The Rite of Spring

Photo taken at the Lost Garden of Heligan, Cornwall. Now playing - Fazil Say's recording of the four-hand piano transcription of the Rite Of Spring. The starting point of this CD is Stravinsky's own four-hand score for the Rite, but the finishing point is some way away from the composer's original. Not only does Say use multi-tracking to play both piano parts, but he builds up further layers with his own additions to the score mimicking percussion and cymbals, with the different layers using different microphone perspectives.

As if this is not enough Say does a Glenn Gould and offers an interview with himself in the sleeve notes justifying his approach and also justifying releasing a full price CD containing just 31 minutes and 12 seconds of music. (He does threaten a coupling of his take on Verklärte Nacht, but thankfully refrains). Not so much Stravinsky as a technical tour de force, and, surprisingly, it is still in the catalogue at full price eight years after release. Certainly not a first choice or even tenth choice Rite but a fascinating musical and technical curiosity if you don't mind few bangs for your bucks.

More interesting orchestration in my Future Radio programme this Sunday (March 9 - check sidebar for details) in Lou Harrison's Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra with a score that includes 12 brakedrums, 6 flowerpots, dustbins, a double bass laid on its back and tin cans. The recording is a new one by Madeleine Mitchell and Ensemble Bash.

No short change with this excellent Signum release (sleeve below) which offers 66 minutes of music from Anne Dudley, Tarik O'Regan, Stuart Jones, and Simon Limbrick and a traditional Sengalese drumming piece which I will finish the programme with. An excellent release, but the Fiddlesticks title, with no mention of Lou Harison on the cover, doesn't do it justice. Retailers are saying it would sell far more copies if it had been marketed as a Lou Harrison recording and filed in the browser under 'H'. Signum are best known for their choral recordings, but are doing some interesting things in contemporary music including a new recording of the complete Philip Glass String Quartets.


More Lou Harrison here.
Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Cleaning the ears of the musically educated

It was, as I remember, through Jean [Erdman} - who is to dancing what Vivaldi was to music - that we met the other member of the party, composer John Cage, who had then become interested in the relationship of music to Zen and was beginning to explore the melodies of silence. My principal tie with John was that we had the same kind of humour, for he would simply bubble with laughter whenever describing his latest plans for musical outrage, such as a very formal piano recital in full evening dress, complete with an assistant to turn the pages, in which, however, the score consisted entirely of rests.

The joke wasn't merely that he was getting away with murder in the hopelessly deranged world of avant-garde music, so as to constitute the master charlatan of all, but that beyond all this and to make matters still funnier, he had also discovered and wanted to share the meditation process of listening to silence. This is simply to close your eyes and allow your ears to resonate with whatever sounds may be happening spontaneously, making no attempt to name or identify them, just as when one listens to formal music. After a while one hears the sounds emerging, without cause or origin, from the emptiness of silence, and so becomes witness to the beginning of the universe.

John slept that night on a divan in the living room, where we kept a hamster in a cage furnished with a vicous wheel, or bhavachakra, wherein the benighted creature could run forever without getting anywhere. This particular wheel squeaked abonimably as the hamster ran, so I told John to put the cage out in the passage if it bothered him. "Oh, not at all!" he said. "It's the most fascinating sound, and I shall use it as a lullaby."

What may not be generally understood about John is that he is an extremely accomplished musician who has, however, realized that we do not know how to listen. Conventional music, as well as conventional speech, have given us prejudiced ears, so that we treat all utterances which do not follow their rules as static, or insignificant noise. There was a time when painters, and people in general, saw landscape as visual static - mere background. John is calling our attention to sonic landscape, or soundscape, which simultaneously involves a project for cleaning the ears of the musically educated public.

As painters once framed "mere" landscape, John is using the ritual of the concert hall to frame silence and spontaneous sound, which we shall in due course find as beautiful as sky, hills, and forests. Imagine, then, the sonic equivalent of those places in national parks usually called Inspiration Point where tourists from Kansas exclaim at the view, "Oh, it's just like a picture!" Buddhahood is the state in which all sensory input is viewed in this way.

