Meanwhile on the BBC Radio 3 message board

'In short, Mr. Ross's insights are not particularly compelling and he has a fairly shallow vision of classical music' - discuss.
Remember folks this is a heads up, so please don't shoot the messenger or start talking about whining Brits - the writer of that comment seems to be American. But I had to laugh at a comment on the BBC Radio 3 message board about a fairly shallow vision of classical music. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

A.C. Douglas said…
The post on the BBC3 message board written by "Mandalee (U14316426)" is an outright plagiarism, and was concocted by taking extracts verbatim from various Amazon.com reader reviews of _The Rest is Noise_ and presenting the concatenation as an original piece of writing.

The plagiarist is one, Eric Anderson, who posted the exact same post on the Classical Music & Opera Forums message board in early March of this year under the name, "Overturesen" (see, here), for which action I closed out his account and banned him (by IP) from ever posting on the CM&OF again (see, here).

ACD
7:28 pm
Pliable said…
ACD, are you sure these reviews weren't written by Orlando Figes? -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8641515.stm
7:38 pm
A.C. Douglas said…
LOL!

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Figes had no part in this.

ACD
7:51 pm
billoo said…
pli, but isn't it incredibly hard to *write* about music? I only started 'the rest..' after reading what I thought was a fascinating piece on Sibelius in the New Yorker. But to me, a layman, the book did seem quite boring!

Would love to know who you do think has insights. I've only ever heard Barenboim's Reith lectures and thought they were great.

p.s thanks for the book recommendations! Will have a look for them-though it's very hard to find stuff here.
4:23 am
Pliable said…
Billoo, a very interesting question. For me books came after the music, not before. My path to classical music came from an acceptance that I had to invest money (I was a student) and time on concerts, broadcasts and LPs of music that I didn't know and some of which went over my head for many years. It also came from listening to recordings with a score. It was only when I became hooked on the music that books became important, and then it was mainly in the form of biographies of the great composers and performers.

Today we are fixated with finding the solution to everything in 420 characters or less. So we have classical charts, composer's greatest hits, and books that the media acclaim for telling us all we need to know about contemporary classical music in 620 pages.

Yes, some of them are of value. But the problem is none of them will ever provide the much sought after 'open sesame'. Moreover there is a real risk that they destroy the essence of the music, its sheer diversity and profundity, in the attempt.

As in many things John Cage had it nailed when he wrote:

'If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.'

In the spirit of the above I suggest the following highly fallible list, many of which have appeared On An Overgrown Path:

* Glenn Gould: Wondrous Strange - Kevin Bazzana
* Evening in the Palace of Reason - James Gaines
* The Roaring Silence: John Cage, A Life - David Revill
* Benjamin Britten - Humphrey Carpenter
* Tainted By Experience - John Drummond
* Hildegard of Bingen - Fiona Maddocks
* Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM - Steve Lake & Paul Griffiths
* Jonathan Harvey - Arnold Whitall
* Boulez: Composer, Conductor, Enigma - Joan Peyser

But I would happily trade them all for Brilliant Classic's 155 CD Bach Edition

On the subject of sourcing books I now almost exclusively buy good quality used copies from Amazon resellers. I have had few problems even with international delivery, and the bargains that can be found are quite astonishing.
10:20 am
billoo said…
Interesting biographical note, pli. Thanks for sharing that. Of course you're right, the music comes first ("in the beginning was..") but was just wondering if reading about music fine tunes your appreciation, leads to a sound thought?

Agree with you also on the dissection/analysis bit-as well as the desire for an easy fix. Much prefer personal recommendations to these lists.

Glenn Gould: still haven't read the Otto Friedrich book my sister has but thanks for the recommendation anyway.

salaams,

b.
2:09 pm
Drew80 said…
I heartily recommend Robert Craft, contentious though he may be, especially his collections of essays. I think he is the finest writer about music in the English language.

