piece was composed only two days after the tragic bombings as a tribute to the victims who were honoured at the ceremony of remembrance. Arvo Pärt’s “Da pacem, Domine” will be included in a forthcoming Alia Vox release.

In the words of Raimon Panikkar “It is difficult to live when there is no external peace in the world around us. It is impossible to live without inner peace, if there is no peace in our hearts”. Arvo Pärt’s Da Pacem Domine is a prayer for those whom we have lost, as well as an invocation to peace and hope, the music creating a space of peace, both in the world around us and in our hearts.

'For Inner and Outer Peace' is the title of an important book by another great musical humanitarian, Antal Dorati. It was published by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), but is out of print. All this ... and what for?

Story source Alia Vox. 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

The true future of opera

'As a by-product, this development will put an end to today's star system. The indispensable quality of "stardom" is its rarity. But, on the one hand, the difference between a star and a non-star performance will not be tolerated much longer by a growingly knowledgeable public. On the other, the stars themselves will fade. Even now, their strength is being progressively dissipated by the incredible fatigue of their enforced nomadic life, and in the end they will be unable to deliver what is expected of them.

The true future of opera lies in the ensemble principle, by which I mean well-matched ensembles of fine singers working together and staying together. This mode of organisation has never completely disappeared. A few, very few, theatres have always maintained it, and elsewhere, now and then at the insistence of a maestro, a performance reflecting it turns up. So the ensemble principle will not need to be re-discovered. Even the public knows about it. And once the public starts asking for it, sooner or later it will get it' - Antal Dorati writes in his 1979 autobiography Notes of Seven Decades (Hodder ISBN 0340159227).

The exigencies of the star sytem mean that Punch and Judy receives a tiny mention in this new Royal Opera House national press campaign, but its composer doesn't. Never mind, read about him here, and continue playing spot the composer's name here, before reading more about Maestro Dorati here.
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The Winter's Tale

“Heck, I reckon you wouldn’t even be human beings if ya didn’t have some pretty strong feelings about nuclear combat.But I want ya to remember one thing, tha folks back home is a countin’ on ya, and by golly, we ain’t about to let ‘em down” Major Kong (Slim Pickens) to his B-52 aircrew when told to attack the Soviet Union. From the movie Doctor Strangelove.

In January 1968 the fears of a catastrophic nuclear accident that had haunted the scientists working on the wartime Manhattan Project were almost realised when an American B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear weapons with a reported combined yield of 4.4 megatons of TNT crashed in Greenland. The US Air Force base at Thule in Greenland was a strategically important early-warning station monitoring Soviet missile activity. Because of its importance and location the US government decided in the late '60s that the base was too vulnerable to Russian attack. So at least one US bomber armed with nuclear weapons was kept in the air all the time within radio range of the base. If Thule was attacked this bomber would be able to strike back against Russia, and the picture below shows one of the bombers, armed with nuclear weapons, at the base.


On 21st January 1968 a B-52 Stratofortress carrying seven crew members and four nuclear weapons was circling near Thule on such a mission when a fire started in the cabin heater. The captain tried to land the crippled bomber at the base, but the fire cut all power and the landing was abandoned. Six crew members baled out safely using their ejector seats, and the stricken bomber with one crew member on board (he could not escape as he did not have an ejector seat) flew over the base and crashed onto the sea ice seven miles west of the base. The bomber exploded on impact killing the remaining crew member, and the force of the explosion scattered the burning wreckage over a wide area. The crashing plane is reported to have severed the hot line telecommunications link from the base, triggering a false nuclear attack alert, and causing the Strategic Air Command to think for a short time that the Thule base had been attacked.

A complex sequence of actions was required to set off the nuclear bombs, and these safeguards thankfully meant that there was not a full nuclear explosion. But the deadly weapons are triggered by high explosives, and these did explode in all four bombs. The resulting explosion spread uranium, tritium and plutonium over a 700 meter radius. The heat from the burning plane caused the ice to melt, and debris, including the thermonuclear assembly from one of the bombs, fell through to the seabed.

