Echoes of Soft Machine


Profile in today's Guardian of Robert Wyatt. He was drummer with Soft Machine until he was fired in 1971. Soft Machine (above) played at the Proms in 1970 when risk taking was still in fashion, and I wrote about them disturbing my sleep here.

Photo of the Softs in 1967 from Hulloder. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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Those are my principles....

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We are encouraged to be victims

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Maria Farantouri went into exile when Mikis Theodorakis' music was banned after the 1967 military coup in Greece. By performing Theodorakis' songs around the world she nurtured international resistance to the military dictatorship and made the Greek public familiar with the poetry of the Nobel Prize-winning poets George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis and other important Greek poets.   On the  1967 LP  seen above Maria Farantouri and John Williams perform Theodorakis' music. (Farantouri is the usual transliteration of the Greek, rather than Farandouri as on the record sleeve.)  After the military coup d’état in 1967 the new regime banned Theodorakis’s music and he was eventually arrested. But he managed to send a short message to Maria Farantouri, advising her to leave Greece.  Maria Farantouri was just twenty years old when she left Greece for Paris, and she gave many concerts supporting the anti-dictatorship movement.  Through her political engagement...
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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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Swamped by a tsunami of classical populism.

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A vintage year for blasphemy and heresy

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Wagner, Mahler and Shostakovich all sound like film music

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In a typically thoughtful contribution to my post Why not play the premier league composers more often? Richard Bratby - who is professionally involved in classical music - mused "speaking solely from my own experience - there is a very noticeable falling-off in ticket sales when a symphony orchestra programmes pre-Beethoven repertoire, irrespective of the quality of the performance or the music, or the energy with which it is marketed. But why?" Now Kea has answered Richard's question with the following comment: Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich, etc, all sound more or less like film music (or -- more accurately -- film music sounds more or less like recycled bits of Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich, etc) and therefore don't require any intellectual involvement or serious effort to listen to. Understanding the music of Bach, Mozart or Haydn, etc (or for that matter Schumann, Brahms, Webern, Cage, etc) actually requires people to listen actively rather than being pulled alo...
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Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

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