The Andrew Porter volumes of criticism are also superb.
6:33 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

David Munrow - more than early music

Image
'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. ...
Read more

Classical music must be doing something wrong

Image
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 ...
Read more

Soundtrack for a porn movie

Image
"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...
Read more

Beware of the classical music nimbies

Image
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...
Read more

All is not lost, but where is it?

Image
It is appropriate today to provide a heads up to the Suns of Arqa 2015 album All is not lost, but where is it? which features contributions from Youth , Raja Ram , The Orb , and the performance poet  John Cooper Clarke . Like all Arqa albums it was masterminded by Michael Wadada, who famously defied the classical nimbies by successfully combining a re-imagined Fauré's Requiem with early rumblings of Dub Step , Hindustani ragas, and Nyabinghi Dub Poetry on another album . My 2020 interview with the now sadly-departed Michael can be read via this link . Track 6 on the album has a sampled John Cooper Clarke - who was a regular Arqa collaborator - reciting his poem The Truth Lies Therein . Here are some of the prescient lyrics.  He shall be taken with out the walls of the city Where pestilence shall hold dominion over all The water will stink and prove bitter on his tongue A plague of isolation shall deliver him to decrepitude Wither shall he fly in such misery He wants t...
Read more

The act of killing from 20,000 feet

Image
Today's Guardian reports the attempted suicide bombings at UK airports under the headline ' A plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale' . Any attempt to take human life is abhorrent, and thank heavens the alleged plot was foiled. But let us not forget that killing on an unimaginable scale by aircraft is not the monopoly of any one ideoology. ' As German fuel supplies dwindled in the autumn of 1944 and into the final months of the war, aircraft were grounded, tanks halted, training for replacement pilots could not be maintained, and most of the new and highly effective Messerschmitt 262 jet-fighter aircraft (photo above), of which over 1,200 had been produced by the end of 1944 and which might have considerably prolonged the war, had neither fuel to fly nor trained pilots to fly them. The ME 262s were anyway extremely fuel-hungry aircraft, and those that went into action had to be towed to their end of their runways to conserve fuel, cows were used to do the towin...
Read more

All aboard the Martinu bandwagon

Image
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 ...
Read more

The composer without a shadow?

Image
If you want to start a fascinating thread write about Leonard Bernstein's Mass . Here are some comments from my most recent Mass post : Movie commented - It's not a dishonest piece and I think it still works today . I commented - But what are examples of dishonest pieces of music? Pentimento commented - I'd say much of Strauss's oeuvre is dishonest. I couldn't live without Metamorphosen , Capriccio or the wind concertos, and one of my most memorable, and disturbing, evenings in the opera house was Hildegard Behrens singing the title role in Salome with Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic at the 1977 Salzburg Festival . But, despite that, you may be right Pentimento. Which leaves me with only one possible back link - Herbert von Karajan Ein Heldenleben Sorry I cannot credit the lovely portrait of Richard Strauss (I do hope you meant Richard and not Johann, Pentimento), but I do not know who it is by. It comes from Ferdinand Von Galitzien's blog . Help with ...
Read more

Nada Brahma - Sound is God

Image
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...
Read more

Are top musicians sharing the financial pain?

Image
Everyone in classical music is talking about funding cuts. But no one is talking about how dwindling budgets continue to be top-sliced by the fees charged by high profile musicians. In my recent post I used an estimate of Gustavo Dudamel's fee for a BBC Prom taken from an identified and reliable source . But it remains an estimate because the musicians, agents and concert promoters involved keep such information a closely guarded secret; even when , as is the case with the BBC Proms , they are paid from public funds. But now a concert promoter who has suffered savage funding cuts and considers some of the current fees "outrageous", has supplied details of what top musicians charge. And, more importantly, has agreed I can publish them anonymously. So here are the fees and associated on-costs. They are as requested by the artist's management for a single concert appearance unless otherwise stated. It should be emphasised this is simply available information and ...
Read more