On An Overgrown Path

Very good to see new music in the form of the above CD making the Gramophone Concerto Award shortlist alongside hardy perennials form Bruch, Beethoven et al . At the time of the 2010 premiere of James MacMillan's Oboe Concerto I interviewed soloist Nicholas Daniel together with James MacMillan who conducted the Britten Sinfonia in both the premiere performances and the recording. That interview can be heard on SoundCloud via this link . As well as discussing the music, the interview touches on some familiar Overgrown Path themes including the links between music and spirituality. Nick Daniel plays a mean oboe, but he is also worth listening to talking about Tibetan Buddhism. Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Classical music cannot stand still; so that means it must find new audiences. Western classical music has evolved into a highly dualist art form with clearly demarcated boundaries around its core offering of the orchestral and operatic repertoire. There is little debate that this repertoire must - and will - remain central to the art form. But it can be argued that to open up new markets the current watertight boundaries around that core offering must become porous. An example of a blurring of these boundaries would be an entry into the mind, body and spirit market; a market which a post here in 2011 pointed out was then worth around $11 billion annually in the US, compared with $200 million for classical album sales. It is tempting to dismiss the mind, body and spirit market opportunity as no more than 'Mozart for meditation' and 'Gregorian Chant for the soul', but that would be a mistake. As my earlier post noted , the spiritual dimension is found in many of clas...

Western classical music has evolved into a highly dualist art form with strict differentiations between masterpiece/minorpiece, celebrity/nobody, young/ageing, prestigious/unimportant, contemporary/mainstream, acclaimed/insignificant, classical/non-classical etc etc. It is my proposition that this rigid dualism erects barriers to engagement with both new and existing audiences. Central to duality is the process of objectifying. This dissects the seamless flow of music making into objects, each with a discrete form delineated by clear boundaries - celebrity conductor, anniversary composer, world class orchestra, prestigious festival etc. Non-dualism dismantles these barriers and returns the music to its original seamless free form - the mystical concept of lata’if . John Coltrane disregarded traditional musical boundaries in his pioneering free form jazz, and my recent listening has included returning to saxophonist Raphaël Imbert's Bach-Coltrane project that I first wrote about i...

In Time Out London 's current edition music bloggers are sent to Berlin and Brighton to carry out three tasks. One of these is to: "Scare yourself silly - find a gig or DJ that a local has recommended to you that is not your usual musical taste". That injunction to scare yourself silly with music from outside your comfort zone resonates with recent musings here about changing the way we listen . Just as light is defined by shade, so familiar music is made more meaningful by the unfamiliar. But we live in an age dominated by the duality of like or dislike; with personalised content delivery making it all too easy to filter out dislikes, leaving us free to live in a soporific world of likes. This polarisation has seeped by osmosis into classical concerts, with 'health and safety' programming removing the risk of the audience being scared silly by an unfamiliar piece. (Yes, the prospect at the BBC Proms of the Heritage Orchestra playing arrangements of Ibiza danc...

A recent post about Sir Hubert Parry's celebrated Blake setting Jerusalem generated considerable interest; so today I am venturing further down the Parry path. Sir Adrian Boult recorded Parry's Fifth Symphony (a work that should be much better known ) in the autumn of 1978 for EMI. The session on 20th December in Studio One Abbey Road was both the last session for the Parry LP and the final session of Sir Adrian's distinguished recording career which had started in 1921. We knew that it would be the 89-year-old conductor's farewell to the studio, and I was privileged to be there for those last takes. The recordings of the three Parry works are still in the catalogue as part of the essential EMI/Warner Sir Adrian Boult: The Complete Conductor 10 CD box, and they completely belie their conductor's age. Yet just a few months before, Sir Adrian had written the following letter to his producer Christopher Bishop. I will be very surprised if our current generation of c...

By supporting Spotify, Apple Music and similar services the classical music industry is backing the wrong kind of streaming. But let me make clear at the start that the purpose of this post is not to condemn music streaming. In fact my thesis is that streaming in a very different form holds the key to classical music's future. Streaming is nothing new; in fact the concept of streaming - at the heart of which is a steady and continuous flow of ideas - has been with us for at least four thousand years. At this point I turn to the Bhagavad-gītā , but please don't leave me; music streaming has its roots in the contemporary knowledge tradition of binary technology, and the Bhagavad-gītā is just another rather older knowledge tradition. The fourth chapter of the Gītā tells us in Sanskrit that Evam paramparā-prāptam , which translates as 'In this way, by handing from master to pupil, the knowledge is passed down'. It is then then explained that sa kāleneha mahatā yogo nas...

