Lost in explanation


Can you imagine music without explanation?

Elmediator is a multi-genre and multimedia performance venue in Perpignan, France. This post is also available via Facebook and Twitter.

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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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Male American pioneers

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As the credit crunches who is going to pass up the opportunity to explore lots of composers for less cash? Budget-priced CDs receive a lot of attention , but budget books are also well worth investigating. 20th-Century Composers is an excellent series from innovative publisher Phaidon . They were originally published in the 1990s and are now reappearing at bargain price. The twenty-five titles range from Bernstein and the Beatles through Minimalists to Hindemith, Hartmann and Henze and György Ligeti , and on to Erich Wolfgang Korngold portrayed by our own Jessica Duchen . Seen above is American Pioneers by Alan Rich which I picked up for £6.95 in Blackwells in Edinburgh (egregious strap-line 'The Knowledge Retailer' ). The book is, as you would expect from a leading art publisher, a visual as well as textual delight, with art direction by New Yorker cover contributor Jean-Jaques Sempé . The main profiles are of Charles Ives , Edgar Varèse , Henry Cowell John Cage ...
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Which is the best is not important

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A recent post highlighted Jazz Raga , a John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar tribute, as one of the few notable new albums in 2025. Another standout among too many dreary derivative new releases is CPO's 16 CD box  Michael Haydn: Complete Symphonies; Wind Concertos .  Michael Haydn's music is overlooked because of meaningless comparisons of 'greatness' with his older brother of Joseph and his contemporary and friend Mozart. As Ajahn Sumedho has explained : "...which is the best is not important. 'The best' is merely a condition we create with thought. When we think about which is the best, we are going into opinions, preferences, conditioning and attachment". Just like the music of Joseph Haydn and Mozart, Michael Haydn's music 'is' and should simply be appreciated for its 'isness'.  
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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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Label me obsessed

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In Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby , one of the characters, Tom Buchanan, a rich man who's also a well-known polo player, says, "I've heard of making a garage out of a stable, but I'm the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage." Not to brag, but I'm doing the same thing. Whenever I find a quality LP recording of a piece I have on CD, I don't hesitiate to sell the CD and buy the LP. And when I find a better-quality recording, something closer to the original, I don't hesitate to trade in the old LP for a new one. It takes a lot of time to pursue this, not to mention a considerable investement of cash. Most people would, I am pretty sure, label me obsessed. The kindred spirit is Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami writing in his new memoir What I talk about when I talk about running . And talking of the same piece on LP and CD my photo shows three generations of a recording I couldn't possibly live without. The HMV LP of Sir John Bar...
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All you need is click bait

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Slipped Disc , the self-acclaimed "world's most-read cultural website" recently ran the story and image shown above. In a clumsy piece of ethnic stereotyping the photo was cropped, cut and pasted without attribution from the website of Angel Island Immigration Station . This notorious station of detention and exclusion for Asian immigrants in San Francisco Bay closed in 1940.  In the interests of shedding just a little light to counter Slipped Disc 's click bait heat, the following is extracted with full acknowledgement from the Angel island website :  Between 1870 and 1940, more than 25 million immigrants arrived in the United States, with a major peak in annual arrivals between 1900 and 1914, when nearly 900,000 persons came per year on average. Those arriving in San Francisco, especially Asian immigrants, encountered very different legal regimes and social circumstances than those passing through Ellis Island in New York. On the West Coast, immigration was medi...
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Third rate music on Naxos' American Classics?

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I'll be interested in American readers' reactions to the start of this review by the Guardian's Andrew Clements - ' Considering how much third-rate music has been included in Naxos's American Classics series, Elliott Carter has so far been poorly served by the budget-price label. But in the year of the composer's 100th birthday, this - the first of two discs that will include all five of Carter's string quartets - could be the start of a major addition to his discography.' Andrew Clements then goes on to write a glowing five-star review of Naxos' new CD of Elliott Carter's String Quartets Nos 1 and 5 performed by the Pacifica Quartet . I'll agree whole-heartedly with his verdict on the Carter Quartets, I bought them last week and they are superb performances of superb music. But I am not so sure about his other views. That judgement of 'third-rate music' raises the interesting point of should a critic focus primarily on the interpr...
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Research identifies classical music’s unique selling point

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Music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system… These results indicate that intense pleasure in response to music can lead to dopamine release in the striatal system... Our results help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies. Those extracts are from a paper in the journal Nature Neuroscience . Complex science needs to be treated with respect and caution, but the findings do resonate with recent paths about the links between classical music and hallucinogens , kinetic art (thanks go to Norman Perryman for the heads up ), therapy , and ecstatic traditions such as Sufism . They also suggest exploitable similarities between music and tangible reward systems such as sex and gourmet food, and more importantly to opportunities for the medical application of music – in particular as a palliative for Parkinson’s disease, because a loss of dopamine-secreting neuron...
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Gentlemen, old Bach is here....

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One Sunday evening in the spring of his seventh year as king, as his musicians were gathering for the evening concert, a courtier brought Frederick the Great his usual list of arrivals at the town gate. As he looked down the list of names, he gave a start. "Gentlemen," he said, "old Bach is here." Those who heard him said there was "a kind of agitation" in his voice. These are the opening words of James Gaines' new book. Bach's compositions are well documented in a wealth of excellent recordings, and there are many scholarly books on his life and work, starting with Albert Schweitzer's seminal biography which was first published in French in 1905. But to date the Bach literature has lacked a really accessible book that makes the man, as opposed to his music, come to life. Now we have Evening in the Palace of Reason . This follows the lives of J.S.Bach and Frederick the Great in parallel and culminates in their meeting in Potsdam. This resul...
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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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