The ensuing clean-up operation involved 3000 personnel, 38 naval ships, and the removal of 10,000 tons of snow and ice. But controversy continues as to how successful it was. A U.S. State Department document dated August 1968 said all the nuclear weapons had been ‘accounted for’, but failed to spell-out whether this actually meant they had been recovered. The Danish media claims that one of the thermonuclear weapons (picture right) was never recovered, and still lies on the seabed. A Pentagon spokesman is reputed to have made the following statement about the missing weapon, “I don’t know of any missing bomb, but we have not positively identified what I think you are looking for”.

A study in 1987 by a Danish medical institute showed that workers at the Thule base were 50% more likely to develop cancers than other Danish military personnel. 200 of the workers subsequently unsuccessfully sued the U.S. government, but the discovery process for the court case identified anomalies in health monitoring procedures.

Missing bomb, or no missing bomb, the Thule B-52 crash graphically confirmed the stanza from the Bhagavad Gita quoted by ‘Doctor Atomic’ Robert Oppenheimer before the very first atomic test, and quoted in my article about the Manhattan Project.

If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds

Eighteen years after the Thule accident fears of a full nuclear disaster were realised at Chernobyl in the former USSR (now Ukraine). Important safety procedures were disregarded while testing one of the reactors in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant located 80 miles north of Kiev. In the early morning of 25th April 1986 the chain reaction in one reactor escalated out of control. The subsequent explosion blew off the reactor's heavy steel and concrete lid (right), releasing a fireball with 'the radiance of a thousand suns'. As well as those killed in the blast 28 people died within four months from radiation burns. 19 more died subsequently, and there have been a further nine deaths from thyroid cancer apparently due to the accident, bringing the total fatalities to 56. As a result of the high radiation levels in the surrounding area 135,00 people had to be evacuated

Nuclear energy is never far from the headlines. On the day I wrote this article Russia cut Ukraine's gas supplies, and triggered a knock-on gas shortage in other European countries. Concern over the stability of energy supplies triggered new calls for the development of further nuclear power stations. Among those who worked with the victims of the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant were International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), 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 in locations ranging 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.

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. The nuggets worth mining include Furtwängler's Te Deum (right) coupled with Brahms and Hindemith (CD40).

Wort und Musik - 60 Jahre nach Hiroshima 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 the lighter side there are also a number of jazz recordings worth exploring, including the Berlin Philharmonic Jazz Group playing live in 2004 in the Philharmonie in Berlin with the world-famous baritone Thomas Quasthoff.

IPPNW co-productions with BIS also contain some real gems. My own favourite is a live Missa Solemnis from the Philharmonie in Berlin with Antal Doráti conducting the European Symphony Orchestra, University of Maryland Chorus, and a distinguished group of soloists. Another BIS co-production recorded at the Philharmonie with the New Berlin Chamber Orchestra and members of the Czech Philharmonic and HdK-Chamber Choir conducted by Martin Fischer-Dieskau includes two of Doráti’s own compositions (his Pater Noster, Prayer for Mixed Choir and Jesus oder Barabbas? a melodrama after a story by Karinthy Frigyes for Speaker, Orchestra and Choir) alongside works from Bartok and Martinu. Finally among the BIS co-productions a live Mahler Symphony No 9 with Rudolf Barshai conducting the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra is a rarity well worth investigating. All proceeds from the sale of these CDs benefit those in dire need as a result of war, industrial and natural catastrophe. Need I say more?

Picture credits: Header - Amazon, B-52 and nuclear bomb - Thule Forum, Chernobyl - BBC News, 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 take an overgrown path to The radiance of a thousand suns

For unto us a child is born

It was a night spent in the basement of a burnt out building.
People injured by the atomic bomb took shelter in this room, filling it.
They passed the night in darkness, not even a single candle among them.
The raw smell of blood, the stench of death.
Body heat and the reek of sweat. Moaning.
Miraculously, out of the darkness, a voice sounded:
"The baby's coming!"
In that basement room, in those lower reaches of hell,
A young woman was now going into labor.
What were they to do,
Without even a single match to light the darkness?
People forgot their own suffering to do what they could.
A seriously injured woman who had been moaning but a moments before,
Spoke out:
"I'm a midwife. Let me help with the birth."
And now life was born
There in the deep, dark depths of hell.
Her work done, the midwife did not even wait for the break of day.
She died, still covered with the blood.
Bring forth new life!
Even should it cost me my own,
Bring forth new life!
by Sadako Kurihara

Sadako Kurihara was at her home in Horishima when the atomic bomb exploded on August 6th 1945. Two days later, in a nearby basement shelter just a mile from ground zero, a baby was born in pitch darkness surrounded by the dead and dying. The seriously injured nurse that delivered the child died, but the baby survived and grew into an adult who sixty years later still lives in the city.

