The almost submerged cathedral

Claude Debussy's La cathédrale engloutie (The submerged cathedral) in his Préludes Book 1 was inspired by the legend of the sunken city of Ys off the Brittany coast. My photograph above was taken in France, but not in Brittany. It shows the Church of Champaubert which is almost submerged by the waters of the Lac du Der Chantecoq in the Champagne region. The lake was created in 1974 as part of a massive flood prevention scheme for the tributaries of the River Seine. It covers 4800 hectacres, and its creation submerged three villages whose 345 residents had to be relocated. Champaubert was one of the villages flooded, but the church remains in eerie isolation by the lakeside.

The huge man-made resovoir has been put to good use. A cycle path runs round the lake, and the area is now a major centre for watersports and cycling. The photo below shows me on the lakeside path. For cycling readers, I am riding my Moulton APB, which is the bike I travel with when serious off-roading is not on the agenda. My ride round the lake was a lot more pleasant than that taken by Debussy's friend Ernest Chausson. In 1899 he lost control of his bicycle on a downhill slope, ran straight into the brick wall of his estate in Limary, Seine-et-Oise, and died instantly, aged 44. But no such mistakes by me on the big downhills.

An interesting bit of music trivia. In 1930 Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra performed an orchestral transcription of Debussy's La cathédrale engloutie with the bass line augmented by a theremin. But the low frequencies caused nausea in the back ranks of the srting section and the experiment was not repeated.

Now playing - Debussy's La cathédrale engloutie, on a piano, what else? Gordon Fergus-Thompson is the pianist on the Brilliant Classics reissue of his ASV recordings of the complete piano music of Debussy and Ravel. Another brilliant bargain from the Dutch label.


More on floods here and here.
Photographs (c) 2007 On An Overgrown Path. Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The colour of music

Useful article in this week's New Statesman on the Eye Music: Kandinsky, Klee and All That Jazz exhibition that I wrote about here a couple of weeks back.

Now playing - A Colour Symphony by Sir Arthur Bliss, with Vernon Handley conducting the Ulster Orchestra. This 1922 work is a musical bridge between the pageantry of Elgar and the progressiveness of Stravinsky and Milhaud. There are four movements, Purple - Andante maestoso, Red - Allegro vivace, Blue - Gently flowing, and finally, Green - Moderato.

Sir Arthur Bliss held that most royal of musical titles, Master of the Queen's Music. He is remembered as an English composer, and is unlikely to feature on Sequenza21. But he was in fact half-American (on his father’s side), and America played an important part in his life and career. In 1923 Bliss went with his father to the United States, and was active there as a conductor, pianist, lecturer and writer. During the time he was in the US his music was played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Monteux and the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. He met Trudy Hoffmann in California and married her in 1925, and returned to England the following year.

A Colour Symphony was composed the year before the composer travelled to America, and the work was a major success on both sides of the Atlantic. But both this work, and the composer's reputation, have faded into obscurity in the intervening years. Today Bliss is usually remembered for his score for the 1936 film based on H.G. Wells' novel The Shape Of Things To Come. That is unfair. His music deserves to be heard more often, particularly A Colour Symphony and Music For Strings. As they say on Amazon.com, if you bought Tippett's Concerto for Double String Orchestra you will like Bliss' Music for Strings.

Wonderful playing from the Ulster Orchestra under Tod Handley in A Colour Symphony. Read more about that fine orchestra here.
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Alan Hovhaness - Mysterious Mountain

Robert Fisk writes in today's Independent ~ "There is nothing so infinitely sad - so pitiful and yet so courageous - as a people who yearn to return to a land for ever denied them; the Poles to Brest Litovsk, the Germans to Silesia, the Palestinians to that part of Palestine that is now Israel. When a people claim to have settled again in their ancestral lands - the Israelis, for example, at the cost of "cleansing" 750,000 Arabs who had perfectly legitimate rights to their homes - the world becomes misty eyed. But could any nation be more miserably bereft than one which sees, each day, the towering symbol of its own land in the hands of another?

Mount Ararat (photo above) will never return to Armenia - not to the rump state which the Soviets created in 1920 after the Turkish genocide of one and a half million Armenians - and its presence to the west of the capital, Yerevan, is a desperate, awful, permanent reminder of wrongs unrighted, of atrocities unacknowledged, of dreams never to be fulfilled. I watched it all last week, cloud-shuffled in the morning, blue-hazed through the afternoon, ominous, oppressive, inspiring, magnificent, ludicrous in a way - for the freedom which it encourages can never be used to snatch it back from the Turks - capable of inspiring the loftiest verse and the most execrable commercialism."

Alan Hovhaness was born in Boston in 1911. His Armenian father came from Adana, which is now in Turkey, and his mother was of Scottish descent. Hovhaness trained at first in the New England Conservatory, and was organist at St. James Armenian Church in Watertown, Massahusetts, (see photo below), where he was influenced by the music of the composer/priest Komitas Vartabed. Listen to MP3 samples of Vartabed's music sung by the Yerevan Chamber Choir here.

In 1942 Hovhaness won a scholarship to study at Tanglewood with Bohuslav Martinu. But Hovhaness did not fit into the Tanglewood clique dominated by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. The official Hovhaness web site says that his compositions were ridiculed by the Tanglewood set, and that Bernstein called it "ghetto music." After leaving Tanglewood Hovhaness developed his unique composing style, and continued to be influenced by Armenian, as well as Indian music. After rejection by the Tanglewood group of composers his champions included fellow mavericks John Cage and Lou Harrison.

