If I were a dictator ...


'If I were a dictator I should make it compulsory for every member of the population between the ages of four and eighty to listen to Mozart for at least one-quarter of an hour daily in the coming years' - Sir Thomas Beecham

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If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to An equal status with the Twelve-Tone boys ...

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steve2 said…
my answer to beecham:i don't like mozart
7:34 pm
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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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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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The act of killing from 20,000 feet

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The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

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To listen to classical music you need a good pair of eyes

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The periodical Nature reports on research by a social psychologist which shows that judgements about the quality of a musical performance are influenced more by what is see than by what is heard. The remit of the somewhat superficial research was the impact of body language, which means it did not consider a little-known but far more important link between the eyes and sound. It has long been a puzzle as to why high-order harmonics extending beyond the upper limit of human hearing produced by fine instruments such as Stradivarius violins make the music sound better. Similarly there has been no explanation as to why extending the frequency response of an audio system beyond the upper limit of human hearing improves the sound quality. But recent medical research has shown that our eyes are sound as well as vision transducers, and that the eyes play an important role in passing ultrasound to the brain. While the upper limit of human hearing ranges from 15 to 18 khz depending on age, ...
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The purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness

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A neglected 20th century masterpiece

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Interviewer: "Did you think as you began to write the ninth symphony that it would be the last thing you wrote?" Sir Malcolm Arnold: "I was rather hoping it would be ....(pause)... the piece is an amalgam of all my knowledge of humanity." Interviewer: "It is a huge, bleak, finale isn't it?" Sir Malcolm: (long pause) "....Yes...I wanted it to die away into infinity....." These words are taken from the discussion between the conductor Andrew Penny and the composer Sir Malcolm Arnold which is included on Naxos' superb recording of his 9th Symphony. The symphony was written in a three week blaze of creativity in August 1986 as a birthday present for the composer's close friend, and carer, Anthony Day. Its composition followed five years of mental illness, and composing silence Sir Malcolm's career started as an orchestral musician. He was Principal Trumpet for the London Philharmonic Orchestra until 1948 when he turned to full time c...
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What I envied him was his courage

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