Survival of the quietest


That stormy sky was photographed when I was hiking on the slopes of Mont Ventoux in southern France a couple of weeks ago. It is the quality of the silence that always strikes me in this region. By choice I was travelling with only a basic mobile phone for emergency use; so I was isolated from both environmental noise and the virtual online noise that increasingly deadens our senses in daily life. The assumption that the loudest virtual noise wins is breeding a dangerous strand of dialectic extremism. And it is one of the many ironies of our time, that in the arts sector many who claim to revere John Cage's advocacy of the music of ambient sounds are drowning out those lauded ambient sonorities with their remorseless self-interested virtual noise.

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).

Comments

Post a comment

Popular posts from this blog

Philippa Schuyler - genius or genetic experiment?

Image
A child prodigy fêted by Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thomson, performed by five leading American orchestras while still a teenager, accompanied by the New York Philharmonic at age 16, ranked alongside Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein, mourned with a Pontifical Requiem Mass in St Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and the rumoured subject of a Hollywood biopic. That is the executive summary of an American musical legend who was born eighty years ago tomorrow. Child prodigies, anniversaries and even executive summaries are the common currency of classical music today. But there are several reasons why the story that is going to be told On An Overgrown Path over the next two days is important. The first is that the legendary figure was a woman who had a black father and white mother. The second is that she experienced the barriers to musicians of colour that still linger on today. And thirdly, despite her legendary status, until the second part of this feature appears tomorrow h
Read more

There is an awful lot of good music in C Major

Image
My recent post sang the praises of the recording of English string music with Sir John Barbirolli conducting the legendary Sinfonia of London session orchestra. Rather confusingly, there is also an excellent long-standing permanent orchestra of forty professional musicians called the City of London Sinfonia . So this post switches Sinfonias but stays with English music to highlight another essential recording.  In 2007 John Rutter made an important contribution to a Norwich Cathedral seminar on 'The Challenge of Contemporary Music', from which this extract is taken: I suppose I never really felt the need to venture into uncharted territory. I think in the end you have to speak with your own voice and there is a difference between being traditional and just copying what other people have done. I mean, we all see and hear quite a lot of second-hand music which... is just a pale imitation of what others have done. There is no mileage in that. I myself however always felt that it
Read more

Why is classical music selling itself short?

Image
Data from the Office for National Statistics shows shows that the number of cases of depression among adults in Britain has doubled over the last twelve months. This means one in five people are exhibiting depressive symptoms compared with one in ten before the pandemic. Obviously an effective vaccine is needed. But, equally obviously, therapies are needed to counteract this alarming and overlooked increase in depression. In recent years authoritative neurological research has identified that  classical music is medicine for the brain . Yet the classical music community is singularly failing to exploit these therapeutic powers, instead choosing to compete in the entertainment market . Why is classical music selling itself short in this way? In a booklet interview for the recording by the Boulanger Trio of the piano trio Canto Perpetuo by Peteris Vasks the composer proposes that : "...people go to the concert hall because they are looking for answers. Above all for a way o
Read more