The individual is sovereign

'That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign' - from On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, who was born in London on 20th May 1806 and died in Avignon, France, where my pictures were taken, on 8th May, 1873.

Mill wrote against repression in Ireland and as a Member of Parliament introduced the first vote on women's suffrage. He campaigned for free speech and proportional representation and against slavery. But we are most indebted to him as a defender of individual conscience and expression. He is buried alongside his wife in the cemetery of St. Veran on the outskirts of Avignon and his tomb, seen in my photos, is marked 'En hommage à John Stuart Mill Défenseur des Femmes'. The plaque has been added by Centre d'Hébergement et de Réinsertion Sociale "Stuart Mill", a refuge for women victims of violence in Paris.


Now playing Motet (Excerpta Tractati Logico-Philosophici) by Elisabeth Lutyens sung by Exaudi directed by James Weeks. Lutyens was a defender of individual conscience and expression but was not a supporter of organised feminism as this extract from Meirion and Susie Harries' excellent biography of her tells - 'Why, she asked, did people speak of 'women's music' and 'female composers' and yet stop short of implying that male homosexuals wrote 'queer music?''If women are to be butts,' she argued, 'let homosexuals be also ... and impotence or any other private sexual consideration, all of which, no doubt, affects one's work.' In 1973 she would write to The Times complaining that William Glock was labelled a supporter of Women's Lib because he had included four pieces by female composers in that season's Proms, and yet no one drew the obvious inference that he had programmed the work of no less than sixteen male homosexuals.'

More on Elisabeth Lutyens here, and listen to a podcast about her music here.
Photos (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

New music ticks outside the box

'Box-ticking' gets short measure in an enterprising concert of new music from Germany and England at The Warehouse, London SE1 on April 10th with the Uroboros Ensemble conducted by Gwyn Pritchard. Here is the programme:

from Germany
Peter Helmut Lang - Dominoeffekt **
Karl-Heinz Wahren - A capricious and romantic meeting **
Johannes K. Hildebrandt - Bruchstück II *
Lothar Voigtländer - Salmo Salmonis *

from Britain
Ross Lorraine - end piece **
James Weeks - The Catford Harmony **
Gwyn Pritchard - Ensemble Music for Six
Joe Cutler - Three Quiet Pieces

** = World première * = UK première

It's an adventurous programme that's refreshingly free of the 'box-ticking' that sanitises so much programming today. And it's not just classical music that suffers from the 'little boxes synodrome'. Here is a thought-provoking extract from a Guardian article about art commissions.

'Today it was announced that Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster will be the ninth artist in the Unilever series of new installations for the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Once again you can see the commission ticking boxes.

Free from macho tendencies? Tick. French artist Gonzalez-Foerster makes melancholy films that passively observe city life. Her art is consciously slight and the character she adopts is that of the "flaneur", the artist as sophisticated urban observer, an idea invented by the 19th-century poet and critic Charles Baudelaire. In other words there is no chance of her filling the Turbine Hall with, say, a massive slab of steel. Her contribution will, like those previous classics the crack and the slides, reject grandiosity in favour of the witty and ephemeral. That's a relief - I was scared they might commission a colossal statue of George Bush. But then again Foerster is also ...

Free from north-American tendencies - another box ticked. Apart from Bruce Nauman who's a sort of honorary non-American, the Turbine Hall commissioners strikingly avoid inviting some rather obvious US candidates. It is precisely in the US that artists tend to work naturally, and brilliantly on this scale - but we have to wait a bit longer, it seems, to see a torqued steel creation by Richard Serra in Tate Modern, or a Jeff Koons inflated toy, or a Claes Oldenburg penknife. "Americanness" seems to be one of the vices the series strains to avoid, perhaps in the curators' minds being a synonym for masculine arrogance.

Free from bad taste - tick. The appeal of the slight, Baudelairean gesture, and the minimal aesthetic, is that it is remarkably tasteful. The kind of art that gets selected for Tate Modern is guaranteed not to make you feel daft or silly for liking it - for all its modernity this art has a decorous style. In other words, it will not give critics anything to mock or audiences anything to be embarrassed by.

