A door to the Arab world


For a valuable resource on the Arab world go to http://www.al-bab.com/. The sections on arts and culture and music in particular are very useful. Also good music resources for individual countries, for instance check out Berber music. Al-bab is a private project by Brian Whitaker who is the Guardian's Middle East editor.

Now read about the secret life of an Arab record label.
Photo is detail of Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakech, Morocco. The Koutoubia dates from the 13th century and its name derives from el-koutoubiyyin which is Arabic for booksellers, as a book market once filled the surrounding streets. More art of the mosque here. Photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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Does classical want a new audience or a larger old audience?

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In a 1982 interview Merce Cunningam described how John Cage's satori came when he separated sound from meaning. Today in the classical world the assumption that sound must have meaning dominates. Programmatic symphonies are supplemented by film music and musicals with meaningful narratives, and socially meaningful - aka virtue signalling - programming in a futile attempt to attract a new audience . But the target for a new classical audience is, by definition, the non-classical audience. And that non-classical audience values sound far above meaning .  Do classical experts realise that electronic dance music (EDM) is the default soundtrack of a large chunk of the non-classical audience? Do these experts realise that the hegemony of ear-bud/headphone listening and bass-heavy Atmos mixes have permanently changed the expectations of non-classical listeners? Is this preoccupation with meaning why recorded sound is so rarely mentioned in classical reviews? Did Proms' atten
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You Musk hear this new classical album

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Fascinating how the classical influencers who use Twitter to claim the moral high ground within and beyond the classical industry remain resolutely silent about the current unfair and unethical employment practices at Twitter. However one notable exception is Igor Levit who has quit the social media platform (again). Art conceived as pure marketing must be treated with extreme caution. But Igor Levit's Tristan album , with its commendable advocacy of Hans Werner Henze 's Tristan scored for piano, tape and full orchestra, and Ronald Stevenson 's piano arrangement of the Adagio from Mahler's uncompleted Tenth Symphony, reaches the heights that social media can't. Igor Levit may be outrageous; but he provides a valuable service encouraging others within classical's increasingly conservative culture to be slightly outrageous.
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Milton Babbitt - writing music for our elite

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Babbitt was famous for writing for a certain type of listener. He never claimed to write for everybody and this was his undoing - that everybody expected him to write music for them. But he said "Why should music? ... most of us are in universities in the States who are interested in complex music, but maybe we should just write for our elite, the way mathematicians send incomprehensible equations to each other, you know what's wrong with that?" and he has a point, absolutely. So his reputation has been branded as an elitist. It's totally unfair and in this country [UK] he has been dismissed. In the States as I say, particularly in the university culture, he is held in very high regard in many places. I hope he will have more of a reputation. I am not sure I really enthuse about his music. I find it fascinating but it is very much a music of structure and a structure that is difficult to hear unless you spend a long time getting to grips with it; it's like th
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Now we rise and we are everywhere

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Nick Drake has featured here many times  over the years. A new addition to the Nick Drake resources is Demian Dorelli's Pink Moon - A Journey on Piano . Impressive interpretation complimented by impressive piano sound captured in Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios . For some, including this listener, the style may be a little too Einauidu for comfort. But an awful lot of people like Ludovico Einaudi . And Einaudi sometimes sounds like Philip Glass on a bad day. And classical music needs a new audience. So what is there to complain about? Now we rise and we are everywhere is a quote from the last track on Pink Moon . It is inscribed on Nick's headstone  at Tanworth-in-Arden.
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A powerful New Year's message

