On An Overgrown Path

'I think there is a great deal in The Kingdom that is more than a match for Gerontius , and I feel that it is a much more balanced work and throughout maintains a stream of glorious music whereas Gerontius has its ups and downs.' That is from Sir Adrian Boult's introductory note to his 1969 recording of The Kingdom and after writing yesterday's post about mystical devotion I listened once again to Elgar's oratorio. Sir Adrian's high regard for The Kingdom is reflected in his interpretation - his recording is probably the finest achievement of the EMI dream team of Boult, Bishop and Parker , although their Pilgrim's Progress runs it a close second. Forget about Elgar the flag waving patriot, he was a Catholic and it was only twenty-eight years before he was born that Catholic emancipation became law in England. Instead follow these links to Elgar the mystic and Elgar the occultist . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material on these page...

'As an Anchoress Julian was allowed to keep a cat for pest control, particularly to keep down the mice. Julian is often portrayed with her cat nearby, no doubt it was a great source of comfort to her.' That notice is displayed in the Anchoress' cell in St Julian's Church in Norwich and I photographed the Marseille street cat seen below when I was on the road with a Sufi saint recently. On my iPod in Marseille was Aïcha Redouane singing her own settings of the Sufi poems of Rabi`a Al-`Adawiyya. Those two remarkable women, Julian of Norwich and Rabi`a Al-`Adawiyya , are linked by their fervour for mystical devotion. Julian and her cat are portrayed by Brother Robert Lentz OFM , a gay American Franciscan friar who controversially incorporates contemporary social themes into his icons. The link between Christian and Islamic mysticism fascinated another American monk Thomas Merton , who venerated both Julian of Norwich and the Algerian Sufi saint Shaykh Ahmad ibn '...

Liturgy comes from a word meaning "public work"; by its performance more is expressed than can be conveyed in verbal formulae. Like music, liturgy holds more than can be explained in a commentary. The meaning is implicit and conveyed by performance. It is not a theatrical performance but more like the performance of a string quartet, not in its aesthetics, but in the thing behind the music. Classical music's anti-silly conventions lobby has been getting quite a bit of airtime here recently , so I offer the thoughts above to add some balance. They come from Christopher Howse's book Sacred Mysteries and help explain why concert hall conventions have survived and also clarify the intentions, if not the actions , of traditionalist Catholics. Illustration shows Julien's Orchestra at a Promenade Concert in Covent Garden. Louis Antoine Jullien (1812-1860) was born in Sisteron in France and after leaving France to escape his creditors established promenade concerts ...

Nielsen's Fifth Symphony has been well served by the record industry. I grew to love it through a long-deleted 1975 LP. Producer David Mottley and engineer Stuart Eltham captured the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paavo Berglund in that wonderfully rich yet realistic sound that was the hallmark of EMI's recordings of the period. Simon Rattle said of Berglund "He is one of the great conductors still among us", an opinion I will happily concur with. I remember a blistering Shostakovich Seventh Symphony in the acoustically magnificent Caird Hall in a freezing Dundee in the 1980s, with Berglund conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Paavo Berglund's 80th birthday passed unnoticed on April 14, 2009. The reason is not difficult to find. The Finnish maestro has never been part of classical music's PR circus. One lasting memory of Berglund [seen above] is his Shostakovich in an arctic Dundee. Another is an appearance by him on BBC Radio 3...

Cut to the Britten Studio at Snape on Saturday evening (Jan 21) where the 'Returns Only' sign was posted at the box office. So what sold out this remote venue in the middle of January - a pop-up concert by Gustavo Dudamel and his Simón Bolívar band perhaps? Well actually no, the event was an exploration of symmetry presented as part of Aldeburgh Music's Faster Than Sound experimental series. A major factor in the box office appeal was that Marcus du Sautoy was animating the event - author of several best selling books and a frequent TV presenter, his day jobs are Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Fellow of New College. Marcus du Sautoy was leading an exploration of symmetry in mathematics, design and music supported by a graphic designer, a multi-disciplinary artist and a multi-sensory artists collective. This Oxford professor of mathematics is also no slouch when it comes to music - he pl...

