On An Overgrown Path

'The Buddha is known as the one 'thus come', Tathagata . He has no more 'meaning' than a flower, than a tree; no more than the universe; no more than either you or I. And whenever anything is experienced that way, simply in and for and as itself, without reference to any concepts, relevancies, or practical relationships, such a moment of sheer aesthetic arrest throws the viewer back for an instant upon his own existence without meaning; for he too simply is - 'thus come' - a vehicle of consciousness, like a spark flung out from a fire' - Joseph Campbell, Zen Myths To Live By Claude Vivier’s Siddhartha , inspired by Hermann Hesse's eponymous book depicting the spiritual journey of a young man seeking enlightenment, is one of the composer's few works for orchestra. Vivier's life and music reflected Joseph Campbell's view that "the first and foremost aim of Zen... is to break our net of concepts ". No review samples involved in ...

Earlier this year a widely read Overgrown Path post explained how audiences need permission to like unfamiliar music . Now that permission is being granted in style by a 4CD box from Lyrita titled British Symphonies . It will retail for around the cost of a single full price CD when released on September 9th. Buy it or live forever in darkness, because this is what is on the discs: Disc: 1 1. William Sterndale Bennett, Symphony in G minor Op.43 2. Cyril Rootham, Symphony No.1 in C minor 3. E.J. Moeran, Sinfonietta Disc: 2 1. Arnold Bax, Symphony No.1 in E flat 2. Edmund Rubbra, Symphony No.4 Op.53 3. Alan Rawsthorne, Symphonic Studies Disc: 3 1. Lennox Berkeley, Symphony No.3 in One Movement Op.74 2. William Alwyn, Symphony No.5 ('Hydriotaphia') 3. Grace Williams, Symphony No.2 4. Malcolm Arnold, Sinfonietta No.1 Op.48 Disc: 4 1. William Wordsworth, Symphony No.3 in C Op.48 2. Humphrey Searle, Symphony No.2 Op.33 3. John Joubert, Symphony No.1 Op.20 Any...

The media resounds with fulsome tributes to Einojuhani Rautavaara who has died aged 87 . These tributes quite rightly position him as an important figure in contemporary music. Yet the reality does not reflect the theory: taking that useful barometer of music fashion the BBC Proms, Rautavaara's music has only been performed three times at the Proms , and not since 2008 . All I can do is paraphrase what I wrote when Peter Maxwell Davies died. We need to remember Einojuhani Rautavaara and the others that we have lost recently. But we need to remember them in perpetuity. That means rising to the difficult challenge of keeping their music alive and introducing it to new audiences long after the media has moved on to the next big thing. 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).

It is troubling when I find myself agreeing strongly with a view expressed in the all too often reactionary Spectator . But Damian Thompson's totally justified castigation of the Southbank Centre's forthcoming Belief and Beyond Belief festival - "This is a missed opportunity on an epic scale" - echoes my view. The fashionably themed concerts, which are billed as "a festival of music inspired by spiritual belief", are presented in collaboration with the London Philharmonic and run from January to June 2017. They include two Mahler symphonies, two Bruckner symphonies and that ubiquitous expression of joyful fuzzy spirituality Beethoven's Ninth . As Damian Thompson observes: "As for the concerts, they look suspiciously like the programmes the LPO was planning to perform anyway, before they had the three-Bs label slapped on them.." As is the vogue, the warhorses gallop alongside contemporary music including commissions and premieres from Aar...

There is an art of listening , when you listen to Beethoven or Mozart and so on, you listen, you don't try to interpret it, unless you are romantic, sentimental and all that. You absorb, you listen, there is some extraordinary movement going on in it, great silence, great depth and all that. So similarly if you can listen, not only with the hearing of the ear, but deeply , not interpret, not translate, just listen. That quote comes from a 1985 TV interview with Jiddu Krishnamurti . There is some serious listening talent in the photo. It shows Aldous Huxley - who famously recommended that "if you ever use mescaline or LSD in therapy ... try the effect of the [Bach] B-minor suite" - kneeling in the foreground, while standing from left to right are Krishnamurti, Igor & Vera Stravinsky, Maria Huxley, and Radha Rajagopal Sloss. The photo was taken in 1949 at a picnic in Wrightwood, California. Radha Rajagopal Sloss was the daughter of the American born Rosalind Rajagopa...