In the 1960s the French artist Nikki de St Phalle created a giant recumbent woman for an art museum, with a door between her legs. You can guarantee you will never see that in the Turbine Hall. Nor will you see the bad taste genius of Damien Hirst on display here - that would be ... so vulgar.'

Now read about how Benjamin Britten helped a composer closely associated with little boxes.
Header photo image is Jeff Koons' Lips, photo by David Heald from the Guggenheim Museum. 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

Found - thousands of happy new ears

In only six weeks more than a thousand people have visited the Overgrown Path podcast page on iTunes, and this week James Weeks talking about the music of Elisabeth Lutyens has been added to my David Munrow and Alvin Curran podcasts. Doesn't that level of interest in music from the long tail tell us something?

Elsewhere there has been some good humoured discussion of Angela Hewitt world Bach tour T-shirts, with one defender of the Bach world tour marketing machine writing - 'I think you are missing the point here, which is trying to get new people interested in her, giving her profile in the press and recognition ... every interview, every talk show appearance is promotion.'

Every talk show appearance may be promotion. But all promotion is not good promotion. And promoting serious music to mass markets is a risky business. There are very few examples of large, and loyal, new audiences being created by mass marketing. But there are numerous examples that ended in tears, where mass marketing failed to attract a new audiences, but instead drove away the core audience. The most obvious example is BBC Radio 3, where going mass market has failed to attract Classic FM listeners, but has instead, literally, switched-off the network's core audience and resulted in a net loss of listeners.

New audiences are essential for the health of serious music, but so is being realistic. We live in an age of instant gratification, and today's arts administrators and broadcasters want immediate access to new mass audiences. This is not only unrealistic, it also often achieves the opposite result to that intended. New audiences can be reached, but we need to be less greedy and more adventurous to reach them.

As always on this blog these are my personal views. But they are based on real world experience. Yes, the sample size may be small, but, as I have pointed out before, the samples are larger than the focus groups used by the BBC and others. And before the cynics sniff at a few thousand listeners for David Munrow and Alvin Curran they should remember that it was revealed recently that Rupert Murdoch's new satellite Fox Business Network is attracting an average of only 6,000 daytime viewers.

The new audience for serious music is in the receptive long tail, not in the mass market short head. The long tail of classical music has received much attention recently. But there are many other long tails - for literature, for the visual arts, for the cinema, for techno and electronic music, and others. There is overlap, but there is also a sizeable new audience for serious music waiting in those other long tails. These are people who have been driven away from classical music by BBC TV's Classical Star and Classic FM's music for dinner parties. They see serious music today as being unexciting. They don't want to be talked down to by chummy radio presenters. They want the adventurousness of Boulez in the 1970s at the Round House and Proms in London, and at the Rug Concerts in New York. But, with a few notable exceptions, we are not giving them what they want.

I have talked to some of the new audience that my internet radio programmes and blog have reached. They told me they bought CDs and downloads of music by Guillaume Connesson, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow and others after discovering them On An Overgrown Path. These new listeners are well educated, have disposable incomes, are interested in the media, travel extensively, have expensive stereo systems, watch art films, and read contemporary fiction. But they listen to non-classical music because they find it more exciting and challenging. They are the long-tail dwellers, they are a receptive new audience for serious classical music, but we need to be a lot more adventurous to reach them.

Sir Brian McMaster arrives at the same conclusion in his controversial and brave report on funding in the UK arts which was published last week. In the report he recommends 'that cultural organisations stop exploiting the tendency of many audiences to accept a superficial experience and foster a relationship founded on innovative, exciting and challenging work'. Or, as that great arts administrator and BBC Radio 3 controller John Drummond wrote "the arts are as much about controversy as about achievement".

We need to be more adventurous and controversial. We already have the exciting music. We should stop apologising for it.

Image with many thanks to AllPosters.com. 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

Radio has to be an adventurous experience

My article last year about Elisabeth Lutyens created a lot of interest. In it I recommended the new CD of Lutyens' choral music sung by Exaudi directed by James Weeks, and on my Future Radio programme this Sunday (Jan 13) James Weeks (above) joins me to talk about Lutyens and introduce some of the music from the disc, including her 1953 masterpiece the Motet (Excerpta Tractati Logico-Philosophici) which is usually known by the more memorable title of the Wittgenstein Motet. The interview will be available as An Overgrown Path podcast after the broadcast.

