On An Overgrown Path

John Cage's 26'1.1499" for a string player became a signature work for cellist and icon of the avant-garde Charlotte Moorman . She embellished Cage's original score by adding a section in which she set her instrument aside and played the body of a half-naked Nam June Paik as if it were a substitute cello. Considering Cage's reputation as an iconoclast, it is surprising to learn that he disapproved of Moorman's embellishments. In her definitive life of Charlotte Moorman , author Joan Rothfuss describes how "Cage and some of those in his immediate circle began to dismiss her interpretation - and her work in general - as overly concerned with self-presentation", and quotes Cage as saying "Paik's involvement with sex, introducing it into music does not conduce towards sounds being sounds". Today, classical music will try almost anything to reach new audiences, as can be seen from my header photo; a PR stunt for the 2014 BBC Proms so...

Last month I reported on the loss in transit of Raga Virga from Ars Choralis Coeln and Amelia Cuni. Now I am happy to report that a replacement CD has arrived and was certainly well worth waiting for. My earlier description of Raga Virga as Indian Dhrupad songs fused with the chant of Hildegard von Bingen fails to do this project justice. Raga Virga does not so much fuse past traditions as build on them to create something entirely new . Star of the show is Amelia Cuni , seen in the foreground above. She trained in the North Indian Dhrupad vocal tradition and has recorded her own realisation of John Cage's eighteen microtonal ragas from 'Solos for Voice 3–58' in his ' Song Books ' - sample here . Cage is usually stereotyped as a Zen Buddhist composer. But Hinduism also shaped his music, and, in fact one commentator talks of Cage’s 'borrowings' from the British-Ceylonese art historian and metaphysician Ananda K. Coomaraswamy . Cage is known to have...

Last week's post ' Stop trying to serve everybody, instead just serve the music ' made a bigger splash. Thanks to social media exposure, the post achieved the highest single day readership of more than three thousand posts over ten years on An Overgrown Path . Response to my exhortation to just serve the music was overwhelmingly positive, with pianist Peter Donohoe commenting on Facebook that "The last four sentences of this great article sum up and articulate supremely everything I have been feeling for years". Fellow pianist Vovka Ashkenazy was less impressed however, observing ruefully "Pity John Cage is mentioned; it could have been a serious article about serious music". WRCJ FM producer/presenter Chris Felcyn took my thesis more seriously, declaring it "Mandatory reading for anyone concerned about the health of classical music", but retired radio presenter David Kanzeg 's view was that "...ignoring the sea changes in techn...