Degenerate Music or Entartete Musik was a label applied in the 1930s by the Nazis to music that was proscribed because it was deemed harmful or decadent. Degenerate Music from the 1930s is now a fashionable cause but Entartete Musik from our own times is ignored, presumably because the regime doing the proscribing makes iPhones , hosts the Olympic Games and buys an awful lot of Bentleys . That great travel writer Colin Thubron takes up the story in his indispensable To A Mountain in Tibet: In a land maimed since 1950 by Chinese occupation, by mass killings and displacement, the Cultural Revolution, with its wholesale destruction of all things old, struck at Tibet's heart. Amid the executions and 'struggle' sessions, all public vestiges of Buddhism were erased, the Buddha denounced as reactionary, sacred images tossed into latrines, and scriptures converted into shoes for disgraced monks. By 1976, out of more than 6000 monasteries and temples, thirteen remained. One of ...

To Alex Ross' growing list of Cage centenary events I would add Aldeburgh Festival's John Cage Musicircus curated by James Weeks and Exaudi on June 23. As the Aldeburgh Festival brochure explains - a plethora of Festival artists and others fling open the doors of the Hoffman Building and let the sound stream out. Centrepiece of the Musicircus is a repeat of Exaudi's performance of the John Cage Song Books . Their first performance at Snape of the Song Books provides my header image and an article here , while you can listen to James Weeks talking to me about Elisabeth Lutyens and more in an iTunes podcast here . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Header photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2012. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

We need more activist musicians so it was encouraging to see members of the London Philharmonic protesting about the excesses of the Israelis and to see New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert protesting about the excesses of a mobile phone user . With those protests out of the way hopefully the London Philharmonic musicians will turn their attention to the orchestra's corporate sponsor Japanese Tobacco International - the company is the world's third largest cigarette company - and Alan Gilbert will talk to the man in the front row from his orchestra's global sponsor Credit Suisse - the bank is currently under scrutiny in a US Department of Justice tax evasion investigation . All of which is, of course, small beer compared with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. But the infringement of human rights in China is very big beer indeed; so it is worth noting that the London Philharmonic returned a few days ago from a seven concert tour of China with pianist Hong...

In our practice, we think that noises, cars, voices, sights are distractions that come and bother us when we want to be quiet. But who is bothering whom? Actually, we are the ones who go and bother them. The car, the sound, is just following its own nature. We bother things through some false idea that they are outside us and cling to the idea of remaining quiet, undisturbed. That refeshingly lateral thought is relevant both to John Cage's view of music as "just an attention to the activity of sounds" and to a certain symphonic ringtone . It comes from Achaan Chah who was an important Buddhist teacher and founded two major monasteries in the Thai Forest Tradition . This Tradition is worth exploring for those who are attracted by the common sense approach of Buddhism but find Zen too austere and Tibetan Buddhism too arcane. To keep the playing field level Zen provides the graphic in the form of a photo I took recently in the Musée Guimet , Paris, while Tibetan Buddhism ...

Perhaps the brain has the equivalent of a laminar flow region (like water from a tap), where all the ordered information and processes are well catalogued and indexed. This is our acquired and inherited knowledge, conscious and sub conscious. Outside this region there is the equivalent of chaos, masses of unstructured data and half-formed thoughts: a swirling mass of unstructured and unintelligible information derived from the incalculable quantities of sensory input the brian receives every second: a region of wild turbulence and disorder. Chaos. We are only vaguely aware of this chaotic region. Here lurk the demons of madness. Yet isn't genius on the edge of madness? What is actually happening at the boundary - at the edge of chaos? If the analogy of our example of the water flowing from the tap holds true, than at the edge of chaos there is an erratic stream of tiny whorls of disordered thought which comes spinning out of chaos to penetrate the lamina region. Are these tiny whor...

Top Music blogs - Free trip to Israel‏ I stumbled upon your blog while searching the web for top music blogs! I am contacting you on behalf of an organization called Kinetis . Kinetis is a grassroots organization established to promote the recognition of Israel at home and abroad as a vibrant and inspirational source of creativity and innovation. By educating about and exposing the creative energy of the Israeli environment and people, we seek to enhance global appreciation for Israel's unique contribution, and to revitalize national pride. The " Vibe Israel " project, which I manage, is an all-expenses paid 7-day tour of Israel we offer to online opinion makers and leaders who write about areas in which Israel has an offering of global relevance. We recently invited a group of Mommy Bloggers to show them the family life, parenting and children aspects of Israeli life, and the response was great (we hosted 3 leading bloggers from the UK and 2 from Spain) and Design blogg...

