On An Overgrown Path

Montreal-based Constantinople Ensemble is a group of musicians who chose the journey, not only geographical, but also historical, cultural, temporal, and inner, as their cornerstone, drawing inspiration from all sources and aiming for distant horizons. To the cynic this vision will sound trite. But unlike so many in the world of contemporary art music , the Constantinople Ensemble under their music director Kiya Tabassian put their music where their mouth is.  Their recently-released album In the Footsteps of Rumi  on the innovative Glossa label may be predictable in subject matter. But the core ensemble of setar (Persian lute), kanun (Turkish zither), percussion, and baroque violin and viola d'amore is far from predictable. For the exquisite Rumi settings in Persian and Arabic they are joined by Tunisian singer Ghalia Benali  in an album that provides a refreshingly astute viewpoint on the over-exposed Rumi . Even further off the predictability sc...

On the right is Frans Brüggen who progressed from recorder and baroque flute virtuoso to distinguished early music conductor and co-founder of the Orchestra of the 18th Century . The photo dates from the early days of the avant-garde recorder trio Sour Cream co-founded by Brüggen in 1972 which was involved with the Dutch counterculture movement. The other founder members of the trio Kees Boeke and Walter van Hauwe are also in the photo. It was remiss of me not to include in my recent Music for Meditation post Sour Cream's legendary The Passion of Reason which was recorded when the trio reformed in 1993. The album is sub-titled 'Five Centuries of 'scientific' music' and arranges music from Guillaume de Machaut to J.S. Bach. It is influenced by the concept of the mediaeval quadrivium or the convergence of music, arithmetic, astronomy and geometry, and inhabits the speculative world of Hermetic philosophy and alchemy . Initially released on the Attacca label ...

' ...our discontentment over being human, with its inherent limitations, is boiling over. Case in point: music is now routinely given a slick, post-production shove toward hyperreality. ...Media have altered musical perspective (e.g., stage perspective, podium perspective, audience perspective, stereo hifi perspective, and in- or over-ear perspective) to such a degree that acoustics developed intuitively over generations (and hardened into convention) to enhance natural sound must now be supplanted by subtle (or not so subtle) amplification and digital processing to satisfy a generation that may never have stepped inside a concert hall and is instead acculturated to the isolating, degraded sound of earbuds and headphones playing back mp3s. Reorienting concert soundscapes and recordings to model immersive, inside-the-head experience (VR tricks the eye in a similar fashion) is promulgated as inevitable if music presenters wish to attract new generations of concertgoers and thus retai...

It is unfortunate that in early music authenticity has led to sterility rather than creativity, and it is doubly unfortunate that this stylistic sterility has spread beyond early music to the mainstream repertoire . Just as the world and the music of audiences are never one and the same , so the stylistic world of the musician should never be one and the same. Evidence of the power of stylistic diversity is provided by viola da gamba virtuosos Fahmi Alqhai . Born in Seville in 1976 with a Syrian father and Palestinian mother, Fahmi Alqhai spent his first 11 years in Syria before studying in Europe with teachers including Paolo Pandolfo . He has gone on to play with leading ensembles including Jordi Savall's Hesperion XXI while also performing flamenco and jazz . In between all that, and presumably in deference to the vagaries of the classical music industry, the young violist also qualified as a Bachelor of Dentistry at the University of Seville. Fahmi Alqhai's mission, as...

A Los Angeles Times article about John Cage's formative years in the cultural stew of 1920s and '30s L.A. quotes how the city was described in 1913 as susceptible to "spiritualists, mediums, astrologists, phrenologists, palmists and all other breeds of esoteric wind-jammers," to say nothing of "mazdaznan clubs, yogi sects, homes of truth, cosmic fluidists, astral planers, Emmanuel movers, Rosicrucians and other boozy transcendentalists". The inclusion of the Rosicrucians in that list of West Coast movers and shakers is prescient, as the secretive society of the Rosy Cross re-entered Cage’s life thirty years later via his fascination with the music of Eric Satie - in the 1890s Satie was the official composer and chapel-master of the Rosicrucian Order Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique, du Temple et du Graal in Paris and several of his works of the period are linked to Rosicrucianism. There are many other composers with connections to Rosicrucianism includ...

