On An Overgrown Path

'When you are you, you see things as they are, and you become one with your surroundings. There is your self. There you have true practice; you have the practice of a frog. Here is a good example of our practice – when a frog becomes a frog, Zen becomes Zen. When you understand a frog through and through, you attain enlightenment; you are Buddha'. Those are the words of Zen master Shunryu Suzuki , and centenary celebrant John Cage was, of course, a Zen practitioner. My recent post The sound of 4’33” generated a large readership, doubtless helped by images of the stunning Zen garden at Venansault, France. When we came to view the photos taken by my wife at Venansault we found the one above that resonates synchronistically with Shunryu Suzuki’s teaching. For many Zen’s metaphysical obscurantism will be irritating, but the Buddhist tradition does contain much truth. Classical music is not an entertainment format , it is not a digital property , it is not a money spinner , it is n...

Two names struck me in this week's announcement of the 2012 BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists , a scheme which has the admirable objective of helping “talented artists to reach the next stage of their careers”. I was struck by the name at the top of the list, Irish tenor Robin Tritschler - he is a very talented singer with a growing international profile who is already represented by leading management agency Askonas Holt . And I was struck by the name of the presenter who will front BBC Radio 3 broadcasts of the new generation artists - Clemency Burton-Hill . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Back in 2008 my posts about funding problems with the EMI group pension fund - which potentially affected my own pension - attracted a lot of interest. Now today’s mail has brought the good news that the trustees have reached agreement with Citigroup to inject £240 million into the pension fund, and, to quote the trustees, “This payment has significantly improved the financial position of the fund”. It would have been more rewarding if the peerless legacy of Boult, Barbirolli, Munrow, Karajan et al could have funded my future CD purchases . But, as the masters of the universe nuked that option , Citigroup’s money will have to do instead. So what has a jellyfish on a beach in western France got to do with the EMI pension fund? Well, Karajan was an EMI artist , and Siegfried Lauterwasser was his court photographer . Lauterwasser’s son Alexander is a graphic artist, and his cymatic images were linked to a jellyfish on the same beach in a 2009 post . Understand now why it is called ...

With intense nostalgia I read your blogpost . Dear Ravi. I attach one of my paintings of him in his prime. I was attempting to capture an elusive shimmering masterpiece. In this East meets West period, Yehudi was attempting something similar. He was there spiritually and of course technically he could do anything, but it was hopeless - somewhere too far down in his ancestral line. "I feel like a little dog" he once told me, "Ravi does something and I just follow him". He acquired this oil, one of several versions and many sketches I made of them during rehearsals at the Gstaad/Saanen Mehuhin Festival. One day they forgot a carpet, so I was dispatched up the hill to Yehudi's chalet to bundle the carpet (in my painting) into my Volkswagen so they could sit down. It was so heavy, I felt it was interwoven with layers and of complex rhythms. Sigh! Golden years.... Your piece makes me want to dig back into those musical treasures and bathe in them again. The strict...

'I notice the kind of background sound which I refer to as the sound of silence, a resonating, vibratory sound. Is it a sound? Whatever it is - "sound" isn't quite accurate - I begin to notice a high-pitched kind of vibration that is always present. Once you recognise this point - at which one is fully open, receptive; when you recognize this sound of silence your thinking process stops - you can rest in this stream. It's like a stream. It isn't like ordinary sound that rises and ceases or begins and ends. The sound of the bell has a beginning and ending, and so does the sound of birds, the sound of my voice. But behind that, behind all other sounds, is this sound of silence. It's not that we create it or that it comes and goes - in my exploraration of this it's always present, it's just there whether I notice it or not. So once I notice it - and it sustains itself, I don't have to create it - then it's just present, pure presence. ' F...

Social media speaks in the binary vocabulary of 'like' and 'dislike' to the total exclusion of the myriad nuanced positions between these two extremes. In his forgotten memoir Spring Street Summer Christopher Hudson describes a teacher of the first binary generation at Michigan State University in the 1980s lamenting that "'All his students cared about was getting grades that would look good on their CVs. They had no time for ambiguity or sublety, no time for doubt". Thirty years earlier in his prescient masterwork Mount Analogue , French writer René Daumal had portrayed an imaginary search for "A way that unites Heaven and Earth, which must exist, otherwise our situation would be without hope". As yet the binary generation has failed to discover Mount Analogue , and the result is a digital culture that hates ambiguity . Graphic shows the 1968 City Lights edition of Mount Analogue . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as ...

