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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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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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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Who needs streaming?

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That's 3200 CDs and counting. More than enough to satisfy me until I shake off this mortal coil. Recent purchases include the following. Harry Van Der Kamp and the Gesualdo Consort Amsterdam's 17 disc box  Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck: The Complete Vocal Works . Sweelinck is an important and overlooked composer who pioneered turning sacred music into an art form. From BIS Dark With Excessive Bright  by Missy Mazzoli; contemporary music that might just reach a wider audience recorded in stunning SACD sound . This new release is just more confirmation that the music industry let the genie out of the bottle by ditching CDs and embracing streaming, and then went on to murder the genie by opting for the MP3 format as the de facto audio standard.  And again from BIS and again in hi-res SACD,  Autumn Equinox by the Finnish composer Sebastian Fagerlund . There is so much quality new music coming from Scandinavian composers that is being buried under the current obsession w...
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Swamped by a tsunami of classical populism.

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These photos show me with Jonathan Harvey in 2010 recording an interview for Future Radio. As I will be away from blogging for a while I am leaving you with a long listen. My broadcast interview is available via this link from the archive website of the then Future Radio station manager Tom Buckham. The 87 minute broadcast ends with a performance of Jonathan's masterpiece for large orchestra and electronics Speakings with Ilan Volkov conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. (For those with 2025 attention spans a transcript is available via this link .)   Jonathan Harvey was a composer with Buddhist tendencies . His composition ... towards a Pure Land for large orchestra evokes the state of mind in Buddhism beyond suffering where there is no grasping. Two years after I recorded the interview Jonathan left us far too early to travel towards the Pure Land - Nibbāna . Since then his eclectic vision of a new music for a new audience has been swamped by a tsunami of cl...
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The Acid Queen hears Stravinsky in Jajouka

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One of several notable new publications in 2025 was Susannah Cahalan 's life of Rosemary Leary. Her biography  The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life of Rosemary Woodruff Leary is a much-needed account of Timothy Leary's often overlooked third wife. Importantly, this meticulously researched and sympathetic book provides an objective counterbalance to the many Leary hagiographies. Synchronicities include my unlikely brief personal encounter with Timothy Leary's second ex-wife, and and the surprising story of how Elgar took a trip . And more synchronicity in this passage from The Acid Queen .   ....It took a full day to reach the foothills of the Ahl Srif Mountains in Morocco to visit the famed Master Musicians of Joujouka, musical healers who mended broken people with their ancient songs. The show begins with a violin. Pennywhistles joined in. Rosemary placed a tab of LSD on Timothy's tongue and then one on her own. Men in hoods rose and lifted wooden pipes that sounded ...
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Elgar and the occult

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Aleister Crowley was a practicioner of the occult, ceremonial magician and recreational drug experimenter. Sir Edward Elgar was Master of the King's Music, practising Catholic and composer of Land of Hope and Glory . A connection between the two may seem highly improbable. But this post explores a little known path linking Elgar to Crowley's world of the occult. In 1915 the actress Lena Ashwell asked Elgar to write the incidental music for a play she was producing. The Starlight Express was based on the recently published novel A Prisoner in Fairyland and the adaption was by the books' author Algernon Blackwood and Violet Pearn. Elgar's original intention was to reuse music from his early composition The Wand of Youth, but as the project progressed he added a substantial amount of new music to the score. The Starlight Express opened in London on 29th December 1915 to mixed reviews. The critical consensus was that the play was too long and the staging inappropriat...
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Classical music can learn a lot from our feline friends

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This cat lives in the house in Assas that was the home of the legendary harpsichordist Scott Ross from 1984 until he died of an Aids related illness five years later. I took the photos a few days ago on the front porch of his little house in Languedoc and they may be more than just charming images. Because Scott Ross’ biographer Michel Proulx tells us that the harpsichord master adopted a black and white female cat while living at Assas. So could we be looking at a hitherto unknown member of a great music lineage? The sleeve notes of Scott Ross’ first LP identified him as a cat lover; in later years his cats accompanied him on transatlantic flights and his feline friends provided the only lasting relationships in an otherwise solitary life. Anthropologist Desmond Morris has observed that “artists like cats; soldiers like dogs”, and there may be a scientific explanation as to why musicians in particular are attracted to cats. As this extract from Akif Pirinçci and Rolf Degen’s b...
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Wagner, Mahler and Shostakovich all sound like film music

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In a typically thoughtful contribution to my post Why not play the premier league composers more often? Richard Bratby - who is professionally involved in classical music - mused "speaking solely from my own experience - there is a very noticeable falling-off in ticket sales when a symphony orchestra programmes pre-Beethoven repertoire, irrespective of the quality of the performance or the music, or the energy with which it is marketed. But why?" Now Kea has answered Richard's question with the following comment: Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich, etc, all sound more or less like film music (or -- more accurately -- film music sounds more or less like recycled bits of Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich, etc) and therefore don't require any intellectual involvement or serious effort to listen to. Understanding the music of Bach, Mozart or Haydn, etc (or for that matter Schumann, Brahms, Webern, Cage, etc) actually requires people to listen actively rather than being pulled alo...
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The end of innocence

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In 1963 an English teacher, who considered passion more important than protocol, smuggled me and a few of his other 14 year old students into a cinema to see a '16' rated film. The newly-released Lord of the Flies was directed by Peter Brook and filmed on a very low budget. It brilliantly transferred William Golding's novel, which we were studying for 'O' Level English, to the screen, and went on to become a classic of the cinema. The DVD of Lord of the Flies , which restores Tom Hollyman's stunning black and white photography to its original glory (images above and below) , is essential viewing. A bonus on the DVD is the optional commentary by Peter Brook and his production team, which was recorded in 2000. But in the 90 minute commentary there is not one single mention of the music score which, with its repetition of the Kyrie Eleison motif, is an integral part of the film. The music for Lord of the Flies was written by Raymond Leppard. It is his best kn...
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The art of the animateur

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I am a great fan of the late John Drummond, and have quoted him, here, many times . But, I blame Drummond for the present decline in presentation standards on BBC Radio 3. In 1987, when he became controller of the network, Drummond changed the role of the presentation team from 'neutral' announcers to presenters who, in his own words, could "communicate enthusiasm and knowledge". Drummond's change was well intentioned, but terribly misguided. It has been responsible for a disastrous sequence of presenters from Paul 'music for lovers' Gambaccini in the 1990s to Petroc Trelawny and his colleagues today, whose idea of communicating enthusiasm and knowledge is to regurgitate half-digested chunks from a children's encyclopedia of music. The disease isn't just confined to the radio. BBC TV's Classical Star , which is fronted by Radio 3 presenters Charles Hazlewood and Chi-chi Nwanoku, has been described by an eminent musician as 'an obscene pa...
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