What the London riots meant for a musician

Our reviewer Carla Rees (seen above), flute player and artistic director of Rarescale, recently lost her home in the London riots. She was burned out losing all her flutes, music and possessions as well as her two cats. She has nothing left and is having to live in a hotel. The company Just Flutes & Jonathan Myall Music are lending her instruments and music and have launched an appeal on her behalf. MusicWeb will be making a donation and would urge you all to do the same.
From the MusicWeb International website. Let us hope that music will rise from the wreckage.

Also on Facebook and Twitter. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

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

Happy birthday to the paradoxical Dalai Lama

Image
Today is the 90th birthday of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama . To celebrate this I am republishing, without further editing, the 2014 photo essay about my close encounter with His Holiness at the Kalachakra Initiation in Ladakh, northern India. The Paradox of Our Age , a short but powerful essay credited to the present Dalai Lama, is widely available in Ladakh in northern India, a region known as 'Little Tibet'. The text ends with the observation that: 'These are times of fast foods but slow digestion/Tall men but short characters/Steep profits but shallow relationships/It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room'. Tibetan Buddhism is widely viewed as an appealing alternative to materialistic Western society, so, not surprisingly, The Paradox of Our Age is widely circulated on the internet and Twitter - see photo tweet below . I bought The Paradox of Our Age on an exquisitely printed little scroll in the Tibetan refugee market in the re...
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

Music you will not find in the Apple download chart

Image
You won't find  Khandroma  from  Patti Smith  and the  Soundwalk Collective  in the Apple download chart. But does that reduce its worthiness? Today audience size is used to measure the worthiness of not just downloads, but also live music,  websites, and every other aspect of classical music . Which is a big mistake: because art music is not about attracting the largest possible audience. It is  about meeting human needs . Every human is complex and different, and every human has a different musical need, and these unique needs also  vary with circumstances . So there is  no 'one size fits all needs' classical music . Which means that, despite industry dogma,  there is no mass market for classical music . Patti Smith and the Soundwalk Collective have had a long involvement with psychogeography . In 2016 their exploration of the effect of geographical location on emotions and behaviour took them to Upper Mustang in Nepal . The ...
Read more

No big bearded imam was going to tell me music was haram

Image
That header photo shows the British Muslim musician Ali Keeler playing with his Al Firdaus Ensemble. The status of music in Islam - forbidden or permissible - is frequently discussed and almost as frequently misunderstood. So I thought it useful to share an extract from an unpublished memoir by Ian Whiteman who was multi-instrumentalist for the mod band The Action and the Sufi-influenced cult psychedelic folk rock band Mighty Baby in the 1960s. Ian went on to make what is, to use a tired and devalued label , an inexplicably neglected masterpiece, the one-off album If Man But Knew by the Habibiyya. In 1971 Ian converted to Islam and became a member of the celebrated Bristol Gardens/Wood Dalling Sufi zawiya founded by the controversial Abdalqadir as-Sufi who later wrote an Islamic interpretation of Wagner's music . After converting to Islam Ian Whiteman took the name Abdallateef and as Abdallateef Whiteman has established a considerable reputation in the Muslim world as a graph...
Read more

The truth about those French orchestras

Image
My article reporting Claudio Abbado’s negative views on French orchestras certainly generated a lot of attention, including a response from Parisian Antoine Leboyer which corrected the myth that Abbado hadn’t actually conducted a French orchestra. Too much attention is given to British and American orchestras here On An Overgrown Path and elsewhere, and I was delighted when Antoine offered to give an inside view on the musical health of the French capital. So here is a guest blog from Paris with the truth about those French orchestras that Claudio Abbado and Daniel Harding love to hate: Let us put things in perspective with a few words on French orchestras. Abbado may not have had the best of experiences, and he may still not find it perfect today but things are improving. Paris has many orchestras (I do not know those outside Paris well, and cannot comment on them; I do have regards for the Lyon Orchestra which played some great concerts when David Robertson was their music direct...
Read more

In the shadow of Chopin

Image
The music police are already telling us how we will be celebrating the Chopin bicentennial this year. So, never one for musical correctness , my header photo honours another giant of the piano, in status if not in stature, who is buried literally in the shadow of Frédéric Chopin. Michel Petrucciani, compositeur - pianiste de jazz , died in 1999 aged just 36. He is buried alongside birthday boy Chopin in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and his pianistic genius has featured several times On An Overgrown Path . Père Lachaise has more musicians per acre than any other burial ground, and they include Georges Bizet whose headstone is seen below. Bizet's grave is surprisingly understated for France's most famous musician and the dates on it are a sobering reminder that he was the same age as Michel Petrucciani when he died. Adjacent to Bizet is the more contemporary resting place of Georges Enescu who died in 1955. Enescu (Enesco in France) taught Yehudi Menuhin , Arthur Grumiau...
Read more

Another pianist with a religious habit

Image
Yesterday I pointed out that Norman Lebrecht was wrong in saying that French pianist Jean-Rodolphe Kars had entered a monastery in 1981 and had not been heard of since. But in a fascinating twist reader Leo Carey, who sparked my recent Hans Schmidt Isserstedt post , has reminded me of another French pianist who did indeed disappear into a Benedictine monastery. Thierry de Brunhoff was born in 1933. His father was the writer and illustrator Jean de Brunhoff (1899-1937) who was famous for creating the Babar the Elephant books. When he was nine years old Thierry de Brunhoff became a pupil of Alfred Cortot at l'Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. Brunhoff's father had died when he was just three and he was encouraged as a pianist by his mother who had also been a pupil of Cortot's. He was a favourite pupil of Cortot and his career developed in the early 1960s to include acclaimed recitals and records, notably of Schumann. Some of his recordings from this period remain availa...
Read more

Jonathan Harvey on the record

Image
In the photo below I am interviewing Jonathan Harvey in August 2010. When the interview was finished I drove down from his house on the Sussex Downs and ate alone in a restaurant in Lewes. During my meal I listened to the interview again on headphones, and as I listened it became apparent that something rather special had been captured. This was confirmed when the interview was subsequently broadcast on Future Radio : how many contemporary composers have made the news - not arts - sections of the Guardian and the Telegraph in the same week? Very sadly, the interview was made even more special by Jonathan's untimely death two years later. Since then it has troubled me that this important document has only been available as a sound file. But, fortunately, that has now been rectified by composer and pianist Timothy Stevens in Australia. Tim undertook the herculean task of transcribing the interview, and it now gives me considerable pleasure to make his transcript available as an ...
Read more