Alpesh Chauhan, who conducts two diurnal BBC Proms this weekend , started his career as principal cellist at the City of Birmingham Youth Orchestra. A friend in the industry tells me that the young British Asian - his parents were born in East Africa of Indian (Gujarati) descent - wants to be judged solely on his music-making, and not on his ethnicity, which is very admirable and refreshing. But there are connections between the cello and India which are worth exploring, so I hope Alpesh will forgive me for using him as the starting point of a path which leads East rather than West. First up is a CD released in 2002 of cellist without frontiers Matthew Barley giving concert performances in London and New Delhi of two ragas, playing with sarodists Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash , supported by tanpura. Although purists may shudder, a raga played on a cello is not heretical. A raga is a loose and tight form that allows the musicians freedom to improvise within a strictly ...

A puff for upcoming Proms in the Independent is headlined 'You don't need to be a white, middle-aged man to wield a baton' and it is very good indeed to see the immensely talented 26 year old British Asian Alpesh Chauhan on the podium in the Royal Albert Hall twice this weekend ( July 23 & 24 ). Alpesh Chauhan - seen above - follows in the footsteps of Indian born Zubin Mehta who has conducted thirteen Proms , the most recent in 2011. But, despite that click baiting headline, it is still fiendishly difficult if you are a black man, yet alone a black woman , to wield a baton at the BBC Proms. In more than 2500 Promenade concerts there have been just three black conductors - all men - and the last one was back in 2003. It is also not insignificant that the 2003 Prom conducted by African American Bobby McFerrin was, like Alpesh Chauhan's two Proms this weekend, not the main evening concert but a daytime event. So sorry to spoil a good Indie headline, but the...

The current paucity of truly great classical musicians is often lamented. To achieve true greatness requires an awful lot of talent and hard work, but it also requires the cultivation of mystique. A definition of mystique is 'a quality of mystery', and that essential and elusive quality of mystery is being destroyed by the petty revelations of social media. I now find it almost impossible to listen to the sublime music making of a certain young and very talented virtuoso without being distracted by flashbacks to the candid photos posted on Facebook of the lifestyles of the rich and famous summer vacation that the musician recently enjoyed. Elsewhere on Facebook my enthusiasm for the music of more than one contemporary composers is being solely tested by the unremitting and uncritical self-promotion of those composers, while my respect for a leading conductor was seriously challenged when he publicly bit the hand that feeds him in order to achieve fifteen minutes of social m...

That shrine to King Mohammed VI of Morocco - the fifth richest man in Africa with a personal worth of $5.7 billion - was photographed by me recently in Marrakech . Others find the Moroccan ruler's regime less lovable ; they include the forgotten Sahrawi people of the Western Sahara whose cause is bravely championed by Sahrawi musician Aziza Brahim - sample here . The photo below of a Sahrawi was taken by me in Guelmim on the edge of the disputed territory and comes from my 2015 photo essay . Morocco's latest request to rejoin the African Union 32 years after leaving in a dispute over the Western Sahara confirms that King Mohammed considers his country's illegal annexation of the territory is a done deal. In Morocco as in so many other countries - Muslim and otherwise - the words of the 14th century Persian poet Hafez now ring so true: Love which once seemed so easy, has fallen into difficulties No comped goods and services used in this post. Any copyrighted mater...

That is John Field above and a new CD from Decca of Elizabeth Joy Roe playing his Nocturnes is something to be cherished. Field is hailed as the father of the Nocturne, a musical form that has come to be associated with the demure etiquette of the salon. But as Elizabeth Joy Roe points out in her studious sleeve essay, for the Romantics nocturnal darkness unleashed dreams, hallucinations, nightmares and visions. A post here several years ago explored the links between hypnagogia and music. Hypnagogia is the transitional state between sleep and wakefulness during which lucid dreaming, hallucinations and out of body experiences occur, and Elizabeth Joy Roe's interpretation looks beyond the demure towards those states. Universal Music takes a lot of stick on this blog, so it is pleasing to be able to recommend this CD so strongly. It is particularly pleasing at a time when recorded sound quality is too often sacrificed on the altar of streaming and download speed to commend ...

That publicity photo for the 2014 BBC Proms season attracted a lot of criticism as yet another example of the dumbing down of the once great concert series. The conductor in it is Sakari Oramo, so it is surprising to find an interview with him in yesterday's Telegraph headlined 'Sakari Oramo: ‘The Proms should not be dumbed down''. And it is even more surprising and puzzling to find the chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra explicitly criticising his BBC colleagues in the Proms planning team by saying "I would not go any further down this tendency of, what shall I call it… ‘dumbing down’, which one can see creeping round the edges... I would steer away from that totally, completely”. Let me say now that I have the greatest admiration for Sakari Oramo as a conductor , and, of course, his criticism is perfectly valid. But he knew the direction the Proms were taking before he accepted the lucrative and prestigious post of chief conductor of the BBC Symph...