One of the many inane things currently doing the rounds on social media is a website devoted to "the greatest poses, facial expressions, hair, and other moments caught on camera, in the history of orchestral conducting". Sir Adrian Boult always eschewed histrionics on the podium. Once he shared a Prom with a young Mark Elder; after a strenuous rehearsal Mark Elder retired to the dressing room where Sir Adrian looked at him over a newspaper and remarked: "Ah, I see you are one of the sweaty type". Anecdote is told by Mark Elder in a contribution to the BBC Philharmonic Club Magazine, June 1986. Header image is grabbed from YouTube video of Sir Adrian Boult conducting the London Philharmonic in Vaughan Williams: Symphony No.8; this footage illustrates perfectly how a great conductor does not have to be a sweaty type. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s...

Applying the non-dualist view of the Open Path to the music business is unexpected and very thought-provoking indeed! It shows very convincingly how too often music is being turned as an object. Dualism is no evil. What may be called for is a more meditative way to listen to sounds, realizing that the most elaborate symphonies are but a hitch to the all-pervading Silence. Also a less discriminative way to appreciate - is not the humming of pygmies hunters as important a contribution as the Bolero? In fact, is the business of music not an illustration of a very general human behaviour? That comment was added to the post Let us change the way we listen by Karim Noverraz, who is an initiate of the Sufi Way and Open Path . The photos were taken at the Art in the Park Eid celebration in Milton Keynes on July 18/19th. This free event, which was refreshingly devoid of star performers, gave the lie to the fashionable dogma that the festival with most celebrity musicians wins. A Sufi fable of...

In a 2011 radio interview Jordi Savall explained to me why he started his own record label Alia Vox - "Ten years ago we started to feel that when working with the major companies, it was impossible to create innovative projects that introduced the risks associated with unknown repertoire. This convinced us that we had to be free to make our own decisions, and had to be free to give decisions about the music priority over commercial decisions". To date Alia Vox has been a Savall family label , with Jordi and his greatly-missed wife Montserrat Figueras as the constants, supplemented by their two children Arianna and Ferran . But now, eighteen very successful years and more than one hundred CDs later, Alia Vox has become an extended family label with the launch of Alia Vox Diversa. This will release recordings made by the pool of talented musicians who are long-term collaborators with Jordi Savall, and the mission of the label is to give the music priority over commercial im...

'Announced today on BBC Radio 2’s Elaine Paige on Sunday, budding singers have until 30 August to submit their videos singing Do-Re-Mi from The Sound of Music. A selection of these entries will be included within a video montage, broadcast on BBC One as part of the Last Night of the Proms, and shown at the Royal Albert Hall and at all four Proms in the Park events across the UK on Saturday 12 September' - from BBC press release 'If you set out to chase ratings, it's quite hard to succeed' - from interview with new BBC Radio 3 controller and Proms supremo Alan Davey Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

In a typical piece of click baitery about the 1916 premiere of Sir Hubert Parry's Jerusalem , Norman Lebrecht writes that *: The conductor was Sir Henry Walford Davis. He and Parry had previously appeared together on a pro-War ‘Fight for Right’ platform. In fact the origins of both the 'Fight for Right' movement and Parry's celebrated setting of Blake are far more complex than suggested by that facile 'pro-war' stereotyping. Soldier and spy turned pacifist Sir Francis Younghusband formed 'Fight for Right' as a religious, not militaristic movement created to engage in a spiritual, not military, conflict. Of particular contemporary relevance is that Younghusband's vision was for a movement that would appeal "to the whole of humanity... Hindus, Mohammedans, Buddhists..." Younghusband believed that the spirit of the people “would respond to music, speech, song”, and this resulted in the creation of Parry's setting of Blake as a rallying ...

