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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XL - On An Overgrown Path

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XL is the new choral work by English composer Antony Pitts . It uses the same forces as Tallis' sublime 40 part motet Spem in Alium , and was composed as a companion piece. XL is on a new Harmonia Mundi CD sung by the Rundfunkchor Berlin directed by Simon Halsey. It also includes the Tallis motet, Knut Nystedt's Immortal Bach , and Zoltán Kodaly's substantial Laudes organi. Other posts linking to the work of Antony Pitts, and well worth reading are Jerry Springer rebel grabs Gramophone accolade and Raindrops are falling on my chant .
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Leaders destroy followers and followers destroy leaders

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That photo of Marrakech's celebrated Jemma el-Fnaa was taken by me a few weeks ago. One of the books that illuminated my visit to the Red City was Stephen Davis' To Marrakech by Aeroplane . Stephen is best known as the biographer of Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and the Rolling Stones, and ghost writer for Michael Jackson, but he also collaborated with me on a two part feature about the Master Musicians of Jajouka , who come from the Rif Mountains in the north of Morocco. Performance artist Brion Gysin , who was a long time resident of Morocco, played a pivotal role in bring the Master Musicians to the attention of Brian Jones , and it was the Rolling Stones' posthumously released album of their music which introduced the Master Musicians to an international audience. To Marrakech by Aeroplane , which is rich in anecdotes about Brion Gysin's Moroccan circle, is published by Inkblot Publications , and that Rhode Island based independent publisher has also made available ...
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Audio perfectionists are an almost extinct breed

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Related to my recent post about Owsley Stanley's recording of Ali Akbar Khan's 1970 San Francisco concert is Robert Greenfield's biography Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III . In my post I described Augustus Stanley as an 'audio perfectionist'. Here is a quote from the biography describing his 1960s sound system:  "Before ever meeting the Grateful Dead, Owsley had already purchased and installed a sound system in his thirty-five-by-fifty-five-foot living room in Berkeley that far surpassed what even the most fanatical hi-fi enthusiast might have dreamed of owning. Looking like "something that someone had rescued from behind the screen at the local movie theater," his Altec Lansing Voice of the Theatre system consisted of two large wooden cabinets, each of which was "about the size of a small fridge". Equipped with a fifteen-inch speaker, a driver that was "about four inches in diameter," and "a ...
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Classical music has many Buddhist tendencies

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With 376 million followers Buddhism is the fourth largest belief system in the world. Its core teachings of compassion and non-violence are well-known; but the wider cultural impact of those in the creative community exhibiting what the composer Jonathan Harvey described as "Buddhist tendencies" is underappreciated. Sri Lanka's state religion is Theravada - doctrine of the elders - Buddhism , and it may not be a coincidence that in 1960 elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike , the world's first woman prime minister. The island has been a center of Buddhist scholarship and practice since the introduction of Buddhism in the third century, and the country played a leading role in the preservation of the Pāli Canon of Buddhist teachings. I took the accompanying photos on a recent pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines in Sri Lanka, and to illustrate the influence of Buddhism on classical music I have juxtaposed them with cameos of music with Buddhist tendencies that provided the iPod so...
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I am not a Classic FM housewife

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Having returned from travels in a distant land I was looking forward to listening to BBC Radio 3's Proms broadcasts. But it wasn't to be, because after just two concerts I have given up. For me, even great music-making cannot survive Radio 3 presenters topping and tailing each work with endless quotes from a children's encyclopedia of classical music punctuated by smug info-commercials.  There has been much self-congratulation by Radio 3 about audience gains; however audience data shows that increase has been achieved by poaching Classic FM's listeners. Despite Radio 3's audience increase, the UK classical radio audience is not increasing. Because listeners are simply moving from Classic FM to Radio 3. In fact the total classical radio audience is decreasing . Under ex-Classic FM supremo Sam Jackson, BBC Radio 3's strategy of taking listeners from Classic FM was initially targeted at the daytime housewife audience. But that strategy has now been applied to even...
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Why composer anniversaries do not win new audiences

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Data from an authoritative source shows that the strategy of focussing on composer anniversaries to raise classical music's public profile is not working. The graph above uses the Google Trends tool to measure online searches for the four main composers with anniversaries in 2013 - Verdi , Britten , Wagner ;and Lutoslawski *. Google Trends plots global volumes for specific search terms and my composite graph maps and compares the trend over eight years of searches for the four main 2013 anniversary composers with results indexed to 100. (Left click on the graphs to enlarge). Three main trends emerge from this analysis. The first is that, as the graph above shows, Verdi is consistently by far the most popular of the four composers. Hardly a revelation in itself; but the trend shows that despite Britten and Wagner undoubtedly receiving more promotional attention in 2013 - e.g. not one complete Verdi opera in the 2013 BBC Proms season and just three concerts including his music ...
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Storm clouds gather over Aldeburgh

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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...
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Is classical music asking the right questions?

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What will have more impact on the future of classical music? Roberto Alagna’s latest “squeeze”, or our ability to organise, search and access digital music files? My view tends to the latter, which is why in a comment on a recent post I said “It has long puzzled me as to why the subject of metadata about music recordings is so neglected”. Now reader Mike has responded with the following comment which justifies a post of its own: Music metadata has been a small bugbear of mine ever since I started digitising music in the 90s. In particular the metadata databases used by Apple's iTunes and Microsoft's Media Players are quite awful when you move out of pop/rock music to classical/jazz/world. I don't let either bit of software touch my collection, especially as you can't trust either to honour their metadata settings, and the penalty for them breaching the trust is the loss of hundreds of manhours of labelling. It's also sad that a great many digital downloads ...
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Gerontius - that is a sublime masterpiece

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On 29 September 1958 John Barbirolli conducted Part 1 of Gerontius with the Dublin Choir in the presence of Pope Pius XII at Castel Gandolfo, only a few days before the Pope's death. 'I have often wondered', he wrote, 'what the feelings of Newman and Elgar would be if they could know that the last music [the Pope] heard had been Elgar's setting of Newman's words "Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul". As Barbirolli knelt before him, the Pope said: 'Figlio mio, questo e un capolavoro sublime' ('My son, that is a sublime masterpiece'). The header photo shows Sir John Barbirolli recording The Dream of Gerontius in 1964 in the Free Trade Hall , Manchester. No CD collection is complete without Barbirolli's Manchester account or Benjamin Britten's version which was recorded in Snape Maltings , the latter is now, thankfully, back in the catalogue - grab it while you can. Also noteworthy is the recent first-ever CD release ...
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