On An Overgrown Path

'To dismiss a work merely because it does not fit into the critics' category of what constitutes modernity is a fatal narrowing of vision' - from Edmund Rubbra's 1956 article Letter to a Young Composer . That quote comes from a book that I have a feeling will be making more appearances here. BBC Music in the Glock Era and After is a memoir by the former BBC producer Leo Black who is also author of the excellent study Edmund Rubbra, Symphonist . What makes Leo Black's new volume on BBC Music so remarkable is the sheer breadth of music that it embraces. As well as making an eloquent case for Rubbra's music the text ranges from a 1961 performance in Vienna of Schoenberg's uncompleted oratorio Die Jakobsleiter to substantial appreciations of Luigi Dallapicolla , Hanns Eisler , Roberto Gerhard , Franz Schmidt and Hugh Wood . All this plus wonderful line drawings, as seen below, by Milein Cosman who is the widow of Hans Keller and is known for her portraits ...

'More important still was his conviction that individual conscience must be supreme: not for him the Marxist argument that a single person's wisdom can never match the collected, collective wisdom of a party. He was to that degree not 'incorporable' in any system of cabinet government, where at times one has, because of one's position, to go along with decisions one disagrees with - which could have been why Glock found him such a difficult colleague' - Leo Black writing about Hans Keller Hans Keller (1919-1985) was an influential figure in contemporary music and championed composers such as Britten and Schoenberg, with Britten dedicating his String Quartet No. 3 op. 94 to him. Between 1959 and 1979 Keller held senior posts in the BBC and worked closely with Third Programme (now Radio 3) controller William Glock and others on broadcasts and concerts that fundamentally reshaped Britain's contemporary music landscape. Glock saw his mission as "dragging ...

'The form was so open that the music had slipped out.' That is Leo Black writing in BBC Music in the Glock Era and After about an unidentified work at the Kranichsteiner Musiktage at Darmstadt in the 1960s. Image is of a 1964 performance by Ben Vautier and Alison Knowles as part of the Fluxus Festival in New York City. Photograph is by Fluxus founder George Maciunas . Performance of Maciunas' Piano #13 (for Nam Juin Panik) here . John Cage's experimental composition classes at the New York's New School for Social Research (topical link here ) in the late 1950s contributed to the early development of Fluxus and he was later a neighbour of Fluxus founder Yoko Ono . This has meant that Cage's reputation is linked to the concept of 'anti-art' and his music is unfairly pigeon-holed as a 'difficult listen'. Which does not sit well at a time when 'easy listening' has moved from being a derided musical category to the turnkey solution to a...

This is the artwork for the forthcoming Decca CD from L'Abbaye de Notre-Dame de l'Annonciation du Barroux with added ornaments to reflect the topical playlist for my Chance Music programme on Sunday, August 1. 1. Titi Robin - Kali Sultana, troisième mouvement 2. Lady Gaga - Poker Face 3. Monks of l'Abbaye Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux - Gregorian antiphons and responsories 4. Bells of l'Abbaye Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux 5. Xavier de Fourvière, Te Saludan - Jean Coutarel (organ) and Jean-Sébastien Bressy (galoubet) 6. Jonathan Harvey , Mortuos plango, vivos voce for eight channel tape 7. Titi Robin - Kali Sultana, septième mouvement and épilogue Titi Robin's daughter features on vocals on the opening track. My daughter will be talking about the Lady Gaga track as she was at the diva's O2 gig in London a few months ago and, I have to confess, I wasn't. But is it art or entertainment , or is it just quick and dirty media ? Does it matter? As broadcaster a...

On An Overgrown Path , May 2008 Telegraph website, October 2010 On An Overgrown Path has championed the work of the visionary arts administrator Sir William Glock over the years, as can be seen from my 2008 post above. I have also featured Leo Black's new book BBC Music in the Glock Era and After several times in the last few months. As can be expected other stories have appeared on Sir William Glock and on Leo Black's book. These include the recent article seen above on the Telegraph website by BBC Radio 3 presenter Petroc Trelawny which was linked to a Radio 3 Music Matters programme on the same subject. There are only so many ways to present an article and the photo used in both articles comes from a third party source. So the visual similarities between the two pieces are, of course, coincidental. But the coincidences run deeper. The image file name in my article uses the standard naming convention which identifies every image On An Overgrown Path. Here is the HT...