Priceless 'John Cage for dummies' from Alan Watts' autobiography, which has recently been republished by New World Library, Novato, California. Alan Watts, who is seen in my header photo, was born in England in 1915. He met the Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki at an early age, and moved to America where he became an Episcopal minister.

After leaving the church Alan Watts wrote more than twenty books on Zen Buddhism, and his teachings were one of the triggers for "beat Zen" in the late 1950s which saw expression in Jack Kerouac's novel Dharma Bums, Franz Kline's black and white abstractions and John Cage's compositions. In the 1960s Watts was considered by many to be a counterculture 'guru', and his circle included Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass). Watts was also an early environmentalist, and he died at his mountain retreat near Muir Woods, California in 1973.

Buddhism has been an important influence on many other modern composers including Philip Glass and Lou Harrison in the States, and Edmund Rubbra, John Palmer and Jonathan Harvey in England. In My Own Way is the compelling story of one man's pursuit of the Buddhist way, and the impact that his teachings had on many other important twentieth-century figures. Highly recommended, together with the Asian Journals of the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton.

* I am sure my readers' ears do not need cleaning, but this Sunday (Feb 10) you can hear John Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra on my Future Radio programme at 5.00pm on Feb 10 and 12.50am Feb 11 framed by Canzoni by the 17th century Italian composer Girolamo Frescobaldi.


Now read about Zen and the art of new music.
Alan Watts website here. Listen on Future Radio at 5.00pm UK time this Sunday, Feb 10 and 1.00am Monday Feb 11 real time here (convert to local time zones here). 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. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Got the T-shirt? - now hear the music

There was some healthy discussion on my recent article about pianist Angela Hewitt's Bach World Tour T-shirts. No discussion on my Future Radio programme this Sunday (Jan 27) at 5.00pm UK time, just 51 minutes 3 seconds of the perfect pianism of Angela Hewitt playing Messiaen and J.S. Bach, connected by less than 5 minutes of the usual low key links from me. The audio stream can be launched here, and is available in real time only.

There is some interesting music coming up on my Future Radio webcasts in the next few months. It includes Elliott Carter's Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord, Michael Tippett's Second Symphony (why aren't his symphonies performed more often?), and a new recording of Lou Harrison's Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra, all complete - no extracts. Through the year I will also be playing all the Vaughan Williams symphonies. Future Radio agreed to this following very positive listener responses to my broadcast of the Fifth earlier this month, and they are rearranging their schedule to accomodate the 71 minute Sea Symphony in August to coincide with the centenary of the composer's birth.

On April 6 I will be presenting Karajan and Twentieth Century Music to mark the centenary of the conductor's birth. For all his faults Karajan made some superlative records, none more so than his 1972 recording of Arthur Honegger's Third Symphony Liturgique, and I'll be playing that with his 1973 recording of Alban Berg's Three Pieces from the Lyric Suite, both with the Berlin Philharmonic. Framing all these contemporary works will be music by Bach, Tallis, Corelli and from the Sephardic Diaspora.

It's all about thinking outside the box, as Olivier Messiaen did.
Listen on Future Radio at 5.00pm UK time this Sunday, January 27th 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. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Now sample the gamelan online

Much interest in the gamelan threads started by my Colin McPhee posts and webcast, including this comment from Jessica Duchen - 'One of my most fascinating musical experiences was playing in a gamelan orchestra at Dartington when I was a student. After you've entered and become part of that soundworld with all its ringing overtones for two hours at a stretch, a Mozart violin sonata can seem very strange indeed.'

Follow this link and sample that special soundworld online with a complete concert from CBC of music for gamelan by Colin McPhee and contemporary composers.