'Great art arrives through the artist's openness to the unknown and the unexpected, in addition to his or her history of practice and developed skills' - Pir Elias Amidon , Pir Elias Amidon is spiritual director of the Sufi Way . Photo was taken by me at the Zaouia Moulay Idriss II Mosque in Fez, Morocco. Any other copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Che fece...il gran rifiuto * For some people the day comes when they have to declare the great Yes or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes ready within him; and saying it, he goes forward in honor and self-assurance. He who refuses does not repent. Asked again, he would still say no. Yet that no—the right no— undermines him all his life. That poignantly topical poem is by C.P. Cavafy **. Dimitri Mitropoulos, who is better known as a conductor , was the first to compose Cavafy settings - audio sample via this link - while John Tavener also paid homage in his ' Tribute to Cavafy ', but the soundtrack for this post is provided by another composer. In their indispensable ' Composing a World: Lou Harrison, Musical Wayfare r' Leta E. Miller and Frederic Lieberman describe how: "For 'Scenes from Cavafy' (1980), Lou Harrison paraphrased selections from the Alexandrian poet, which he then set for male chorus, baritone solo, gamelan, psal...

There was a gratifyingly positive response to yesterday's post Let us change the way we listen . Too often these days I despair of the direction that classical music is taking; but the open-minded response to my advocacy of non-duality shows there is room for an alternative to the pervasive " nips and willies " approach pioneered by Norman Lebrecht and endorsed by so many classical musicians who should know better. Underpinning my post was the metaphysical cantus firmus of the twelfth-century Andalusian Sufi mystic, poet, and philosopher Ibn 'Arabi . At the core of his teaching is the concept of waḥdat al-wujūd - oneness of being. This proposes a monist (non-dual) alternative to the more generally accepted dualist thinking of Aristotle , Averroes , Descartes , St. Thomas Aquinas and others. Monism views all existence as being part of a single unitary whole. This leads to the interpretation that all great religious/knowledge traditions converge in a single Truth...

Nikos Kazantzakis suggested that "Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality". Much energy is being expended by the classical music industry on trying to change the unchangeable reality of shifting demographics, harsh economic conditions, new technologies and new lifestyles. So, since we cannot change these realities let us change the ears that hear reality. My recent listening to both live and recorded music has been enriched by exploring and applying the practice of non-duality. At this point let's deal with the dead moose in the middle of the room. Some, or probably many, will dismiss this thread as more Overgrown Path hippie babble . Which is, of course, their prerogative. But I would respond by suggesting that as classical music has been led so far astray in recent years by marketing babble , a little babble of a different kind can do no harm. Less facetiously, I would also point out that the practices briefly and inadequately summ...

In a desperate attempt to drum up some controversy-led media coverage for a distinctly lackluster Proms season , BBC presenter Suzy Klein has served up some tasty soundbites defending the concert featuring a chamber orchestra with conductor and vocal soloists performing arrangements of Ibiza dance anthems . But she misses the point that what people are objecting to is not Ibiza dance anthems at the Proms, but dumbed down versions of Ibiza anthems played by a dumbed down chamber orchestra in a dumbed down concert as part of a dumbed down Radio 3's increasingly frantic attempt to stop its plunging audience figures *. If, as Ms Klein claims, the concert was true to the spirit of the Proms - as practised in the William Glock era in particular - the late night event would feature Boulez's Domaines followed by Amnesia resident DJ Marco Carola spinning a techno set from turntables while foam** was pumped into the Albert Hall arena. The only thing that the Heritage Orchestra p...

Following his headlining appearance at the Glastonbury Festival - tickets £250 - the Dalai Lama returns to the UK in September to appear at the London home of stadium rock, the O2 arena . For this London appearance ticket prices range from £24.75 to £90.25 , while packages giving access to exclusive lounge, catering and bathroom facilities are available for an undisclosed sum. Presumably to avoid criticism of high ticket prices the Dalai Lama makes the following disclaimer on his official website : For your information, as a long-standing policy His Holiness the Dalai Lama does not accept any fees for his talks. Where tickets need to be purchased, organizers are requested by our office to charge the minimum entrance fee in order to cover their costs only. But that disclaimer, which is repeated on the websites of organisations hosting appearances by the Tibetan spiritual leader, deserves closer examination. Top tickets for Neil Diamond's concerts at the O2 this month cost £97 ; ...