James Weeks is also active as a composer and we will be playing one of his choral compositions on the programme. James is a champion of contemporary music, and he has just been appointed music director of the New London Chamber Choir. Pierre Boulez is patron of the NLCC, which has a reputation for pushing the new music envelope just about as far as it will go, and sometimes beyond. The choir was founded by James Wood, and together they stirred things up with a new work which I featured in an early post here. The week following the Lutyens programme I will be playing the NLCC's recording of Luigi Dallapiccola's moving Canti di prigionia in a programme of Italian choral music.

If any confirmation is needed that radio has to be an adventurous experience it comes from non-music blogs such as Threading thoughts, which recently wrote:

I am intrigued, transported, and mind-moved by music. Like visual art and literature I respond to a wide selection: classical, pop, folk, jazz, and contemporary classical (which I always think is a dull title). However, I know next to nothing - well, nothing - about music. I just know what I like! I was delighted last Sunday in the Observer newspaper Review section to find a list of contemporary music blogs to try out. As I type this I am listening to Future Radio which I found through the On An Overgrown Path blog. Also I like the Zen saying on the header of the Overgrown Path blog.

Now read about another contemporary composer who said music has to be an adventurous experience.
Listen on Future Radio at 5.00pm UK time this Sunday, January 13th in real time here (convert to local time zones here). An Overgrown Path podcast will follow. 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. Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Hip hop rhythms through sound proof glass

The background rumble of trains on the London Underground passing beneath the hall can be heard on several of the great classical recordings made in the Kingsway Hall in the 1960s and 70s. I was reminded of this when recording the interview for my recent David Munrow on the record programme as I could hear the 21st century equivalent of Underground trains in the form of low frequency hip hop rhythms coming through the 'soundproof' window from the adjacent studio at Future Radio. I decided to ignore the breakthrough as it was not too obtrusive, and I was also mindful of the numerous potentially degrading links in the distribution chain that the programme would go through before reaching the final listener.

But I was still thinking analogue, and had seriously underestimated the resilience of programme content in the digital domain. When I listened to the broadcast of the interview live from the audio stream on KEF monitor quality speakers at home the breakthrough could be heard, although it certainly didn't detract from a very interesting programme. More surprisingly the hip hop rhythms can also be heard on the podcast of the interview, despite a multi-stage distribution chain and the file using the 'intermediate' iTunes encoding sampling rate of 44kHz and mp3 bit rate of 256kbps to contain download time.

That distant hip hop beat highlights the new challenges posed by digital distribution. I have already written here about the difficulties associated with webcasting classical recordings with wide dynamic ranges. This problem was brought home again while working on this Sunday's Elisabeth Lutyens programme with James Weeks. When Lutyens specifies ppp Exaudi directed by James Weeks sing ppp, and NMC's recording engineer Andrew Post digitised that ppp. Exactly as it should be, until listeners switch off when the broadcast/webcast programme content is submerged under background noise. The same problem was experienced when testing the audio stream for the complete Inner Cities webcast. I mentioned this to pianist Daan Vandewalle who replied that the reason why some passages were very quiet on his recording was because he played them very quietly!

In rock music compression is increasingly being applied to reduce the dynamic range of recordings, despite the wide signal to noise ratio made available by digital technologies. Compression gives recordings more impact by making them sound louder, and that sells product as the marketing men say. But a backlash against the excessive use of compression has begun with the creation of the website Turn Me Up who summarise their aims as follows:

Turn Me Up!™ is a non-profit music industry organization campaigning to give artists back the choice to release more dynamic records. To be clear, it's not our goal to discourage loud records; they are, of course, a valid choice for many artists. We simply want to make the choice for a more dynamic record an option for artists.

Today, artists generally feel they have to master their records to be as loud as everybody else's. This certainly works for many artists. However, there are many other artists who feel their music would be better served by a more dynamic record, but who don't feel like that option is available to them.

This all comes down to the moment a consumer hears a record, and the fear that if the record is more dynamic, the consumer won't know to just turn up the volume. This is an understandable concern, and one Turn Me Up! is working to resolve.