Music from the esoteric realm on my current personal playlist includes the therapeutic syncreticism of Nawab Khan from India and Ahmed Abdelhak Kaâb from Morocco, and Jonathan Harvey 's tantric hymn for cello and electronics Advaya . On the website of his Mantra Ensemble Nawab Khan makes a persuasive case for using sacred music from the great faith traditions as a non-doctrinal force for good. The wide appeal of sacred music is evidenced by the sales of Gregorian Chant. An album of plainsong by the monks of the Monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain reached number 3 in the Billboard pop chart in 1994 and has gone on to sell more than five million copies, while Gregorian Chant is one of the few resilient genres in a depressed classical market. And in our metric driven age it is worth remembering that the US mind, body and spirit market is worth $11 billion compared with a recorded classical music market of less than $200 million. Yet despite this, classical fundamenta...

That is the English composer and political activist Ethel Smyth above. Tonight (July 13) excerpts from her choral work The Prison are being given their first American performance with orchestra at a New York concert* of music by women composers in support of humanitarian causes. An event which the UK's cultural commentators - male and female - have chosen to totally ignore. But the same commentators are devoting screeds to analysing the tuneless twittering of an outgoing prime minister who never lifted a finger for the arts. * More on the Unfinished Dream concert here . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter .

A recent post described my trekking adventure in Morocco's Atlas Mountains under the headline ' This is most definitely not health and safety territory '. Now via my Berber friend Hassan comes this most definitely not health and safety photo of improvising young surfers in Morocco. Soundtrack for this post is the lovingly remastered Dust to Digital edition of Paul Bowles' 1958 Moroccan field recordings ; much of disc 1 was recorded in the Berber enclaves of Tiznit and Tafraout to the south of where the photo was taken. 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).

Tomorrow (July 13) the activist orchestra The Dream Unfinished presents a concert at the Great Hall of Cooper Union , New York paying tribute to the black women impacted by racial injustice, and the female activists of the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements. Among the featured composers are Florence Price , Margaret Bonds , Ethel Smyth , and Courtney Bryan , and the conductors are the miscegenetic duo of John McLaughlin Williams - seen above - and James Blachly . This concert has been given a very specific and tragic relevance by the recent racially motivated killings of blacks and whites in America. But the mission of The Dream Unfinished to allow classical musicians to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement also has a powerful relevance closer to home. Someone with a not inconsiderable profile in the UK classical music industry recently wrote on social media à propos the EU referendum: "I don't think I realised, until two weeks ago, just how muc...

Despite predisposition in India's favour, I have to acknowledge that Indian music took me by surprise. I knew neither its nature nor its richness, but here, if anywhere, I found vindication of my conviction that India was the original source... Its purpose is to unite one's soul and discipline one's body , to make one sensitive to the infinite within one, to unite one's breath with the breath of space, one's vibrations with the vibrations of the cosmos . That quote comes from Yehudi Menuhin , and my photo was taken yesterday during a recital of Carnatic music at the Cambridge Live festival. The musicians include* Ranjan Vasudevan , whose day job is a researcher at Cambridge University in X-Ray astronomy . Ranjan has pioneered adapting Carnatic music to the electric guitar, incorporating sliding and Veena bending techniques - SoundCloud samples here . Nearest the camera is Prasanna Sankaran . who is a consultant in respiratory medicine at one of the region's...

For this book which is neither light reading nor literary opus, I wish you just the opposite: that my grandson, grown to adulthood, will stumble upon it amidst the family bookshelves, thumb through it, read a passage or two and then replace it with a shrug, surprised that in his grandfather's time such things still needed saying No that is not a quote from the executive summary of the the Chilcot Report on Britain's participation in the Iraq War. The quote in fact comes from the Lebanese-born French author Amin Maalouf 's book In the Name of Identity ( Les identités meurtrières ), and prefaces the CD booklet for his nephew Ibrahim Maalouf's newly released jazz tribute to the Egyption diva Oum Kalthoum seen above*. The libretto for Kaija Saariaho 's opera Love from Afar , directed by Peter Sellars at its 2000 Salzburg premiere , was written by Amin Maalouf, and my recent rewarding reading has included his novels Leo the African and Balthasar’s Odyssey ....

