Composing for dummies

'Say what you have to say as simply as possible and then leave before they have a chance to figure you out.'
That was Paul Simon's advice to a songwriting class he taught at New York University and the quote comes via David Browne's disappointingly earthbound chronicle of the music of 1970 Fire and Rain. Elsewhere Simon and Garfunkel are beyond cool.

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Joe Shelby said…
I always liked Richard Thompson's take on getting good at songwriting: write a thousand songs and throw them all away.
7:01 pm
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David Munrow - more than early music

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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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Those are my principles....

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Norman Lebrecht: Slipped Disc and   Lebrecht Weekly, 12/05/2023   "Why I cannot, in good conscience, review this record I cannot, in all conscience, give this recording a star rating, or even a detailed review. The soloist is Elisabeth Leonskaja, a legendary pianist whose introspections are perhaps the strongest living reminder of her late friend Sviatoslav Richter....Christian Thielemann, in the recent film ‘Music under the Swastika’, claimed that Wilhelm Furtwängler’s complicity in the Third Reich was justified by his legacy of extraordinary recordings.  Leonskaya’s presence in Putin’s Russia is not dissimilar. What are we to make of them?... The performances, per se, have nothing to do with the present situation. And yet, everything.I cannot review them". . ..and if you don't like my principles... well, I have others . Norman Lebrecht: Slipped Disc , 19/11/2025 "The Muziekgebouw in Eindhoven has cancelled a December 4 concert by the Russian-Georgian Jewish pia...
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Know your audience

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Recently Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Luther Adams (seen above)  announced he had moved  from the USA to Australia, explaining "the current situation in the United States was a major element in my decision to leave". Even by Slipped Disc standards the response to that announcement on Norman Lebrecht's industry-endorsed website was deeply unpleasant. Here are just a few of the comments deemed acceptable for publication on Slipped Disc .  Good riddance. Maybe he’ll take his rather tiresome music to Antarctica next. He can be closer to Muslim assassins. Wise choice Absolute loser  If that’s what passes as a top classical composer these days, no wonder the genre is doomed. What a jerk. As a critic you cannot possibly ignore how unbearable his compositions are (I carefully avoid the word music). Let's ignore what a potential classical music funder would conclude from a typical Slipped Disc narrative . Yes, the defense of free - if not particularly intell...
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More Slipped Disinformation

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On Slipped Disc Norman Lebrecht crows that "BBC Radio 3 bounces back after summer disp... Radio 3 has risen again to 1.91 million, a quarterly increase of 106,000 listeners". This is misinformation. Because comparing the autumn/winter Q4 (Oct to Dec) figure of 1.91m with the summer Q3 (July to Sept) 1.81m is deliberately misleading. It does not take into account the seasonal change in radio listening: more people listen to the radio in autumn/winter than in the summer. The meaningful analysis, which is omitted from Norman's puffery, is the audience movement from the same quarter the previous year. BBC Radio 3's audience in Q4 2024 was 1.952m and in Q4 2025 was 1.912m. So, in fact, rather than bouncing back, Radio 3 showed a small - 40k - drop in audience year on year. For those preferring facts to misleading spin, the two relevant RAJAR reports are reproduced here - Q4 2025 above, Q4 2024 below.        
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Requiem psychedelia

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Award-winning author, environmentalist, Zen Roshi , and womanizer Peter Matthiessen - seen in photo above - featured in a recent post here . This drew on Lance Richardson's engrossing new biography of Matthiessen. So now here is a a short and deliciously inappropriate vignette from the biography. When he wasn't hosting his girlfriend, Matthiessen smoked pot at Polgeto , swam in the castle pool, and caught up on writing. He also took LSD which was readily supplied by John Abbot . On a previous visit, Matthiessen had bought a small green notebook with ' Appunti ' stencilled on the cover - this became his LSD journal. One day he added 300 micrograms of Sandoz LSD to a cup of coffee, put Fauré's Requiem on the stereo, and pushed through an onslaught of paranoid self-pity.
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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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Pushing the classical music envelope

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'In his short life and his art, the French Canadian composer Claude Vivier was a man diving, often recklessly, into the ultimate…. And from the edge of experience, he began to bring back, in the years leading up to his death in 1983, a new sound.' – Paul Griffiths , The New York Times I recently asked Who is pushing the classical envelope? My header photo shows a little-known figure who certainly pushed the classical music envelope and in the process created a new sound world that is ripe for rediscovery. Claude Vivier, was born to unknown parents in Montreal in 1948. After adoption his education prepare him for the priesthood until he was expelled from his seminary for "immature behaviour". But his religious training had awakened another vocation and he went on to study music, first in Montreal and then in Europe where his teachers included Karlheinz Stockhausen . In 1976 Vivier visited Japan, Bali and other Eastern countries and their musical traditions influenc...
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The purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness

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Two contrasting responses from America to my post Third rate music on Naxos' American classics? Flinging merde - ' Granted some of the stuff that Naxos has packaged in that series has been less than distinguished but operating in a cultural establishment where critics treat every cow patty ever dropped by the likes of Alwyn (above) and Bax and Finzi and Michael Tippitt (sic) as if it were fois gras, Clements is hardly in a position to fling merde' - from Sequenza21 , and I'm sure Norman Lebrecht would approve of that misspelling of Tippett. The true beauty of the effort - ' Personally speaking I expect listener reaction to concert music is heavily dependent on emotional mood and cultural/historical context . The concept of "ratings" and "tiers" for composers is pretty much an over-rated specialization of critics, which serves the purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness. My father is the American composer George Frederick McKay (photo be...
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If it ain't Mirga don't spin it

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In his latest Spectator press release - sorry review - for John Wilson conducting the reincarnated Sinfonia of London, Richard Bratby credits the original Sinfonia with recording movie soundtracks from  The Snowman to Vertigo . But he omits to mention that the Sinfonia of London and the Allegri String Quartet under Sir John Barbirolli made what is, arguably, the greatest classical recording committed to tape  -  Elgar's Introduction & Allegro for strings and Serenade for Strings in E minor, and Vaughan William's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis & Fantasia on Greensleeves. Just another case of the if it ain't Mirga, Wilson, CBSO, Kanneh-Mason, or film music , don't spin it syndrome.  New Overgrown Path posts are available via RSS/email by entering your email address in the right-hand sidebar. Any copyrighted material is included for critical analysis, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).
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Also sprach the composer

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I see from the autumn publishing schedules that Paul Griffiths has a new novella being published titled Let Me Tell You . It is written in the Oulipo tradition of constrained writing, and uses only the vocabulary allotted to Ophelia in Hamlet . I know that Paul is not a composer, but he is, among other things, an authority on Stockhausen , scholar of Messiaen and librettist for Tan Dun . So, in the style of my composer as painter thread , it started me thinking about composers as authors of literary works, as opposed to music theory books and memoirs. Here for starters are two composers as authors. The most obvious one is in the photo above. Paul Bowles studied with Aaron Copland, composed a considerable amount of music most of which was for the theatre, and wrote five very successful novels and a number of short stories. My second composer as author is slightly more arcane. The Minimal Piano Collection which was featured here last year includes on CD 4, among contributions from ...
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