Composers lost and found


Audiences need permission to like unfamiliar music. So the typo in that headline is particularly appropriate.

Comments

Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

Image
In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A...
Read more

Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

Image
These photos were taken by me in 2008 at independent record retailer Prelude Records in Norwich. Jordi Savall's impromptu viol recital and signing session preceeded two performances at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. One was a solo recital by Jordi in Peter Mancroft Church ; the other was an immensely moving performance of his visionary Jerusalem multicultural project at the Theatre Royal*. As reported here Prelude Records closed earlier this year; it was a victim of predatory online retailing, and today its premises stand empty awaiting occupation by a mobile phone or E-cigarette retailer. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival has been the victim of savage funding cuts , but continues in a more modest form due to the dedicated work of its small management team. A few days ago I wrote about a two-thirds empty Snape Maltings concert and proposed that classical music's heartland is facing a perfect storm caused by the convergence of the shifts in consumer tastes and the r...
Read more

Audiences need permission to like unfamiliar music

Image
That photo of Sir Malcolm Arnold and Julian Bream appears on the late composer's website . Ten years ago I was literally very close to Sir Malcolm's music. He spent his final years being tended by his carer Anthony Day in Attleborough just a few miles from where I live in Norfolk. I managed Sir Malcolm's website and one of my first posts  about his music dates from that time. Following Sir Malcolm's death in 2006 I never lost my appreciation of his music, but it featured less frequently in my listening. However, recently I have returned to his symphonies, and listening to them again has raised some important questions. His nine symphonies are the product of a master craftsman. They move forward from Mahler and Shostakovich, yet should be immediately accessible to contemporary audiences saturated in the music of those two composers. But, despite this, Sir Malcolm Arnold's symphonies remain unknown outside a small circle of admirers. Why? Let me make it clear ...
Read more

A vintage year for blasphemy and heresy

Image
2010 was a vintage year for blasphemy and heresy. A post on Salvador Dali drew attention to his forgotten audiovisual opera-poem Être Dieu inspired by the Cathar heresy, Jonathan Harvey stirred things up on my Chance Music programme by saying "the future must bring things which are considered blasphemous like amplifying classical music", while yet another path took me to new heights of heresy. In fact the path reached 2400 feet, which, as the photo above shows, is a serious challenge for anyone who, like me, who has a vertigo problem. I took the photo from the fortress of Quéribus in Languedoc, France and the view is towards Mont Canigou, the holy mountain beloved of Pablo Casals and Thomas Merton . Quéribus castle was the last Cathar stronghold to surrender in 1255 and Jordi Savall's The Forgotten Kingdom had led me to Languedoc and Catharism and on to Gnosticism. The Cathar heresy has its roots in the "dualist" religions in the Indus basin which origina...
Read more

Come to the edge!

Image
Twenty-one years ago I wrote about an article on NewMusicBox  that forecast the age of music streaming, and included the following quote from the article: A world where music is available via the latest technologies for a single monthly subscription charge. A world with unlimited access to a huge range of music. A world where the music business will explode and reinvent itself. A world where listeners are empowered, and the reach of new music is limited only by your own imagination. A world where the major record companies aren’t invited to the party. A world where music becomes a utility on tap, just like gas and electricity. A world where music is like water.  It can be argued that streaming has empowered consumers by offering instant gratification. But two decades ago, in my post I expressed concerns about the advent of 'music like water' with these words: "Music-like-water won’t bring a utopia where every recording, of every work, by every composer from Evaristo Abaco ...
Read more

David Munrow - more than early music

Image
'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. ...
Read more

Nada Brahma - Sound is God

Image
It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig...
Read more

Surgeon General's Warning: Inner Cities

Image
"The German psychologist Dr. Weisenhutter interviewed the musicians of the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra and found them beset by psychogenic illnesses. The players are impotent. They hate new music. After playing it they cannot engage in sexual activity. This is understandable, for musicians are emotional people and if a musician is not convinced of the validity of what he does, his sexual life is bound to suffer" ~ from Boulez - Composer, Conductor, Enigma by Joan Peyser (Schirmer ISBN 0028717007) Be prepared for a disturbed night, or worse. At 12.01am tonight UK time the first complete broadcast of Alvin Curran's Inner Cities will start. The four and a half hour cycle will be broadcast in full without any announcements or advertisements, and pianist Daan Vanderwalle will be introducing the performance with me. The programme starts at 12.01am on Wednesday December 5 in the UK, which is afternoon or evening Tuesday December 4 in North and South America. Convert to y...
Read more

BBC Radio 3 audience crashes by 11.4%

Image
Latest RAJAR figures for UK radio audiences report that the BBC Radio 3 audience dropped by a whopping 11.4% year on year. This was a loss of 233,000 listeners from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025. Average hours per listener were also down, by 4.9% to 7.7. (Elsewhere, in an attempt to boost Radio 3 and talk down the loss, R3 presenter Norman Lebrecht compares the latest quarter - Q3 2025 - with the previous quarter - Q2 2025. As any industry insider knows, this is a meaningless comparison as radio audiences vary substantially by season. Most importantly Q3 audience is always boosted by Proms listeners compared to Q2.)  This dismal performance comes as no surprise. It was inevitable that Radio 3's strategy of aping Classic FM  would result in short term gain followed by the long term pain which is starting to emerge. Classical radio - and classical music in general - needs to build a strong distinctive franchise with  a loyal audience that is prepared to be challenged . BBC Rad...
Read more

Classical music must break through the electronic glass ceiling

Image
Why does classical music have such entrenched antagonism towards electronic sounds when one of its most successful recent compositions is closer to ambient electronica than a Beethoven symphony? Now don't get me wrong. For me John Luther Adams' Become Ocean is a masterwork which thoroughly deserved the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the 2015 Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. But after listening to it many times I have come to the conclusion that John Luther Adams' orchestral tour de force is, in fact, electronica by another name. And what's wrong with that? In his ecstatic review of Become Ocean Alex Ross describes Become Ocean as possibly "the loveliest apocalypse in musical history". But there is also a strong case for arguing that this apocalypse could be created with similarly magical impact by electronics instead of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, if only deeply reactionary factions within the classical establishment would allo...
Read more