On An Overgrown Path

An important wake up call for everyone in the creative industries comes in a policy paper from the BBC's outgoing Director of Future Media & Technology . The paper by Erik Huggers gives the strategic thinking behind the BBC's decision to cut their online budget by 25%, close 170 websites and shed 360 jobs . Every BBC website has been reviewed using the three criteria of meeting public purpose, meeting editorial priorities and distinctiveness. The latter criteria is defined by Erik Huggers as: How does it differ from what else is out there in the market; is it distinctive?, and if not - should we be doing it all? It is this focus on distinctiveness, see diagram above, which should be sending a message far beyond Broadcasting House. Contemporary culture has fallen into the trap identified by Marshal McLuhan back in 1964 of confusing the medium and the message . Binary thinking is part of this confusion as is cut and paste culture which replaces distinctiveness with cloned...

Internet sleuth Walt Santner contributes to my initiative to highlight fresh new music blogs with a couple of search tips. Prognotfrog is a blog aggregator which Walt reports has led him to good classical music blogs. Walt also recommends the music blog search engine Captain Crawl (apart from the ads) which I have already noticed sending readers to the path . Thanks Walt: it's the sharing that matters in music, not the money and power . Photo taken at London Stanstead airport and (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

The Path's resident download sleuth Walt Santner has come up with a real Christmas cracker. The Radio Prague Choir has recorded thirteen Czech carols and made them available as free and legal downloads, complete with texts and scores. Start the musical celebration here , lots more Walt discoveries here . Christmas canine captured in Avignon's Le marché de Noël and (c) On An Overgrown Path . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Happy 65th birthday to our download detective Walt Santner. Even on his birthday Walt was sleuthing. Here is his link to Chicago Lyric Opera podcasts , you can find all the cases that he has solved here . More evidence that youth is a state of mind, not a time of life . I took the photo in the Abbey Church of St Philibert in Tournus in Burgundy. It is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

'Where to find the cheapest music on the internet' is the promise in today's Independent . But, on the weekend that the BBC Proms start , the Indie forgets that there is such a thing as classical music to download. To redress the balance, here is an alternative guide to the digital revolution in the form of twelve 'wild cards' of classical downloads. All but one (thanks Bernard) have been supplied from the States by the indefatigable Walt Santner whose complete download detective work can be found down this path . Walt and I must bracket these wild cards with a major health warning. We can't guarantee the quality or copyright status of the files which the links point at. We are not hosting these files, they are not recommendations but rather suggestions for exploration. Feedback from readers on Aces and Jokers and other recommendations via Comments will be very much appreciated. * American works for winds with Howard Hanson - Card 1 * Transfers of Victor Red Se...

"This is music of a metallic nightmare" wrote a reviewer of the music of Alexander Mosolov . Born in Kiev in 1900 Mosolov wrote "socialist realist" music in the USSR during the 1920s including the work recorded on the shellac 78 above which is variously described as coming from A Symphony of Machines or a ballet called Steel . More information from the excellent webrarian.co.uk or listen online to the record here . The "B-side" of the disc features a work evocatively titles "the Dnieper Water Power Station". This is scored mainly for percussion and celebrates the building in 1932 of what was the largest single hydro-electric plant in Europe on the Dnieper River in Ukraine. The composer is Yuli Meytus who was born in 1903 in Elisavetgrad . Again more at webrarian.co.uk and listen online to the music of a water power station here. Many thanks to prolific 'path finder' Walt Santner for uncovering the musical gems, enjoy more of Walt...

My personal overgrown path is leading back to the radio studio, and that has set me thinking recently about how to create programmes that are distinctive, inclusive and personal. Over in Holland the creator of Big Brother , Endemol , has its own formula for distinctive broadcasting, and this week launches De Grote Donorshow ( The Big Donor Show ) which gives three dialysis patients the chance to win a dying woman's kidney - or not. Back in 1969 Glenn Gould took a different approach to producing great broadcasting when he created his 'contrapuntal radio documentary' The Latecomers . The main subject was the new Canadian province of Newfoundland , but there was a second subject of solitude, isolation and non-conformity seen from a cultural perspective. The Latecomers , with its basso continuo of the ocean, is both a land-mark in twentieth-century broadcasting and a seriously neglected aspect of Gould's work. Now, thanks to reader Walt Santner, you can hear the whole...

Articles locating MP3 downloads, including historic performances by Dinu Lipatti, Pablo Casals and Arturo Toscanini , by Leopold Stokowski , and of Russian opera , are among the most popular On An Overgrown Path . Regular readers will know that most of these articles originate from web research by retired broadcaster Walt Santner. News has come that Walt has had a few medical problems that have required surgery, but the good news is that he is now recovering back at home in Maplewood, New Jersey . I know everyone who has enjoyed Walt's cyber detective work here will join me in sending our very best wishes for a speedy recovery. I guess Walt will be spending even more time listening to music via the internet, so here is a timely heads-up from another 'friend pictured within'. Music from Other Minds is a programme of new and unusual music by innovative composers and performers around the world. Produced for KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco by Other Minds the presenter is fellow ...

An interesting, and rewarding, recent development On An Overgrown Path recently has been the interest in the recording process and sound quality, an interest also reflected in other new blogs including the excellent The Crunch . Recording history is a particular area of interest for me as I worked for both the BBC and EMI in my time in the music industry, so I was delighted this week when our internet sleuth Walt Santner sent me details of a veritable treasure trove of recording history links. The links are part of the University of San Diego's project documenting the history of recorded sound. The timeline only currently goes up to 2005, so it doesn't yet cover topics such as SACD in depth, but there is some really interesting material there including a history of microphone development . But the real gem is the extensive list of internet resources and links . And please don't think this is just for geeks, there is important musical and cultural material there as well. ...

A Japanese site has a treasure trove of recordings by the legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski ranging from 1917 acoustic recordings to 1953 electric recordings. All were 78rpm shellac releases, and the site claims they are copyright free. There are a lot of very fine things to listen to including two complete Tchaikovsky symphonies, a complete 1941 No 4 recorded with the NBC Symphony in 1941, and a 1940 Symphony No.6 'Pathetique' with the All American Youth Orchestra . Thanks go to US reader and internet sleuth Walt Santner whose research uncovered these, and the Norwegian historic MP3s , for us, and to the unknown Japanese webmaster for making them available. Stokowski was the role model for today's jet set maestros. Born in North London in 1882, a short distance from what was to become EMI's famous Abbey Road Studios , he started his musical career as organist in St James' Church, Piccadily . He moved to the US in 1905, and ten years later became a naturali...

The Finnish national broadcaster YLE Radio 1 has the most extraordinary treasure trove of historic MP3 downloads on their website. I can't even list the riches available, but the artists include Dinu Lipatti, Pablo Casals, Alfred Cortot, Kirsten Flagstad , Yehudi Menuhin, Arturo Toscanini, and many, many more. There are lots of downloads for each artist, and the technical quality is very good. The whole site is in Finnish, but navigation is intuitive. Just select the artist from the left hand side list, then select the Real Audio or MP3 hyperlink under the composition. Each download has a spoken introduction of around 20 seconds in Finnish, but don't let that put you off. This is an extraordinary discovery. I am listening to Toscanini conducting the adagio molto e cantabile from Beethoven's 9th as I write - beautiful. Here is the link, and many thanks to reader Walt Santner for the heads-up. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for ...