Composers lost and found


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

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Different tempo but the music continues

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'The pause is as important as the note' ~ Truman Fisher We start a summer of travelling tomorrow with a flight to Morocco, so the tempo of posting will slow markedly. While I'm away do read other great music blogs here , but why not escape the tyranny of league tables and explore the long tail of music blogs over here ? But don't forget the music continues on my Future Radio programme at 5.00pm UK time every Sunday with a repeat at 12.50am on Monday morning. Here is the forward schedule which starts on April 20 with two modern composers who between them do not have a single note of their music in the 2008 BBC Proms season . April 20 Unique British voices - Peter Maxwell Davies Missa Parvula sung by Choir of Westminster Cathedral; Edmund Rubbra Symphony No 6 played by Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Norman del Mar. (Nice Max connection as I took the photo of the Japanese garden at Dartington Hall where he was a fixture at the Summer School for many years). A...
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Racism disguised as patriotism must not prevail

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Hubert Parry’s inspired setting of William Blake includes the famous lines ‘Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant land’. Over the years Parry's Jerusalem has become associated with rabid nationalism , and racism disguised as patriotism is dominating the current political agenda both in Britain and the US . However the album artwork above is not there to illustrate the danger of nuanced racism, but rather to explode the beguiling myth surrounding Parry's Jerusalem. Because far from being the product of ethnic nationalism, Jerusalem started life as a rallying cry for a spiritual movement formed, to quote its founder, to appeal "to the whole of humanity... Hindus, Mohammedans, Buddhists... " And that is only the start of a long but remarkable story, because Sir Francis Younghusband, who commissioned Jerusalem in 1916, was an evangelical Christian Colonel who led colonial forces in a bloody invasion of Tibet. But in his mature years he became ...
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Britten – music does not exist in a vacuum

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Three Overgrown Paths converge. Antoine Leboyer wrote about the role of hall acoustics in creating good ensemble, sfmike asked about live performances of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem , and the Middle East is a recurring nightmare here , and everywhere. This convergence sent me back to the inspirational speech Britten made when he accepted the first Aspen Award in the Humanities in 1964: And then the best music to listen to in a great Gothic church is the polyphony which was written for it, and was calculated for its resonance: this was my approach in the War Requiem – I calculated it for a big, reverberant acoustic and that is where it sounds best. I believe you see, in occasional music , although I admit there are some occasions which can intimidate one – I do not envy Purcell writing his Ode to Celebrate King James’s Return to London from Newmarket . On the other hand almost every piece I have ever written has been composed with a certain occasion in mind, and usually for defi...
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Is Hugo Chavez really music to our ears?

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Venezuela, and its charismatic president Hugo Chavez , have featured On An Overgrown Path several times recently. Back in November I raised concerns about the objectivity of the Guardian's coverage (above ) of Venezuela's acclaimed music education programme, and only yesterday I highlighted human rights activist Harry Belafonte's support for Chavez . So today's Observer article Mr Chavez and the death of freedom makes interesting reading. Here is an extract: "Consider, for it's a looming headline event in 2007, the Hugo Chavez dilemma. On the one hand, many committed media freedom warriors in Britain - including Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists - vociferously support Venezuela's totemic president and all his egalitarian works. They raise money for his causes, pass NUJ conference motions of support and generally despise scribblers on the other side who think him a bit of a demagogue. On the other hand, Aidan White, gene...
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There is more than one War Requiem

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Eleven young choristers from the famous Kreuzchor were among more than 25,000 who died in the British and American bombing of Dresden on February 13th 1945. As well as this terrible human loss the famous choir also lost its its Neo-Gothic choir school on the Georgplatz, its library of sheet music and archive, and its very raison d'être, the beautiful Kreuzkirche (Church of the Holy Cross) which dated from the 13th century. The history of the Kreuzchor dates back to the 14th century, and its reputation grew through the Reformation and into the 20th century. In 1932 Rudolf Mauersberger was appointed cantor, and the choir's reputation spread through its acclaimed performances of Bach's choral music in the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy tradition , and the Kreuzchor made two tours of the USA in the 1930s. A year before he died in 1971 Rudolf Mauersberger recorded Bach's Matthäus Passion with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. The two choirs were the Kreuzchor and the Thomanercho...
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No flowers please for Herbert von Karajan

