The art of the bad review

Long Road Out Of Eden
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Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

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These photos were taken by me in 2008 at independent record retailer Prelude Records in Norwich. Jordi Savall's impromptu viol recital and signing session preceeded two performances at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. One was a solo recital by Jordi in Peter Mancroft Church ; the other was an immensely moving performance of his visionary Jerusalem multicultural project at the Theatre Royal*. As reported here Prelude Records closed earlier this year; it was a victim of predatory online retailing, and today its premises stand empty awaiting occupation by a mobile phone or E-cigarette retailer. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival has been the victim of savage funding cuts , but continues in a more modest form due to the dedicated work of its small management team. A few days ago I wrote about a two-thirds empty Snape Maltings concert and proposed that classical music's heartland is facing a perfect storm caused by the convergence of the shifts in consumer tastes and the r...
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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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Critical Mass

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I'm a big fan of Marin Alsop . But last night her BBC Prom performance with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra playing her own sequence of the suites from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet was strangely unsatisfying. Tempi were pulled around, and rather than adding to the tension the wayward performance weakened it. When it finished I wanted some 'in your face' music making that was over the top, but which really worked. So as Marin Alsop was a pupil of Bernstein's I put on his 1971 recording of his own Mass , a work I don't listen to very often. Is Mass Bernstein's unrecognised masterpeice? Or is it a failed experiment in using the vernacular and exploiting street chic? (But wasn't the 'parody mass' a legitimate renaissance musical form which exploited contemporary music such as L'homme arme ?) My view used to be that Mass was simply a failed experiment, but I have to confess I am slowly moving towards the view that it may be a misunderstood m...
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The purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness

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Two contrasting responses from America to my post Third rate music on Naxos' American classics? Flinging merde - ' Granted some of the stuff that Naxos has packaged in that series has been less than distinguished but operating in a cultural establishment where critics treat every cow patty ever dropped by the likes of Alwyn (above) and Bax and Finzi and Michael Tippitt (sic) as if it were fois gras, Clements is hardly in a position to fling merde' - from Sequenza21 , and I'm sure Norman Lebrecht would approve of that misspelling of Tippett. The true beauty of the effort - ' Personally speaking I expect listener reaction to concert music is heavily dependent on emotional mood and cultural/historical context . The concept of "ratings" and "tiers" for composers is pretty much an over-rated specialization of critics, which serves the purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness. My father is the American composer George Frederick McKay (photo be...
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All you need is click bait

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Slipped Disc , the self-acclaimed "world's most-read cultural website" recently ran the story and image shown above. In a clumsy piece of ethnic stereotyping the photo was cropped, cut and pasted without attribution from the website of Angel Island Immigration Station . This notorious station of detention and exclusion for Asian immigrants in San Francisco Bay closed in 1940.  In the interests of shedding just a little light to counter Slipped Disc 's click bait heat, the following is extracted with full acknowledgement from the Angel island website :  Between 1870 and 1940, more than 25 million immigrants arrived in the United States, with a major peak in annual arrivals between 1900 and 1914, when nearly 900,000 persons came per year on average. Those arriving in San Francisco, especially Asian immigrants, encountered very different legal regimes and social circumstances than those passing through Ellis Island in New York. On the West Coast, immigration was medi...
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Music for four accordions

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Charles Ives , Umberto Giordano , Osvaldo Golijov , Paul Hindemith and Alban Berg all wrote music for accordion. So did Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; in fact he wrote a score that calls for four diatonic button accordions. Tchaikovsky's Suite No. 2 for Orchestra is not as well known as the Suite No. 4 'Mozartiana' . Which is surprising: as they say on Amazon, if you like Tchikovsky's ballets you will like his Suite no. 2. Or is it because, as they say in the music director's office today: - if your score needs four accordions don't expect us to programme it? I have Michael Tilson Thomas' recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra; which also includes 'Mozartiana' . The performance is excellent as is the sound. The latter is explained by CBS sub-contracting the recording to EMI. The venue was Abbey Road Studio One in 1981 with EMI's Neville Boyling at the mixing desk. My research indicates that this CD of the two orchestral suites is currently only ...
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Many of the audience knew nothing about music

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A notably enterprising new release which stands out from the usual bland 'more of the same' fare is Jazz Raga from Cherry Red Records . This 3 CD set, which is sub-titled 'Spiritual explorations of the two greatest melodic creators on the planet' brings together classic John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar tracks. In  his biography of John Coltrane J.C. Thomas explains that:  'John Coltrane was more mystic than musician. This is the only logical explanation for the effects his music had on many of his audience: in fact, many of them knew nothing whatsoever about any kind of music, including jazz, yet they were mesmerised, entranced. There had to be something else besides music there; in reality there was a force beyond music that was communicating with Trane's audience on quite a different, higher level of meaning.' There is much here that the struggling classical community can learn. Coletrane's music is definitely not easy listening, and is way beyond es...
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While classical music debates nothing changes

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'This magic comes only with the sounding of the music, with the turning of the written note into sound - and it only comes (or comes most intensely) when the listener is one with the composer, either as a performer himself, or as a listener in active sympathy' - Benjamin Britten Recent articles here about whether classical music responds to mass marketing and social media have generated considerable interest. So I thought it worthwhile to create a straw model which summarises the thrust of the articles and that is the purpose of this post. The straw model is remarkably simple and is built around the following four propositions. 1. Classical music engages new audiences most effectively by direct transmission to what Britten describes as as "a listener in active sympathy". 2. Despite this classical music today is characterised by hypermediation, meaning there are more and more intermediary layers appearing between performer and audience. 3. These intermediary la...
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Audiences need permission to like unfamiliar music

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That photo of Sir Malcolm Arnold and Julian Bream appears on the late composer's website . Ten years ago I was literally very close to Sir Malcolm's music. He spent his final years being tended by his carer Anthony Day in Attleborough just a few miles from where I live in Norfolk. I managed Sir Malcolm's website and one of my first posts  about his music dates from that time. Following Sir Malcolm's death in 2006 I never lost my appreciation of his music, but it featured less frequently in my listening. However, recently I have returned to his symphonies, and listening to them again has raised some important questions. His nine symphonies are the product of a master craftsman. They move forward from Mahler and Shostakovich, yet should be immediately accessible to contemporary audiences saturated in the music of those two composers. But, despite this, Sir Malcolm Arnold's symphonies remain unknown outside a small circle of admirers. Why? Let me make it clear ...
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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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