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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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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All that twitters is not gold

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That tweet saddens me. It was written by Jeremy Pound who identifies himself without disclaimer on his Twitter account - see below - as the deputy editor of BBC Music Magazine . I don't know Jeremy Pound, but presumably he is a very nice guy who holds a senior position in an influential publication which he reached due to his qualifications and experience. Of course all of us have blind spots in our music appreciation. But is it not the role of a writer to report with a reasonable degree of objectivity that a work fails to engage them, fails to move them, or is beyond their comprehension? And is it not also their role to explore why that vital connection has not been made? Karlheinz Stockhausen has been judged by others with far stronger credentials than Jeremy Pound to be an important if controversial figure in late 20th-century music. To publicly dismiss one of his seminal works as "a load of pish" - definition "variation of piss, most usually used in the nort...
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Racism disguised as patriotism must not prevail

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Hubert Parry’s inspired setting of William Blake includes the famous lines ‘Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant land’. Over the years Parry's Jerusalem has become associated with rabid nationalism , and racism disguised as patriotism is dominating the current political agenda both in Britain and the US . However the album artwork above is not there to illustrate the danger of nuanced racism, but rather to explode the beguiling myth surrounding Parry's Jerusalem. Because far from being the product of ethnic nationalism, Jerusalem started life as a rallying cry for a spiritual movement formed, to quote its founder, to appeal "to the whole of humanity... Hindus, Mohammedans, Buddhists... " And that is only the start of a long but remarkable story, because Sir Francis Younghusband, who commissioned Jerusalem in 1916, was an evangelical Christian Colonel who led colonial forces in a bloody invasion of Tibet. But in his mature years he became ...
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Is Hugo Chavez really music to our ears?

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Venezuela, and its charismatic president Hugo Chavez , have featured On An Overgrown Path several times recently. Back in November I raised concerns about the objectivity of the Guardian's coverage (above ) of Venezuela's acclaimed music education programme, and only yesterday I highlighted human rights activist Harry Belafonte's support for Chavez . So today's Observer article Mr Chavez and the death of freedom makes interesting reading. Here is an extract: "Consider, for it's a looming headline event in 2007, the Hugo Chavez dilemma. On the one hand, many committed media freedom warriors in Britain - including Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists - vociferously support Venezuela's totemic president and all his egalitarian works. They raise money for his causes, pass NUJ conference motions of support and generally despise scribblers on the other side who think him a bit of a demagogue. On the other hand, Aidan White, gene...
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A vintage year for blasphemy and heresy

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2010 was a vintage year for blasphemy and heresy. A post on Salvador Dali drew attention to his forgotten audiovisual opera-poem Être Dieu inspired by the Cathar heresy, Jonathan Harvey stirred things up on my Chance Music programme by saying "the future must bring things which are considered blasphemous like amplifying classical music", while yet another path took me to new heights of heresy. In fact the path reached 2400 feet, which, as the photo above shows, is a serious challenge for anyone who, like me, who has a vertigo problem. I took the photo from the fortress of Quéribus in Languedoc, France and the view is towards Mont Canigou, the holy mountain beloved of Pablo Casals and Thomas Merton . Quéribus castle was the last Cathar stronghold to surrender in 1255 and Jordi Savall's The Forgotten Kingdom had led me to Languedoc and Catharism and on to Gnosticism. The Cathar heresy has its roots in the "dualist" religions in the Indus basin which origina...
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No flowers please for Herbert von Karajan

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Few musicians have generated such a mixture of respect and revulsion as Herbert von Karajan. It takes Richard Osborne 851 pages in his masterly biography to capture the essence of this extraordinary conductor, entrepreneur and opportunist, and it would be impertinent to even attempt to cover the same ground here. So instead, with the centenary of Karajan's birth falling on April 5, I offer this personal vignette from my time at EMI, which I hope in some small way illustrates the conundrum that was this extraordinary man. During the late 1970s the Machiavellian Karajan had carefully nurtured a deadly rivalry between EMI and his other contract company, Deutsche Grammophon. This meant that EMI had, at very considerable expense, outbid DG for the four act version of Verdi's Don Carlos with José Carreras and Mirella Freni , and Debussy's Pelléas et Méliande with Frederica von Stade and Richard Stilwell . Pélleas was a personal passion of Karajan, and because of this he ...
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Classical music should exploit its healing power

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Classical music cannot stand still; so that means it must find new audiences. Western classical music has evolved into a highly dualist art form with clearly demarcated boundaries around its core offering of the orchestral and operatic repertoire. There is little debate that this repertoire must - and will - remain central to the art form. But it can be argued that to open up new markets the current watertight boundaries around that core offering must become porous. An example of a blurring of these boundaries would be an entry into the mind, body and spirit market; a market which a post here in 2011 pointed out was then worth around $11 billion annually in the US, compared with $200 million for classical album sales. It is tempting to dismiss the mind, body and spirit market opportunity as no more than 'Mozart for meditation' and 'Gregorian Chant for the soul', but that would be a mistake. As my earlier post noted , the spiritual dimension is found in many of cl...
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May I say a word about André Rieu?

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May I say a word about André Rieu? It is easy to look down at him and his style of presentation, to sneer at it as schlager or easy listening or glorified elevator muzak or whatever. I've done it myself. But, to my own considerable surprise, I find myself less and less sympathetic with such criticisms, and more and more embarrassed to have indulged in it myself. He is providing -- dare I say it? -- innocent, wholesome pleasure to millions of people, many of whom have never been afforded the opportunity to develop sophisticated classical music tastes. My mother-in-law, who grew up in a poor neighborhood near the Chicago stockyards and certainly never had exposure to classical music growing up, enjoys her Rieu CD and video very much. And the more I think about it, the more I can't find anything wrong with that. For it seems to me that to find fault with someone else's musical pleasure is at best presumptuous and at worst just rank snobbism. As much as I admire artists of un...
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Revisiting the Master Musicians

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Two of the albums that I return to time and time again during my explorations of mystic turuq  are Brian Jones Presents the Pan Pipes at Joujouka from 1971 and Bill Laswell 's 1995 Apocalypse Across the Sky , both of which capture the literally entrancing sound of the legendary Master Musicians of Jajouka in their home village in Morocco's Rif Mountains. Six years ago I collaborated with Led Zeppelin biographer and Michael Jackson ghost writer Stephen Davis on a two-part profile of the Master Musicians. Between 1973 and 1989 Stephen made a number of visits to Jajouka, and he is therefore an important and reliable source on an important cultural tradition in which the music is sometimes drowned-out by the sound of axes being ground . When I asked Stephen to choose between the Brian Jones and Bill Laswell productions he plumped for the more atmospheric and authentic 1971 recording, but conceded that Apocalypse Across the Sky "sounds great". Personally I love Brian ...
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Britten's passion for the East

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In a recent post I described the 2012 Aldeburgh Festival presentation of Jordi Savall's Mare Nostrum as a "bold piece of programming". But on reflection perhaps the performance of this transcultural work in the Snape Maltings is not so much bold as appropriate in view of Benjamin Britten's pioneering role in what later became known as world music. Britten's initial interest in Far Eastern music was sparked by his friendship with the Canadian composer and ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee, who he met when living in New York between 1939 and 1942. There is more on this friendship in my post Colin McPhee - East collides with West , and the photo below shows the two composers in New York c. 1940. Britten's first operatic venture Paul Bunyan was composed in New York and Balinese influences can be heard in its Prologue, while in 1941 McPhee and Britten recorded McPhee's transcription for two pianos of Balinese Ceremonial Music . This exposure to a different...
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