I design gardens with music

Bob, you'll find a link in my latest post to a charming BBC Radio 3 documentary on Takemitsu which was broadcast a few years ago. In case you missed it then, I recommend it. It briefly restored my faith in Radio 3.
That email was sent by David Derrick and the headline quote comes from Toru Takemitsu who appeared here recently in Remixing Japan. My header photo was taken in Les Jardins du Loriot, Venansault, France and featured in another post that mixes music and gardens.

Also on Facebook and Twitter. Photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2013.

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Where has all the musical adventurousness gone?

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My enthusiasm for ensemble sans frontières  Oregon is shared by Trevor Hodgett who wrote the booklet essay for the newly released 1974 . This double CD captures a live set by the band recorded in exemplary sound by Radio Bremen in March 1974. Oregon were then at the top of their game, and remained there until master multi-instrumentalist Collin Walcott was killed in an East German tour bus crash. Here is Trevor Hodgett's assessment of Oregon:  'The late 60s/early 1970s was an era when musical adventurousness and eclecticism had become almost the norm and when musicians like Miles Davis, The Beatles and The Grateful Dead were redefining popular music and blending genres in previously unimaginable ways. But Oregon, who formed in 1970, may just have been the most dizzyingly original band of them all, with a clearly irrepressible determination to transcend conventions and pursue their own unique musical vision.'    In 1974 Kraftwerk released their seminal album Autobahn , Pa
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Virtue signalling does not sell concert tickets

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This article is unique among the 4554 posts uploaded to On An Overgrown Path since August 2004. Because it agrees with a Slipped Disc post. Last week Norman uploaded a Slipped Disc reader's contribution headlined ' Why I won't be going back to concerts '. The thrust of the contribution was not the reader's fear of COVID, but how for him concerts had become "just a bit too often ordinary... a bit of a ritual". Which resonates with my recent post 'Where has all the musical adventurousness gone?'  lamenting the demise of musicians who is transcend conventions and pursue their own unique musical visions. David Munrow is talking to Peter Maxwell Davies in that photo. In the early 1970s David Munrow’s Pied Piper radio programme was broadcast four times a week for five years and introduced a new audience to early music. He presented a successful TV series, and wrote scores for the BBC TV series The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elisabeth R , and
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My 2018 post profiled the Parsee violinist Homi Kanga who joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1950 and may have been the first non-white orchestral musician in the UK. My post related how Homi Kanga left the LPO in 1960 after he complained about the dismissal of a colleague for what he viewed as political reasons. In my post I speculated that Homi Kanga's departure was triggered by a dispute between the LPO management and its Anglo-Indian violinist John Mayer .  However a new comment on my 2018 post suggests Homi Kanga's departure resulted from the dismissal of another musician. An anonymous commenter has suggested that "It was over the sacking of Chumleigh Hind that Homi left the orchestra" but provides no more information. Chumleigh Hind was a scholarship holder at the Royal Manchester College of Music  from 1945-50 and went on to play in the Hallé Orchestra under Sir John Barbirolli and also performed as a soloist . But my research has uncovered no oth
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