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These photos was taken by me at a music workshop for local women run by  Sufi adept Ahmed Abdelhak Kaâb in Essaouira on Morocco's Atlantic coast. Long-standing readers will know of my love for Morocco and the ageless wisdom  of its generous people . Recently TIME Magazine selected Elon Musk as its “Person of the Year” . Morocco World News put this gesture of vacuous sycophancy firmly in its place with a coruscating op-ed . Below is the conclusion from that exemplary piece of journalism which contains a powerful message not just for the classical music industry , but for all humanity.  'In the end, perhaps Elon Musk does deserve to be “Person of the Year.” He deserves it not for any contributions he has made to humanity, he deserves it as it serves as an apt example of our current world. Indeed, Musk's brazen adulation and celebration perfectly captures a culture where pandemic responses are limited by profit-making, where business booms amid economic crisis, where v
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Towards infinite potential

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The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics postulates that "atoms form a world of potentials and possibilities, rather than of things and facts". Following a parallel path Ajahn Sumedho , a teacher from the Thai Forest Buddhist tradition , has proposed that: We do not know the future. But we do not need to know. We can let the future be the mysterious unknown, the infinite potential - the possibility for pleasure, the possibility for pain, the possibility for peace. As we let go of the fear of the unknown, we find peace. My photo of a stormy sky over Colombo in Sri Lanka hints at that infinite potential. There are many ways to experience it, and music is one of them. For me two examples particularly relevant to this post are Claude Vivier's Siddhartha and Jonathan Harvey's Body Mandala . It is now time for me to defy my advancing years and travel into the mysterious unknown of the future. Which means On An Overgrown Path  will fall silent, When, or indeed i
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New classical audiences need new music

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A reader's  perceptive comment  explained that to reach a new audience classical music must help listeners across the classical/non-classical divide.  Electronic Dance Music  (EDM) is the immensely popular staple fare of classical's elusive new young audience, and EDM lacks any narrative progression. Classical music can also be non-linear: one example is John Luther Adams' Become Desert , a seamless 40 minute sonic mirage which   abandons the horizontal narrative structures of works such as Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony  with its 'Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside'.  Become Desert sits comfortably in the concert hall, yet it would not be out of place in a sunset session at Ibiza's Café Del Mar or a full moon trance party on Koh Pha Ngan . As John Luther Adams described in a New York Times essay ,  Become Desert  literally entrances its audience - "You find yourself listening in ways you never have before. The scale of yo
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Virtue signalling does not sell concert tickets

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This article is unique among the 4554 posts uploaded to On An Overgrown Path since August 2004. Because it agrees with a Slipped Disc post. Last week Norman uploaded a Slipped Disc reader's contribution headlined ' Why I won't be going back to concerts '. The thrust of the contribution was not the reader's fear of COVID, but how for him concerts had become "just a bit too often ordinary... a bit of a ritual". Which resonates with my recent post 'Where has all the musical adventurousness gone?'  lamenting the demise of musicians who is transcend conventions and pursue their own unique musical visions. David Munrow is talking to Peter Maxwell Davies in that photo. In the early 1970s David Munrow’s Pied Piper radio programme was broadcast four times a week for five years and introduced a new audience to early music. He presented a successful TV series, and wrote scores for the BBC TV series The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elisabeth R , and
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The good, the bad and the ugly

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Inuit hunters in the Artic regions know they catch most by watching the edges. The CD Call to Prayer . This juxtaposes music from Marin Marais, Antoine Forqueray, and Jean de Sainte-Colombe with classical Arab maqams  and Indian Dhrupad ragas . It is the work of respected early music specialist, viol player and Hathor Consort director Romina Lischka and Tunisian mondo-musician, singer, dancer, poet and actress Ghalia Benali , and this very good album has enough edge to satisfy any Intuit hunter. Which is why I am recommending it. Also worth catching is Ghalia Benali's CD Dhrupad Fantasia which interweaves the modality of Indian ragas with the polyphony of Tudor England. Edge of a very different kind is delivered by Moroccan author and painter Mahi Binebin 's novel Horses of God . It uses the first person voice of Yachine, a boy growing up in the Casablanca slums, to tell how together with his friends he was radicalised and coerced into becoming a suicide bomber. Ho
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The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

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Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
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