On An Overgrown Path

Here is an interesting variation on my musician as artist thread . The sleeve of this 1962 recording of Toshiro Mayuzumi's Nirvana Symphony uses artwork by none other than Yoko Ono. Although better known as John Lennon's wife and as a notable conceptual artist in her own right, Yoko Ono has some interesting connections with classical music. While majoring in philosophy at Gakushuin University in Tokyo she also studied music, specialising in German lieder and Italian opera. After moving to the US with her parents Yoko dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College , Bronxville, NY (which was then not coed), and aged 23 eloped with the Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi (b. 1933) whose teachers included John Cage . The marriage did not last; Ichiyanagi returned to pursue his career in Japan while Yoko Ono stayed in New York to become a central figure in the Fluxus group which pioneered muti-media 'anti-art'. Other members of the group included Cage and La Monte Young . The ...

That great visionary Carl Nielsen wrote 'even if we reached agreement on the fact that now the best and most beautiful has been achieved, mankind thirsting more for life and adventure than perception, would rise and shout in one voice: give us something else, give us something new' . Today I celebrate two projects that bring something else and something new; both are for the piano and both from across the Atlantic. First for 'something new', and an uplifting story from blogger Michael Strickland who be more familiar as a serial comment poster on the Path using his sfmike handle. Michael tells us that pianist Sarah Cahill , who is seen above, has commissioned eighteen composers to write music for the piano on the subject of peace . The project is called 'Sweeter Music' and the impressive list of contributors includes a refreshingly large number of women composers: Meredith Monk , Frederic Rzewski , Terry Riley , Yoko Ono , Bernice Johnson Reagon , Pauline O...

'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...

Karlheinz Stockhausen died on December 5, 2007. In tribute I will be playing his orchestral work Gruppen on my Future Radio programme on December 16, preceeded by Palestrina's Missa Brevis . My article below explains the connection between the two works, and also looks at Stockhausen's position within the bigger picture of mid-twentieth century culture. This photo of Peter Orlovsky was taken in 1955, and he is the subject of the background portrait which was painted by Robert LaVigne . Orlovsky became beat poet Allen Ginsberg's lover and companion, and Ginsberg is listed as one of the thirty-six most influential people of the hippie era. Here is the complete list: Bella Abzug , Muhammad Ali , Joan Baez , Helen Gurley Brown , Rachel Carson , Bob Dylan , Buckminster Fuller , Jerry Garcia , Stephen Gaskin , Allen Ginsberg , Berry Gordy Jr ., Bill Graham , Germaine Greer , Dick Gregory , Tom Hayden , Jimi Hendrix , Janis Joplin , John Kennedy , Jack Kerouac , Ken Kesey , Rev...

Scott has left a new comment on your post " Schoenberg and stomach cramps ": On a mildly related topic which would have fit better a few topics back, I've never really come to grips with what "world music" is. Specifically, why are Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan (to mention a personal favourite) often mentioned as world music? Surely they are classical music (or art music) as much as is Schoenberg. Sometimes I think that world music is anything that the writer thinks is more lasting than "popular music" but which doesn't fit within the boundaries of western art music or jazz. Thanks Scott, as ever a perceptive comment. As it's Friday and the sun is shining I am going to freewheel down the path you sent us on with those important words 'more lasting'. Back in 2006, when I was writing on Arvo Pärt's Passio , I quoted Mark Van Doren (from the introduction to Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain incidentally) as saying: ...

In the 1960s we were open to experimentation in all things from natural to unnatural to supernatural. I believed that knowledge acquired from instinct and observation was as valid as an academic search for factual verity. Parsing everything was not a path to discovery - it was a deterrent. It wasn't that I was against study and excavating for information, but I believed that overanalyzing was harmful and interfered with the ability to see. I was wary of entering a tunnel of thought that ignored the surrounding terrain and the weather above it. Those words from Suze Rotolo's 'A Freewheelin' Time' remind us of how new approaches to the creative process produced remakable results in the 1960s. Here are four examples of the notable new music that was composed in one year alone - 1968 Roger Sessions - Eighth Symphony Harrison Birtwistle - Nomos Luciano Berio - Sinfonia Luigi Dallapiccola - Odysseus But instinct is not always a good thing. In 1972 the self-styled bla...

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...