skip to main |
skip to sidebar
'The Orlandos hadn't met the Tuvans when I spoke to them, but were confident they'd find common ground, since this is the strategy they employ as a way of drawing in audiences to the forbidding medieval music they specialise in. Forbidding is my word, not theirs: as tenor Angus Smith points out, composers such as Steve Reich, Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell-Davies are now ploughing the same melodic furrow of the monks of Notre-Dame, 800 years ago. "We don't like to programme early music in isolation – we like to find ways of giving it a resonance today," says Smith. "And the music of medieval Notre-Dame is, in many ways, similar to the music being written today"' - from Michael Church's Independent preview of the East Neuk Festival in Scotland.
The festival includes a premiere by Tarik O'Regan whose Scattered Rhymes, inspired by Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame, featured in my recent 'Mixing it' post and the CD of which provides my header graphic. And mixing it certainly does draw audiences, a very healthy number of the East Neuk Festival concerts are sold out.
More from the Notre Dame composers here.
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
'If something is boring for one minute try it for two, and if it is still boring, try it for four minutes; eventually one discovers it is interesting' - Zen saying.
Find out whether the Zen masters are right this holiday weekend when my Future Radio programme scores another first with the broadcast premiere of a complete African trance ritual recorded in the Medina of Marrakech, Morocco. The performance is by traditional gnawa musicians (photo above) and has been made possible by a collaboration between the Norwich community station Future Radio 96.9FM and KamarStudios who are based in Marrakech and New York.
Marrakech is known as the Gate of Black Africa and gnawa music came to Morocco from sub-Saharan Africa with the slave trade. For centuries gnawa has only been played in secret spirit-possession and healing ceremonies called lilas that evolved from ancient African animistic and Islamic Sufi rituals. In these religious rites healing spirits are said “to mount” the possessed, who whirl and writhe in an ecstatic trance.
Recordings of the gnawa trance rituals are very rare as they are performed in private. But KamarStudios have worked with leading gnawa musicians to record the complete ‘black’ section of the twelve hour long Nights of the Seven Colours trance ritual which celebrates the creation of the universe. The ‘black’ ritual lasts for two hours and in a broadcast first will be aired on Future Radio without interruption. The performance is led by gnawa master musician Abbes Baska Larfaoui supported by eighteen musicians and dancers.
Gnawa music, which combines vocals with repetitive and intricate cross rhythms on percussion has many connections with contemporary music and now has its own festival at Essaouira on the Moroccan coast which attracts an international audience, while Steve Reich and many other contemporary composers have been influenced by African drum rhythms.
To reflect these contemporary connections the broadcast of the sacred lilas is being paired with a one hour set which combines the traditional gnawa musicians with two young Marrakech DJs whose influences range from Philip Glass to Bill Laswell. This one hour electro-acoustic ‘minimalist trance’ set concludes the webcast which starts on Future Radio at 12.01am UK time early on Monday morning May 26 which is Sunday afternoon or evening in North America, find precise local time here.
Remember also my interview with Jordi Savall which is being broadcast at 5.00pm UK time this Sunday May 25. As the gnawa trance broadcast takes the usual Overgrown Path repeat slot early on Monday morning the Jordi Savall interview is getting a special repeat at 12.01am on Wednesday May 28, which is Tuesday afternoon or evening in North America.
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
'Question is - what's more environmentally friendly - going to an independent store, by anything else than on foot, or ordering a CD online?' - asked the irrepressible violainvilnius in a comment on a recent post. I don't know the answer, but we've just arrived back from Belgium with a bunch of CDs bought from an independent dealer and managed to travel by walking, a bicycle, train, bus and just one short taxi ride on the whole trip. The main part of the journey was by Eurostar train which now leaves London from the splendidly restored St Pancras station, seen in my photo above, and stops at Lille before arriving in Brussels just one hour and fifty three minutes later. It may not be environmentally perfect, but it's a step in the right direction.
Now playing - MGV (Musique à Grand Vitesse) by Michael Nyman. This 27 minute orchestral work was commissioned by the Festival du Lille for the inaugaration of the TGV North-European line which we travelled on to Brussels. The first performance was by the Michael Nyman Band and the Orchestre National de Lille under Jean-Claude Casadesus in Lille in 1993.
There is a surprising amount of classical music inspired by trains, with Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231, Heitor Villa-Lobos' Little Train of Caipira and Steve Reich's Different Trains among the best known examples. But my favourite is a little more obscure. In 1983 the composer and director of music at Ely Cathedral Arthur Wills was asked to write a work in aid of the Ely Cathedral Restoration Appeal. The result was the choral work The Spiritual Railway which sets words taken from a memorial slab in the grounds of the Cathedral commemorating a railway worker killed on the track near Ely. The Spiritual Railway was given its first performance on Platform 10 of London's Liverpool Street Station, the terminus for the Ely train.
Now take the train to the Music and Railways website which not only includes The Spiritual Railway but also manages to find railway connections in Bruckner's Fourth Symphony and Dvorak's Serenade for Wind Instruments! Which only leaves me to ask how green was your concert?
Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
'Peter Sellars doesn't think the age of genius - of great classical music - is dead. At all. When I last met him, wandering the streets of Vienna, he was raving about John Adams's latest opera A Flowering Tree - 'You can put his recent pieces up against anything of Verdi' - and the new Kaija Saariaho oratorio La Passion De Simone, which he called 'breathtaking'.
Sellars could be right. This is the most interesting time in classical music for at least a generation. It's safe to get back in the water after the chilly era of the over-intellectual avant-garde (the legacy of Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone technique) or the initially exciting but occasionally facile repetitions of the Philip Glass and Steve Reich generation (cited as an influence by pop acts as different as Giorgio Moroder and Sonic Youth). Some of the most inspiring, moving and challenging - and also some of the most daft and insane - music of this century has been written by contemporary composers.
10 contemporary classics
1. El Nino - John Adams (2000)
2. Tevot - Thomas Ades (2007)
3. St Mark Passion - Osvaldo Golijov (2003)
4. L'Amour de Loin - Kaija Saariaho (2000)
5. 3rd String Quartet - Gorecki (2007)
6. Neruda Songs - Peter Lieberson (2007)
7. You Are (Variations) - Steve Reich (2006)
8. A Flowering Tree- John Adams (2006)
9. Nuevo - Kronos Quartet (2001)
10. The Tempest - Thomas Ades (2003)'
From a major feature in today's Observer Music Monthly. Great to see contemporary music getting the exposure it serves. But the article rather misses the point that there is a lot of exciting new music, and even some contemporary classics, beyond the corporate bandwagons of Adams, Ades, Glass, Gorecki, Golijov, Reich et al.
Now read about inspiring, moving and challenging new music from a host of other contemporary composers.
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
