On An Overgrown Path

Read the backstory in New audiences want classical music up close and personal . Image is Wikimedia Commons via Classicalite . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use", for the purpose of critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter .

I conducted an interesting test years ago. While working with students around North America and Europe I would ask them to lie on the floor in a quiet, darkened room and hum the tone of celestial unity. I was surprised when I noticed that in North America the tone was generally B natural, 60 cycles, while in Europe it was G sharp, 50 cycles. They were humming the sound made by electricity in their particular part of the world - the sound that a light bulb gives off etc. Somehow we carry a memory imprint of this sound with us. We're never oblivious to the environment around us, even if we're not paying attention. That anecdote comes from a talk given by sound ecologist and composer R. Murray Schafer at Hirosaki University, Japan in 2005. Evidence of how we carry sound imprints meshes with my post Research proves audiences become what they listen to . This contingency continues into Jonathan Harvey's observation that "Energy is oscillation, largely. And when we say we ...

Last week Philip Sheppard supported Toumani and Sidiki Diabaté in Norwich with a superb set for electric cello that engaged the packed non-classical audience from the first notes*. Afterwards, I complimented Philip, who is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and an in demand film composer, on the compelling headphone-like sound in the auditorium. To which he responded with the telling observation that 'No one mixes for speakers these days'. Today the mix of choice in recording sessions is the immersive up close and personal headphone sound, and not the traditional speaker mix portraying the musicians spread out at a distance in front of the listener. Classical music needs to take this on board if it really wants to reach a wider and younger audience. Because the sound in a classical concert is balanced to the same conventions as the traditional but redundant studio speaker mix. There is an erroneous and dangerous orthodoxy that the sound of classical music is encapsulat...

Dumbed down classical music has joined Top Gear on the list of British cultural exports. State broadcaster Radio France , which includes classical station France Musique among its seven national networks, has appointed Mathieu Gallet as its new president, and he has not been slow to import dumbing down from across the Channel. In a press interview M. Gallet has declared: “It’s not acceptable in Paris, for example, that the audience for France Musique is 1.2% compared with 3.5% for [commercial owned] Radio Classique," and promised he would “make a larger place for music and less for musicology". This despite the error of such thinking having been dramatically demonstrated by his broadcasting colleagues in Britain. Giving new audiences classical music without showing them how to listen doesn't make sense. Which explains why listening figures for classical radio - state and commercial stations combined - in the UK has plunged by 10.7% over twelve months . BBC Radio 3 ...

There has been a large spike in traffic to my 2012 post Is Olivier Messiaen part of the Vichy myth? seen above. Traffic logs show the traffic as coming from Facebook, but do not identify the exact source. As this is a mildly controversial topic with topical resonances I would be grateful for any information from readers about links to this post. Contact me via a comment or the email address in the sidebar. Thanks. Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

I began to understand that night, for the first time, the inner usefulness, the psychological value, of the Terrible Deities painted for meditation purposes on the walls of the gompas . I saw that in their frank portrayal of the horror of anger, desire, greed, and lust for power, they do not merely terrify the onlooker, they give him an opportunity to confront those parts of his energies which he is repressing, to confront, understand and master them, to turn them [...] into a power to heal. That extract is from Andrew Harvey's Journey in Ladakh . The sixteenth or seventeenth century thangka seen above shows a heruka , a wrathful male deity, and comes from a temple in Ladakh. Eliane Radique's electronic masterpiece Trilogie of Mort is inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Kyema , the first part, represents the six stages of the intermediate state of bardo between life and death. The second part, Kailasha , evokes an imaginary pilgrimage to the Buddhist holy mountain o...