'Can you imagine not having any personality? Just nothing really - it sounds like you're almost dead! Every personal opinion, every personal feeling, we would need to reject. But that's not it. It's not an annihilation of self. It's seeing that the self we tend to cling to is our own creation. We create ourselves. And so with awareness we're beginning to see that. We're beginning to notice how I create myself as a person. Just out of habit, out of not awakening, out of being caught up in thinking habit, emotional habits, and identities that I never notice yet alone question'. Recently I have been spending time with Wagner as interpreted by Sir Adrian Boult and Glenn Gould, and also - readers cannot have failed to notice - with Ajahn Sumedho's teachings . Sir Adrian's approach to Wagner, as captured in the invaluable EMI reissue of his orchestral excerpts , is what Thai Buddhists term anattā - devoid of self. Glenn Gould's transcriptions of...

'Hovering up above the parched plains of Andrah Pradesh, the bloody sun sat like a mothership bearing galactic emperors to an appointment at the end of the world. The sudden, awesome beauty of this spectacle felt like a punch to the heart. We hurtled through the primeval landscape, which was palely illuminated by an alien star fat and heavy with burning blood. I felt like the first man, or the last one. Slipping on headphones, I started listening to Ravi-Shankar's Shanti-Dhwami where I'd left off after buying it the day before. Dedicated to Indira Gandhi - its sole shortcoming - it is a shimmering masterpiece, transcending musical definition.' That is Paul William Roberts writing in his personal homage to India Empire of the Sun - long out of print but well worth searching out . Mystic Sai Baba , Mother Teresa , George Harrison , a millionaire drug dealer, and the founder of India's first pornographic magazine are among those who appear in the book, which is base...

Decca's latest attempt to boost its flagging fortunes by once again exploiting the 'god rock' genre was the subject of a commendably critical piece in yesterday's Independent by Jessica Duchen . Voice from Assisi is a new album from Alessandro Brustenghi, a Franciscan friar from Assisi, and Jessica's concerns parallel those expressed by me in an earlier post about another of Decca's 'god rock' projects - their 2010 album with the nuns of L'Abbaye de Notre-Dame de l'Annonciation at Le Barroux. But it is not just concerns about the cynically exploitative nature of this project that need to be raised. What also needs highlighting is the breathtaking lack of creativity, vision and integrity exhibited - with a few notable exceptions - by those who now run our record companies, classical radio stations and other major arts organisations. Every day we hear complaints about falling CD sales, cuts in funding, shrinking audiences, insolvent orchestra...

'Viking John, the best-looking student on campus, was now sleeping on a mattresss on the floor of my room. He'd bought his record collection with him. 'What about some Rachmaninov?' he suggested while I was flipping through my thin stack of albums, wondering what to put on next. 'I'm not big on classical music,' I replied and went on looking. 'No, I think you'll like this, his second piano concerto.' he took the album out of its sleeve and passed it to me. 'This guy's a real freak'. I put the record on the turntable, lit the joint of Afghani I'd just rolled and sat back. John was right, Rachmaninov was out of his skull. The music was passionate, almost demented in its intensity. With eyes closed, I felt I was in a coach, rocking throught the snowy Russian landscape, wrapped in some vast Slavic tragedy.' That vignette of university life in 1968 comes from Leaf Fielding's recently published memoir To Live Outside the La...

'The British have a long history of cultural arrogance. Going out to save or civilise the rest of the world, to convert them to Christianity, correct them, free them from their Barbarian ways, is all cultural arrogance. It is no longer politically correct to think like this, which is good. But to get beyond attachments to ideals of democracy and equality and freedom as the Western conditioned mind conceives them, is through awareness. Just recognise this stillpoint, a centered, reflective attention to the present, and then cultivate that. Practice seeing the impermanence of the self-view, the sakkaya-ditthi , the impermanence of cultural conditioning, the arising and ceasing of thoughts, the thinking process.' From The Sound of Silence: the Selected Teachings of Ajahn Sumedho . More on the impermanence of cultural conditioning here . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2012. Any other copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fa...

Benjamin Britten was a pupil at Gresham's School in Holt, Norfolk from 1928 to 1930, and the photo above shows the "drama-documentary" Peace and Conflict being filmed there recently. The movie, which will be released as part of the 2013 Britten centenary, explores the development of the composer's pacifism during his time at Gresham's, and the producers say it uses new research and recently discovered archive material. The photo comes via an Eastern Daily Press story and there is more background on the film website . Although not mentioned in the film's promotional material it is worth noting that when asked "What would you do if Britain were invaded?" by a a tribunal for the registration of conscientous objectors in 1942, Britten replied "I believe in letting an invader in and then setting a good example" - an example which if followed by others in the event of a Nazi invasion would have meant the absence of Mendelssohn and a num...