Rejecting the viewpoint of the avant-garde

The Belgian serial composer Henri Pousseur (left) has died aged 79. He featured on a path in November 2007.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

Come to the edge!

Image
Twenty-one years ago I wrote about an article on NewMusicBox  that forecast the age of music streaming, and included the following quote from the article: A world where music is available via the latest technologies for a single monthly subscription charge. A world with unlimited access to a huge range of music. A world where the music business will explode and reinvent itself. A world where listeners are empowered, and the reach of new music is limited only by your own imagination. A world where the major record companies aren’t invited to the party. A world where music becomes a utility on tap, just like gas and electricity. A world where music is like water.  It can be argued that streaming has empowered consumers by offering instant gratification. But two decades ago, in my post I expressed concerns about the advent of 'music like water' with these words: "Music-like-water won’t bring a utopia where every recording, of every work, by every composer from Evaristo Abaco ...
Read more

In the shadow of Chopin

Image
The music police are already telling us how we will be celebrating the Chopin bicentennial this year. So, never one for musical correctness , my header photo honours another giant of the piano, in status if not in stature, who is buried literally in the shadow of Frédéric Chopin. Michel Petrucciani, compositeur - pianiste de jazz , died in 1999 aged just 36. He is buried alongside birthday boy Chopin in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and his pianistic genius has featured several times On An Overgrown Path . Père Lachaise has more musicians per acre than any other burial ground, and they include Georges Bizet whose headstone is seen below. Bizet's grave is surprisingly understated for France's most famous musician and the dates on it are a sobering reminder that he was the same age as Michel Petrucciani when he died. Adjacent to Bizet is the more contemporary resting place of Georges Enescu who died in 1955. Enescu (Enesco in France) taught Yehudi Menuhin , Arthur Grumiau...
Read more

Musician's dissent dismissed as "sanctimonious shit"

Image
Violinist, conductor, composer, and improviser Pekka Kuusisto recently announced he would pausing his professional engagements in the United States in the following message: I’ve decided to stop working in the United States for the time being.  I want no pressure placed on any of my colleagues to come to the same conclusion.  Love and solidarity Predictability his decision was greeted by an outpouring of bile on the classical music industry's online resource of choice Slipped Disc . Just as the decision of respected American composer John Luther Adams to relocate to Australia  was greeted with similar bile . Here is just one comment posted in response to Pekka Kuusisto's decision: Sanctimonious piece of shit. Never going to another one of his concerts. The US didn’t kill Iranian school girls for performative violence. This false accusation is disrespectful to the US military which gives Pekka his freedoms. Online forums always attract nutjobs. But this thread is a conti...
Read more

Exclusive - David Munrow on the record

Image
My Future Radio programme on Sunday December 30th takes an exclusive look at David Munrow on the record . In the early 1970s the scores for the BBC TV series The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elisabeth R brought David Munrow’s music to millions. His Pied Piper radio programme was broadcast four times a week for five years, he presented a successful TV series, and wrote the scores for several major feature films including Ken Russell’s The Devils and the film version of HenryVIII (sleeve below). David Munrow's interest in early music started when he taught in Peru before going up to Cambridge. He combined reading English at Pembroke College with independent studies of Renaissance and medieval music, and went on to form his famous Early Music Consort of London. Under his leadership the Early Music Consort became best-selling recording artists, and David Munrow’s records were considered so important that copies of them were sent to Saturn on board two NASA spacecraft in 1976. ...
Read more

Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

Image
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...
Read more

Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

Image
In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A...
Read more

Classical music shoots itself in the baton

Image
On An Overgrown Path has been preoccupied recently - some would say obsessed - with the absence of black conductors at the BBC Proms , and recently highlighted this Sunday's admirable concert at the Festival Hall by the Chineke! Orchestra, a professional orchestra made up entirely of black and minority ethnic musicians. So a big splash by Tom Service in the Guardian about Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the soloist in Sunday's concert, should be be good news. But instead it simply provides another example of how classical music is shooting itself in the baton. Tom Service is employed by both the Guardian and BBC . (Some would argue that the Guardian and BBC are one and the same ). So in his article Tom Service mentions the BBC in the sub-head seen above, in the opening paragraph, and four more times in the body copy. The immensely talented Sheku Kanneh-Mason is of course a BBC property as he won the 2016 BBC Young Musician competition and is the subject of a BBC Four TV document...
Read more

New music from the old world

Image
Interesting article in French over on ConcertoNet.com about twentieth century music in general and Alex Ross' new book in particular. (Flaky machine translation here .) The writer is sometime Overgrown Path contributor Antoine Leboyer who highlights some overlooked contemporary European composers, and particularly recommends exploring Philippe Boesmans (above right), Guillaume Connesson , and Pascal Dusapin . Connesson and Dusapin are both French, but Boesmans is Belgian. Today, Belgium has been without a government for 157 days, and as time ticks by the possibility of a permanent split between the country's Dutch and French speaking communities comes closer. It is a story that has attracted surprisingly little international media coverage, and that is not because Belgium is of little importance. It was the German invasion of the country in 1914 that caused Britain to enter the First World War, a conflict that changed the world political landscape for ever. Since 1831...
Read more

Eric Whitacre outsells Mozart

Image
How to reach new audiences is a continuing preoccupation of the 'serious music' community. Yet just this week a surprise classical best-seller has shown how to do it. You don't need dumbing-down , the latest avant-garde tricks , classical music night-clubs or free Beethoven MP3s. What you need is great contemporary music which is innovative, honest and accessible. It needs to be recorded by an enterprising label, with top-class performers and engineering. It also needs to feature a marketable personality and be supported by the media. Cloudburst , a CD of Eric Whitacre's choral works sung by Polyphony, is currently the surprise UK classical best seller. It hit all the hot buttons, and proves that a full price CD of music written in the last fifteen years can outsell the TV promoted greatest hits of a dead guy from Salzburg. Andrew Cane of leading UK independent classical store Prelude Records explained to An Overgrown Path yesterday: " Cloudburst had been ou...
Read more

Just Pärt of fiction

Image
It had been performed in the great barn at Snape Maltings , of course ... Arvo Pärt, who was present only because his own work was being premiered the following day, sat in the row in front, dressed in a long, brown raincoat like a seedy French detective. He’d leaned forwards, a thumb buried in his huge dark beard, his balding head shining above the long hair, hunched and concentrated. He was all elbows, a lot thinner than Jack had expected, and kept nibbling the ends of his long fingers, too restless for an Old Testament prophet. His wife sat next to him, looking owl-like behind huge spectacles. She often spoke for him in interviews and Jack was more nervous about what she might say than of Pärt himself ... Jack took a bow afterwards and then, once the clapping had subsided and the house lights had gone up, surveyed members of the audience from the side. Among the silvery, distinguished heads there was a lot of winking, a lot of confiding of patient fortitude and thin-lipped smirks, p...
Read more