On An Overgrown Path

Back in 2016 I recounted how I was impressed and moved by Anna Thorvaldsdottir's In the Light of Air . Recently I have been similarly impressed and moved by her Archora and Aion performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Eva Ollikainen. Anna Thorvaldsdottir's music combines the two essential of being both accessible and challenging. And, sadly, it is that challenge that probably explains why her music has failed to gain the traction it deserves in todays comfort zone-delimited culture .    Today it is perfectly acceptable, no praiseworthy - for classical music and other great art to be tailored to the needs of the lowest common denominator. It is less acceptable - no politically incorrect - to echo Benjamin Britten's credo that " Music demands ... some preparation, some effort ". So, at the risk of once again being politically incorrect, I reprise the words of another great under-appreciated woman musician, Alice Coltrane . This quote comes from...

These collages by Florence Dabby are inspired by the Rubaiyat of Hafiz . They were exhibited in the Bahia Palace, Marrakech  in July 2026. More on Sufi mysticism in my Salzburg Festival programme essay  Listening with the ear of the heart .

As the annual administrative behemoth known as the BBC Proms lumbers into motion, filling the national ether with its familiar blend of civic piety and corporate branding, one is forced to confront a recurring fatigue.To listen to BBC Radio 3’s broadcasts of these mammoth London concerts is to witness a curious ritual of cultural containment. Before a note of Vaughan Williams or a forgotten rarity by Jonathan Harvey can safely enter the acoustic space, it must first be sanitized. The listener is subjected to presenters topping and tailing each masterwork with breathless, patronizing trivia, as if lifting entries straight from an illustrated children’s encyclopedia of classical music. One hears the familiar, smug cadence—that unmistakable institutional voice which assumes that the public cannot possibly encounter sound unmediated by narrative hand-holding.  The star system versus the art  The modern Proms season operates less as a sanctuary for deep listening and more as an e...

Having returned from travels in a distant land I was looking forward to listening to BBC Radio 3's Proms broadcasts. But it wasn't to be, because after just two concerts I have given up. For me, even great music-making cannot survive Radio 3 presenters topping and tailing each work with endless quotes from a children's encyclopedia of classical music punctuated by smug info-commercials.  There has been much self-congratulation by Radio 3 about audience gains; however audience data shows that increase has been achieved by poaching Classic FM's listeners. Despite Radio 3's audience increase, the UK classical radio audience is not increasing. Because listeners are simply moving from Classic FM to Radio 3. In fact the total classical radio audience is decreasing . Under ex-Classic FM supremo Sam Jackson, BBC Radio 3's strategy of taking listeners from Classic FM was initially targeted at the daytime housewife audience. But that strategy has now been applied to even...

Marshall McLuhan presciently warned of the dangers when "the medium is the message". His prediction has come true today, with media such as MSN News offering content of exclusively  AI-generated clickbait trash . We now live in an age where are lives are defined by the media, and examples where the message is no longer subordinate to the populist message are disturbingly few and far between.  But one interesting example can be found in the arcane genre of early Franco-Flemish polyphony. Back in the 1970s the Westminster Gold label famously exploited the click bait potential of album graphics , years before clickbait became the media norm. Then half a century later the curiously titled vocal ensemble Beauty Farm very effectively played the same card - see examples above and below.  Beauty Farm are a sextet of male singers from leading European early music vocal groups. Based at the former Carthusian monastery of Mauerbach , Austria, they record on the independent...

On paper Leif Segerstam's symphonies don't look promising. More than 300 in total, each lasting only around half an hour but needing only two pages of score, and some requiring no conductor. All underwritten by the philosophy that "My symphonies are sperm. There is strength in numbers. Some will survive to take evolution forward". (So my headline is a genuine pull quote, not Slipped Disc-style clickbait). Anyone acquainted with his authoritative Sibelius and Rautavaara will know that with Segerstam unconventional does not mean unacceptable. There is a method in what many will view as his madness. In the deliberate absence of a conductor the musicians are cued by certain specified signals given by different instruments in turn. The aim is to release the players' latent creativity which is normally suppressed by the highly prescriptive Western classical tradition.  Segerstam explained that "I wanted a performance to be a creative event, not a Prussian plou...