Not coming to a TV near you


Elsewhere there are imaginative conspiracy theories as to why the film Peace and Conflict about Benjamin Britten's time at Gresham's School - production still above - is not being aired on British television. Follow this link for another possible reason conspicuously missing from that coverage.

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I have seen the future and it is cardboard

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This striking structure is the work of the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. It houses one of the electric powered tugs that worked on the Burgundy Canal until the 1930s, and is part of the Cap Canal museum at Pouilly-en-Auxois in France which we visited recently. By any criteria this is a remarkable work of art, but it becomes quite exceptional when it is explained that this is one of Shigeru Ban's famous paper tube structures. Shigeru Ban is famous for his innovative work using paper and cardboard tubing as a material for building construction, and he is particularly known for using recycled cardboard paper tubes to quickly and efficiently house disaster victims . His designs are influenced by the pioneering geodesic domes created by Buckminster Fuller, who made a guest appearance in Karlheinz Stockhausen - part of a dream . Free thinking chamber music ensemble Domus used a geodesic dome when they performed outside the comfort zone , while maverick architect Louis Kahn's
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New classical audiences need new music

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A reader's  perceptive comment  explained that to reach a new audience classical music must help listeners across the classical/non-classical divide.  Electronic Dance Music  (EDM) is the immensely popular staple fare of classical's elusive new young audience, and EDM lacks any narrative progression. Classical music can also be non-linear: one example is John Luther Adams' Become Desert , a seamless 40 minute sonic mirage which   abandons the horizontal narrative structures of works such as Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony  with its 'Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside'.  Become Desert sits comfortably in the concert hall, yet it would not be out of place in a sunset session at Ibiza's Café Del Mar or a full moon trance party on Koh Pha Ngan . As John Luther Adams described in a New York Times essay ,  Become Desert  literally entrances its audience - "You find yourself listening in ways you never have before. The scale of yo
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Have all the really great musicians come and gone?

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When classical musicians fought against tuxedo fascism

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There is not a shred of evidence that the fortunes of classical music are linked to what audiences wear, or don't wear. But the subject of dressing down versus dressing up continues to exercise the minds of classical music's movers and shakers. However, there is clear evidence that the sound audiences hear is vitally important. Yet, despite this, there is very little interest in the possibility that reshaping the sound may be the key to reshaping the future of classical music. In his influential book The Tuning of the World , composer and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer coined the word ' schizophonia ' to describe the disparity between an original sound and its electroacoustic reproduction. Schizophonia* is a form of cognitive dissonance , a condition that creates unease in a person. The Tuning of the World was written in 1977, and, until very recently, schizophonia resulted from the inability of electroacoustically reproduced sounds to mirror their unmediate
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...and the musicians were paid £800

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Virtue signalling does not sell concert tickets

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