“The modern experiment to live without religion has failed, and once we have understood this, we know what our 'post modern' tasks really are” wrote E.F. Schumacher in 1977. Today Schumacher is remembered for his pioneering advocacy of intermediate technology in Small Is Beautiful . But he was a multi-faceted personality whose personal path took him from living without religion to esoteric traditions such as Buddhism and Gurdjieff’s 'Work' and finally on to the Catholic Church, a journey that inspired his neglected A Guide for the Perplexed from which the quote above is taken. I think Fritz Schumacher would have approved of the newly released CD Trialogue which mixes sacred vocal and instrumental music from South India, Morocco and Medieval Europe in a project that wisely takes the path of unity within diversity rather than fusion. Singers Aruna Sairam , Noureddine Tahiri and Dominique Vellard are supported by a transcultural ensemble of instrumentalists, and all a...

This notion, that one's 'got it', often stunts any possibility of growth or originality. It's easy to slide from being sure of yourself to being sure that others are wrong (both feed off one another); it's easy to accept that the answer has already been worked out for you well in advance and all you have to do is nod your head, repeat the words, and step into your pre-assigned role. It could be argued that the various forms of fundamentalism we witness are modern-day reactions to the preponderance of doubt and uncertainty, to the fragmentation of narratives and our inability to turn to Nature, Reason, or God for some coherent picture and our place in it. What is historical here, and what deep, psychological impulse? Conformity, order, the end of the story, there in the beginning all along; the allure of belonging, the 'charm of tyranny' ( Buruma ). To talk of individualism today is, the detractors would say, to align oneself with the forces of capitalism. Th...

Question - What does a Jordi Savall sideman do to let his hair down? Answer - Make an album scored for electronic samples, keyboards, vibraphone, marimba, cardboard tubes and much else, but with the viola da gamba notably absent. All that recent talk about authentic performances prompted me to share with you a delicously inauthentic album that has been a favourite on my iPod for a long time. El Aroma del Tiempo (The Scent of Time) comes from Pedro Estevan, who is best known as the percussionist extraordinaire on many Jordi Savall projects. After studying at Madrid's Conservatory of Music he studied contemporary percussion with Sylvio Gualda , who worked frequently with Iannis Xenakis , African percussion with the Senegalese griot and teacher Doudou N'Diaye Rose , and tambourine with frame drum master Glen Velez . Despite contributions from several other musicians familiar from Jordi Savall albums, notably Dimitris Psonis on lute, tar and bouzouki and Jordi's daught...

radiomovies has left a new comment on your post " Jordi Savall and the just-in-time interview ": What an artist, what a human being. His recordings of Tobias Hume pieces (say it quietly) make the Bach solo Suites sound pale. Any composer who can write a piece called 'Whoopee do me no Harme' , at the beginning of the 17th century, has to be a good thing... best PDS Philip , thanks for giving me the opportunity to feature Jordi Savall's CD of the overlooked and underrated Tobias Hume (1569?-1645). It also allows me to showcase another disc that has been giving me a lot of pleasure, this time by the Italian viola da gamba player Paolo Pandolfo , who was an early member of Jordi Savall's Hesperion XX. Carl Friedrich Abel's music is even more neglected than that of Tobias Hume. Which is quite surprising as Abel (1723-1787) was a close associate of J.S. Bach and composed a symphony in E flat (Op. 7 No. 6) which was erroneously attributed to Mozart (KV 18). C...

'Music industry finds the solution to its pirate troubles - give everything away' - screams a Guardian headline . Sorry folks, but the classical sector has been giving away music for years. Here from my current Visa bill are the prices I paid for CDs online recently including delivery: Messiaen Des canyons aux étoiles (2CDs) - £4.00, Dallapiccola choral works - £3.41, Stockhausen piano works - £4.22, Elgar Dream of Gerontius (2CDs) - £5.67. It actually gets worse in the stores. Just last week I bought 10CDs of Thomas Tallis' complete works in recordings made as recently as 2004 for £3 a CD, and that wasn't discounted. In HMV stores you can currently pick up 14CDs of the complete Mahler symphonies by classical music's premium brands, Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, for £1.79 a disc. That means a Mahler CD from our industry's most prestigous band now costs less than a cappuccino, and it's not expanding the market for classical music or filling c...