With a little help from our friends

October 4th is World Animal Day. Which explains why this morning I thought I saw a Sufi cat.

Photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2012. Ginger can be booked via his agent Catskonas Holt. Report broken links, missing images etc to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk Also on Facebook and Twitter.



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Why cats hate Mahler symphonies

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My recent post ' Your cat is a music therapist ' was well appreciated judging by site traffic. So here is a codicil which raises some interesting points about synaesthesia. Reportedly Alexander Scriabin, Jean Sibelius, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti and Franz Liszt were among the classical composers who experienced cross-over between sensory channels. The impact of narrowing sensory bandwidth as music moves from a live to a recorded environment, and then from analogue to lossy digital formats is little understood and little researched.But it may have important implications for classical music's attempts to reach a new audience, and, topically, it may be very relevant to the post-COVID experience of Zoom concerts and live music in socially distanced auditoriums . I will discuss how what we see influences what we hear in a forthcoming post. Meanwhile here is an extract from Akif Pirinçci and Rolf Degen ’s book Cat Sense which explains the synaesthetic impact of a Ma
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The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

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Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
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Götterdämmerung

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That photo shows the ruins of the great 12th century Tinmel Mosque in Morocco's High Atlas mountains which collapsed in Friday night's terrible earthquake . Below is the post I wrote after my 2018 visit to Tinmel.  Four days after the earthquake I was scheduled to fly to Marrakech and then, once again,  trek in the High Atlas close to the quake's epicentre. The mountain village I would have been based in is now cut-off by landslides, and has no electricity or mobile phone connection. But we have received information that, thankfully, our Moroccan friends there are safe, although others have died in the village. Now playing: Siegfried's Death and Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung, Klaus Tennstedt conducting the LPO .  Is this Wagner's legendary Monsalvat? No, this is not Monsalvat, the mythical castle of the Knights of the Grail in Parsifal. My photos show the 12th century mosque in Tinmel at an altitude of 1270 metres in the High Atlas mountains 100km from Mar
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Nada Brahma - Sound is God

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It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig
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Watch Michel Petrucciani video online

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Back in January 2005 I wrote about legendary jazz pianist Michel Petrucciani (right), and that article remains high in my 'popular pages' listing after fifteen months. Since writing that piece Overgrown Path reader Andrew Nathan and I have been tracking down Petrucciani video footage, and just this week Andrew came up with an absolute gem that is available free on Google video. In my original article I wrote that Michel Petrucciani was a 'pianistic genius' , and it is no coincidence that he is buried in the Pierre Lachaise cemetery in Paris alongside Chopin. This 38 minute video with excellent sound (and a bonus guest appearance from the gorgeous Charlotte Rampling ) is not just essential viewing for jazz fans, it should be watched by all students of the piano - whatever their discipline. Just click here to view this important document. (The video is not hosted by On An Overgrown Path , this is a link to an external site). And to set the video into context here is m
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Censorship by web proxy

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Yesterday's article about Harvard Radio station WHRB 95.3 FM included a number of occurences of the words 0rgy/ies, all in a music programming context. Many large organisations run web proxy software such as WebMarshal which, to quote their website : When a user on your network requests access to a web page, the request goes through WebMarshal. WebMarshal then checks the requested web page against a set of rules that you (the employer) define (your internet access policy). WebMarshal then scans the page for its content - viruses, profanity, appropriateness, b0mb making, adult themes etc - a whole host of things.. Then if the rules allow, and the user is allowed access, and if WebMarshal deems the page is "safe", WebMarshal fetches the page and sends it to the users browser. It does all this instantly and transparently to your users - affording them a safe Internet browsing experience. Some web proxy software decided that my article Harvard Radio treads where BBC fears t
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Sibelius remastered or reimagined?

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Classical music has a schizophrenic relationship with sound quality. On the one hand there is an obsessive preocuppation with hideously expensive 'acoustically perfect' concert halls . On the other hand recorded classical music has been chased down the rabbit hole of lo-fi by MP3s, streaming, ear buds, and mobile listening, and rarely - if ever - is sound quality mentioned in reviews of CDs . So it is not surprising but still disappointing that a major initiative by one of the largest classical labels to open the debate about recorded sound quality has passed unremarked, while classical's great and good continue their demands for yet another 'acoustically perfect' concert hall.  Warner Classic's rerelease of Sir John Barbirolli's legendary Sibelius recordings are labelled as 'remastered'. But what is remastering? Mastering and remastering are two very different processes. When a recorded is mastered to CD very little is done to the sound
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Once Britten twice shy

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A reader reports that Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst make a surprise appearance in the adult humour comic Viz . Copyright, not to mention good taste, prevents me from reproducing the whole comic strip, but the heavily edited samples above gives the general idea. Imo and Ben appear together in rather more congenial surroundings here . 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
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Berlin Philharmonic's first woman conductor

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In 2005 the appointment of a woman music director by a major American orchestra caused a storm of controversy . So, it is surprising to find that it was back in 1930 that the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was first conducted by a woman, and even more surprising to find she was an American. But the story doesn't have a happy ending. Despite receiving critical acclaim, Antonia Brico found doors closed to her when she returned to the US, and was forced to form her own orchestras to continue her conducting career. She is seen above conducting in New York in 1945. (Image credit Dr. Ralph Weizsäcker ). Antonia Brico was born Wilhelmina Wolthus in Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1902, and emigrated to California with her foster parents in 1908. She attended high school in Oakland where she gained experience as a pianist and conductor. She went on to study liberal arts at the University of California, Berkeley , and also worked at the San Francisco Opera as an assistant to the director,
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Untold story of the counterculture's Islamic connection

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For many children of the sixties a 'journey to the East' was a mandatory rite of passage. As a result one of the lasting impacts of the counterculture was the assimilation into Western culture of esoteric religions. The embrace of Vedanta and Zen Buddhism is well-documented, as is the music that it produced ranging from the Beatles' Indian period to John Cage's 4' 33". Less celebrated is the counterculture's engagement with the esoteric strand of Islam known as Sufism, an involvement that also produced important but overlooked music. Given the current preoccupation with Islam it is puzzling that more attention has not been paid to the green shoots of Sufism - a tradition with a benign history - that appeared in the West in the late 1960s. Earlier this year the film Blessed are the Strangers directed by young director Ahmed Peerbux premiered. But this film is selective in its coverage of 1960s Sufism, so this post attempts to fill in some conspicuous and
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