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.

No Stockhausen - no Radiohead

I went into Norfolk's main library on Saturday morning and asked for a book from the reserve collection. The librarian was in his early twenties, had a beard and wore a T-shirt with a slogan. Great to see a hip young person working in a library I thought. When I asked for the copy of a biography of Stockhausen the young librarian looked blank and asked "How do you spell that?"

Clearly the librarian hadn't seen the surprisingly high profile media coverage of Stockhausen's death. But he is also one of the internet generation, and my server data currently shows very few Google searches for Stockhausen. Far lower than, for instance, Rostropovich following his death. Yes, it is a weekend, but internet traffic yesterday was low even for a Saturday.

I wonder if that young librarian read Ed Vulliamy's tribute in today's Observer? - "The fact is: no Stockhausen, no Pink Floyd, no Stockhausen, no Velvet Underground or Yes, certainly no Brian Eno. Probably no Radiohead either".

Have I have accidentally stumbled on the acid test of cultural significance? - can the librarian spell it? No chance for György Kurtág or Peteris Vasks. But I wonder if in thirty years time a librarian will be able to spell Radiohead? Coming to that, I wonder if in thirty years time we will have any librarians?

* Perhaps that young librarian should read Karlheinz Stockhausen - part of a dream?

* Header photo is from one of my recent articles on Pierre Boulez and shows from left to right, Luigi Nono, Boulez and Stockhausen.

* Below is the book that was in the library's reserve collection, the English translation of Michael Kurtz's Stockhausen biography (Faber ISBN 057117146). Is it significant that this book is out of print? The library copy has been on loan ten times since 1996.


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

Norfolk Rhapsody by Ralph Vaughan Williams

Winter sky over North Norfolk this afternoon.

Now playing - Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir Adrian Boult conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra on EMI LP ASD 2847. The Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 was based on tunes collected from King's Lynn fisherfolk. The town is about 20 miles from where I took this photograph today. In the sleeve notes for the LP Michael Kennedy writes that the Rhapsody "begins and ends with a musical description of the Fens landscape, misty and mysterious ..."

Now read about November woods from a brazen romantic.
Photograph (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

A catholic selection on internet radio

I'm playing John Sheppard's beautiful Western Wind Mass in my Future Radio programme this Sunday, November 18. The CD was recorded by the Tallis Scholars in Salle Church here in Norfolk, and my header photo shows the interior of the magnificent Anglican church.

The music in this Sunday's programme is a catholic selection. Sheppard's Western Wind Mass was probably composed in the reign of Queen Mary who briefly returned England to Catholicism. Edmund Rubbra, whose Fifth Symphony is the second work in the programme, was a mid-life Catholic convert. Like Thomas Merton, he went to explore Buddhism, but unlike Merton he also became interested in Taoism.

My catholic selection is on Future Radio at 5.00pm this Sunday, November 18. And remember, you can help shape the future of internet radio later that evening.

* Listen via the audio stream on Sunday Nov 18 at 5.00pm UK time. Convert Overgrown Path radio on-air times 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. Photograph (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

I've seen the future and it's orange

Regular readers will know I am not a fan of the infernal combustion engine. Which is why I photographed the car currently standing on our drive. It doesn't use an internal combustion engine. This little orange number goes from 0 to 60mph in under 4 seconds, its energy consumption is the equivalent to 135mpg, and it is electric powered. It is a Tesla Roadster, and it is the brain-child of a Silicon Valley start-up backed by A-list names including Sergey Brin and Larry Page. There is a waiting list for the Roadster which goes on sale in the States next year, and George Clooney and Matt Damon are among the names down for the $98,000 car of the future.

Once you are on the road two things strike you. It is very fast, and it is very quiet. In fact it is so quiet that there have been problems with pedestrians stepping in front of it because they couldn't hear a car coming. The Tesla Roadster comes from a Californian company, and will go on sale on the West Coast - if you look carefully this UK registered pre-production model is left-hand drive, wrong side for us. But the development and building of the car takes place at Hethel, a mile and a half from our house here in rural Norfolk, and one of our family is working on the technology in it.

