Mixing music and politics - 2


Croatia is a very musical place, as yesterday's presidential election result confirmed. Mixing music and politics -1 is here.

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Scott Ross and the paradox of genius

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On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of his great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the château, the harpsichordist gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos below were taken by me on a
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Classical music must woke up and smell the coffee

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As pointed out here previously Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc receives the unequivocal support of the classical music industry in the form of advertising, exclusive news and interviews, advertorial partnerships, and complimentary concert tickets and CDs. Yesterday Norman published an article headlined 'US orchestra: Conductor wanted. No whites need apply' which was sourced from the National Review .  This conservative publication has a certain notoriety, including being one of the few media outlets to publish material written by Jeffrey Epstein's publicist Christina Galbraith . The National Review also publishes contributions by Dinesh D'Souza who has tweeted "So Rosa Parks wouldn't sit in the back of the bus--that's all she did, so what's the big fuss?" and this year ran an article bylined 'The Editors' proposing that the Equality Act "represents is a cynical attempt to use the Civil Rights Act as a Trojan horse for radi
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Why is the classical music industry anti-vax?

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Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc receives the unequivocal support of the classical music industry in the form of advertising, exclusive news and interviews, advertorial partnerships, and complimentary concert tickets and CDs. Yet  Slipped Disc  repeatedly publishes unmoderated misinformation about Covid vaccines - see just two examples above and below. Therefore the classical music industry is supporting potentially deadly anti-vax misinformation. (Follow this link for more on Dr. Luc Montagnier's alleged warning.) It pains me to hold Facebook up as an exemplar. But even that tainted social network banned misinformation about vaccines months ago: as the Guardian reported in February , Facebook "will remove posts with false claims and groups with repeated violations will be shut down". This is not about free speech. It is, like libel laws, about stopping irreversible damage by misinformation .  Slipped Disc , supported by the classical industry, regularly demonises
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All you need is loot

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Jon Blake's novel 69ers  about the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival has an apposite epigraph:  Note to the reader : this novel originally began by quoting the first verse of The Ballad of John and Yoko . However, not wanting to kiss the ass of Sony/ATV Music Publishing nor pay them a penny for permission to use lyrics freely available all over the web, I trust to your own initiative in seeking them out for yourself.
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Don't let the facts get in the way of a good Slipped Disc story

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One of the more obvious examples of the classical music industry being seduced by the lure of click bait traffic was the recent Slipped Disc exclusive on "the disintegrating compact disc" . This "researched" story claimed that "everybody has this problem" of disintegrating CDs. As my earlier post pointed out, this damning conclusion was reached on a ludicrously small sample of three copies of the same CD out of the more than 200 billion CDs sold since the format was introduced in 1982. My post went on to propose that the likely explanation for the three problem CDs was  a batch manufacturing defect on that particular disc rather than endemic deterioration. Now Overgrown Path reader Mark Meldon has added this informative comment to my previous post , which supports my hypothesis of a batch manufacturing problem:  'Back in 1986/87, I briefly worked in a CD factory in West Sussex, the long-gone Disctronics. My job was setting index points on the di
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Mikis Theodorakis' Songs of Freedom

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Mikis Theodorakis has died aged 96. In his memory I am republishing two Overgrown Path articles from 2007. The accompanying post  The Political Dimension of the Artist can be read via this link . The role of the artist in a society where human rights are denied is a recurring theme On An Overgrown Path . As I write Maria Farandouri sings To Yelasto Pedi from Mikis Theodorakis’ sound track for the 1969 film Z (poster above). This legendary film was a barely fictionalised account of the assassination in 1963 of the Greek socialist politician Gregoris Lambrakis MP, and the film and its soundtrack, became an international symbol of opposition to the Greek military junta . This dictatorship savagely suppressed human rights until its overthrow in 1974, and brought tanks onto the streets of Athens, as is shown below. The junta was established in April 1967 when right wing army colonels led by George Papadopoulos seized power under the pretence of preventing a communist takeover. The
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'I dig Strauss and Wagner – those cats are good'

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That photo shows Jimi Hendrix headlining at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. In his memoir The Last Great Event about the Festival, its co-founder Ray Foulk reveals that during the planning for the event there was a meeting with Harold Lawrence  who was then General Manager of the London Symphony Orchestra. Harold Lawrence was responsible for the high profile appointment of André Previn as Principal Conductor of the LSO in 1968, and Ray Foulk's vision was for the LSO to appear at the Festival "not only to accompany some of the acts, but also to give their own performance of music from 2001: A Space Odyssey and other suitable works" . But the LSO's busy schedule combined with doubts about the final venue for the Festival meant that, sadly, the LSO did not join Hendrix, The Who, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Joan Baez, the Moody Blues , and Leonard Cohen on the Isle of Wight. Ray Foulk's brave attempt to involve a symphony orchestra is a reminder of how in 1970 the
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How classical music ignored the awakening electronic dream

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Eclectic Dutch composer Louis Andriessen has died at the age of 82. So I am reprising my 2019 post inspired by his brother Jurriaan Andriessen which ran under the headline 'Classical music is not connecting with its rewired audience '. Classical music's new audience is new not just because it hasn't yet learned to appreciate classical music: it is also new because it has different behaviour patterns and value systems to the traditional classical audience. It is an important but overlooked point that the traditional audience is also becoming 'new' as its neural connections are rewired by the extended use of new technologies. The defining characteristics of this rewiring are well documented: shortened attention spans, demand for instant feedback/gratification, decreased reliance on linear thinking, reliance on mobile technologies, increased visual acuity, multi-tasking capability, etc.   A typical American adult spends more than 11 hours each day interacti
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If this had been a Deutsche Grammophon session.....

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Riccardo Muti is 80 and I am adding my birthday wishes to the fulsome tributes elsewhere. As balance is an essential skill of great maestros, I am contributing a little balance by republishing this little vignette which first appeared here in 2019. Back in the 1970s and 80s when sleeve design and liner notes came within my remit at EMI's International Classical Division , all the top artists had the right of artwork approval written into their contracts. Above is the sleeve for Riccardo Muti's 1979 debut recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra which was created on my watch. The venue for the photo shoot, the Philadelphia Museum of Art , was relevant, and in recognition of Muti's already super-sized ego we made sure not a hair was out of place. But the maestro ran true to form and hated the cover with a passion, and it took considerable persuasion and a very thick skin on my part before his approval was given. The recording venue was the old and decrepit Met Church b
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Making the case for Wagner-lite

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My interview last year with James Blachly who masterminded the premiere recording of Ethel Smyth's The Prison reached a gratifyingly wide audience . So in view of this and of my early championing of female musicians , it is pleasing to see Dame Ethel's The Wreckers being staged at Glyndebourne next year . However I have previously expressed concerns about  gender replacing merit  in classical music. So, without questioning the undoubted merit of The Wreckers, I want to make the case for just one of the many meritorious works sunk by the social media wreckers . Engelbert Humperdinck's masterful Wagner-inspired Hänsel und Gretel has won a place in the classical repertoire and in the hearts of many listeners, including the author's *. But another meritorious example of Wagner-lite has singularly failed to gain traction. Rutland Boughton's The Immortal Hour was premiered in a piano reduction at the very first Glastonbury festival in 1914. This powerful and ori
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