On An Overgrown Path

Marketing is now an accepted tool for trying to reach classical music's elusive new audience. In the world of marketing there are two separate entities, the product and the brand. Classical music's product is the music itself. Fortunately there is very little that can be done to damage the product. The transcendental genius of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and their peers across the ages will continue to shine for decades and centuries to come. But the classical music brand is a different matter.  One definition is that a brand is the personality of an organisation, communicated through an identifying.....voice and tone. So what is the personality, voice and tone that the classical music brand is communicating today? The self-styled 'world's most-read cultural website' is  Slipped Disc . This high-profile face of the classical music brand enjoys the full support of the classical music industry. Yet for years Slipped Disc has leveraged tribalism through its on-line lync

That photo was taken by me a few days ago in Morocco's High Atlas Mountains . My soundtrack for time spent at altitude was the reissue Music of Morocco recorded by Paul Bowles as archived in the Library of Congress. As my photo shows Morocco still has a unique ambience in the mountainous areas. But overall Morocco was a very different country when Bowles made his recordings in 1959. As the Italian writer and traveller  Tiziano Terzani  explains in  A Fortune Teller Told Me :    A country at the crossroads between modernization cum destruction and an isolation that would preserve its identity has no real choice: others have chosen on its behalf. Businessmen, bankers, experts from international organizations, officers of the UN and half the world's governments and passionate prophets of 'development' at all costs. They believe unanimously in a kind of mission not far removed from that of the American General in Vietnam who, after razing a Vietcong-occupied village t

Much spin surrounded the launch of BBC Verify which fact-checks and counters disinformation in external sources. So let's hope the same forensic analysis is applied to the BBC's own contributors .

These days if reader numbers are down all you need do is write an article which uses a photo of Wilhelm Furtwängler with Hitler. Stereotyping and prejudices satisfied, readership up, more work from the BBC; job done. But there is a different perspective which looks beyond cheap click bait. In my archive material seen above there is a 1964 BBC Third Programme listing. In that year Christopher Nupen compiled and introduced a tribute on the tenth anniversary of Furtwängler's death. This included recordings made during his performances and contributions from Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, Szymon Goldberg, Leon Goosens, Eugen Jochum, Paul Kletzki, Rafael Kubelik, Walter Legge, Frida Leider, Yehudi Menuhin, Gareth Morris, Gregor Piatigorsky, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, and Friedlind Wagner.  In those glorious pre-click bait days the listing explains how "Both in music and politics Furtwängler was the subject of controversy and the programme will attempt to tell more about him a

These photos were taken by me at the new Cambridge Central Mosque . My recent reading has included the anthology Tales from the life of Bruce Wannell: Adventurer, Linguist, Orientalist [and Muslim convert]. Bruce Wannell was an accomplished keyboard player, here is an extract from  master potter Isabel Denyer 's contribution to the anthology: If one 'got' [Bruce Wannell] and onto his wavelength... and relaxed into his rhythm and  and off-site piste approach, whether it was striding over the moors and getting inspiration for pots from lichen and landscapes or listening to music - Handel, Afghan, lute, Greek, Sudanese, Persian, north African, Bach, sometimes heard intimately in people's drawing rooms, sometimes on rooftops, at the Wigmore Hall or Glyndebourne, whenever possible and in whatever form possible - one could not help but enter into a world of discovery, caught up by his endless curiosity.  In another tribute George Lemos quotes T.S. Eliot , a quote which

The worst thing for any victim is not the pain that one has undergone, but the knowledge that the culprit is still roaming free, and worse if the victim has to stand in silence while the culprit goes about in the crowd with a show of power. To be in a free country and allowing Chinese leaders to go unchallenged, allowing them to carry on their business as if everything is fine back in China and Tibet, is a DUTY not performed. We protest not because we hate Chinese , but because we want to speak to their conscience or their wrongdoing, and tell them we have not forgotten and that we still protest this, and also to tell the world of the injustice we are suffering at the hands of the brute and the bully, thereby seeking their support.  That extract comes from the essay Protest As Celebration Of Difference by Tenzin Tsundue . After graduating from Madras, South India, Tenzin Tsundue crossed the Himalayas on foot and entered Tibet. He wanted to see the situation in his occupied country