Wouldn't it be lovely?


Wouldn't it be lovely if a classical musician gave a free concert/radio/TV interview when she/he didn't have a new CD/concert tickets to flog?

Also on Facebook and Twitter. Photo taken in the Ait Ourir Souk, Morocco is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2011. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

Pliable said…
Free music...

You might like to know that I have put three samples from the last concert onto the Voces website.

Go to www.voceschoral.webs.com and click on 'Listen to us'.

More passion than polish, but none the worse for that, and the audience feedback has been terrific. A pity about the unmuffled coughing...

With best wishes,

Martyn Warren, Director
Voces - Renaissance Choral Music
Newton Abbot
Devon

Voces previousl featured here http://www.overgrownpath.com/2008/03/what-price-music-of-unsung-master.html
9:04 am
Pliable said…
Email from Martyn Warren of Voces -

One comment on your 'Wouldn't it be lovely' post this morning: I suspect that most classical musicians love to talk about their music - their passion. The problem is that, unless one is in the superstar category, the general media will only want to talk with a classical musician if he or she has something to 'sell' - either literally, as in concert tickets or CDs, or metaphorically in the shape of radical new ideas, great success, great disaster, or scandal. Admittedly my experience is at a pretty low level, trying to interest local/regional print and broadcast media, but I suspect it is typical.

Things have changed markedly in the last 10 to 15 years. In the past our regional newspaper had an arts editor, who attended events in person and interviewed artists - no more. The BBC local news programme had a 5-minute slot on a Friday evening previewing upcoming arts events - no more. I had no trouble interesting local radio in mini-features based around our music, and more than once have spent a happy hour in a radio studio chatting live about renaissance choral music and my choir - I don't expect that to happen again.

I am generalising from the specific, and I am sure that you will get opposing views.

Best wishes, and keep up the good work,

Martyn
10:25 am
Pliable said…
Martyn Warren makes a very good point in the email above.

Too often we, and I include myself in this, blame the musicians for attention seeking.

But in many cases the musicians are hostages, willing or otherwise, of the commercial/intermediary complex, and of the media and agents in particular.

Which brings us back to the question that my article linked to above asks. Who is benefitting from disintermediation in classical music? Is it the music, or is it the commercial/intermediary complex?
10:30 am
Gavin Plumley said…
If we're talking about Barenboim, then I'm all for it. Yes, the media circus is dull.. but marketing exists in all walks of life and Classical Music needs all the help it can get. To appreciate it in a marketing vacuum may seem like utopia, but such an idea is ultimately a castle in the air.
7:57 am
Pliable said…
Gavin, as ever I am happy that there is more than one point of view on this.

But I am becoming incresingly uncomfortable with the concept that "Classical Music needs all the help it can get."

Just think today's BBC Radio 3, Norman Lebrecht, and the Classical Brit Awards etc etc.

Classical music needs help, but it needs the right kind of help. Many of the problems facing classical music today have been caused by the greed of the middle feeders who have used the mantra that "Classical Music needs all the help it can get" to further their own agendas.

Defining the right kind of help is very difficult, if not impossible. But we can at least try.
9:18 am
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

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

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

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
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...
Read more

Aaron Copland's McCarthy Hearing

Image
EXECUTIVE SESSIONS OF THE SENATE PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS OF THE COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS ========================= VOLUME 2 __________ EIGHTY-THIRD CONGRESS FIRST SESSION 1953 STATE DEPARTMENT TEACHER-STUDENT EXCHANGE PROGRAM [Editor's note.--The composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990), whose works included Billy the Kid, Lincoln Portrait, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944 and an Academy Award in 1950. Because he had gone to Italy on a Fulbright scholarship in 1951, the subcommittee questioned him about his past political associations. His oral history, published as Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland, 1900 through 1942 (New York: St. Martin's, 1984), and Copland Since 1943 (New York: St. Martin's, 1989) acknowledged that he had been a ``fellow traveler'' in the 1930s because ``it seemed the thing to do at the time,'' but stated that he had never joined a political party. Fo...
Read more

Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

Image
In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A...
Read more

She was not just a woman

Image
My passion  for the music of Alice Coltrane  is shared by  a number of prominent musicians .  This passion was reawakened recently by listening to albums such as Journey in Satchidananda , Illuminations and above all  World Galaxy when travelling in Kerala down in the south of India. That header photo shows  Swamini Turiyasangitananda  - aka Alice Coltrane - at the Sai Anantam Ashram which she founded in 1983 in the Santa Monica Mountains, California. In 2018 the Ashram, which had been closed for a year, was  destroyed in the Woolsey wildfire ; a demise which neatly symbolises society's progression from the the metaphysical to the material.  Alice Coltrane is one of those great women musicians who are still overlooked because they do not fit into the rigid pigeonholes defined by today's virtue signalling culture . (Another great but totally overlooked woman musician has sold millions of albums and influenced, among others, Bob Dylan and Ro...
Read more

Storm clouds gather over Aldeburgh

Image
On An Overgrown Path’s traffic logs show that the UK and international media are actively researching the private life of Benjamin Britten. One of the many failings of the BBC in the Jimmy Savile scandal was to assume that a potentially damaging story would simply go away. So, although I would much prefer to be writing about other things, I am reluctantly returning to the subject of Britten . I am a huge admirer of Britten’s music , I have written in praise of Aldeburgh , and Snape is my local concert hall . But for some time I have had a growing discomfort about certain aspects of the composer's private life, and this means I do not share the dismissive attitude that prevails elsewhere in classical music towards its continued scrutiny. And it also means I object to being labelled as a “smut-stirrer” for believing the subject should not be off-limits . The aspects of Britten’s personal life under scrutiny are public knowledge. In his eloquent appreciation of Britten in Th...
Read more