The only downsides I can see are the 245 miles range per battery charge and the absence of a CD autochanger. Now that would cause problems on our annual one thousand mile pilgrimage to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

None of which will stop the Tesla becoming the de rigeur Hollywood fashion accessory of 2008. Electric cars are the big thing there, as today's Guardian report on the current screenwriter's strike confirms - The police are threatening to hand out tickets for "contributing to noise pollution" if the pickets continue to hold up their "honk" signs to passing motorists - "There are a lot of Priuses honking," says Andy McElfresh, another Jay Leno writer, "a lot of non-writing Priuses".

And creative people going on strike takes us back to when market forces and music collided.
Interesting background here on the Tesla name. 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

East Anglia faces stormy sea interlude

Thousands of people in East Anglia have been advised to evacuate their homes amid fears a storm surge from the North Sea will cause severe flooding. The Environment Agency has warned flood defences in Norfolk and Suffolk may not be able to cope. The storm surge is expected to peak there at 0700 GMT today. Norfolk Police are advising people in 7,500 Great Yarmouth homes to leave and hundreds of Suffolk homes are at risk - from BBC News.

For back story see East Anglia 1953 - New Orleans 2005, and for playlist see Britten and Stravinsky - After the Flood. Photo of north Norfolk coast by Pliable (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007.
Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Wonderful church - wonderful recording venue

This photo of the interior of Salle Church in Norfolk was taken this afternoon. The church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul is in a rural area of the county and is uniquely all built in one style. The construction of the massive church took just thirty years and was completed in 1430, and since then there have been no alterations or additions to the structure.

Many readers will have recordings made in this wonderful building in their CD collections. For many years it was the chosen location for Tallis Scholar recordings due to its magnificent acoustics. Their CD of Manuel Cardoso's sublime Requiem was made there, and plays as I write.

But terrorism can even affect deepest rural Norfolk.
Photo On An Overgrown Path. 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

Opera's other ring

Opera at the big houses is a circus with acts that include £10million donations, vanity productions and shuffle maestros. My photo above was taken last night at an opera as far away from £170 ticket prices as you can get, but it was still a circus.

Great Yarmouth Hippodrome is one of the oldest surviving circus buildings in Europe still used for circus performances. The survival of the remarkable building, which dates from 1904, is almost certainly due to the circular arena, or ring, which very unusually doesn't have a stage. This meant it was unsuitable for conversion into a theatre or cinema, and the structure has survived for more than a century virtually unchanged, although the original audience capacity of three thousand has been reduced to today's Health and Safety friendly nine hudred.

The historic photo below, showing the interior, is the first of two kindly supplied by the current owner Peter Jay, and was taken soon after the Hippodrome was opened. One of the remarkable features of the building is the water feature created when the floor of the circus ring sinks and is flooded with 60,000 gallons of water. The feature is still in regular use, but not for last night's opera!


When the Hippodrome was opened Great Yarmouth was a fashionable seaside resort, and the second historic photo below shows the circus building in its heyday. In the hundred years since then the town's fortunes have declined, with the collapse of both the tourist industry and commercial fishing leaving the area economically blighted, a stark contrast to fashionable Aldeburgh which is just 25 miles to the south.

Today Yarmouth is a bleak place dominated by amusement arcades, fast-food joints, and cheap hotels for migrant workers. The Hippodrome's front lot has been sold as a slot arcade, but, by a miracle, the building remains intact behind it, and is still a working circus due to the heroic efforts of former rock star Peter Jay who now owns and actively manages it (does anyone out there remember Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers?). For details of circus performances follow this link.


