On An Overgrown Path

When Timothy Leary first offered Allen Ginsberg LSD the poet objected, saying "Walking on water wasn't built in a day", and responses to recent posts here underline that the new audience for classical music also will not be built in a day. My appreciation of Arnold Dolmetsch's work with young people prompted Philip Amos to comment: The second paragraph of this fine post serves to bring again to my mind that the potential saviours of classical music are now about five years of age, if not younger... The key is to expose children to classical music at the latest in their first year of school and thereafter. I do not mean teach music. Nor 'music appreciation' classes if that entails another sort of blether. Just expose. I can remember the first classical works I was conscious of hearing -- and listening to: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik , Morning from Peer Gynt, Water Music...I was five and these were the among the works played as we gathered for morning assembly. On...

Most recently of all, I've been contemplating the return of that great theme at the end of the Elgar's First Symphony, asking myself whence come those extraordinary chords that intermittently add stresses. Tangentially, there is a video of Tod Handley conducting the work on YouTube, and I wish I could make it mandatory viewing for all neophyte conductors, above all, keeping in mind that this was an appearance as guest conductor to boot (with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra !). This is great conducting, I would say. What my mind kept returning to was what in Elgar's mind inspired him to write those chords, and I came to think that the answer to a question quite often posed is that all we really need to know is what is in the music, though it would be a huge bonus if we could hear from the composer what thought process it issued from, if any. I can't answer the question whether absolute music 'says' something coming from the mind of the composer, but all that i...

Making the case for Stokowski the magician , Lisa Hirsch comments on Twitter that "The long list of works he premiered in the US tells you Stokowski was the real thing", while in a blog comment Philip Amos urges us to "Consider the orchestras he founded... the premiere performances he conducted... the inspired way in which he placed the sections of orchestras." To Lisa and Philip's advocacy I would add Stoki's pioneering work with new technologies. A 2013 Overgrown Path post described Stokowski's experiments in multi-channel sound with Bell Telephone Laboratories and the Philadelphia Orchestra, pioneering work that pre-dated today's surround sound systems by 80 years. And Fantasia , which was released in 1940 with a soundtrack by Stokowski and his Philadephia Orchestra, was the first commercial movie with stereo sound . Later in his career Stokowski recorded for RCA at the time they were issuing CD-4 quadraphonic LPs ; one example is the 1975 ...

What does "under-represented" mean in this context? Because some minority group doesn't have "representation" in some profession it's assumed to be evil? Perhaps it's simply not part of the culture and it is a self-selecting group. After all, "classical" music is male in origin and culture, so why should there be a lot of women "represented"? It is disturbing that a comment like that should be made in 2016, even if such sentiments are now - quite rightly - greeted with vociferous protests and Twitter firestorms. That comment was added to a recent Overgrown Path post, but clarification is needed. I have changed two words, and the comment greeted with neither vociferous protests nor a Twitter firestorm. Here is the original wording : What does "under-represented" mean in this context? Because some minority group doesn't have "representation" in some profession it's assumed to be evil? Perhaps it's simpl...

'Images are the literature of the layman.' Umberto Eco provides that coda to yesterday's path about the medium usurping the message . Connecting with the layman is the holy grail of the arts. Yet it is one of the paradoxes of digital culture that so much emphasis is placed on communications technology while so little is placed on the visual and verbal vocabularies that populate the technology networks. Umberto Eco's field is semiotics , so I offer two interpretations of the non-photo of Carl Nielsen. The glass is half empty - as Umberto Eco tells us, the visual is the literature of the layman, which once again points to the path of seeing the music . Yet, as Philip Amos points out in a a thought provoking comment , that literature and the important cultural linkages which sustain it are being subverted in the name of accessibility. Yes, a lot of fuss about a photo of a radio presenter. But just one example of how media organisations are cynically abusing the arts in t...

I have no doubt that you are absolutely right about the entertainment fallacy , Bob. I've commented on the issue here in times past but a couple of things I might add. First, there is a site called ' Classical Live Online Radio ', a great convenience for it provides links to 160 or so classical music stations, these categorized geographically as Europe, USA, and Rest of the World. The great majority of the stations thereon that I've listened to in all regions have the simplest format: an announcer who names the composer, work and performer(s), and then the music. Why anyone would suffer the teeth-grinding twittering and blethering of BBC Radio 3 and similar when they could stream, to take one example among so many, RAI, which I light upon because much of its programming is drawn from the vast RAI archives of studio and broadcast concert performances (and that raises another beef with the Beeb), I do not know. For people who do not have a vast personal collection of reco...

'When you wrote that Philippa (Schuyler) would approve of both conductor and soloist in the Americas concert , the thought, quite unbidden, "A black woman pianist?!" came into my mind. Just reflecting, I can think of not one living, but I can recall one who left us in 1983: Winifred Atwell. I think she deserves a mention in the context of this thread, for surely fewer and fewer today remember her, and hardly any know that, born in Trinidad and Tobago, she went in the early 40s to study with Alexander Borowsky in Boston. (As an aside, Borowsky's recordings very much need to be reissued.) In 1946 she went to London and was taken into the Royal Academy of Music, where she was the first female pianist to receive the highest grade for musicianship (a point relevant to what follows). So much for Wiki plus a little surfing. Whether she did, as claimed, say that she "...starved in a garret to get onto concert stages",I'm not sure. However, what this bit of rese...

'BBC Radio 3,will, I suppose, make this abysmal state of things into a sort of national standard. The worst journalists and bloggers it co-opts by dipping into its very weighty bag of goodies because they fit in well with Radio 3's own standards, and so also they try to co-opt the best, often with success, because they live in mortal fear that they may one day train their critical faculties full bore on Radio 3 itself. And so I wasn't surprised to find Dr. Service occasionally is on there, nor to learn that Mr. Lebrecht will be. There are only two music blogs in Britain, as I review in my mind those I'm pretty well-acquainted with, that I know are untarnished by all this, and only one I can think of that is willing to go head to head with the Beeb, and that is the most admirable one I'm commenting on at this very moment.' That is part of a comment added by Philip Amos to yesterday's post . Many other personal emails have been received from readers who agree ...

London 2012 Festival celebrates global ethics Opening the London 2012 Festival on June 21 is the UK premiere of Jonathan Harvey's Weltethos performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Edward Gardner. Weltethos , which means 'global ethic' in German, pays homage to the radical theologian Hans Küng who believed that international peace can only be achieved by a global ethical consensus, and the work is structured around the teachings of six religious figures on ethical topics. Weltethos was written to a commission by the Global Ethical Foundation ( Stiftung Weltethos ) and the " premier partner " for the London 2012 Festival performance is multinational oil and gas company BP. BP's ethical track record includes the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which resulted in the loss of 11 lives and caused disastrous environmental damage . A US government report into the Deepwater disaster blamed it on poor management ...

I used to read Gramophone and subscribed to it for quite some time. I cancelled my subscription 15 years ago and have not missed it. The main reason for the Gramophone's demise is simply that what represents the core of their interests, recorded classical music, is a barely alive dinosaur. Classical music is better represented these days by live events. What makes the news is not a new recording of Beethoven’s 9 symphonies by Chailly and the Gewandhaus but the fact that these artists are touring in many capitals around the world to perform them. TV with specialized channels like Europe’s mezzo, Radio and Web-based radio, Web concert from concert hall acting as producers have replaced recorded music as the mean by which we discover and hear music. (I hate to quote myself but have a look here and here among many others …). Similarly, every Opera house is following the steps of the Met with their live relays in movie theaters. Live Music is where things happen and technology has m...