You can hear (or perhaps not hear) Lutyens' ppp writing on Future Radio this Sunday Jan 13. There is no hip hop background but listeners with high quality speakers may hear the door of the adjacent studio closing a couple of times. The following Sunday the opening of the 1995 recording of Luigi Dallapiccola's Canti di prigionia performed by Ensemble InterContemporain and the New London Chamber Choir will also test the signal to noise ratio of the whole digital distribution chain.

Hip hop accompaniment and doors slamming regardless, I am very grateful to Future Radio for allowing me to use programme time as a sonic sandbox. They have also been extraordinarily helpful in tweaking the audio stream quality to accomodate the extremes of dynamic range found in contemporary music, and the dreaded silence detector is currently off. Norfolk, UK is becoming something of a hotspot in the recording world, and a state of the art rock studio has just opened a few miles from where I live in rural Norfolk. Leeders Farm recording studios are close to where Sir Malcolm Arnold spent the last years of his life. Which allows me to back link to a relevant post which brings together the different worlds of rock and classical music.

Header photo is NOT the Future Radio studio! It is Castle Sound in Scotland, which, I am sure, doesn't suffer from sonic breakthrough, although those speakers may cause the engineer to go deaf instead. 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.

Early and late music reaches new audiences

Adventurous programming of early and late music has reached new audiences via my Future Radio programme. My Inner Cities webcast, which was late both in terms of the work's year of composition and my bedtime, was just one example. From earlier times my David Munrow (photo above) feature was repeated by popular demand over Christmas, and it has just been made available as an iTunes podcast, as has my interview with pianist Daan Vandewalle, who played Alvin Curran's Inner Cities. And every week I am getting more emails at the station responding favourably to the programmes' eclectic mix of music.

My sample size may be small, but it is no smaller than the focus groups used extensively by the BBC and by US presidential contenders. If I were predicting the future I would say that early music will be the 'big thing' in 2008, and that there is also a real opportunity for live concerts combining early and contemporary works. Pierre Boulez did it in his Domaine Musical concerts in France in the 1950s (e.g. Bach or Gabrieli combined with new works), while in 2000 a concert in Berlin combined Mahler and Ockeghem and sold out. Whatever the sample size the Overgrown Path webcasts are punching well above their weight, and the last thirty hours of broadcast music have not included a single note of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler or Shostakovich.

I've already written here how David Munrow virtually single-handedly made early music the 'big thing' in the 1970s. All that is needed to make it happen again is the right animateur. If early music is the surprise of 2008 perhaps EMI's new owners will make their acquired assets work for them by releasing a box of the complete David Munrow recordings with decent documentation instead of sub-licensing them for peanuts to other companies while also giving them away piecemeal on their own budget label? That way the new owners wouldn't need to 'revalue' my pension.

Over the next few weeks I have some very interesting programmes on Future Radio which combine early and contemporary music. I will publish full details before each broadcast, but here is an outline of the schedule. Judging by recent events you may also see some of these composers making last minute appearances in the BBC Radio 3 schedules. My programmes are broadcast on Sunday at 5.00pm, convert to other time zones here.

* Jan 13 - Elisabeth Lutyens' music with guest James Weeks. Rising star conductor and composer James Weeks discusses his highly acclaimed CD of Lutyens' choral music with me, and plays some of her music from it. Available after broadcast as An Overgrown Path podcast.

* Jan 20 - The Italian Job. Giosefffo Zarlino Motets (new recording from Ensemble Plus Ultra and Michael Noone), and Luigi Dallapiccola's Canti di prigionia.

* Jan 27 - Celebrating Messiaen. Excerpts from Messian's Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jésus and Bach Toccatas played on the piano by Angela Hewitt.

* Feb 3 - Pilgrimage to Santiago. Music from the medieval Codex Las Huelgas and two complete sections from Joby Talbot's acclaimed 2005 choral work Path of Miracles.

* Feb 10 - A study in contrasts - Cage and Frescobaldi. Girolamo Frescobaldi's Canzoni framing John Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra

More on Joby Talbot's contemporary choral work Path of Miracles here, and read what a critic thought of Luigi Dallapiccola's music here.
David Munrow photo from Testament's condensed CD re-release of his The Art of the Recorder and Instruments of the Middle Ages. 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