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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How listening hard alters the music

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The guy who writes the music-themed blog On An Overgrown Path is a bit of an obsessive, but I like that. The entry for 14 August happily happens to chime with a number of my own obsessions. Listening to music, and I mean listening hard, alters the music, and preparing to listen makes it twice as strange. And wonderful. That post by Brian Connor on his blog From a far place appealed to me, because not only does it sum up nicely what I have been saying On An Overgrown Path over the last ten years, but it also hints at the huge untapped potential of the lost art of listening . My own recent listening - and I mean listening hard - has included Bridgettine Chant from Vox Silentii . Birgitta Birgersdotter (1303-1373) of Sweden was a visionary and founder of the Bridgettine monastic order of contemplative nuns: she was canonized in 1391 and declared Patron Saint of Europe in 1999. Sung by the by the Finnish all-female medieval music specialists Vox Silentii , these recordings are not ne...
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No flowers please for Herbert von Karajan

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Classical music as ritual

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On the question of how to make classical music more accessible I remain a seeker. There are persuasive arguments from the modernists who see the need to cleanse concerts of what they see as silly conventions . But the classicists counter these with compelling explanations of how such conventions are an integral part of the concert experience. Recent posts here have favoured the modernists , but parallel reading has led me to see the arguments of the classicists in a different light. Zen Buddhism has had a considerable impact on Western classical music . But its more esoteric cousin Tibetan Buddhism remains elusive despite its embrace by Jonathan Harvey and other composers. Buddhism warns against dualism and the possibilities offered by the non-dualistic middle way are evidenced by Jonathan Harvey's questioning so-called silly concert conventions while composing music influenced by Tibetan Buddhist rituals and the highest yoga tantra . Central to the Vajrayana school of Tibetan ...
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Messiaen and Xenakis - Oiseaux Exotiques

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Early musician who could have become a great conductor

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David Munrow is best known as an early music virtuoso but his genius knew no bounds. His producer at EMI Christopher Bishop mentored both Riccardo Muti and André Previn early in their careers, and therefore his view that had David Munrow not died tragically young he could have become a great conductor cannot be dismissed easily. That view was expressed by Christopher in a 2007 radio interview with me - sound file via this link . Below is my transcription of that radio interview, see footer photo taken at the time. Christopher Bishop is best known for his work with Sir Adrian Boult, and the interview touches on the recording he produced of the Brandenburg Concertos conducted by Sir Adrian with David Munrow and John Turner playing the recorder parts. That recording was reissued in the 2012 EMI Classics box ' Sir Adrian Boult from Bach to Wagner ' which was lovingly curated by my EMI colleague Richard Bradburn . Richard died last week of a Coronavirus-related illness and th...
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So it's not just listening ...

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Over time classical music has shifted from being a lean forward activity, where the emphasis is on participation, to a lean back activity, where the audience are passive observers. Music originated as a lean forward activity in churches. The chorales in the Bach Passions are a brilliant use of lean forward music, and Britten followed Bach's example with the congregational singing in Noye's Fludde and Saint Nicholas . The flourishing community choir movement in France is a testament to the power of lean forward music . Music lessons in schools, now fast disappearing , are lean forward music pure and simple. John Cage wrote his A House Full of Music (described by him as 'A Musicircus of non-professional music' ) for 800 music-school pupils in Bremen, Germany, and his 4' 33", where ambient sound becomes the performance, is the ultimate lean forward music. But lean back music, where the focus is on celebrity performers, is the darling of the media driven 21st c...
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What was on Hitler's iPod?

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'He was genuinely convinced that he had an infallible musical ear. Heinz Lorenz suggested, 'My Führer, you ought to give a concert in the Great Hall. After all, you could afford to invite the best German musicians, Gieseking, Kempff, Furtwängler and so on. You don't go to the opera or the theatre any more, but you could listen to music. It wouldn't strain your eyes either'. Hitler rejected the idea. 'No, I don't want to trouble such artists just for me personally, but we could play a few records.' A thick book listed all the records that the Führer owned. There must have been hundreds of them. The wooden panelling of the wall turned out to be a cupboard holding records, with a built-in gramophone that was invisible till the cupboard doors were opened. The black discs stood in long rows, labelled with numbers. Bormann operated the gramophone. Hitler nearly always had the same repertory played: Léhars operettas, songs by Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf and Ri...
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Separating the medium from the music's message

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