Altered states


From Sacred Journey by photographer and seeker David Howard. This gorgeous book from Taschen is well worth seeking out despite the Freudian typo. Now beware, this man is dangerous.


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How listening hard alters the music

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The guy who writes the music-themed blog On An Overgrown Path is a bit of an obsessive, but I like that. The entry for 14 August happily happens to chime with a number of my own obsessions. Listening to music, and I mean listening hard, alters the music, and preparing to listen makes it twice as strange. And wonderful. That post by Brian Connor on his blog From a far place appealed to me, because not only does it sum up nicely what I have been saying On An Overgrown Path over the last ten years, but it also hints at the huge untapped potential of the lost art of listening . My own recent listening - and I mean listening hard - has included Bridgettine Chant from Vox Silentii . Birgitta Birgersdotter (1303-1373) of Sweden was a visionary and founder of the Bridgettine monastic order of contemplative nuns: she was canonized in 1391 and declared Patron Saint of Europe in 1999. Sung by the by the Finnish all-female medieval music specialists Vox Silentii , these recordings are not ne...
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No flowers please for Herbert von Karajan

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Few musicians have generated such a mixture of respect and revulsion as Herbert von Karajan. It takes Richard Osborne 851 pages in his masterly biography to capture the essence of this extraordinary conductor, entrepreneur and opportunist, and it would be impertinent to even attempt to cover the same ground here. So instead, with the centenary of Karajan's birth falling on April 5, I offer this personal vignette from my time at EMI, which I hope in some small way illustrates the conundrum that was this extraordinary man. During the late 1970s the Machiavellian Karajan had carefully nurtured a deadly rivalry between EMI and his other contract company, Deutsche Grammophon. This meant that EMI had, at very considerable expense, outbid DG for the four act version of Verdi's Don Carlos with José Carreras and Mirella Freni , and Debussy's Pelléas et Méliande with Frederica von Stade and Richard Stilwell . Pélleas was a personal passion of Karajan, and because of this he ...
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Classical music as ritual

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These photos were taken on my recent spirit quest in Morocco to the Sufi shrine of Sidi Chamharouch, which is seen above. A 75 minutes drive from Marrakech brought me to Imlil where the road ends and the mountains begin. The hamlet of Sidi Chamharouch - which is one of those blessed places which returns a blank in a Trip Advisor search - is at an altitude of 2350 metres and is reached by a tough and potentially dangerous two hour climb up a rocky path. Access is impossible for wheeled vehicles and supplies are brought in by the mules seen in my photos. Beyond Sidi Chamharouch is Jebel Toubkal, which at 4,167 metres is the highest mountain in North Africa. During my trek I was struck by the similarity between the High Atlas and Ladakh on the border of India and Tibet . Film director Martin Scorsese was also struck by the similarity. With Tibet a no-go zone he used this region for location shooting of his 1997 movie Kundun ; this depicts the Dalai Lama 's flight into exile fro...
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Over time classical music has shifted from being a lean forward activity, where the emphasis is on participation, to a lean back activity, where the audience are passive observers. Music originated as a lean forward activity in churches. The chorales in the Bach Passions are a brilliant use of lean forward music, and Britten followed Bach's example with the congregational singing in Noye's Fludde and Saint Nicholas . The flourishing community choir movement in France is a testament to the power of lean forward music . Music lessons in schools, now fast disappearing , are lean forward music pure and simple. John Cage wrote his A House Full of Music (described by him as 'A Musicircus of non-professional music' ) for 800 music-school pupils in Bremen, Germany, and his 4' 33", where ambient sound becomes the performance, is the ultimate lean forward music. But lean back music, where the focus is on celebrity performers, is the darling of the media driven 21st c...
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Master musician who experienced the pain 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 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...
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'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. ...
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