Out of the closet


Observed at Restaurant Les Artistes, 21 Bis, Place Crillon, Avignon. The restaurant is on the extreme right of the photo in my recent Olivier Messiaen post. More bathroom art 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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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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Soundtrack for a porn movie

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"No, you have not landed on Slipped Disc by mistake. Respected electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze tells the story himself.  The origins of " Body Love " are quite funny. I received a call from a movie producer named Manfred Menz and I wound up becoming his principal composer for a period of time. Amongst others, I composed the "Barracuda" soundtrack for him [1978, previously unreleased on album]. This led to a friendship which lasts till today. Menz now lives in Malibu, California where I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, this guy calls me and asks if I would compose the score to a porn movie. I said: "Porn? Nah, I don't do that kind of thing".  As it turned out, the director of the movie, Lasse Braun, had already shot it and had used my albums " Timewind " [1975] and " Moondawn " [1976] as a kind of "working soundtrack". This was obvious because the couples in the film were moving in time to my gro...
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All aboard the Martinu bandwagon

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Depressing, but predictable, to see the mainstream media scrambling aboard the Bohuslav Martinů bandwagon as soon as BBC Radio 3 announces a cycle of his superb symphonies . Equally depressing, but a sign of the times, to see the Independent publishing an appreciation of the composer's symphonies by a writer who confesses elsewhere to never having heard a single note of them. As Norman Lebrecht famously wrote in the Evening Standard back in 2006: ‘... until bloggers deliver hard facts … paid for newspapers will continue to set the standard as the only show in town’. Sadly the hard facts now show that Norman is no longer at the Evening Standard , and, as from next Monday, the Evening Standard will no longer be a paid for newspaper . But you can find pre-bandwagon appreciations of Martinů here and here . 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 ...
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Zakir Hussain - Remember Shakti

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Zakir Hussain, who has died at the far too young age of 73, made a huge contribution to the Indian classical tradition. Just a few examples from my own CD library are the 1993 Royal Albert Hall Concert for Peace with Ravi Shankar, the 1997 concert recording from Stuttgart with sitarist Ustad Vilayat Khan, and the 1990 concert in Passaic Valley Auditorium, New Jersey with sarangist Sultan Khan. Elsewhere tributes have lazily centred on Zakir's collaborations with George Harrison and Van Morrison, supplemented by the usual YouTube videos. So I want to highlight two other collaborations which highlight just what a visionary genius Zakir Hussain was. Arguably Zakir's furthest left-field project was Tabla Beat Science with bass guitarist, producer and demolisher of comfort zones Bill Laswell . This collaboration, described by a reviewer as "hard-hitting westernised electric fusion...a cross-cultural technical extravaganza", produced two remarkable CD releases, Tala Mat...
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Nada Brahma - Sound is God

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It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig...
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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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Norfolk Rhapsody by Ralph Vaughan Williams

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Winter sky over North Norfolk this afternoon. Now playing - Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 by Ralph Vaughan Williams , Sir Adrian Boult conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra on EMI LP ASD 2847. The Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 was based on tunes collected from King's Lynn fisherfolk. The town is about 20 miles from where I took this photograph today. In the sleeve notes for the LP Michael Kennedy writes that the Rhapsody "begins and ends with a musical description of the Fens landscape, misty and mysterious ..." Now read about November woods from a brazen romantic . Photograph (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
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Beware of the classical music nimbies

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Ezra Pound proposed that in moments of transition there are almost always moments of clarity. Today, classical music, the arts, and culture in general have all reached a moment of fundamental transition. But in classical music, where is the clarity?  It is incontestable that classical music has reached a moment of transition. Until recently it was struggling to connect with the young rewired audience . But today the problem is far more fundamental. A decade ago the mature cohort despaired at youngsters whose life experience - including music - was confined to the screens of mobile devices. But now the entire Western population - in fact my recent time in India suggests the entire global population - experiences almost every aspect of their life through a mobile phone. In every age group attention spans are diminishing, social media has become the primary tastemaker, entertainment is valued above enlightenment, instant gratification rules, and  quality expectations have dimin...
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Facebook is a wake-up call that must not be ignored

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A timeline comment of 'I don't think Facebook is perfect by any means... but this is the medium that I find most congenial... and so I'm here for the duration. I hope you'll stay too' and the associated 473 likes and 35 shares to date sum up the prevailing attitude among influential figures in the classical music world. So fortuitously for Mark Zuckerberg and other rapacious online corporations, the data sharing scandal will soon be forgotten , buried beneath Trump's latest folly and the new Brexit mud-slinging. But a vitally important point is being missed. The Facebook scandal must not be ignored, because it is not just about the security of social media profiles. It is about the much wider and even more serious issue of how we have allowed digital technologies to control our lives. Over the years my shared overgrown paths about serendipitous CD discoveries have brought pleasure and some modest enlightenment to readers. I have never purported to be a prof...
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