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...

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

'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...

Deutsche Grammophon has spun the story of signing its first ever female cellist Camille Thomas , and the news has dutifully been re-spun by clickbait master Norman Lebrecht. Why is such a story circulated when anyone with even a cursory knowledge of classical music knows that Anja Thauer in 1968 - see above - and Jacqueline du Pré in 1979 - see below - not to mention other soloists and chamber players have made recordings for DG, for which they must have signed a contract? Not to mention the countless rank and file female cellists in orchestras contracted to record for DG over the decades. And coming to that, why would Vladmir Spivakov's Moscow Virtuoso Orchestra promote a concert of male composers' music as a celebration of International Women's Day ? The inconvenient truth is that #female has become just another exploitable marketing gimmick in an industry that is addicted to marketing gimmicks . Now before the music thought police take further sanctions against me , ...

Overgrown Path has been saying it for years - BBC Proms - a multicultural society? , BBC Proms 2006 lacks eternal feminine , Music gets in the way of running BBC Proms , and BBC Proms last night - I flee the country . Now other people are saying it - Hodge attacks Proms: they're narrow and lack the common British values: The culture minister, Margaret Hodge, will today criticise the Prom concerts as one of many British cultural events that fail to engender new common values or attract more than a narrow unrepresentative audience. At last people are finally waking up to the fact that the BBC Proms in their present form are outdated, irrelevant and unworthy of the BBC's marketing hype as 'the world's greatest music festival'. But government intervention will only make the situation worse, unless the cause of the problem is tackled. History is the key to understanding the present problems. The first Promenade Concert took place in 1895, and it was twenty-seven years ...

In May 2006 I ran a post lamenting the absence of women composers at that year's BBC Proms season. In those days there were very few people highlighting the gender imbalance in classical music, and that post is just one of many on the theme that have appeared On An Overgrown Path . In recent years a number of rather more influential people have, thankfully, spoken out about the under-representation of women in classical music. Depite their efforts the problem remains and continues to require urgent attention. Which does not stop me feeling distinctly uncomfortable about the artistic director of London's Southbank Centre Jude Kelly using the paucity of women in orchestras as a way to spin the launch of a rather underwhelming new Southbank season as seen above. Of course it is good that Marin Alsop, Lisa Batiashvili, Martha Argerich and Mitsuko Uchida are performing and that there is music by Stevie Wishart and Anna Clyne . But Marin Alsop conducting the London Philharmonic...

As I advance in years Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius touches me more and more. Elgar was a devout Catholic and the oratorio's chilling story of a soul's journey through death to judgement is, of course, a setting of Cardinal Newman's poem of the same name. Newman was the Anglican vicar of St Augustine's Oxford before converting to Catholicism in 1845 and he wrote his paen of praise to mystical Catholic theology, The Dream of Gerontius in 1865. Another of Cardinal Newman's work, his 1845 essay Development of Christian Doctrine in which he justifies his conversion to Catholicism, was a major influence on one of the least known and most fascinating religous figures of the twentieth-century, a figure whose progressive views on homosexuality, feminism and inter-faith communities could hardly have been more distant from the prim Victorian world of Elgar and Newman. Bede Griffiths was born Alan Richard Griffiths into a British middle class family at Walton-on-Tham...

'Iggily buff' by Vanessa Pooley, bronze 16" long. Do visit the artist's website and blog. I don't write about women composers or women artists, just as I don't write about men composers or men artists. But this is the first in a sequence of three posts featuring very interesting artists and composers, and by a coincidence they are all women. Now read how the eternal feminine follows the musical 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

'According to data on US orchestras compiled by the International Association of Women Conductors (IAWC), 22 out of 270 music directors of C level orchestras - below a $1m (£505,000) annual budget - are women. At the top end of the spectrum, Marin Alsop and JoAnn Falletta are the only female music directors of the 38 orchestras that have a budget of more than $10m per annum. ' From Baton of the sexes in today’s Guardian, now read how the BBC Proms lack the eternal feminine 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

Chandos Records has a new blog and it looks rather familiar. Now they need some decent photos and album covers and to work out how hyperlinks work. Talking of technology Jean-Michel Jarre is performing his 1977 album Oxygene live at the Albert Hall in March and he is using the original Mellotron , string-ensemble Eminents and VCS 3 synthesisers for the gig, not a computer or pre-recorded track in sight. He thinks the analogue sound is better, and he's not the first to say it . Jarre has a classical pedigree, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire and also with the father of musique concrète , Pierre Schaeffer at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales . More in the Independent . Staying at the Albert Hall Vernon Handley may not yet have his Knighthood , but my sources tell me he has a 2008 BBC Prom after a long absence from the venue. This is the first season for the new Proms director (and BBC Radio 3 controller) Roger Wright after the Michael Ball years of Nicholas Kenyon . At lea...

Spirit of space as well as spirit of place is being celebrated at this year's Aldeburgh Festival. The magic of perspective was present even before the music started with sculptor East Anglian sculptor Laurence Edwards' three nine feet high Creek Men (photo above) menacingly standing guard over the distant marshes. Space and visual images were also at the heart of last night's double-header new music programme which included the UK premiere of Harrison Birtwistle's string quartet Tree of Strings . This totally convincing study in creative fragmentation started with the superb Arditti Quartet inhabiting a single musical and physical space at the centre of the stage. Then, as the thirty minute work unfolded they moved to separate and distanced spaces around the perimeter of the large Snape platform where they spoke with separate musical voices before individually, and silently, making their exits from the famous performing space. In the magical final moments, as the l...