Norfolk and Norwich Festival took the inspired decision to bring opera to the Hippodrome in 2007 for the first time ever, with Armonico Consort Touring Opera bringing their much praised production of Purcell's Fairy Queen for just one night. Bringing an innovative production to a new venue in a town that never sees live opera is what music festivals are all about. This adventurous approach simply underlines how the BBC, and other corporations, have hijacked the word 'festival' to give credibility to events such as the BBC Proms that are now little more than cynical exercises in massmarket entertainment and commercialism.

Purcell's Fairy Queen is a musical fantasy (or 'semi-opera') based on the ideas and characters in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Designer Thomas Guthrie took his inspiration for the Armonico Consort production from the 19th century painter of Shakespearian fantasies Richard Dadd. The artist established a reputation in that extraordinary genre, the Victorian fairy painting. But he changed career direction when he was committed to a mental institution in 1843 after killing his father. In echoes of Vincent Van Gogh, an enlightened doctor in Bedlam encouraged Dadd to paint without commercial constraints , and the results inspired last night's production which, as my photos show, was set in an old-style mental hospital.


The production used comedy, music, song, dance, puppetry and circus skill, but was also musically completely authentic and extremely well sung. What an evening! - live music-making of the highest order, imaginative staging that gave real meaning to those tired words 'music theatre', an inspired choice of venue, and a vision from the Norfolk and Norwich Festival that redefined inclusiveness. But above all an evening that challenged our preconceptions of what opera is, what a music festival is, and even what we are. Here are director Thomas Guthrie's wise words:

For me both Dadd and Fairy Queen represent the need for marriage within us all, whether we are actually 'married' at all, or even inclined to it. The marriage in the Fairy Queen is a union not between characters we have come to know and feel for, as it is in Midsummer Night's Dream, but at a deeper level a marriage of mind and heart, of heaven and earth, fairy and mortal, lost and found, inward feeling and the outward expression of that feeling. It concerns us all because we are in a relationship with ourselves as well as with the world around us. A marriage that none of us can escape.


Now read about how another artist was encouraged to paint by an enlightened doctor
Three production photos taken by Pliable at Hippodrome performance on May 9 2007 using available light with Casio EX-Z120 digital camera. 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 important is a composer’s music?

Why a String Quartet? What is it that has given it its exalted reputation and mystique? Why have so many composers regarded it as the perfect medium of expression, though it is perhaps the most demanding to write for? And why do distinguished artists often prefer to work as a team in a first class quartet rather than make bigger money as, say, orchestral leaders? Music means different things to different people: but for those to who music is an intellectual art, a balanced and reasoned statement of ideas, an impassioned argument, an intense but disciplined expression of emotion – the string quartet is perhaps the most satisfying medium of all.

These words are by Elizabeth Maconchy (photo below) who was born one hundred years ago, on March 19th 1907. She has been described as the greatest ever English composer for strings, irrespective of gender. She wrote a remarkable cycle of thirteen string quartets, and three one-act operas. Her music is lean, sinewy and uncompromising, and develops from the central European styles of Berg, Bartok and Janacek. But, despite all these attributes, the neglect of Maconchy’s music is breathtaking. She is ignored by the mainstream. Her music is absent from our concert halls, and in the classical departments of London's two largest record stores her name does not even appear on the CD racks. And she is ignored by the cognoscenti, with neither William Glock nor John Drummond mentioning her in their autobiographies.

The neglect of Elizabeth Maconchy does raise the question, how important is a composer’s music? Comparisons with another twentieth century composer, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, are interesting. Korngold was born in the right place, mainland Europe. He had the right teachers including Zemlinsky, and moved in the right circles, including Mahler and Richard Strauss. He was forced to move to the right place, Hollywood, for the right reasons, political persecution. He worked in the right genres, film scores and neo-romantic orchestral music. And Korngold is rightly recognised with browser space in the CD stores, two biographies, and concert and broadcast performances.

