La typographie


La musique ici, Stockhausen and scatological graphics here. (Sorry, but that last phrase defeated my French).
All photos taken in Pas de Calais and Vendée regions of France in 2009 and (c) On An Overgrown Path 2009. Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

Lyle Sanford, RMT said…
Welcome back!
10:15 pm
The Wound Dresser said…
hey, welcome back.Your posts were sorely missed ,by me,certainly.BTW Kronos quartet plays free in Brooklyn,NY this thursday evening.Just going along with your posts on free concerts and such...
4:29 pm
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Mixed wisdom traditions inspired by recent travels. My photos below were taken last month at the Theravada Buddhist temple of Wat Khongkha Kha Phimuk in a very hot Thailand. Then a repeat of my 2020 post about the Mahayana Buddhist view of what happens between bitching and reincarnating. Music from between heaven and hell   Why is the between so underrated? We live in a binary age which is defined by 0 or 1, and anything in between is dead meat. So we think only in terms of good or bad , right or wrong, masterpiece or minor-piece , and black or white . One of the main drivers of this dualism is social media where narratives are defined by like or dislike, friend or unfriend, and the ultimate sanction of follow or block . But life is not defined by absolutes. We actually live in an infinitely nuanced analogue world which digital technologies compress to just two binary options. Which obliterates the priceless legacy of the between created in the millennia before we became ad...
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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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2010 was a vintage year for blasphemy and heresy. A post on Salvador Dali drew attention to his forgotten audiovisual opera-poem Être Dieu inspired by the Cathar heresy, Jonathan Harvey stirred things up on my Chance Music programme by saying "the future must bring things which are considered blasphemous like amplifying classical music", while yet another path took me to new heights of heresy. In fact the path reached 2400 feet, which, as the photo above shows, is a serious challenge for anyone who, like me, who has a vertigo problem. I took the photo from the fortress of Quéribus in Languedoc, France and the view is towards Mont Canigou, the holy mountain beloved of Pablo Casals and Thomas Merton . Quéribus castle was the last Cathar stronghold to surrender in 1255 and Jordi Savall's The Forgotten Kingdom had led me to Languedoc and Catharism and on to Gnosticism. The Cathar heresy has its roots in the "dualist" religions in the Indus basin which origina...
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Good enough for Toscanini, Ormandy and Stokowski

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Edmund Rubbra's Brahms Variations And Fugue On A Theme By Handel Op. 24 was performed in the 1940s and 50s by Arturo Toscanini and Eugene Ormandy, and his Rubbra's Fifth Symphony was recorded by Sir John Barbirolli and programmed by Leopold Stokowski. Yet today Rubbra's music is rarely if ever heard in the concert hall. So we are fortunate that it has been better served in the recording studio. Notable recordings include Richard Hickox's indispensable survey of all the symphonies for Chandos , supplemented by compelling interpretations by Norman del Mar, Tod Handley, Sir Adrian Boult, and the composer. (But strangely, Rubbra's Brahms Variations is missing from the current CD catalogue.) But why has Rubbra failed to gain traction in the concert hall? Why, for example, in an age when accessible trumps challenging , is Rubbra's Fourth Symphony virtually unknown? Why is his music so neglected when the Lark Ascending consistently tops popularity polls, and Robert L...
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