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Few musicians have generated such a mixture of respect and revulsion as Herbert von Karajan. It takes Richard Osborne 851 pages in his masterly biography to capture the essence of this extraordinary conductor, entrepreneur and opportunist, and it would be impertinent to even attempt to cover the same ground here. So instead, with the centenary of Karajan's birth falling on April 5, I offer this personal vignette from my time at EMI, which I hope in some small way illustrates the conundrum that was this extraordinary man. During the late 1970s the Machiavellian Karajan had carefully nurtured a deadly rivalry between EMI and his other contract company, Deutsche Grammophon. This meant that EMI had, at very considerable expense, outbid DG for the four act version of Verdi's Don Carlos with José Carreras and Mirella Freni , and Debussy's Pelléas et Méliande with Frederica von Stade and Richard Stilwell . Pélleas was a personal passion of Karajan, and because of this he ...
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All that twitters is not gold

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That tweet saddens me. It was written by Jeremy Pound who identifies himself without disclaimer on his Twitter account - see below - as the deputy editor of BBC Music Magazine . I don't know Jeremy Pound, but presumably he is a very nice guy who holds a senior position in an influential publication which he reached due to his qualifications and experience. Of course all of us have blind spots in our music appreciation. But is it not the role of a writer to report with a reasonable degree of objectivity that a work fails to engage them, fails to move them, or is beyond their comprehension? And is it not also their role to explore why that vital connection has not been made? Karlheinz Stockhausen has been judged by others with far stronger credentials than Jeremy Pound to be an important if controversial figure in late 20th-century music. To publicly dismiss one of his seminal works as "a load of pish" - definition "variation of piss, most usually used in the nort...
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Even more Brilliant Classics

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On An Overgrown Path started to spread the word about the Dutch super-budget label Brilliant Classics more than a year ago. BBC Radio 3 has finally caught on to the riches available, and featured a number of exciting new releases in CD Review on Sunday. The big news is that Brilliant Classics has done a major licensing deal with EMI, which makes some very interesting recordings available at crazy low prices - around £3 ($5 US) here in the UK. Among them are Riccardo Muti's Schubert symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic . They are a bargain at this price, but not much more. As with so many of Muti's orchestral recordings they are all circumference and little circle, and his interpretation of the ninth symphony justifies the title 'Grate C major'. (If you want budget priced Schubert symphonies numbers one to six you can do a lot worse than Menuhin's 2 CD set on EMI, recorded in Studio 1 Abbey Road). But if Scriabin's style of 'smell, touch and fee...
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Going Buddhist with Lou Harrison

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'That Pope John Paul II took the trouble in his books to attack Buddhism suggests that there might be something valuable here. Why else would he see it as a dangerous rival belief system ? It offers hope to those of us who are hurt by the speed and aggression of the modern world, willing to look within to try to moderate our own aggressive pace and notice that we often run the gauntlet of purely imaginary dangers; or inhabit a fog of no-feeling' ~ from Going Buddhist by Peter J Conradi (Short Books ISBN 1904977014). I've just returned from a few days at the Padmaloka Buddhist retreat centre here in rural Norfolk. The accompanying photos were taken by me at Padmaloka, and, believe it or not, the shrine room below is a converted Norfolk barn! Now playing is Joanna MacGregor's recording of the piano concerto by a composer with a deep commitment to Buddhism. Lou Harrison was born ninety years ago, on May 14 1917, and died in 2003. Here is an interview with him by Dr G...
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Classical music should exploit its healing power

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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 cl...
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