On An Overgrown Path

The feminine point of view is a complementary one to the masculine ... the woman's approach presents a different emphasis. I think that women contribute a great deal to this understanding through the visual arts and perhaps especially in sculpture, for there is a whole range of formal perception belonging to feminine experience - Barbara Hepworth All photos taken at the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in St. Ives, Cornwall. Dame Barbara Hepworth lived at Trewyn Studio from 1949 until her death in 1975 at the age of 72. Barbara Hepworth had many musical connections. She designed the costumes and sets for the premiere of Michael Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage at Covent Garden in 1955. One of her sculptures stands in front of Britten's Snape Maltings concert hall and in 1969 she was invited to the first ever Ladies' Night at London's Royal Academy of Arts together with Elisabeth Lutyens . The composer Priaulx Rainier (who deserves an article to her...

'Feminine music? Try Meredith Monk ' - suggests Richard Friedman on From up here you should see the view . Lots more music from female 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

Ewa Strusinska has been appointed assistant conductor of orchestra of the moment , the Hallé in Manchester. Ms Strusińska (above) was born in Poland and studied at the Frederic Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw. She has built her reputation in the mainstream repertoire but has also conducted music by Brett Dean , Einojuhani Rautavaara and Edward Gregson . Because Ms Strusińska is female we are, thankfully , spared her age in the press coverage. But, to maintain equality of the sexes, I can reveal she was born in the year Benjamin Britten died. Feminine World Music here. Photo credit Bamberger Symphoniker . 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

In my wanderings through song and poetry over the last ten years, I have come across stony paths, paths strewn with flowers, pathways across land and sea, and almost invisible trails, where it was very easy to lose my way ... Arianna Savall ( daughter of Jordi ) describes her own Overgrown Path in the liner notes for her first solo CD, Bella Terra . Now follow this link for an MP3 sample of some of really ravishing music, and if you think Arianna (above) has a beautiful voice remember that not only is she also playing the harp, but all the settings of the poems are composed by her as well. Meanwhile another eternal femine follows an invisible trail at Covent Garden's Linbury Studio Theatre as the Independent describes : - Dominique Le Gendre grew up around music. "Our next-door neighbour and landlady was a woman called Olive Walke, who was the leader of a choir called La Petite Musicale in Trinidad. My sister and I used to go and sit under her piano at the rehearsals,...

Music journalists are, by instinct, more drawn to something that is good to write about than something that is good to listen to. Marshall McLuhan taught that the medium is the message , and in the classical sphere the music itself must always be the primary message. But today's obsessive contextualising means that the context is fast becoming the message. As an example, it goes without saying that much important work still remains to be done to eradicate gender inequalities. But because the feminine narrative is good to write about and rich in click bait , the female context is starting to become the message at the expense of the music. Let's consider a provocative scenario. Funders are pressuring an orchestra manager to deliver better attendances. There is a choice between two conductors of equal calibre. One is male the other female. The manager knows that booking the woman conductor will generate much-needed media coverage, and this in turn will boost audience numbers. W...

The performing arts are so much part of Hindu culture that the poet W. B. Yeats was moved to write that Indian music is ‘not an art, but life itself’. To understand that assertion fully we must ponder on the two seemingly simple, but in reality almost unanswerable questions of what is Hinduism? And what is Hindu music? Hinduism and its sub-traditions Contrary to popular belief, the word Hindu does not have a religious root. It originated as the Indo-Aryan name for the Indus River that flows through the north of present-day India and Pakistan. The Persians used the name Hindu in the eighth century to describe the people living beyond the Indus River, denoting their geographic location rather than their religion. Today, however, the term Hinduism is used to describe a heterogeneous religious tradition which has evolved on the Indian subcontinent over thousands of years. This tradition is now practised by around one billion Hindus, not just on the subcontinent but in the regions s...

That's Marin Alsop with Leonard Bernstein in the photos I've just added to the right hand side-bar. And the New York Times are thinking Alsop as well. They have an excellent feature on her today. Cue link to the New York Philharmonic's first woman conductor. 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

Mahatma Gandhi exhorted us to "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever" . So, accordingly, I celebrated my recent coming of (old) age by taking the overnight Stena Line ferry seen above across the North Sea from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, from where the excellent Dutch public transport network took me on the path of more living and learning. My first destination was Norman Perryman's studio in Amsterdam. Norman's experiments in fusing kinetic art with classical music have long appealed to me, and when I wrote about his Aldeburgh Festival appearance with Pierre Laurent-Aimard I asked Has classical music finally found its contact high? Norman works exclusively in the analogue domain . He paints on multiple overhead projectors, and the audience can watch the creation and dissolution of his fluid images on a giant screen in real time, as his brushwork flows, pulsates convulses in time with the music. Quite understandably...

'Another difficulty I find with many composers of your generation is, that inspite of the considerable interest and ingenuity of the colour of the music, I often find a lack of interesting shapes in the phrases. Lack of basic ideas can become boring after a time' ~ Benjamin Britten writes in 1968 to a twenty-nine year old Jonathan Harvey . Although Britten may have had reservations about some of the new composers of the 1960s he had no such reservations about Jonathan Harvey. On Britten's advice Harvey studied with Erwin Stein and Hans Keller , and an invitation from Pierre Boulez in the early 1980s started a longstanding relationship with IRCAM which continues to this day. Today he is one of the leading exponents of electro-acoustic music, and more than eighty CDs of his music have been recorded. His new opera Wagner Dreams was premiered in Luxembourg in May 2007 to considerable critical acclaim . The opera is based on the true story that Wagner was planning an oper...

Ben.H has left a new comment on your post " A great American composer and artist besides ": While we're naming names, Gloria Coates is another composer and painter, whose CDs typically use her art for the cover designs. Ben, thanks for including the eternal feminine . 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

They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was quite darkest and there was no path. When there's a way on a path, it is someone else's path; each human being is a unique phenomenon. That is Joseph Campbell  with a prescient warning of the dangers of the wisdom - 'friends', 'followers' & 'likes' - of online crowds. He was writing in Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine  describing the entry of the Grail Knights into the forest in Minnesänger Wolfram von Eschenbach's  Parzival . The accompanying portraits of eight unique phenomenon were taken by me during recent visits to Crete and India.  My listening while travelling was predictably varied. One of many highlights was Andrew Gourlay's Parsifal Suite constructed from Wagner's opera. Andrew Gourlay conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra in an exceptionally sonorous recording - complet...

Aleister Crowley was a practicioner of the occult, ceremonial magician and recreational drug experimenter. Sir Edward Elgar was Master of the King's Music, practising Catholic and composer of Land of Hope and Glory . A connection between the two may seem highly improbable. But this post explores a little known path linking Elgar to Crowley's world of the occult. In 1915 the actress Lena Ashwell asked Elgar to write the incidental music for a play she was producing. The Starlight Express was based on the recently published novel A Prisoner in Fairyland and the adaption was by the books' author Algernon Blackwood and Violet Pearn. Elgar's original intention was to reuse music from his early composition The Wand of Youth, but as the project progressed he added a substantial amount of new music to the score. The Starlight Express opened in London on 29th December 1915 to mixed reviews. The critical consensus was that the play was too long and the staging inappropriat...