While elsewhere you can play your own Virtual Javanese Gamelan using free software developed by WCS Music using the Javanese Gamelan of Wells Cathedral School. Their website reports that using the expertise of the music faculty of the Cathedral School, and leading consultants, an innovative and award winning suite of music education software has been created. This allows users to explore one of the liveliest forms of Javanese Music, the Lancaran, and take part in an ensemble performance using sampled sounds from a gamelan. There is also the opportunity to compose and export audio files, and learn about Indonesian Music using online resources.

The first module of the Virtual Javanese Gamelan is available for immediate download free of charge from the WCS Music website. Reader reports on the software are welcome.

Lou Harrison was one of the Western composers who embraced the gamelan. I am very grateful to regular reader Jean Missud of Fitchburg State College, Massachusetts for sending me a link to a wonderful interview with Lou Harrison. Which is a very approprite way to end this gamelan post.

Image credit CBC.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

How can you consider that music?

'The importing agent in Den Pasar handled among other things, Oriental records, Chinese, Malayan, and even recordings from the Koran. There were shelves of Balinese recordings - sacred texts, cremation music, theatre, music from the shadow-play. They had been made in Bali in the late 'twenties by two German firms, Odéon and Beka (label below), and were rare, since only a few had been considered successful enough for the European market. You could not get them in Europe, or even Java, but here they had been stored in quantities.

They had been made, of course, to sell on the island - a naïve project, for no Balinese had money or even the desire for a phonograph. Why should they sit and listen to disks when the island rang day and night with music? Thus, one morning, when I bought two sets, the agent remarked bitterly that this was the first sale in a year. I shall throw them all out, he said angrily. They are only taking up room on my shelves.

It was a warm day, and I thought that he was perhaps infuriated by the heat as much as anything else. But, later, when I knew I was leaving, I returned for another set of records, only to find that he had, in one of those quick fits of rage that can seize a Westerner in the tropics, smashed them all the week before. Not one remained.

Good riddance, he exclaimed defiantly. He seemed quite pleased at my dismay. Anyway, he suddenly shouted, how can you consider that music? You, who call yourself a musician? He looked at me through his thick glasses with sudden hatred'.

Colin McPhee writes in A House in Bali of the destruction of the remaining stocks of the historic gamelan records that were to have such an influence on Western composers including Benjamin Britten and Lou Harrison. More on Colin McPhee here.


Buy MP3 downloads of the historic gamelan recordings here. Photo of G'ndérs playing the melody for the lélong dance from A House in Bali by Colin McPhee, Oxford University Press ISBN 0195804481, out of print. Beka record label from Wikipedia.

Hear Colin McPhee's gamelan inspired Tabu-Tabuhan on my Future Radio programme on Sunday December 9 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, on Sunday December 9 at 5.00pm UK time. 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 errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk.

Colin McPhee - East collides with West

'It seems to me certain that future progress in creative music for composers of the Western world must inevitably go towards the exploration and integration of elements drawn from more than one of the world's cultures.' This remarkably accurate prophecy was made by Henry Cowell in 1947, and was prompted by a radio broadcast of Colin McPhee's gamelan inspired Tabuh-Tabuhan which had received its first performance eleven years earlier.

Carol J. Oja's exemplary biography (jacket below) describes Colin McPhee as a 'composer of two worlds'. He was born in Toronto in 1900, and established a dual career of pianist and composer at an early age. He started his studies at the Peabody Conservatory in 1918, and spent two years studying in Paris before settling in New York in 1926. He quickly established himself as a one of a new generation of American composers, and his music was presented at a concert of Edgard Varèse's International Composer's Guild.

At the time Henry Cowell ranked McPhee in a group that included Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Charles Seeger, Roy Harris, Henry Brant and Ruth Crawford. McPhee's dual career of composer and pianist continued, and in 1927 he played in the infamous Carnegie Hall premiere of George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique alongside Aaron Copland. In New York McPhee also developed an interest in African-American culture, and ignored contemporary prejudices by accompanying the black soprano Abbie Mitchell in a group of his own songs.

