On An Overgrown Path

'It was November, extremely cold with an east wind. I crossed the Channel and called on Stravinsky . He was living in the Fauborg St Honore, in a very elegant apartment. He was spruce and gnome-like, immaculately dressed, and looking more like a business executive than a composer. But this impression changed as we sat talking: he was precisely like a cricket wearing spats. Just as a cricket will stay immobile, then suddenly bound into the air with a spring of compressed energy, so I had the feeling that Stravinsky might bound through the ceiling at any moment. He looked alert, nervous though not neurotic, as though he had just emerged from one of those baths where you are rubbed with ice and beaten with birch-sticks. ... Suddenly...the cricket sprang, 'I want to show you something,' he said, and led me into his study. It was a small room, clinically tidy with an upright piano. Stravinsky went straight across the room to a shelf beside his piano and took down a portrait bust...

Sex, drugs and rock and roll is the familiar adage. But this path explores links between sex, drugs and the music of composers including Igor Stravinsky Pierre Boulez and Elliott Carter. Our starting point is the welcome new Beethoven Symphony cycle from the Basel Chamber Orchestra and Giovanni Antonini for the German Oehms Classics label . For those interested in the history of the orchestra their agent Askonas Holt's website explains : Founded in 1984 by graduates of various Swiss conservatories, the Basel Chamber Orchestra now ranks among Europe’s most highly acclaimed chamber orchestras. The BCO is committed to cultivating the chamber orchestra tradition bequeathed on Basel by Paul Sacher, one of the most important music patrons of the twentieth century. Which is all rather confusing because Lesley Stephenson's authorised biography of Paul Sacher tells us: In 1926, [Sacher] achieved his first major ambition: on 4 November his Basler Kammerorchester (Basle Chamber Orchestr...

Igor Stravinsky's music features on two of Alice Coltrane's albums and in both instances she conducts her own transcriptions with devastating effect. Lord of Lords released in 1972 by Impulse was her first essay into Stravinsky transcriptions. She reported that her take on the Firebird - listen via this link - was recorded after a ghostly visitation by its composer who offered her musical and spiritual advice, and blessings. In her sleeve note Alice reported that Stravinsky brought her a vial of clear liquid, which she drank, explaining that “Divine instruction has been given to me throughout the entire arranging of this music.” She referred again to these visitations in the note for her 1976 album Eternity seen above: Stravinsky has once again wonderfully inspired me. The infinite sound of the eternity permeates his music. I am truly grateful to Stravinsky for his offerings, and for the sharing of his gifts with us; and for the channel through which he communicates to me...

Igor Stravinsky with three of his children Milene, Soulima , and Theodore by his first wife Catherine . (A second daughter Maria was born in 1913). The undated photo was probably taken in Clarens, Switzerland 1913/14. Stravinsky died in New York on April 6, 1971. Soulima plays Stravinsky's Concerto for 2 Solo Pianos with his father in a 1938 recording in the Works of Igor Stravinsky 22 CD box . 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 errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

That painting on the cover of Harry Oldmeadow's Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with Eastern Religious Traditions is by Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947). Russian aristocrat, Theosophist, and artist Roerich is well-known as the designer of the controversial 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring , but his wider role in the gestation of the Rite is less clear. In his monumental life of Stravinsky biographer Stephen Walsh describes how "early collaborators like Benois and Roerich found to their surprise that their part in the creative process had been conveniently forgotten or trivialized" in the composer's self-serving Chroniques de ma vie . While elsewhere pianist Süher Pekinel tells how "before beginning to compose Le Sacre du Printemps , Stravinsky was apparently interested in the rituals of pagan tribes and contacted Roerich to ask for detailed information about them". Süher Pekinel , who was born in Istanbul, recorded t...

Igor Stravinsky greets Mistlav Rostropvich at the Royal Academy of Music, London in June 1964. Stravinsky was in England to conduct his Symphony of Psalms and Variations on the Bach Chorale Von Himmel Hoch da komm' ich her at the English Bach Festival in Oxford, and rehearsals were held at the Royal Academy. Mrs Stravinsky has her back to the camera, while the figure in the background extreme upper-left is the 20 year old John Tavener . Stravinsky's early serial composition Canticum Sacrum was a major influence on the young Tavener. All the Stravinsky works mentioned in this post are in the complete Stravinsky box at a crazy price. Photo and background from Geoffrey Haydon's excellent John Tavener - Glimpses of Paradise (Gollancz ISBN0575057033). It was published in 1995 and is now out of print , but is well worth seeking out. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and wil...

Lost in meditation is creating some fantastically tenuous links , and here is another one. The Joffrey Ballet's 1987 production of Vaslav Nijinsky and Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring used the original sets, costumes, and choreography from the 1913 production. In the image above I've used electronic trickery to turn the Joffrey production into an ersatz mandala. Because Nicholas Roerich, who co-wrote the scenario of The Rite with Stravinsky and also designed the sets and costumes for that first production, was a celebrated Tibetan scholar. And there are more fantastically tenuous Buddhist links to Stravinsky. The wife and daughter of Ernest Ansermet , who was a celebrated conductor of Stravinsky's music, were both ordained as Buddhist nuns. Read the whole story in an Overgrown Path exclusive . 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 reque...

