Classical music is shanghaied


My recent posts on classical music in China in general and Shanghai in particular were remarkably prescient. Header image is from my 2006 post about music in China.

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Travels beyond TripAdvisor

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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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Those fair corpses that litter the grooves of our records

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My recent listening has taken me deeper into vinyl territory and today I bought my first new LP in more than 30 years. The identity of that vinyl will not be revealed until a post some time in the future, although some of my ultra-knowledgeable readers may be able to identify it from the graphic above. For some of us vinyl adds something that digital formats lack , but for almost all of us live music adds an essential but intangible quality that recordings lack. Quite why the most high-end audio system can never match the sound of live music is a mystery. But the following explanation of the shortcomings of sound reproduction systems from Harmonies of Heaven and Earth by Joscelyn Godwin may provide the answer. And please, before dismissing the explanation as amusing nonsense remember that some greatly respected musicians, including Jonathan Harvey and Bruno Walter , were profoundly influenced by the teachings of Rudolf Steiner . Take care while I travel... The inevitable question...
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Critical Mass

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I'm a big fan of Marin Alsop . But last night her BBC Prom performance with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra playing her own sequence of the suites from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet was strangely unsatisfying. Tempi were pulled around, and rather than adding to the tension the wayward performance weakened it. When it finished I wanted some 'in your face' music making that was over the top, but which really worked. So as Marin Alsop was a pupil of Bernstein's I put on his 1971 recording of his own Mass , a work I don't listen to very often. Is Mass Bernstein's unrecognised masterpeice? Or is it a failed experiment in using the vernacular and exploiting street chic? (But wasn't the 'parody mass' a legitimate renaissance musical form which exploited contemporary music such as L'homme arme ?) My view used to be that Mass was simply a failed experiment, but I have to confess I am slowly moving towards the view that it may be a misunderstood m...
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What price the BBC Proms?

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My life was changed by a Henry Wood Promenade Concert on 4th August, 1975. In the second half Sir Adrian Boult gave us Vaughan William's Fifth Symphony , and the blazing intensity of that performance remains unmatched, in my experience, in the concert hall or on record. Sir Adrian's 86 years had no relevance to his music making. Music, not age, was what mattered then. In the summer of 1975 punk was at its peak and the Vietnam War had ended after Communist forces took Saigon in the spring. Back with classical music, Pierre Boulez was in his last season as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which was at the top of its game , while William Glock's golden period as BBC controller of music and Proms administrator still informed music making in London. Your life could be changed for £1.30, which was the price of a balcony seat in the Albert Hall. All of which set me thinking, what price today's BBC Proms? In 2009 Promenade Concerts are one of few remaining...
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Philip Glass half empty

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As a big fan of both Philip Glass and Tenzin Choegyal I greatly admired their collaboration on the 2020 album The Last Dalai Lama . So I was particularly looking forward to their Be The Sky project. This was released by Philip Glass' Orange Mountain Music (OMM) label as a download last year to celebrate the 90th birthday of the His Holiness the Dalai Lama , and has only just appeared as a CD release .  Unsatisfactoriness - dukkha (Pali) - is at the core of Buddhist teachings. It describes an inherent sense of unease, incompleteness, or imperfection underlying all worldly experiences. Which, unfortunately, pretty well sums up Be The Sky .  Dukkha sets in from the start of the first track Snowy Mountains which features  the choir of the Tibetan Children's Village in Dharamsala . Tenzin Choegyal's dranyen (3-stringed Tibetan lute) is far too prominent and the mix is skewed heavily to the left channel. As on Heart Strings , which was the stand out track on The...
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Most music is only meant for a certain group of people

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Back in 2016 I recounted how I was impressed and moved by Anna Thorvaldsdottir's In the Light of Air . Recently I have been similarly impressed and moved by her Archora and Aion performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Eva Ollikainen. Anna Thorvaldsdottir's music combines the two essential of being both accessible and challenging. And, sadly, it is that challenge that probably explains why her music has failed to gain the traction it deserves in todays comfort zone-delimited culture .    Today it is perfectly acceptable, no praiseworthy - for classical music and other great art to be tailored to the needs of the lowest common denominator. It is less acceptable - no politically incorrect - to echo Benjamin Britten's credo that " Music demands ... some preparation, some effort ". So, at the risk of once again being politically incorrect, I reprise the words of another great under-appreciated woman musician, Alice Coltrane . This quote comes from...
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John Cage's crazy creativity

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Crazy wisdom, as exemplified by the celebrated but controversial  Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche , is wisdom gone wild. It is wisdom expanded beyond conventional intelligence and beyond the concept of ordinary people. Similarly, crazy creativity is creativity gone wild, and the importance of the threatened art of crazy creativity is seriously underestimated in today's  algorithmically flattened culture .  Social psychologist and scholar Donald T. Campbell   has proposed that dependence on random mutation does not just apply to human evolution, but also to creative evolution. So no random mutation in the creative process means no development. All creativity depends on taking old ideas and combining them in new, unusual, and sometime wrong ways. Without this vital mutation there would be no variability, meaning all art would become nothing more than a replica of the preceding art.  John Cage's pioneering work is one outstanding example of crazy creativity combinin...
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Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

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These photos were taken by me in 2008 at independent record retailer Prelude Records in Norwich. Jordi Savall's impromptu viol recital and signing session preceeded two performances at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. One was a solo recital by Jordi in Peter Mancroft Church ; the other was an immensely moving performance of his visionary Jerusalem multicultural project at the Theatre Royal*. As reported here Prelude Records closed earlier this year; it was a victim of predatory online retailing, and today its premises stand empty awaiting occupation by a mobile phone or E-cigarette retailer. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival has been the victim of savage funding cuts , but continues in a more modest form due to the dedicated work of its small management team. A few days ago I wrote about a two-thirds empty Snape Maltings concert and proposed that classical music's heartland is facing a perfect storm caused by the convergence of the shifts in consumer tastes and the r...
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A fresh face in the house of Wagner

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Today's Guardian reports - The 29-year old great-granddaughter of the German composer Richard Wagner will face a crucial moment in her young career tonight when her production of the nation's most controversial opera is staged for the first time. The critical success or failure of Katharina Wagner's (above) Bayreuth Festival debut will not only decide on the future of what is arguably one of the most important musical extravaganzas in the world, but also on who takes pole position in the Wagner dynasty. Everything depends on the reactions to her production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg - from the critics and from those of her father and festival head, 87-year-old Wolfgang Wagner. If the opera is thought a success, she is likely to be chosen by the Wagner Foundation as the successor to the Richard Wagner throne. The 2007 Bayreuth Festival performances, including today's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg , are being webcast on Polskie Radio Dwoja , Warsaw. Click here ...
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