While in New York Colin McPhee had heard newly released recordings of the Balinese gamelan. This experience was to change the composer's life, as he explains in his own words: 'I was a young composer, recently back in New York after student days in Paris, and the past two years had been filled with composing and the business of getting performances. It was quite by accident that I had heard a few gramophone rcords that were to change my life completely, bringing me out here in search of something quite indefinable - music or experience, I could not at this moment say.'

In 1931 McPhee travelled to Bali for the first time accompanied by his wife Jane who he had married the previous year. As well as being an established researcher in her own right, Jane McPhee contributed much of the funding for her husband's work in Bali. The marriage lasted for seven years despite Colin McPhee's undisguised homosexuality. There was genuine interdependence in the marriage, but extraordinarily, Jane McPhee, née Belo, is completely written out of the composer's accounts of his time in Bali, all of which are written in the first person singular.

In 1932 the McPhee's started to build their own house on Bali. The story is beautifully told in McPhee's own words in his book A House in Bali (jacket above), albeit without any mention of his wife who bankrolled the whole project. During his first stay on the island McPhee immersed himself in Balinese culture, and studied the gamelan from close quarters. In 1935 the McPhees returned to America for an extended period, and the composer renewed his close working relationship with the Mexican conductor Carlos Chávez, who has already featured on these pages. Chavez had founded the Orquestra Sinfónica de México in 1928, and he invited McPhee to visit Mexico in 1936 to compose an orchestral work for the Mexican orchestra using material from Bali. This work was to become the Toccata for Orchestra and Two Pianos, Tabuh-Tabuhan. Its title is a Balinese collective noun for a collection of percussive rhythms and sounds.

Tabuh-Tabahan was completed in a rented house in the exquisite silver mining town of Taxco, south of Mexico City. The two photographs here were taken in Taxco in 1987 when I was staying in the town while working with Chavez's Orquestra Sinfónica de México. They are anachronistic, but, nevertheless, somehow reflect the different worlds of Colin McPhee.


There is another interesting musical connection to Taxco. Igor Stravinsky, his wife, Robert Craft and his secretary, later turned unauthorised biographer, Lillian Libman had visited the town on Good Friday 1964 to see the Passion Play that is performed there every year. The procession through the town is led by small boys from the village, like the one above, and the whole town follows with lighted candles. The Stravinsky party had stayed at the Hotel de la Borda, which is where I also stayed twenty-three years later.

The ambience of Taxco clearly suited Colin McPhee's muse. The first performance of Tabu-Tabuhan conducted by Carlos Chávez in Mexico City in September 1936 was a major critical success, and it looked as though McPhee's advocacy of World Music would relaunch his career as a composer. But he was a prophet before his time. Despite support from Aaron Copland and Carlos Chavéz further performances did not follow, although those interested in the score included Leopold Stokowski and Serge Koussevitzky.

After failing to secure further performances of Tabuh-Tabuhan McPhee returned to Bali in early 1937, and he contunued to study the culture and the arts of the island. He and his wife had been living separate lives for some time, and they were divorced in 1938. The gamelan groups, with their male players with naked torsos, seemed to meet an emotional as well as musical need, and McPhee was known to have had a number of male lovers. During his stay in Bali a young male child dancer, Sampih, lived in McPhee's house. Tragically, Sampih was murdered long after McPhee had left the island.

By 1938 the political climate in Bali had changed. The Dutch colonial authorities had started to hound homosexuals, despite their acceptance by the Balinese, and the spread of Fascism in Europe semed likely to spread to the Dutch East Indies. McPhee returned to New York in February 1939, a decision also prompted by his reduced financial circmstances following his divorce. From 1943 to 1947 McPhee lived in the famous communal house in Middagh Street, Brooklyn Heights that was also home at varying times to Benjamin Britten, W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Paul and Jane Bowles, Peter Pears, Oliver Smith and Gypsy Rose Lee.

