Being and nothingness

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The inspiration for Jean-Paul Satre's Being and Nothingness came to him in a Paris cafe, when he asked the waitress for a cup of coffee with no cream. "I'm sorry," she replied, "we're out of cream. How about with no milk"?
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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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Happy birthday to the paradoxical Dalai Lama

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Today is the 90th birthday of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama . To celebrate this I am republishing, without further editing, the 2014 photo essay about my close encounter with His Holiness at the Kalachakra Initiation in Ladakh, northern India. The Paradox of Our Age , a short but powerful essay credited to the present Dalai Lama, is widely available in Ladakh in northern India, a region known as 'Little Tibet'. The text ends with the observation that: 'These are times of fast foods but slow digestion/Tall men but short characters/Steep profits but shallow relationships/It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room'. Tibetan Buddhism is widely viewed as an appealing alternative to materialistic Western society, so, not surprisingly, The Paradox of Our Age is widely circulated on the internet and Twitter - see photo tweet below . I bought The Paradox of Our Age on an exquisitely printed little scroll in the Tibetan refugee market in the re...
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The Accidental Pilgrim

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There are an awful lot of books around about the journey to Santiago de Compostela in particular, and pilgrimages in general; and let’s be quite truthful a lot of them are rather average. But one that stood out from the crowd for me was David Moore’s The Accidental Pilgrim which was published in 2004 as a paperback by Hodder Headline Ireland, and is available in both the UK and US. The serendipitous path that links these posts meant that I bought this book in the departures lounge at Stansted Airport en route to the Danish Thread Subtitled 'Travels with a Celtic Saint', The Accidental Pilgrim is the story of a 1500 mile bike ride by the author from Bangor in Northern Ireland to Bobbio in northern Italy via France and Switzerland. The journey follows in the footsteps of the Irish missionary Saint Columbanus who made the journey in the 6th Century. (Which coincidentally, and linked to other threads , was around the time that Gregorian Chant was emerging as the official musi...
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Soundtrack for a porn movie

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"No, you have not landed on Slipped Disc by mistake. Respected electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze tells the story himself.  The origins of " Body Love " are quite funny. I received a call from a movie producer named Manfred Menz and I wound up becoming his principal composer for a period of time. Amongst others, I composed the "Barracuda" soundtrack for him [1978, previously unreleased on album]. This led to a friendship which lasts till today. Menz now lives in Malibu, California where I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, this guy calls me and asks if I would compose the score to a porn movie. I said: "Porn? Nah, I don't do that kind of thing".  As it turned out, the director of the movie, Lasse Braun, had already shot it and had used my albums " Timewind " [1975] and " Moondawn " [1976] as a kind of "working soundtrack". This was obvious because the couples in the film were moving in time to my gro...
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Walking with Stravinsky

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Lizzie, I am sorry that this article didn’t appear last year as I had planned. 2006 was the centenary of your birth, but the year passed with scarcely a mention of your work, or a performance of your music. It was my plan to rectify that in a small way, and I wrote a very nicely turned appreciation. I am sure you would have approved of it - all about the myth of Elisabeth Lutyens, the mother of British serialism, ‘Twelve-tone Lizzie’ - the outspoken eccentric shunned by the musical establishment whose compositions were rejected by the BBC, and the composer who struggled for commissions and performances. The myth is perpetuated in your Wikipedia entry which says you 'worked in isolation and neglect, creating a personal style of serialism and eventually gaining some recognition for her ability to set text. Lutyens' work was exposed to the public at large through her scores for horror films.' In your autobiography the Goldfish Bowl you made much of the tensions with your ...
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Music and politics in the garden of Allah

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No, those photos were not taken in Algeria in the 1950s. They were snatched by me earlier this year during nightime location shooting for the feature film La Baie d’Alger ( The Bay of Algiers ), with the beach at Le Racou in French Catalonia standing in for North Africa. La Baie d’Alger is based on the eponymous Prix Méditerranée winning novel by Algerian born Louis Gardel which is set in 1955 during the early part of the Algerian war of independence. This bloody conflict between the French military and the the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) ended on July 5th 1962 when the country was granted independence. The cinematic release of La Baie d’Alger is just one of many events taking place next year to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence. This anniversary will attract global interest because the independence struggle resonates with the Arab Spring which has profoundly changed neighbouring Tunisia while leaving Algeria in the grip of a political ble...
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Art has been hijacked by the addiction-directed internet

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Christopher Lyndon-Green 's cycle of Valentin Silvestrov's orchestral works for Naxos is remarkable in several ways. His conducting of the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra does full justice to the music of one of our greatest living symphonists. But there is more. For the new release of Silvestrov's magnificent Symphony No. 8 and Violin Concerto with soloist Janus Wawrowski , Christopher Lyndon-Green contributes an essay that expresses what many of us feel, but with an eloquence we cannot match. Here is an extract:  Is Silvestrov a Postmodernist Composer?  What, exactly, is meant by the term ‘postmodernism’ has yet to be satisfactorily defined.   Jean-Jacques Nattiez has famously written, in his great essay about Boulez’s Répons , ‘Modernism created a gulf with the public, and postmodernism wants to bridge that gap.’  Such a ‘definition’ would seem to give free reign to the all-too-often superficial neo-Romanticism of much contemporary composition, to mim...
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Return of the night watchman

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BBC Radio 3's mercifully Petroc Trelawny-free Proms relay of Die Meistersinger plays as I write. Listening to Act II reminded me of a long forgotten detail of the legendary 1968 Sadlers Wells production of the opera conducted by Reginald Goodall (and later by Charles Mackerras ) and produced by Glen Byam Shaw and John Blatchley . The night watchman has a small but vitally important role at the end of Act II. As the riot subsides he makes his second appearance to sing 'Watch out for ghosts and goblins, lest an evil affright your soul' and, after a G flat on his horn, peace is restored and the curtain falls. It is one of the most magical moments in all music and for this reason the role attracts top singers. But that is his last appearance as Wagner gave him no part in the valedictory final act. This not withstanding the producers at Sadlers Wells in 1968 created a non-singing role for the night watchman in the festival meadow scene. As the guilds entered he took their emb...
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Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

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On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the Château d'Assas, Scott Ross gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos b...
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Male American pioneers

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As the credit crunches who is going to pass up the opportunity to explore lots of composers for less cash? Budget-priced CDs receive a lot of attention , but budget books are also well worth investigating. 20th-Century Composers is an excellent series from innovative publisher Phaidon . They were originally published in the 1990s and are now reappearing at bargain price. The twenty-five titles range from Bernstein and the Beatles through Minimalists to Hindemith, Hartmann and Henze and György Ligeti , and on to Erich Wolfgang Korngold portrayed by our own Jessica Duchen . Seen above is American Pioneers by Alan Rich which I picked up for £6.95 in Blackwells in Edinburgh (egregious strap-line 'The Knowledge Retailer' ). The book is, as you would expect from a leading art publisher, a visual as well as textual delight, with art direction by New Yorker cover contributor Jean-Jaques Sempé . The main profiles are of Charles Ives , Edgar Varèse , Henry Cowell John Cage ...
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