Exploited for the symphony-going public

'Eight freedom songs Merton had written a few years earlier had been set to music by Alexander Peloquin for a young black singer who had subsequently disappeared to Ireland to take part in a successful show. In the end Peloquin used the songs in a symphony for Eileen Farrell, and Merton found himself accused of selling out, of using the sorrows of the black race simply as material to be exploited for the symphony-going public' - from The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton by Michael Mott
* John Jacob Niles' less accident prone setting of Thomas Merton's The Responsory features in my Chance Music homage to Catalonia. Listen to the podcast here.

Chance Music will be broadcast/webcast on Future Radio 107.8 FM at 3.00pm UK time on Sunday Nov 7 with a repeat at 1.00am of the morning Nov 7 to 8 - listen here. A podcast will be available here after the broadcast. Photo of Thomas Merton via alexsothblog. 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 Also on Facebook and Twitter.

Comments

Pliable said…
From a Thomas Merton website I see the singer the song settings were originally intended for was Robert Lawrence Williams -

http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/2007/07/making-your-way-freely-in-jungle.html

More details of Alexander Peloquin's Freedom Songs here -

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q_-MB735l0EC&pg=PA368&lpg=PA368&dq=thomas+merton+alexander++Peloquin&source=bl&ots=KsN3kuWyEX&sig=fV-1UmdJ9mhW54jlMZx3W4OpoZ4&hl=en&ei=Y1nUTPrbEuaR4gaMydD8Aw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDQQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=thomas%20merton%20alexander%20%20Peloquin&f=false
7:25 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

Does Facebook really have to be this dire?

Image
Social media and its inherent dangers are forensically analysed by Jacob Silverman in Terms of Service . This book should be required reading for all social media users; even for those who already understand how Facebook manipulates news feed and sells their personal data to all and sundry to boost its $523 million profit. It makes for very frightening reading, but the fact remains that there are 1.5 billion Facebook users. Which means social media offers a powerful free (if the cost of losing control of personal data is ignored) communication platform for classical music, an artform that is struggling to widen its reach. So why is classical music's use of Facebook and other social media so dire? Classical music's Facebook users fall into two categories: those who need to sell themselves and those who don't. Those who don't need to sell themselves conform to the social media convention of circulating stories from the Guardian, BBC and New York Times that everyone...
Read more

Classical music's march to the scaffold

Image
News that revamped BBC Radio 3  attracted a record audience in Q1 2025 and programme presenter Norman Lebrecht's euphoric support for the network's new regime should be seen in the context of the following extract. This comes from a paper entitled The guillotine: Shadow, spectacle and the terror in volume 20 of the academic publication Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal:   'Executions were the most frequent and popular of revolutionary festivals, and the guillotine was at the centre of entertainment celebrating the Republic. A sense of the fairground spectacle and amusing novelty is conveyed in the following passage:  "Around the scaffold people sold mementos and lists of the scheduled executions. There were restaurants and cabarets de la Guillotine, where the latest victims were lists as “catch of the day” and satirical songs and poems were performed. The crowds were especially dense near the Jardin des Tuileries where, it was commonly known, one had...
Read more

The Accidental Pilgrim

Image
There are an awful lot of books around about the journey to Santiago de Compostela in particular, and pilgrimages in general; and let’s be quite truthful a lot of them are rather average. But one that stood out from the crowd for me was David Moore’s The Accidental Pilgrim which was published in 2004 as a paperback by Hodder Headline Ireland, and is available in both the UK and US. The serendipitous path that links these posts meant that I bought this book in the departures lounge at Stansted Airport en route to the Danish Thread Subtitled 'Travels with a Celtic Saint', The Accidental Pilgrim is the story of a 1500 mile bike ride by the author from Bangor in Northern Ireland to Bobbio in northern Italy via France and Switzerland. The journey follows in the footsteps of the Irish missionary Saint Columbanus who made the journey in the 6th Century. (Which coincidentally, and linked to other threads , was around the time that Gregorian Chant was emerging as the official musi...
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

Brilliant Russian sacred choral music

Image
A wonderful concert by the Hermitage Ensemble of Russian singing sacred hymns and folk songs in the beautiful little Sibton Church of St Peter in Suffolk (the ruins of a Cistercian Abbey can be seen close to the church) took me down the overg rown path of Russian sacred choral music. Two outstanding recent releases from the innovative Dutch super-budget label Brilliant Classics are highly recommended. The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris is famous for its tradition of Russian Orthodox chant. In 1967, under their director Evgeni Ivanovitz Evetz, they recorded an anthology of Russian Orthodox Church Music. Evetz was born in Poland of Russian parents, and his status as a Russian 'displaced person,' meant that he made his reputation as a refugee building and conducting choirs, first in Morocco and then in Paris. The anthology features composers ranging from Rachmaninov and Arensky to many lesser-known figures, and has now been released as a double CD . The sound isn't dem...
Read more

Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

Image
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 the harpsichordist's 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 d'Assas, Scott Ross 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 b...
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