Britten's initial interest in Oriental music is attributed to his friendship with McPhee, rather than his own visit to Bali in 1956. Paul Bunyan was composed while Britten was in New York with McPhee, and Balinese influences can be heard in the 'Moon Turns Blue' episode in the Prologue. McPhee is also thought to have given Britten a grounding in American jazz. In 1941 McPhee and Britten recorded McPhee's transciption for two pianos of Balinese Ceremonial Music in New York, and this recording is available on Chandos 1011 coupled with 2003 recordings of Tabuh-Tabuhan and the Suite from Britten's ballet The Prince of the Pagodas.


The years in New York were difficult for Colin McPhee. Without the company and sponsorship of a wealthy wife, living in sordid accomodation and with little acceptance of his music, he relied on writing to generate an income, and the alcohol misuse that was to finally kill him started at this time. The only glimmer of hope was a CBS radio broadcast for schools in 1947 of two movements of Tabuh-Tabuhan rescored for reduced forces.

But an apparent breakthrough came in 1952 when World Music came to America in the form of a Balinese gamelan group. The resulting interest in Eastern music prompted Leopold Stokowski to conduct the US premiere of Tabuh-Tabuhan at the Carnegie Hall in October 1953, and the reviewers, led by Virgil Thomson, gave the work a positive reception. This performance and the growing interest in cross-cultural music prompted further performances of the work (including a recording by Howard Hanson) and new commissions followed.

It would be nice to report a happy ending to the story. But it was not to be. It seemed that the creative fires that had blazed in 1936 had been dimmed by the physical, emotional and financial traumas of the following years. A noteworthy Second Symphony was premiered in 1958, but McPhee's other compositions of the period lack the creative fire that shines through Tabuh-Tabuhan.

But his last years at least gave a degree of reward. In 1960 Colin McPhee took the option chosen by many American composers of the time and became a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. He was well-liked and respected by his students despite his deteriorating health. But advancing cirrhosis of the liver killed Colin McPhee on January 14, 1964. Roy Harris and Charles Seeger spoke at his funeral, and a telegram from Leopold Stokowski was read out.

Although Colin McPhee is usually only remembered for Tabu-Tabuhan, his legacy is considerable. He was a pioneer of World Music, and his use of repeating musical cells predated the minimalist composers by several decades. But it was probably through his writings that McPhee was most influential. His book A House in Bali asserted that music and the environment in which it is performed are inseperable (a topical subject this week). But McPhee's life work was his monograph Music in Bali which was finally published two years after his death, and is still regarded as one of the definitive work on the subject. His writings influenced a generation of composers, and Lou Harrison has recounted how McPhee's 1949 article on the five-tone gamelan music of Bali had a major impact on him.

I will be celebrating the music of Colin McPhee and Lou Harrison in my Future Radio programme on Sunday December 9. At 5.00pm UK time (convert to local time zones here) I will be playing Tabuh-Tabuhan and Lou Harrison's 1985 Piano Concerto. There are many links between the two composers, from their fascination with the East, through their homosexuality to the sublime slow inner movements of both works. Broadcasts of either work are rare, so don't miss this collision of East and West on Sunday. There is more on the Lou Harrison Concerto here.


Tabuh-Tabuhan was first performed in 1936. Now read about some other new music first performed at that time, but in very different circumstances.

Principal sources:
* Colin McPhee - Composer in Two Worlds by Carol J. Oja, Smithsonian Institution Press ISBN 0874747325, out of print.
* A House in Bali by Colin McPhee, Oxford University Press ISBN 0195804481, out of print.
* February House by Sherill Tippins, Scribner ISBN 0743257243
* Benjamin Britten, A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter, Faber ISBN 0571143253

Listen to Tabu-Tabuhan by launching the Radeo internet player from the right side-bar, or via the audio stream, on Sunday December 9 at 5.00pm UK time. 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.

Taxco photos are (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. 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.