For the first performance of John Tavener's The Cappermakers at Charleston Manor in 1964, students from the Royal Academy and the Royal College were bolstered by professionals. Tavener himself conducted, and Francis Steiner took the prominent piano part in the ensemble, which consisted otherwise of woodwind, horn, trumpet, harp and string quintet. The chorus was the St Christopher Singers, who also provided the male trio to sing the part of Christ. One solo tenor and one baritone shared the parts of Lazarus and the four Jews. In a volume of Stravinsky's conversations, Tavener had read the great composer's description of the part of Satan in his opera The Flood : 'a high, slightly pederastic tenor'. Having no idea what 'pederastic' meant, but assuming it was a musical term, and loving the sound of Satan on the recording of The Flood , John urged his soloists to sing more pederastically. One of them 'turned the colour of an orange', he remembers. Du...

Finally the rains have stopped, and summer has arrived in East Anglia . Photographs taken this morning as I cycled out of our village. Benjamin Britten's wrote Noye's Fludde here in East Anglia, and it was first performed at the 1958 Aldeburgh Festival . It is Britten's most substantial work for children, and is based on one of the 16th century Chester Mystery Plays using an edition by Alfred W. Pollard . The main vocal parts are written for children, with the exceptions of the adult parts of Noye himself, Noye’s wife and the Voice of God. Noye's Fludde is scored for strings, recorders, bugles, handbells and a range of percussion, and also calls for home-made instruments including sandpaper blocks and slung mugs. Every CD collection should include the definitive 1961 recording made in Orford Church . Igor Stravinsky wrote the musical play The Flood in California to a commission from CBS television. The libretto is a compilation of texts by Robert Craft from th...

Postcard from Igor Stravinsky to his mother in 1911. The message says 'From Beaulieu where your son is working on Petrouchka.' This afternoon I was returning from a business meeting by car, and caught the last few minutes of a performance of the 1947 suite from Petrouchka on BBC Radio 3. I didn't know who the performers were, but it was very clear that there was some pretty amazing chemistry between the conductor and orchestra, and the sound they were producing was equally impressive. After a well deserved ovation I heard that the band was the BBC Scotttish Symphony under the Russian conductor Alexander Titov , and the concert was relayed live from the orchestra's superb sounding new home in Glasgow City Halls . The BBC Scottish revel in Stravinsky, and I have already enthusiastically praised an earlier performance by them of the Firebird here. Nothing delights me more than to praise a BBC orchestra and broadcast, and the very fact that the BBC can produce such great...

There is an art of listening , when you listen to Beethoven or Mozart and so on, you listen, you don't try to interpret it, unless you are romantic, sentimental and all that. You absorb, you listen, there is some extraordinary movement going on in it, great silence, great depth and all that. So similarly if you can listen, not only with the hearing of the ear, but deeply , not interpret, not translate, just listen. That quote comes from a 1985 TV interview with Jiddu Krishnamurti . There is some serious listening talent in the photo. It shows Aldous Huxley - who famously recommended that "if you ever use mescaline or LSD in therapy ... try the effect of the [Bach] B-minor suite" - kneeling in the foreground, while standing from left to right are Krishnamurti, Igor & Vera Stravinsky, Maria Huxley, and Radha Rajagopal Sloss. The photo was taken in 1949 at a picnic in Wrightwood, California. Radha Rajagopal Sloss was the daughter of the American born Rosalind Rajagopa...

I don't believe in magic, I don't believe in I-Ching,I don't believe in Bible, I don't believe in tarot, I don't believe in Hitler, I don't believe in Jesus, I don't believe in Kennedy, I don't believe in Buddha, I don't believe in mantra, I don't believe in Gita, I don't believe in yoga, I don't believe in kings, I don't believe in Elvis, I don't believe in Zimmerman, I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me That litany of rejected influences comes from the track God on the 1969 John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album. John Lennon dismisses two elements of Christianity, the Bible and Jesus, and five of Eastern traditions, I-Ching, Buddha, mantra, Gita and yoga. But intriguingly Lennon does not reject Islam as an influence. There may well be a simple explanation for this: namely that Vedanta and Zen Buddhism but not Islam were the esoteric traditions of choice for the the 1960s counterculture. But there is another possibl...

'It seems to me certain that future progress in creative music for composers of the Western world must inevitably go towards the exploration and integration of elements drawn from more than one of the world's cultures. ' This remarkably accurate prophecy was made by Henry Cowell in 1947, and was prompted by a radio broadcast of Colin McPhee's gamelan inspired Tabuh-Tabuhan which had received its first performance eleven years earlier. Carol J. Oja's exemplary biography (jacket below) describes Colin McPhee as a 'composer of two worlds'. He was born in Toronto in 1900, and established a dual career of pianist and composer at an early age. He started his studies at the Peabody Conservatory in 1918, and spent two years studying in Paris before settling in New York in 1926. He quickly established himself as a one of a new generation of American composers, and his music was presented at a concert of Edgard Varèse's International Composer's Guild. At ...

Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Kaikhosru Sorabji and John Foulds may seem unlikely bedfellows. Elgar and Holst have achieved global recognition if not acclaim, Sorabji has a small but select cult following , but Foulds lingers in the twilight zone between cultism and global acclaim. However, as recounted in an earlier post , the four composers are brought together in Nalini Ghuman's recently published Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination,1897-1947 , because they share the cultural influence of colonial India. The accompanying photos capture the exotic and esoteric mysticism of a sacred tantric ritual in northern India, and the culture of pre-partition India permeated the English musical imagination via Theosophy, an esoteric philosophy that made this kind of exotic Eastern mysticism fashionable for Western dilettantes long before the Beatles visited Rishikesh. Among those attracted by Theosophy were John Foulds (1880-1939) and his wife the violinist Mau...