After the trauma of Hiroshima Sadako Kurihara was determined to express her furious hatred of nuclear weapons, and to campaign against their use. Her talent as a poet gave her a powerful outlet for her beliefs. Her most famous work is the story of the baby born amongst nuclear devastation. In Japanese it is Umashimenkana, which translates as Bring forth new life.

For the rest of her life Sadako Kurihara was a staunch anti-war and anti-nuclear campaigner. She published a literary magazine on the theme of the atom bomb attacks on Japan, and circulated an anthology of anti-war poems when discussion of the bombing was restricted by the occupying Allied powers. The author of more than five hundred poems in a writing career spanning more than seventy years, she died in March 2005 aged 92.

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, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Berlin recently.

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. The nuggets worth mining include Furtwängler's Te Deum coupled with Brahms and Hindemith (CD40).

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 the lighter side there are also a number of jazz recordings worth exploring, including the Berlin Philharmonic Jazz Group playing live in 2004 in the Philharmonie in Berlin with the world-famous baritone Thomas Quasthoff.

IPPNW co-productions with also contain some real gems. My own favourite is a live Missa Solemnis from the Philharmonie in Berlin with Antal Doráti conducting the European Symphony Orchestra, University of Maryland Chorus, and a distinguished group of soloists. Another BIS co-production recorded at the Philharmonie with the New Berlin Chamber Orchestra and members of the Czech Philharmonic and HdK-Chamber Choir conducted by Martin Fischer-Dieskau includes two of Doráti’s own compositions (his Pater Noster, Prayer for Mixed Choir and Jesus oder Barabbas? a melodrama after a story by Karinthy Frigyes for Speaker, Orchestra and Choir) alongside works from Bartok and Martinu. Finally among the BIS co-productions a live Mahler Symphony No 9 with Rudolf Barshai conducting the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra is a rarity well worth investigating. All proceeds from the sale of these CDs benefit those in dire need as a result of war, industrial and natural catastrophe. Need I say more?

Now take An Overgrown Path to I am a camera - Dresden Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
Image credits:
Header - Drawing and text, Tomiko Miyaji September 15, 1945, from Hiroshima Peace site
Other images record companies
Image owners - if you do not want your picture used in this article please contact me and it will be removed.

Is classical music too fast?

Time passes slowly in Orford. At the eastern end of the 14th century church of Saint Bartholomew the remains of the Norman chancel can be seen, with moulded arches and great shafted piers still standing. Six centuries later century the church saw the first performances of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, and the three church parables, Curlew River, The Prodigal Son, and Burning Fiery Furnace. (photo to right is a detail from the Church Parable window by John Piper in Aldeburgh Church).

Britten was a true polymath. His genius as a composer goes without saying. His genius as both pianist and conductor is immortalised in many great recordings. His genius as music visionary lives on today in the Aldeburgh Festival. In his autobiography Notes of Seven Decades Antal Dorati writes:

“…the English-speaking world lagged far behind the Latin and German countries in creating and performing opera. The change in this century – a sudden and dramatic one – can be attributed virtually to the life work of a single man: Benjamin Britten. He, almost alone, brought opera back to the English language for the first time since Purcell; or if one prefers to put it the other way round, brought the English language back to opera. This achievement is truly unique, and, notwithstanding the high esteem in which the music and image of Britten are held in his own country, still underrated and not fully understood.”

Curlew River, with its libretto by William Plomer based on the Medieval Japanese No-Play Sumidagawa, is typical of Britten’s multi-layered genius. It covers an enormous time span, from the medieval origins of the play on which it is based through the Gregorian chant Te lucis ante terminum (Before the ending of the day) which opens and closes it, to the contemporary musical idiom in which the body of the work is written. (Photo to right is from L'Opera de Rouen production).

The use of Gregorian chant is a stroke of genius. The plainsong which frames Curlew River is historically timeless, and transcends conventional concepts of speed and musical rhythm. And that prompts me to ask the question, is classical music too fast?