'A strong breath of life rose from Marseille and its ports, an insistent call towards distant horizons, like a subtle and irresistible magic spell. For the first time Orschanow realised that the universe did not end here on this quayside, that out there, beyond the soothing sea, were lands of sun and silence: Africa.' Those are the words of Dmitri Orschanow, the central character in Isabelle Eberhardt's little known autobiographival novel Vagabond and my header photo shows the quayside and soothing sea at Marseille. Isabelle Eberhardt was a cultural explorer, Sufi adept and libertine. It is no coincidence that the narrator in her autobiographical novel is male because, as my October 2011 post recounted , from an early age Isabelle experimented with cross-dressing. For most of her extensive travels she wore male Arab clothing and assumed the identity of a man, a disguise that almost certainly went beyond the need for security in Muslim countries. Like Isabelle, Orschanow s...

Bob, your comments over the years about BBC Radio 3 have always resonated strongly with me and I don’t even live in the UK. They have great relevance to my own downward spiral of listening enjoyment of CBC Radio 2 (in Canada), and I share Scott’s sentiments (in the previous post on this subject ). One used to be able to learn something from CBC Radio 2 programming; now it’s some bimbo who self-identifies as “the girl with the hair in the chair” and whose pithy commentary is pretty well limited to “ewwwwww, doesn’t that send chills up your spine?”. (To be fair, the IQ rises 20 points for two hours afterwards with another host, and on Saturday and Sunday.) I am most grateful for your flogging this issue as I am sure there must be at least one producer at the CBC who reads your blog. Let the hills echo with the sounds of complaining. Radio 3 and Radio 2, in the UK and Canada respectively, have lost their way. Clearly people aren’t listening, in Britten’s sense and as reflected in audi...

This photo is an outtake from the visit to Sainte-Nazaire in France that resulted in my 2010 post Musique Concrete . In the background is the famous Sainte-Nazaire bridge and on the left is a cruise ship being fitted out in one of the city's dockyards. I remember wondering at the time what would happen if one of these ships fell on its side . And let's not forget the many connections between classical music and cruise ships . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2012. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

But if you just look at the history of images then it becomes much easier. For 500 years the church had social control because it was the main supplier of images. You can point to Darwin, but social control moved with the control of images in the early 19th century to what we now call the media: newspapers, then Hollywood and television. There is now another revolution and the images are moving to individuals. David Hockney talks to Nicholas Wroe in Saturday's Guardian . There are also some interesting thoughts in the article on the relationship between visual perception and hearing. These are prompted by Hockney's declining hearing and are relevant to the thread on these pages about seeing the music . It is illuminating to apply Hockney's theory of the control of images to music. As with images, music was initially controlled by the church. But since the early 20th century that control has been in the hands of the now beleagured intermediary layer of record companies and ...

The relationship betwen music and totalitarian regimes is a recurring theme On An Overgrown Path and the collaborationist Vichy regime in France has featured in a number of these paths . Until recently what had really happened in Vichy France during the Second World War was obscured by assiduously cultivated folklore. Central to this is the myth that the entire population of France was opposed to the Nazis and that everyone was an active member of the resistance. Only in recent years has the truth been uncovered about les années noires , a truth that includes the Vichy policy of deporting Jews to deathcamps without Nazi coercion. After the Franco-German armistice in 1940 the 84 year old Marshal Pétain became Chief of State of Vichy France and presided over a regime that had a strong following in the Catholic Church . In August 1945 Pétain was found guilty of treason, and was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on the grounds of his age and First ...

People protest when I complain about BBC Radio 3 . So here is someone else doing it . Marseille street scene is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2012. With thanks for heads up to Spectator reader David Derrick . Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk Also on Facebook and Twitter .

Chance uncovers a unique example of music being used in the defence of a war criminal. Many visitors arrived On An Overgrown Path yesterday following the airing of Nazi Hunters - Paul Touvier on History Television in the States. Search engines had directed them to my January 2010 article which uncovered links between French war criminal Touvier and the singer Jacques Brel, who is seen above. By coincidence as History Television was bringing Touvier to the attention of many in the States a book on the same subject arrived here in Norfolk from Seattle. It is a volume I had tracked down online following a recommendation from a reader who had read my recent article about the continuing activities of the Society of Saint Pius X, the traditionalist Catholic group that had harboured Touvier for sixteen years before his arrest in 1989. Memory, the Holocaust, and French Justice edited by Richard J. Golsan is a valuable academic study of the flawed prosecution by the French judiciary of T...