What’s killing criticism? The stars… In a former life, as assistant editor of a formerly respected newspaper, I fought hard and successfully against the blight of applying star ratings to reviews of live performances. My argument was that once readers counted the stars they would not bother to read those reviews. Of all my gloomiest predictions, I fear this one has been most fully validated. When I stepped down, the stars took over. Today, critics whose columns are unadorned by stars stand a chance of getting read down to the very end. The rest must hope for a scandal or a miracle to secure close attention from a general readership. That condemnation of star ratings by Norman Lebrecht appears on Slipped Disc today . Above it is his latest review for Sinfini Music . As you can see, he gives the album a four star rating. Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical anal...

This is the strangest music I know. It's hardly music at all. Those long wind things... the way the drum rattles in the middle of a prayer... the long roll of cymbals that brings everything to a climax. It is hardly music at all. It is as if the rock were singing; it is as if the wind and the rain were singing. It is not music: it is sound, essential sound. That description of Tibetan Buddhist ritual music comes from Andrew Harvey's classic travelogue Journey in Ladakh . I took the photo of the monks of the Tibetan Buddhist Tashi Lhunpo Monastery playing 'those long wind things' - Tibetan long horns known as dungchen - in 2009 at the unlikely venue of Snape Maltings: for the full story see Wagner and the Tantric Orchestra . Increasingly classical music dwells in suburban comfort zones , but, as readers will know, those regions hold little interest for me. African American author John Francis has described how : 'The 'ragged edge' plays an important part ...

The wrong note played with gusto always sounds better than the right note played timidly. Today's wisdom comes from Tommy Jordan , co-founder of the alternative rock band Geggy Tah . I took the photo of notes being played with gusto in 2012 at a school in Norwich during an In Harmony session. However, as members of the Britten Sinfonia were working with the young musicians, the notes played with gusto were also right. As part of the In Harmony project I was privileged to present a performance by the youngsters that preceded a Britten Sinfonia concert with Pekka Kuusisto playing Thomas Adès' Violin Concerto. More on that story in Music on the other side of the great celebrity divide . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use", for the purpose of critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

It goes without saying that any derogatory personal comment about a singer in a review is unacceptable. So I heartily endorse Norman Lebrecht's outspoken Slipped Disc editorial declaring : 'Fat should not be an issue in opera', and all praise to BBC Radio 4's flagship World at One programme for trying to engineer a confrontation between Norman and the 'chubby critics' on air today. However, we should also remember that the Glyndebourne Der Rosenkavalier is not the first time that journalists have made fat an issue in opera. Preceding it by several years was the description of Maria Callas as a 'fat Greek soprano' seen above. It appeared in the high profile book Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness by a certain Norman Lebrecht. Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

In Western civilisations time is defined by constants - seconds, minutes, hours etc. Our contemporary society is ruled by time, and today's binary culture is defined by inflexible analogue to digital sampling rates that are measured in frequencies (kHz) per second. By contrast, in the ancient perennial wisdom tradition of Buddhism - which has at its heart the concept of impermanence - time is measured by change *. Jonathan Harvey described how , by convention, classical music was grounded in linear time, and how the Darmstadt School led by Stockhausen and Boulez challenged that convention by introducing the revolutionary concept of global time depicting eternity - the 'tranquil abiding' of Buddhism that Jonathan depicted in his eponymous orchestral work . The paleontologist Bob Brain has described how: We're tied to a sequential time sequence, it's the only way evolution can work - otherwise everything happens at once. But every now and then the process falter...

In the photo below I am interviewing Jonathan Harvey in August 2010. When the interview was finished I drove down from his house on the Sussex Downs and ate alone in a restaurant in Lewes. During my meal I listened to the interview again on headphones, and as I listened it became apparent that something rather special had been captured. This was confirmed when the interview was subsequently broadcast on Future Radio : how many contemporary composers have made the news - not arts - sections of the Guardian and the Telegraph in the same week? Very sadly, the interview was made even more special by Jonathan's untimely death two years later. Since then it has troubled me that this important document has only been available as a sound file. But, fortunately, that has now been rectified by composer and pianist Timothy Stevens in Australia. Tim undertook the herculean task of transcribing the interview, and it now gives me considerable pleasure to make his transcript available as an ...