Hovhaness wrote 67 numbered symphonies, the second of which was composed in 1955 and titled "Mysterious Mountain." Those who believe that youth is a time of life should note that Hovhaness wrote his first symphony aged 25, his second aged 40, and his last aged 81. It would make the perfect overgrown path if the title "Mysterious Mountain" referred specifically to Mount Ararat, but sadly this is not the case. The title refers to mountains in general rather than one specific peak, and the apocryphal story is that the title came about because Leopold Stokowski asked the composer to give the symphony a name.

Whatever the derivation of the title Hovhaness' Second Symphony, like all of the composer's music, should be heard more often. I will be playing the symphony in my Overgrown Path programme on Future Radio tomorrow (Sunday August 5). This is a test webcast, and will be broadcast between 5.00pm and 6.00pm British Summer Time, and is available on web radio. Convert on-air times to your local time zone using this link. Click here for the audio stream. Windows Media Player doesn't like the 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 happen to be in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM.

On Sunday week (August 12) I will be playing William Alwyn's Fifth Symphony which featured in Brain music. Lou Harrison championed Alan Hovhaness. I will be webcasting an all Lou Harrison programme on September 23, and you can read an interview with him in Going Buddhist with Lou Harrison.


Listen via internet radio to Armenian Radio here. Photo credits. Mount Ararat from Wikipedia. St James Armenian Church, Watertown, Mass from church web site. 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

I don’t care what they say about Stokowski

“I know there are other things in music that are more important,” he said in his eighties, “but after all, sound is what we’re selling. I hate nasty tone. Even the timpani should sing. I remember the cymbals in the Bruckner Seventh when Furtwängler did it with the Berlin Philharmonic – a shower of stars. Not a bang or a clap, which is what you seem to get these days. I don’t care what they say about Stokowski. He was good. He could achieve a lovely sound. I learned something from that.”

Another great conductor, Reginald Goodall, talks about Leopold Stokowski who was born on April 18th 1882. Quote from Reggie, the Life of Reginald Goodall by John Lucas, John Murray ISBN 1856810518

For Stokowski downloads take this path, to read about Fantasia click here.
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A treasure trove of music recording history

An interesting, and rewarding, recent development On An Overgrown Path recently has been the interest in the recording process and sound quality, an interest also reflected in other new blogs including the excellent The Crunch. Recording history is a particular area of interest for me as I worked for both the BBC and EMI in my time in the music industry, so I was delighted this week when our internet sleuth Walt Santner sent me details of a veritable treasure trove of recording history links.

The links are part of the University of San Diego's project documenting the history of recorded sound. The timeline only currently goes up to 2005, so it doesn't yet cover topics such as SACD in depth, but there is some really interesting material there including a history of microphone development. But the real gem is the extensive list of internet resources and links. And please don't think this is just for geeks, there is important musical and cultural material there as well.

I've only just started to explore the resources, but already I've been fascinated by the Aaron Copland Collection from the Library of Congress, America's Jazz Heritage from the Smithsonian Institution, a discussion of recording and gender, an audio file of Stokowski talking about orchestra seating layouts, a very good summary of sound recording copyright, and one for the geeks - an illustrated history of world payphones. There are also a lot of downloads, check out the 44 recordings of Omaha Indian music, and Stokowski downloads of ten audio and two video files.

Ideal browsing for an autumn holiday weekend - enjoy!

* That wonderful header photo is from the the HybridSoundSystem.com website, and shows the Seattle Session Orchestra being recorded in Bastyr University Chapel - do check out the HybridSound site for the interesting audio samples.

For more Walt Santner discoveries visit a Treasure trove of historic MP3 downloads
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

A treasure trove of Stokowski downloads

A Japanese site has a treasure trove of recordings by the legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski ranging from 1917 acoustic recordings to 1953 electric recordings. All were 78rpm shellac releases, and the site claims they are copyright free. There are a lot of very fine things to listen to including two complete Tchaikovsky symphonies, a complete 1941 No 4 recorded with the NBC Symphony in 1941, and a 1940 Symphony No.6 'Pathetique' with the All American Youth Orchestra. Thanks go to US reader and internet sleuth Walt Santner whose research uncovered these, and the Norwegian historic MP3s, for us, and to the unknown Japanese webmaster for making them available.

Stokowski was the role model for today's jet set maestros. Born in North London in 1882, a short distance from what was to become EMI's famous Abbey Road Studios, he started his musical career as organist in St James' Church, Piccadily. He moved to the US in 1905, and ten years later became a naturalized American. He took over the Philadelphia Orchestra (see my article Reflections on the Philadelphia Orchestra), and it was here that he built his reputation as orchestral trainer, contemporary music champion (including the first performance and recording of Charles Ives' Symphony No. 4) , pioneer of new technology, and womaniser. He is remembered for many things, most notably his wonderful recorded legacy, his Bach orchestrations, and his work with Walt Disney on the film Fantasia. Do listen to the audio files that Walt Santner has done us all a great favour by uncovering.

* The biography Leopold Stokowski by Preben Opperby was published by Hippocrene Books in the US and Midas Books in the UK (ISBN 0882546589 & 0859362531) but is now out of print.

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
If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to Rhythm Is It! - the new Fantasia?