Elizabeth Maconchy was born ten years after Korngold, in the wrong place. Her birthplace, Broxbourne in Hertfordshire, is one of the few towns in the world that doesn’t even merit a Wikipedia entry. She had the wrong teachers. Ralph Vaughan Williams, who remained a close friend but not a musical influence, is forever branded an English pastoralist, while her teacher in Prague, Karel Jirak (left), remains as neglected as his pupil. She had the wrong life changing event. TB claimed her sister and father, and she contracted and recovered from the illness herself. This experience contributed to the development of her individual musical voice, and her single minded and painstaking focus.

She also lived in the wrong place. Essex is a creative no-go area between the musical honey-pots of London and Aldeburgh. She didn’t network with musical movers and shakers, although she was the first woman to sit on the influential BBC music panel, and was also the first woman President of the Society for the Promotion for New Music. She was married to a historian for more than sixty years, and bore two daughters, one of whom, Nicola LeFanu, is a notable composer in her own right. And she wrote for the wrong genre. The string quartet stubbonly refuses to fit into the sound-byte culture of radio stations such as BBC Radio 3, where a single movement is rapidly becoming the largest acceptable single unit of musical currency.

Let’s make one thing clear, I am a big fan of the music of Korngold. In the 1970’s I discovered him through the three pioneering LPs of his music. First the RCA Red Seal LP of his film scores, The Sea Wolf conducted by Charles Gerhardt. Then, the still unsurpassed, recording of the Symphony in F-sharp with Rudolf Kempe and the Munich Philharmonic (nla), followed by Jascha Heifetz's recording of the Violin Concerto (below). But around the same time I discovered the music of Elizabeth Maconchy. First there was her unrepresentative overture Proud Thames on an adventurous Lyrita LP of 1972 (SRCS 57) that also included music by Geoffrey Bush, William Alwyn and Lennox Berkeley. But the record that got me hooked another Lyrita LP (SRCS 116) with Vernon Handley conducting her Symphony for Double String Orchestra, and Manoug Parikian playing the Serenata Concertante for Violin and Orchestra. It is very sad that the Lyrita re-issues on CD have not included these wonderful recordings in the composer's centenary year.

The peak of Elizabeth Maconchy’s achievement are the thirteen quartets, and these span more than fifty years from 1932 to 1984, from the youthful exuberance of the first, to the ultimate concision of the thirteenth (Quartetto Corto) which lasts for just eight minutes. The ghosts of Berg, Bartok, Janacek, and Jirak hover over the opus, and Maconchy's uncompromising approach to composition is expressed in her own notes about the Sixth Quartet: ‘Writing music, like all creative art, is the impassioned pursuit of an idea … The great thing is for the composer to keep his (sic) head and allow nothing to distract him. The temptations to stop by the way and to be side-tracked by felicities of sound and colour are ever present, but in my view everything extraneous to the pursuit of this central idea must be rigorously excluded – scrapped’.

We are very fortunate that the neglect of Elizabeth Maconchy’s music is not total. In 1989 Unicorn-Kanchana had the vision to record the complete quartets with three young string groups, the Hanson, Bingham and Mistry Quartets. The performances are committed, energetic, and exemplary. The recordings were produced by Misha Donat, and two church venues were used with the legendary sound engineer Tony Faulkner balancing nine of the quartets, and Anthony Howell the others. These are performances and recordings to die for, and the even better news is that the complete string quartets are now available on 3 CDs on the Regis label for the price of a single CD, and they come with an excellent 24 page booklet of notes by the composer and Nicola Lefanu.

But despite this wonderful recorded legacy we are still left with the conundrum of Elizabeth Maconchy - vital and astringent music combined with an unassuming personality. My header photo expresses this conundrum perfectly. When Erich Wolfgang Korngold died in 1957 he was buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery just a few steps away from another film composer, Walter Jurmann, who is famous for writing the song "San Francisco". When I started writing this article I did not even know where Elizabeth Maconchy was buried. To my astonishment, my research uncovered that the unassuming final resting place she shares with her husband, shown in the photo, is a few miles from where I write these words, at Eaton Parish Church here in Norfolk.

