The irony of freedom

'The bitter irony, the irony of freedom, is that choice opens doors to anterooms - that is all' - Todd Gitlin, The Sixties
The sixties - Oscar Peterson or Karlheinz Stockhausen?

Photo taken at Essaouira, Morocco and (c) On An Overgrown Path 2010. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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Is this the concert hall of the future?

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Classical music is irrevocably and fatally tied to place. Geocentricity dictates that the only place to hear classical music is an acoustically perfect concert hall . It dictates that this concert hall must be in a city centre , and also mandates that city centres are the only place to hear classical music. And geocentricity dictates that the only music to hear in the acoustically perfect city centre halls is from the European classical tradition. New technologies have created a mobile generation - mobile computing, mobile communications, mobile listening , and mobile workplaces. Yet classical music remains wedded to immobility and geocentricity.  In his memoir Silences So Deep John Luther Adams explains how "I began to feel that my music was no longer about place, but had in a real sense become a place of its own". Aspects of the recent Arts Council England proposals may be wrong-headed. But the underlying message of the proposals was profound and, predictably, overloo
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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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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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There is no difference between life and death

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This photo shows John Cage and Daisetz Suzuki in 1962. Now playing is Cage's 36 Mesotics re and not so re Marcel Duchamp which is dedicated to the Japanese video artist Shigeko Kubota and includes this quote from the Zen teacher Daisetz Suzuki: 'There is no difference between life and death'. In the Harmonia Mundi recording the text is sung by Paul Hillier and spoken by Terry Riley . More on Daisetz Suzuki here and here. Cage Talk, dialogues with and about John Cage is available from Boydell Press . Photo credit Yashuiro Yoshioka. 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 copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
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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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Interest in Arvo Pärt is mushrooming

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Gunther Herbig's CD of his transcriptions for electric guitar of Arvo Pärt's music was recommended in my previous post . That new release should also have been recommended for Gunther Herbig's sleeve essay which is a much-needed reminder that great music is a personal and private experience, and not a Facebook moment . Here is an extract:  "As wanderers through time and space we navigate by certain key experiences that shape and influence the charts by which we travel. One of those key moments in my life happened on a Sunday. It was the mid-80s in the beautiful North German town of Lübeck where I studied music. It was winter, a magical bright sunny day and, like in a Brueghel painting, the colours mixed between the blue of the sky, the gold of the sun, the white set of the snow and ice and the dark winter clothes of strolling people on the frozen river Wakentiz against the red bricks of the city.  Maybe it was the magic mushrooms. It was a shamanic and spiritual exp
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What is the sound of no CD playing?

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Is the sound of no CD playing the silence that Erling Kagge  explored , Ajahn Sumedho identified , and John Cage immortalised ? Or is it the sound of streamed music like water ? Maybe it is the same sound as no audience clapping  or perhaps the eerie silence of a hall emptied by lazy click bait programming . Or is it just the relentless white noise of social media ?  Whatever the answer - if indeed there is an answer - 'What is the sound of no CD playing' is an example of a translogical question known in the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism - hat tip to John Cage  - as a koan. In his book Bring Me the Rhinoceros John Tarrant explains that koans highlight the importance of creative moves, encourage doubt and curiosity, and undermine reasons and explanations.  My undiminished curiosity and distrust of explanations led me to buy two recent CD releases -  Sangam from sitarist Paul Livingstone and cellist Pete Jacobson, and Wherever I Go... Arvo Pärt  from Gretsch White Falcon gu
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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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Contemporary composer's Dutch courage

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The Dutch composer Lex van Delden died on July 1, 1988. I first came across his music in 1972 when it was used in the title sequence of a BBC Television programme about the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and my photo montage above shows van Delden against a background of stills from the programme. Born Alexander Zwaap in 1919, as a Jew van Delden played a courageous role in the Dutch resistance against the Nazis, but suffered the loss of almost his entire family in the Holocaust. After the war he found work through his wartime contacts as the resident composer and music director of the first post-war Dutch ballet group, "Op Vrije Voeten" ("On Liberated Feet") and from 1947 as the music editor of the daily, originally underground, newspaper "Het Parool". Most of his pre-war compositions were destroyed during the accidental bombing of Nijmegen in 1944 by the U.S. Air Force and the first of his works to attract wide attention was Rubáiyát (nine quatrains by Omar
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