Music from beyond the viral circle


Tomorrow the annual festival celebrating trance music and the role of women in the Sufi hadra tradition opens in Essaouira, Morocco. My recent photo essay explored how the workshops linked to this festival are banging the drum for oppressed women musicians. Much needed progress has been made towards giving women their rightful place in art music's celebrity culture. So it would be good if more attention was now paid to those women who make music in very difficult circumstances far beyond the reach of charmed viral circles.

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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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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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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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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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No flowers please for Herbert von Karajan

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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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Classical music should exploit its healing power

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Britten's passion for the East

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In a recent post I described the 2012 Aldeburgh Festival presentation of Jordi Savall's Mare Nostrum as a "bold piece of programming". But on reflection perhaps the performance of this transcultural work in the Snape Maltings is not so much bold as appropriate in view of Benjamin Britten's pioneering role in what later became known as world music. Britten's initial interest in Far Eastern music was sparked by his friendship with the Canadian composer and ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee, who he met when living in New York between 1939 and 1942. There is more on this friendship in my post Colin McPhee - East collides with West , and the photo below shows the two composers in New York c. 1940. Britten's first operatic venture Paul Bunyan was composed in New York and Balinese influences can be heard in its Prologue, while in 1941 McPhee and Britten recorded McPhee's transcription for two pianos of Balinese Ceremonial Music . This exposure to a different...
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BBC launches free classical MP3 downloads

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Classical music is about art not algorithms

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In his book Which Lie Did I Tell? the Hollywood script writer William Goldman explained the difference between entertainment and art. Entertainment either tells you lies or tells you comforting truisms that we know already. Whereas art tells you uncomfortable things that you perhaps don't want to hear, truths that you may not be comfortable hearing. My photos were taken a few weeks ago in the Moroccan oasis town of Skoura on the northern fringe of the Sahara. Listening to those local musicians playing under the stars and the next morning listening to Norman Del Mar's recording of Rubbra's Sixth and Eighth Symphonies highlighted for me again, if it needed highlighting, how right William Goldman was. There is growing concern about  the impact of algorithms  on the media we consume. But there is very little concern about the impact of algorithms on the arts. In fact algorithm driven art is the new poster child of contemporary culture. The prime example of this is BBC Ra...
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