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

Going Buddhist with Lou Harrison

'That Pope John Paul II took the trouble in his books to attack Buddhism suggests that there might be something valuable here. Why else would he see it as a dangerous rival belief system? It offers hope to those of us who are hurt by the speed and aggression of the modern world, willing to look within to try to moderate our own aggressive pace and notice that we often run the gauntlet of purely imaginary dangers; or inhabit a fog of no-feeling' ~ from Going Buddhist by Peter J Conradi (Short Books ISBN 1904977014). I've just returned from a few days at the Padmaloka Buddhist retreat centre here in rural Norfolk. The accompanying photos were taken by me at Padmaloka, and, believe it or not, the shrine room below is a converted Norfolk barn!


Now playing is Joanna MacGregor's recording of the piano concerto by a composer with a deep commitment to Buddhism. Lou Harrison was born ninety years ago, on May 14 1917, and died in 2003. Here is an interview with him by Dr Geoff Smith, Head of Music, Bath Spa University which explores some of the Eastern influences on the composer's music. The interview is republished from Joanna MacGregor's excellent SoundCircus website.

I'd like to start by asking you about living and composing on the West Coast of America as opposed to the East. What are the differences between the two, and why have you chosen the West?
Well, why would anyone choose the East? The division in the United States is no longer between North and South, it's the Rockies. As I like to point out, starlings and Lyme Disease (a very dangerous disease first found in East Lyme, Connecticut) have both made it to California from the East. The Rockies are the great divide. California is a very different part of the United States - it's a very special civilization. In between the East and California is, from my point of view, the real America, that is to say the four states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. That to me is America, the rest is peripheral - shore stuff.

How would you describe 'West Coast' music? What would you say is its essence?
Well, there's no one 'is' about it. I have defined it as being freer. We're not bound up with industrial 'twelve-tone-ism' quite so much as the East seaboard is, and also we're not afraid out here if something sounds pretty. I don't see that increased complexity is any solution at all. We also have a very strong connection with Asia. People in New York commute to Europe all the time, and that feels strange to me. I habitually go to Asia. This is Pacifica, that's Atlantica. They're different orientations. I don't think that there is a composer in the West who is not aware of that. We're all aware, from Seattle and Vancouver down to San Diego, that we're part of Pacifica. For some of us it feels more natural than for others. I came to my legal maturity (I've never really grown up) in San Francisco, where every week I went to the Cantonese Opera. I constantly heard Asian music. I heard my first gamelan in the middle of San Francisco Bay, and half of my friends go back and forth to Indonesia and Japan all the time. I mean, gee whizz, yesterday morning I finished one of my boxes of Kellogg's Ken Mai flakes. You can't get them in this country - my Japanese friends send them to me. So we have a regular transit across the
Pacific.


Going back to West versus East, how is your relationship with European tradition changed? Was it always so clear to you that you were looking East?
Well, I lived in Manhattan for ten years and had a breakdown at the end of it, which revealed to me that I was not a true New Yorker. So I moved back here, with an intermission of a couple of years at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which was very pleasant. After I got back, my parents wanted to give me a little place to work in. Just a couple of doors from here was a place they had looked at. I looked at it, and it was just like my studio at Black Mountain College, so I said, 'That's it.' That was I954, and that's why I'm here. Also, Harry Partch was in San Francisco at that time, and we stayed friends till he died in San Diego. John [Cage] was here for a long time too, but that was early on, in the late 1930's. But there's a tradition in California. For example, Mills College, the Centre for Contemporary Music has been going for a long time- Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Terry Riley. Cal Arts has been a lively place, as has La Jolla in San Diego. There's a centre in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle is a hotbed. But it also goes along the whole coast and includes Mexico and Vancouver too.

What is it about living in the country that appeals to you?
Well, as I said, I 'did' ten years in Manhattan and finally had a breakdown. Three days in a city now and I'm quite flipped. There's too much noise. I just can't do with it. But these days a fax can come in from anywhere in the world, books and records can be ordered from anywhere. When I first moved here, to Aptos, there was very little: no real bookstores, the university was not here, neither was Cabrillo College. It was really rural. Then it gradually piled up, and now it's a classy metropolitan area. I used to go to San Francisco almost monthly, not only for sex but for books and galleries. Now there are lots of bookstores, galleries, craftsmen and intellectuals. There's a Shakespeare festival and the Cabrillo music festival every year. I see no reason why anybody has to live in depraved surroundings, in deteriorated air etc. Be yourself. If you want a calmer life then take it, for heaven's sake. The mind doesn't stop.