But in the end it is the music matters. I started by asking the question ‘How important is a composer’s music?’ The string quartets of Elizabeth Maconchy are important twentieth century music. £15 ($28) is a very small price to pay to find out how important.


Good to see the BBC doing their bit. Elizabeth Maconchy (above) is the Radio 3 Composer of the Week starting March 19th, and you can also download audio files of her talking about her art. And read here about another scandalously neglected Elizabeth.
Header photograph by Pliable, February 2007, copyright On An Overgrown Path. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "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

Dialogues of the Carmelites

Dialogue 1: The Order of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel is an enclosed Catholic Order founded in the 12th century by Saint Bertold on Mount Carmel, Israel, with the bretheren taking their name of the White Friars from their distinctive white cloaks. Increasing tension between East and West forced the Order to move to Cyprus and Sicily in 1238, and they were in England two years later. In 1250 a Carmelite Priory was established on the banks of the River Wensum in Norwich immediately opposite the city’s magnificent Norman cathedral.

The monastery was suppressed in 1543, the property was divided up, and over the intervening centuries virtually all traces of the priory have disappeared. But the presence of the Carmelites lives on in Norwich. The thoroughfare leading across the river from the cathedral and law courts is known as Whitefriars, and my photograph above shows the bland office building called Carmelite House on the far side of the bridge. This was built on the site of the monastery in 2003, and is where my day job is based. Clearly visible in the foreground is the only remaining fragment of the original Carmelite monastery. This is an arch from one of the two anchorite houses that were built in the grounds of the priory, and my heart lifts each morning as I pass this medieval fragement on my way to modern mayhem.

Dialogue 2: Speaking of mayhem, Francis Poulenc based his 1956 opera Dialogue of the Carmelites on historical events that took place in a Carmelite convent in Compiègne during the French Revolution. In the opera the French authorities dissolve the convent, and the nuns take a vow of martyrdom. In the immensely moving final act the nuns march to the scaffold singing the Salve Regina, and this changes to the hymn Deo patri sit Gloria (All praise be thine, O risen Lord). The opera was composed between 1953 and 1956, and during this period Poulenc suffered a nervous breakdown, reputedly due to his identification with the suffering of the nuns.

Dialogue of the Carmelites is one of the peaks of 20th century music theatre. It expresses profound psychological and religious insights through a musical language accessible to anyone familiar with Poulenc’s more popular works - if you know his Organ Concerto you will feel at home from the first bars of Scene 1 . There is extensive use of recitatives, and these contrast with some wonderful choral settings including the Ave Maria (Act II, Scene II) and Ave verum corpus (Act II, Scene IV). The opera is well served in the catalogue by the excellent Opéra de Lyon recording on Virgin Classics with a stellar cast under Kent Nagano.

At budget price this re-release is quite unmissable, and it helps reinforce Poulenc as a major 20th century composer. These words from the website of the composer's publisher are worth reflecting on - "Like his friends Honegger and Milhaud, he had the courage to resist the serialists’ diktats and remain true to himself. Now that the serialist terror has passed, those of us who love Poulenc’s music can hold up our heads in the most sophisticated company."

Dialogue 3: No serialists' diktats here, but I am a sucker for historical reconstructions which add colour and variety to potentially arid expanses of early music. In 1707 Handel visited Rome, and he was commissioned to provide music for the festival of Our Lady of Mount Carmel celebrated annually on 16th July. No information survives on Handel’s contribution, but Andrew Parrott has made a hypothetical reconstruction combining Handel’s music with Carmelite psalm settings, and all five antiphons are chanted before their respective psalms. This is a gorgeous 2CD set, wonderfully performed by the Taverner Consort and Players directed by Andrew Parrot, with balance engineer Mike Clements providing wonderfully airy sound in St Augustine’s, Kilburn. Highly recommended as a mid-price reissue from Virgin.