On Facebook Kevin Scott draws attention to Wilfred Josephs' Requiem with these words: "This magnificent work for chorus, string quintet and orchestra deserves many, many more performances. It is an utterance of faith that embodies a faithful setting of the Kaddish alongside sections of the Catholic requiem mass. Wilfred Josephs' tribute to those who perished at the hands of the Nazis is a must-hear piece!" That accolade prompted me to listen again to Josephs' Symphony suasive No. 5 (Pastoral) performed by the sadly missed David Measham and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra on my 1983 Unicorn LP * seen above. Wilfred Josephs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1927 of Russian and English Jewish parents, and died in 1997. He was a prolific composer whose output, like Havergal Brian's , verged on the over-prolific: the Wilfred Josephs catalogue includes 12 symphonies, 22 concertos, operas, chamber music, ballets, an anti-war oratorio , and music for TV, rad...

So Norman Lebrecht has discovered the music of R. Murray Schafer , who sadly has Alzheimer's . It is evidence of the mess that classical music is in that a musician only receives media attention when they have serious health problems, or are involved in a scandalous divorce or child abuse. R. Murray Schafer's book about his twelve ritualistic music dramas is titled Patria: The Complete Cycle . Today the life of a classical musician has become a cycle in which mortality or fallibility is the completing pseudo-event . 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).

My recent post Your cat is a music therapist attracted a large readership; so today I have another rather more edgy post about cats. Almost two years ago our cat Ginger suffered a very serious injury to a rear haunch, caused in the view of the vets that treated him by his leg being trapped in an illegal rabbit snare for more than 24 hours. Due to the miraculous skill of orthopaedic surgeon James Tattersall of the Grove Veterinary Group at Fakenham, Ginger's irreparably damaged ligament was replaced with a synthetic substitute and he regained full mobility. Ginger was ten when injured, so we decided to make him a house cat to protect the injured leg, and he has adapted remarkably well to his new life. However we recently bought him a Mywood cat jacket so he can exercise outdoors on a lead. Before his injury Ginger was an inveterate hunter, and he has started hunting again on his lead. Today he achieved a pretty remarkable result for a cat on a lead, as the photos show. If you...

Stuart Armitage has it exactly right when he writes in the Guardian that "Really, the surprise isn’t that Chris Evans has quit Top Gear . The surprise is that he even hosted it in the first place". It was an act of supreme folly by the BBC senior management to expect a programme format tailored to the idiosyncratic personality of one celebrity presenter to achieve the same results under a different celebrity. The departure of Jeremy Clarkson and his sidekicks should have been used for a total creative reworking of the programme. But instead the BBC took the easy and lazy option of neglecting creativity and emphasising celebrity. The BBC is accused - usually with justification - of many sins, including bias, profligacy, and audience chasing. But its biggest sin, a total dearth of creativity, goes almost unremarked. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in BBC Radio 3 under its new controller Alan Davey . I rarely listen to Radio 3 these days. But when I do I find nothin...

The gigantic echo chamber that is social media is resonating with far too much unhelpful bombast from both EU referendum camps. So it is with some trepidation that I am posting on the subject today. But this quote from - of all people - Boris Johnson caught my eye in yesterday's Telegraph : It was wrong of the Government to offer the public a binary choice on the EU... It caught my eye not because I have any sympathy at all for Boris Johnson's politics, but because it reflects the dangers of dualism. Norman Perryman reminded us of those dangers some time ago when he explained: "We are by nature analogue (def. "a continuous spectrum of values") beings, consisting of fluid organic substances." Too often today - especially on social media - we forget that humankind holds a continuous and fluid spectrum of values that cannot be forcibly polarised into a tick in one of two boxes, just as the true sound of music cannot be reduced to a 0 or 1 . The dangers of t...

A CBC story on the new all-women Allegra Chamber Orchestra describes it quite rightly as one of the few all-female orchestras in the world. That story provides a convenient reason for me to turn the spotlight on a forgotten woman musician who formed one of the first all-female orchestra back in the 1930s, and who later became the first woman to conduct in London's Royal Festival Hall. Kathleen Riddick was born in 1907 and studied at the Guildhall School of Music and the Salzburg Mozarteum. In the 1930s she formed the London Women's String Orchestra which later became the multi-gender Riddick String Orchestra. The BBC onlinearchive gives details of a 1939 broadcast by the London Women's String Orchestra of arrangements of Rameau, while the Riddick String Orchestra was active until shortly before its founder died in 1973. The Riddick String Orchestra was held in high esteem, and in 1951 Kathleen Riddick conducted it with Dennis Brain as soloist in the premiere of Gordon Ja...