A lot of people are starting to think that classical music needs slowing down, and several of them are putting their money where their mouth is. Longplayer is a 1000 year long piece of music which started to play on the 1st January 2000 and will continue to play, without repetition, until the 31st December 2999. Then it will come back to the point at which it began - and it will start again. Longplayer was developed and composed as a computer programme between October 1995 and December 1999 by Jem Finer. It takes an existing recorded piece of music and uses this as source material. Six sections are played simultaneously from it, each at a slightly different position and different pitch.

It's exactly the same principle as taking six copies of a record and playing them on six turntables, each one rotating at a different speed. The source music is primarily Tibetan singing bowls of various sizes, and gongs. A more detailed explanation of the mathematics behind Longplayer is on their web site, and you can hear this unique work in real time through this audio stream:

John Cage’s ASLSP was written in 1985 for piano, and became an organ work in 1987. The ASLSP of the title stands for As Slow As Possible, and since its composition there has been debate as to how slow can slow really be? The burghers of the German town of Halberstadt came up with a novel answer. It is 639 years since the famous Blockwerk organ was constructed in the cathedral at Halberstadt. So it was decided to play Cage’s work for 639 years.

To make this possible a disused 11th century church, which was a Cistercian convent for six hundred years, has been renovated. A rather beautiful ‘Cage organ’ has been specially built in the church of St Burchardi by the organ builder Romanus F. Seifert & Sons. The keys are counterbalanced allowing notes to be held continuously once played until reset, producing intentional ciphering. The first three notes were played for eighteen months, following the seventeen months of silence while the organ bellows were completed. Scheduled completion is 2639. But for those that can’t make the finale there are regular concerts when 600 odd years are taken off the performance time as ASLSP is given a half-hour ‘condensed’ performance. Full details of Cage's ASLSP in Halberstadt are on the beautifully produced project web site.

A slightly less extreme advocacy of slower classical music comes again from Germany where 'authentic tempi' may be the next big thing after 'authentic instruments'. Uwe Kliemt is a leading advocate of the Tempo Giusto movement which sprang from the Dutch musicologist W.R. Talsma’s 1980 book The Rebirth of the Classics: Instructions for the Demechanization of Music. It is worth remembering that Maelzel’s mechanical metronome was only created in 1816, the year of the composition of Beethoven’s 8th Symphony. Prior to that tempi relied on the subjective interpretation of Italian instructions. There is a lot of scholarly support for some astonishingly slow tempi on Uwe Kliemt’s web sites. If you want a different take on two familiar works try these tempo giusto audio files.

Sonata C-Dur KV 440 by W.A.Mozart -

Sonata Pathétique c-moll op.13 von L.v.Beethoven -

So is classical music too fast? Or is it just catching the ‘hurry sickness’ that pervades every aspect of life today? Support for the latter viewpoint comes from none other than flautist Richard Adeney who played at the premiere of Curlew River, and on the definitive Decca recording conducted by Britten with Peter Pears as the Madwoman. Time & Concord (Autograph Books, 1997) is a wonderful book of reminiscences from the first fifty years of the Aldeburgh Festival. Richard Adeney contributes the following from a time when mobile phones, iPods and digital cameras were unknown, and the world, if not classical music, moved more slowly.

“Curlew River had more rehearsal time than any other new work that I have ever played….I would walk around (Orford) church to the ruined Norman arches in the courtyard and stand by myself with an empty mind, feeling relaxed and happy. The eerie quality of the music, the singing of plainchant, and the repetitive rehearsals, tranquillized me into an unusually quiet state.

In time off, I took my new Hasselblad camera to the surrounding churches and photographed the amazing monuments and carvings inside them. Sometimes, the churches were almost dark inside, and, because of using slow film and small apertures for depth of focus, the time exposures were as long as forty minutes, and that slowness, that waiting with the open-lensed camera with its tripod slowly doing its work, while I wandered around in the sun outside or sat in a pew of a quiet, cool empty church, fitted in with the tranquil music of Curlew River, which still quietly played in my mind.”

This post was sparked by Carl Honoré's fine book In Praise of Slow. There is an excellent section on classical music, and the chapters on slow food and slow sex aren't bad either. You can sample the book on the In praise of slow web site. (In the US the book is called In Praise of Slowness for some reason).

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