... it avoids today's ever-increasing trend to cocky knowingness, memorably summed up long ago by [BBC Radio 3 controller] Ian McIntyre in the phrase "handing out sticky buns". 'Editorializing' of any kind was strictly forbidden under the BBC's charter, so producers were not allowed to express opinions or comment on the music in their programmes, nor even to refer to performers as 'distinguished' (they were that by definition if they broadcast for us): they were there to deliver facts. That quote about broadcasting in the 1970s is from Leo Black's ever-illuminating BBC Music in the Glock Era and Beyond . Just before 10 this morning [Aug 18] on BBC Radio 3, Rob Cowan introduces Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 4, conducted by Karajan. After it finished he says "That was Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2....although it says no. 4 on the CD for some reason". The latter said in a very confused voice, as if the error is the CD's not...

Unsurprisingly, I listened to more Bach than anything else in 2008. Raphaël Imbert's Bach/Coltrane CD for the Zig-Zag Territoires label captivated me, and judging by the emails it generated, it captivated many readers as well. Linn Records' one-to-a-part eight voice recording of the 1742 final performing edition of Bach's Matthew Passion was a new release, and it was, for me, one of the best new recordings of the year. An article about it waits in the upload queue, delayed by the sheer volume of wonderful music I have heard in the year. Also missing from my posts was the extraordinary Alpha Productions CD of parodies and transcriptions of music by Bach for organ and violin, played by Raphaël Oleg and Vincent Dubois. An endlessly fascinating disc that is also a wonderful example of the art of the balance engineer. A very welcome female interloper in a predominantly male profession, engineer Aline Blondiau achieves the impossible and produces a demonstration quality bal...

“At a concert this week in Berlin, Berlin's famed 65-year-old Philharmonic Orchestra was led by a U.S. war correspondent in battledress. Besides being a war correspondent, the guest conductor was a Negro, born in British Guiana. The 2,000 Berliners and the 500 Allied soldiers in the audience found it quite an experience. They applauded warmly when the conductor led the orchestra through Weber's familiar Oberon and Tchaikovsky's Pathétique. They broke into cheers, and called him back five times, when he gave them Berlin's first hearing of fellow-Negro William Grant Still's boisterous, bluesy Afro-American Symphony. Slender, serious Rudolph Dunbar is no musical freshman. He studied at Manhattan's Julliard School, has several times conducted the London Philharmonic. He was in Berlin as correspondent for the Associated Negro Press of Chicago. Shortly before the Berlin Philharmonic's Conductor Leo Borchard was accidentally killed by U.S. sentries, he had in...

With 376 million followers Buddhism is the fourth largest belief system in the world. Its core teachings of compassion and non-violence are well-known; but the wider cultural impact of those in the creative community exhibiting what the composer Jonathan Harvey described as "Buddhist tendencies" is underappreciated. Sri Lanka's state religion is Theravada - doctrine of the elders - Buddhism , and it may not be a coincidence that in 1960 elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike , the world's first woman prime minister. The island has been a center of Buddhist scholarship and practice since the introduction of Buddhism in the third century, and the country played a leading role in the preservation of the Pāli Canon of Buddhist teachings. I took the accompanying photos on a recent pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines in Sri Lanka, and to illustrate the influence of Buddhism on classical music I have juxtaposed them with cameos of music with Buddhist tendencies that provided the iPod so...

Paradoxically, the work's deliberate archaisms now seem to strike a notably contemporary resonance in the context of the current popularity of the music of religous composers such as Pärt and Górecki. John Pickard writes about Edmund Rubbra's Meditations on a Byzantine Hymn in a perceptive sleeve note for the CD seen above . Rubbra composed his Meditations for solo viola in 1962 and later made the two viola arrangement recorded by members of the Dante Quartet . Rubbra's string quartets, which are the main works on the disc, are well worth investigating, particularly the taut Fourth from 1977, which is dedicated to Robert Simpson . Wonderfully committed playing from the Dante Quartet and glorious Snape Maltings sound engineered by Tony Faulkner in 2001 for Dutton . I paid £10 delivered from an online seller . Rubbra dedicated his Sinfonia Concertante for Piano and Orchestra (1934) to his teacher Gustav Holst. The photo below shows Rubbra (left) with Holst and students...

Rubbra's output reveals a unity on two levels: the musical, which is readily demonstrable, and the less easily perceived religous/philosophical, which overrides the musical and encompasses almost everything he wrote. It is universal rather than sectarian, an instinctive blend of the most spiritual and mystical elements of Buddhism and Catholicism. It led to a music that overflows with optimism and a sense of well-being, though the, at times, dramatic and conflictual aspects attest to the hard-won nature of that ultimate peace and reassurance. Edmund Rubbra's biographer Ralph Scott Grover writes in the 2001 New Grove . If Rubbra is known at all today, it is for his eleven symphonies and the violin concerto, all of which overflow with that 'optimism and sense of well-being'. But there is also some very fine and little known chamber music, including four superb quartets , that deserves to come out of the shadow of more fashionable twentieth-century compositions. The Dut...