Life discovered beyond the Planets


There is a generous link to On An Overgrown Path in Tom Service's Guardian preview of next week's chamber music Prom which features Imogen Holst's Phantasy Quartet. Thanks Tom; it is good to see there is life beyond the Planets for a Holst, and life beyond Sinfini Music, BBC Radio 3 and the Huffington Post for a blogger.

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Travels beyond TripAdvisor

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These photos were taken on my recent spirit quest in Morocco to the Sufi shrine of Sidi Chamharouch, which is seen above. A 75 minutes drive from Marrakech brought me to Imlil where the road ends and the mountains begin. The hamlet of Sidi Chamharouch - which is one of those blessed places which returns a blank in a Trip Advisor search - is at an altitude of 2350 metres and is reached by a tough and potentially dangerous two hour climb up a rocky path. Access is impossible for wheeled vehicles and supplies are brought in by the mules seen in my photos. Beyond Sidi Chamharouch is Jebel Toubkal, which at 4,167 metres is the highest mountain in North Africa. During my trek I was struck by the similarity between the High Atlas and Ladakh on the border of India and Tibet . Film director Martin Scorsese was also struck by the similarity. With Tibet a no-go zone he used this region for location shooting of his 1997 movie Kundun ; this depicts the Dalai Lama 's flight into exile fro...
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BBC Proms and the tyranny of the children’s encyclopedia

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As the annual administrative behemoth known as the BBC Proms lumbers into motion, filling the national ether with its familiar blend of civic piety and corporate branding, one is forced to confront a recurring fatigue.To listen to BBC Radio 3’s broadcasts of these mammoth London concerts is to witness a curious ritual of cultural containment. Before a note of Vaughan Williams or a forgotten rarity by Jonathan Harvey can safely enter the acoustic space, it must first be sanitized. The listener is subjected to presenters topping and tailing each masterwork with breathless, patronizing trivia, as if lifting entries straight from an illustrated children’s encyclopedia of classical music. One hears the familiar, smug cadence—that unmistakable institutional voice which assumes that the public cannot possibly encounter sound unmediated by narrative hand-holding.  The star system versus the art  The modern Proms season operates less as a sanctuary for deep listening and more as an e...
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Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

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