A turd world country?

Example

- there are 200,000 dogs in Paris

- each day they leave ten tons of excrement behind them

- each year six hundred Parisians break a limb slipping on dog turds

- the city of Paris uses sixty green motorcrottes that streak through the streets trying to vacuum up the turds. The cost of these to the tax payer is £5million a year

From Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong by Jean-Benoit Nadeau & Julie Barlow

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David Munrow - more than early music

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'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
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Classical music must be doing something wrong

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Classical music's website of choice Slipped Disc  today runs a story on the latest RAJAR UK radio listening figures . This story states that a "...record number of individual hours was spent listening to [BBC Radio 3]. They must be doing something right". Which is good news; but only for those who believe that facts should never stand in the way of a good story. Because simple arithmetic shows that BBC Radio 3 is not doing very much right, while UK classical radio in its entirety is doing something wrong.   In the quarter ended September 2024, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM audiences were 2.039m and 4.416m respectively. Which gives a total audience for the two classical stations of 6.455m. For the same quarter in September 2023 the audiences were 2.002m and 4.467m, giving a total classical radio audience 12 months previously of 6.469m.  So BBC Radio 3's "something right" turns out to be a fractional increase in its audience year on year, and a contribution ...
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Art as an erotic explosion

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According to the UK's National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles , one of the reasons for the recent decline in sexual activity among younger people is the "search for spiritual and mental development". But many have disagreed with the proposition that asceticism and celibacy are the key to higher levels of consciousness. One notable dissenter was the French Indologist and musicologist Alain Daniélou  (1907-1994) whose circle in the 1930s included Jean Cocteau, Serge Diaghilev, and Stravinsky. After later moving to India Daniélou stayed with Rabindranath Tagore , before becoming a professor at the Hindu University of Benares and director of the College of Indian Music. He corresponded with René Guénon about the philosophic and religious approaches of Shaivite Hinduism, and shared some of Guénon's less-savoury anti-modernism views . (The toxic undercurrent of the far-right has been around for a long time: Steve Bannon cites Guénon as an influence .) In 1963...
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Composer with very mixed feelings about the digital world

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In an online interview LA-based composer Jeffrey Roden explained: I have very mixed feelings about the digital world in general and would hesitate to say that the net worth of it has been positive for music and its listeners... Technology has made many very wonderful things possible. More music is not one of them..  The photo above shows Jeffrey Roden with members of the Bennewitz Quartet during a recording session for his 2016 double album Threads of a Prayer Volume 1 . Swiss philosopher Max Picard lamented how "Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence" and Threads of a Prayer is an extended hymn to that lost silence. This overlooked essay in the power of the silence between the notes can be compared to the music of Morton Feldman, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener. But as Roden explains, such comparisons are not only meaningless, but disrespectful and demeaning: Although I am paraphrasing, Hemingway said talking about the work too much took away i...
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All aboard the Martinu bandwagon

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Depressing, but predictable, to see the mainstream media scrambling aboard the Bohuslav Martinů bandwagon as soon as BBC Radio 3 announces a cycle of his superb symphonies . Equally depressing, but a sign of the times, to see the Independent publishing an appreciation of the composer's symphonies by a writer who confesses elsewhere to never having heard a single note of them. As Norman Lebrecht famously wrote in the Evening Standard back in 2006: ‘... until bloggers deliver hard facts … paid for newspapers will continue to set the standard as the only show in town’. Sadly the hard facts now show that Norman is no longer at the Evening Standard , and, as from next Monday, the Evening Standard will no longer be a paid for newspaper . But you can find pre-bandwagon appreciations of Martinů here and here . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of ...
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Storm clouds gather over Aldeburgh

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On An Overgrown Path’s traffic logs show that the UK and international media are actively researching the private life of Benjamin Britten. One of the many failings of the BBC in the Jimmy Savile scandal was to assume that a potentially damaging story would simply go away. So, although I would much prefer to be writing about other things, I am reluctantly returning to the subject of Britten . I am a huge admirer of Britten’s music , I have written in praise of Aldeburgh , and Snape is my local concert hall . But for some time I have had a growing discomfort about certain aspects of the composer's private life, and this means I do not share the dismissive attitude that prevails elsewhere in classical music towards its continued scrutiny. And it also means I object to being labelled as a “smut-stirrer” for believing the subject should not be off-limits . The aspects of Britten’s personal life under scrutiny are public knowledge. In his eloquent appreciation of Britten in Th...
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Soundtrack for a porn movie

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A vintage year for blasphemy and heresy

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The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

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While classical music debates nothing changes

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