You studied with Henry Cowell first, then Schoenberg. What did they give you?
Lots. Cowell gave me an enormous amount of 'how to' knowledge, including how to write a serial piece before I went to Schoenberg. Also an immense stimulation about world music. He was an absolutely fascinating man, because of his knowledge not only of world music but also of how to do different things. His book New Musical Resources continues to be very stimulating, as does the symposium that he put out years ago, American Composers on American Music. From Schoenberg, oddly enough, I learned simplicity. I got myself into a corner one day, so I took the problem to him. He extricated me by saying, 'Only the salient. Only the important. Don't go any further. Just do what is going ahead and in its most salient form.' In short, no complications - strip it. I've sometimes wondered whether, when I write a Balungan for a Javanese gamelan for only five or seven notes, it might have something to do with Schoenberg's admonition. When I left he said that I was not to study with anybody, that I didn't need that. He said, 'Study only Mozart'. That was his admonition - simplicity. He was a wonderful man, incidentally, quite unlike the image a lot of people seem to have of him as some sort of German militarist. I mean, he was Viennese! His liquor bills were very high and he smoked too much. His fingers were iodine-coloured. But he also had a good sense of his own virtues and faults.

Could you tell us something about the American gamelan, and how it differs from the Indonesian gamelan?
Firstly, the shapes and forms are different, because for the most part we do not do bronze, which is a very difficult metal to deal with. We use aluminium and/or iron. On the West Coast, Bill Colvig pioneered the use of aluminium (he's built two very large gamelans) and on the East Coast, Dennis Murphy and his pupil Barbara Benary used iron in a more or less traditional way. This country is flooded with gamelans - about one hundred and fifty or so - and a fair proportion of them are American-built. Bill's first gamelan was pipes and slabs, and it was his discovery that an aluminium slab resonated with cans soldered together that first stirred the enthusiasm for building, both in Berkeley and San Jose.

So the main difference is in the material they're made of?
Also the tunings and the range. Some gamelans in the United States have wider ranges than the Balungan instruments; instead of six or seven tones, they have maybe two octaves. All Bill's gamelans have two octaves. They run from five to five in both pelog and slendro. Predictably, there are melodies that will not work unless you have those extra tones. That's why they're there and, sure enough, some of my best music requires them. So it's range and tuning- some of us use just intonation of various sorts. In fact, the slendro part of the gamelan C Betty (which is one of the gamelans that Bill made, dedicated to Betty Freeman) is, to our great surprise, tuned to a schema attributed to Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD in Alexandria. I thought I'd invented it, but it's hard to invent anything these days.


Was there a point in your career or a particular piece where you felt you'd found your own voice?
Well, some day I probably will!

Is your music performed in Indonesia?
Yes. As a matter of fact, I'm astonished to find that there may be a retrospective of my work in Jakarta. Well, what Western composer would have a retrospective in Jakarta?! So yes, I'm well-known. In fact, I am told that my Double Concerto for Violin, Cello and Javanese Gamelan is required listening in the state conservatories.

How did Harry Partch inspire you?
When the first printing of Harry's book came out, Virgil Thomson was sent a review copy because he was writing for the New York Herald Tribune. He gave it to me the following day and said, 'See what you can make of this.' Of course I was utterly fascinated and within the week I'd bought a tuning wrench for the piano, and I've been doing it ever since. The piano in here, which used to be a favourite of Percy Grainger's and was given to me by the Cowells, is tuned in Kirnberger Number Two, as is my Piano Concerto, and I keep it that way. Harry and I had a very close relationship which went on for years. Betty Freeman was his patron. She set him up in houses, underwrote his work, and gave him money if he wanted to do a big thing, which he often did. There was a movement to make copies of Harry's work and put the original instruments in the Smithsonian Institute. That's been going on for ever. When I last saw Danlee Mitchell, a few years ago, he and some friends had reconstructed some of the dilapidated instruments but with new and more durable materials. They sounded better, as a matter of fact. Harry wasn't a luthière, you know. He was, as he said, a musician seduced into carpentry. So some of them could profitably be rebuilt in more resonant and more durable materials. He accepted a large psaltery I had built - it's part of that instrumental collection and he gave me a set of instruments too, bamboo things. So yes, we exchanged instruments, ideas, and pleasantries- and he made wonderful mint juleps too!