Dialogue 4: Although the Carmelites left Norwich more than four centuries ago the Order flourishes today in Quidenham, just 30 miles to the south. A Carmelite monastery was established there in 1948 by a group of nuns, and the photograph below was taken by me in the grounds last autumn. in the 21st century the nuns follow the Carmelite Rule in a balanced regime of prayer, work, intellectual study and recreation. This is an enclosed order, and the nuns only leave the monastery because of illness or for family reasons. The offices are celebrated with plainsong settings of the psalms, and the Carmelite nuns in Quidenham demonstrate the resilience of this remarkable Order in the face of the terrors portrayed so powerfully in Poulenc’s opera.


For more inspiration take An Overgrown Path to There is a green hill far away called Taizé
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "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

East Anglia 1953 - New Orleans 2005

I know I am dying….Please bury me here, by the path to this chapel. Then, if travellers from my dear country pass this way, their shadows will fall on my grave, and plant a yew tree in memory of me.

The Ferryman recount’s the words of the dying boy abandoned by the river in Britten’s church parable Curlew River. The work was premiered in 1964 in Orford Church, Suffolk, on the East Anglian coast.

Eleven years earlier, on the night of 31st January 1953, Suffolk and the whole of East Anglia had suffered one of the worst floods in living memory, and one of the biggest environmental disasters ever to have occurred in the UK.

During the evening, freak winds and a rising tide pushed the sea to dangerous levels. Inadequate flood defences were breached by huge waves, and coastal towns along the English east coast from Lincolnshire, through Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex to Kent were devastated as sea water rushed into the streets. There were 1200 breaches of sea defences along 1000 miles of coastline. 24,000 homes were flooded, and 307 people were drowned. 160,000 acres of farmland were flooded, and 46,000 livestock were lost.

The inquiry after the disaster concluded that the floods in 1953 were caused by a 'storm surge.' This was a freak of nature, and statistically should only happen once every 250 years. A web site about the tragedy says the following: "Storm surges are a problem associated with hurricanes. Many people consider the strong winds to be the main feature of such a storm, but the associated rise in sea level and heavy rainfall are responsible for most of the deaths associated with hurricanes."

The findings of the analysis is available on the Environment Agency web site, where there is also information on managing flood risk. To avoid a repetition millions of pounds have since been spent on protective measures. Sea defences have been re-engineered to the extent that the sea would need to rise six feet above the 1953 levels to flood the same areas. Massive artificial reefs of imported stone have been built to diffuse the force of waves coming off the North Sea. (There is no natural rock in East Anglia, which is the reason why it is so low lying).

One of the main findings of the inquiry was that there was a lack of communication between the UK Meteorological Office and National River Authority, and this resulted in inadequate warnings. Gales were predicted, but the deepening of the low pressure and the severity of the strengthening winds was not forecast. Today all information on storms and floods is co-ordinated by a single body, the Meteorological Office. An advance warning system is in place to predict high tides on the East Coast. The Environment Agency provides three level of flood warnings – yellow when flooding is possible, amber when flooding is likely, and red means serious flooding probable. These flood warnings are updated on their web site every 15 minutes. I live in East Anglia, and this warning system is rigorously enforced, and has a high profile in the media.

But the fact remains that despite massive expenditure and Herculean efforts it is financially, and practically, impossible to protect every mile of the East Anglian coast adequately. Less serious breaches of the sea defences occurred in 1978, 1996, and 2000. Because of the rise in sea levels caused by global warming alternative strategies are now under debate. One of these is controlled retreat. This means allowing the sea to flood some low lying areas naturally, rather than trying to protect them artificially.

Our tenure on earth is finite. East Anglia 1953 and New Orleans 2005 remind us that the force of nature is infinite. At the end of Curlew River the cast join the boy’s mother praying at his graveside.

Go your way in peace, mother.
The dead shall rise again,
And in that blessed day,
We shall meet in heav’n

Now take an overgrown path to Easter in Aldeburgh
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