You're written some of your texts recently in Esperanto.
Yes, a few. It's a language I like. And I'm having the astonishing discovery that when I practise sign language now, occasionally in my head I slip into the Esperanto version. This morning I had an insight from reading this month's Scientific American, which is devoted to the brain and the linguistic centres. I suddenly realized that my recent interest in sign language is not only because Bill and George (a close friend) are getting deaf, but also because I had heart surgery three or four years ago and the first thing I noticed afterwards was that my linguistic centres were screwed up. I'd been doing spoonerisms like 'I don't want to work and work and die in my salad' instead of 'saddle'. Clearly, my interest in sign language is partly in getting into my linguistic centres again to try to remedy that.


Do you use European models for the structures of your pieces?
I'm mad for one European form, the medieval estampie. I've written too many of them, in fact; my latest symphony is the last one, and I'm not going to go any further. I like ABAs and rondos too. I'm particularly fond of the French rondo with no variation - not the Viennese rondo with its transposition of the subject, as in Mozart and Haydn. I also like some of the contrapuntal forms - passacaglias and things like that - though I use them less. I have quite a good historical background in European music.

Did your studies of Indonesian forms throw up whole new ways of working?
Indonesian forms are different from European forms. It knocks you numb when you first realize what the formal range is in Indonesian music. ABA would be simple-minded in Indonesia. There are forms whose first line lasts, say, eight counts and there are forms whose first line lasts, say, 385 counts. Then they go through a process known as irama, which is tempo layers. If you take a form of ten lines of 385 counts, for example, take one ten times that, and then shift it to the fifth irama - which means that it would expand by five geometric times - you get some idea where you're going. There's also the practice of using certain instruments to mark off where you are. It's a little bit like the chords: you know that you're not at the tonic when you're on V or IV- those are subsidiary cadences. Similarly, you know when you come to the great song, which is the equivalent of the tonic. So the shape, tonally, is very controlled, and it's instrumentally indicated. Its size, its interconnections and what you can do are breath-taking, that's all I can say. I will never, for the rest of my life, be bored as long as there are gamelans and players around. And writing too. If I write now, just out of my head, there are only two things I really like to do. One of them is harps and other tuned instruments playing modes, usually from the antique world but sometimes made up. And the other is gamelan compositions. I instinctively write Balungans now, which is the skeleton line for a gamelan piece. Up on Mount Hamilton, we just premiered my Gending in honour of Max Beckmann. It eliminates the pitch two in pelog, which makes a fascinating mode. The next one is in honour of Munakata Shiko - the other great artist of the century, I think.

Do you have any specific way of working, like so many hours per day or certain times?
They don't let me. The phone or the fax or visitors or whatever are happening all the time, and I do well if I get a half an hour in during the day. I have a load of work that I can never really accomplish. I've also been designing my own type fonts - I made four last year and my book of poems uses two of them. I now have a subsidiary career as a poet! I'm also sending slides of my paintings and drawings to the Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, which is originating an exhibition that's perhaps going around the world.


Many thanks to SoundCircus and Dr Geoff Smith for the Lou Harrison (photo above) interview. Now read about Lou Harrison's straw-bale studio
Photographs of Padmaloka Centre taken by Pliable May 19 2007 and (c) On An Overgown Path. And yes, I know that Padmaloka is run by the Friends of Western Buddhism, and I'm aware of the baggage. 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