On An Overgrown Path

We live at a time when the alleged influencing of the result of a presidential election by Russia triggers an avalanche of righteous indignation; but the possible skewing of the same election by Facebook's news feed algorithms triggers very little protest. So no apologies for returning, yet again , to the insidious impact of social media algorithms. The graphic below is taken from a Techcrunch article titled 'How Facebook news feed works' . Presumably most readers already understand social media algorithms, but for any that don't here is a quick and simple overview. Lots of people read, 'like' and share posts about Mahler, so the algorithms give a high ranking to stories about Mahler, and as a result they are highly visible in news feeds. Very few people read, 'like' and share posts about Malcolm Arnold, so the algorithms give a low ranking to stories about Malcolm Arnold, and as a result they are virtually invisible in news feeds. Research shows t...

That album of Jonathan Harvey 's choral music from Les Jeunes Soloistes featured in a 2007 Overgrown Path post . The title track The Angels was commissioned for the 1994 service of Nine Lessons and Carols in King's College Cambridge. Sir Edward Burne-Jones once exclaimed that 'The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels I shall paint' and also on the album is How could the soul not take flight . This is Jonathan's setting of Andrew Harvey 's - no relation - re-imagining of verses by Rumi. Its injunction to 'Fly away, fly away bird to your native home/You have leapt free of the cage/... Hurry, hurry, hurry, bird, to the source of life' is a powerful reminder of the need to free ourselves from the cage of filter bubbles and recommender algorithms that we have allowed Facebook, Google and their online peers to enclose us with . Thankfully there is still life outside the cage. On Nov 8th at the alternative London music venue Cafe Oto the...

That photo was taken by me in the Madrasa Bou Inania in Fes, Morocco. My recent reading has included Michael Golding 's novel A Poet of the Invisible World which treats the antithetical subjects of homosexuality and Sufism with admirable sensibility and sensitivity. On my peripatetic iPod the transient Habibiyya with their album If Man But Knew fulfill the role of sonic poets of the invisible world . No review samples used in this post. 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 .

Pierre Boulez declined to conduct Tchaikovsky because he did not like his music. To my knowledge there are no modern maestros who do not like Mahler. But it can be argued there is a case for a courageous modern maestro to decline to conduct Mahler on the grounds that the current saturation coverage of his music , excellent as it undoubtedly is, distorts concert programmes and, even more seriously, freezes out other deserving composers. Take the case of the Bernstein 100 celebration being presented this autumn by the London Symphony Orchestra. (Should it not be Bernstein 99 as he was born in August 1918?) All five of the concerts - I am excluding the children's concert - are laudable for showcasing Bernstein's music. But only one other composer is featured. And yes, you guessed, it is Mahler. His music is programmed in two concerts, both conducted by Marin Alsop. In one the Adagio from Symphony No 10 is paired with Bernstein's Symphony No 3, ‘Kaddish’. In the other Berns...

There is a passage in Tchaikosky's Pathetique Symphony which I find more moving than anything else in the realm of music. Up to that moment, the melodies have been gay and lilting, with only a trace of underlying sadness here and there. Troikas galop through the sparkling snow, diamonds sparkle on the snowy bosoms of beautiful ladies at the ball, whose hands are extended to the lips of men in splendid uniforms. We smell the hot tallow from the chandeliers, the sweetness of the ladies' bouquets and the perfume discreetly sprinkled behind their shell-pink ears. All is love and joy. The composer, Having snatched a kiss from his beloved, rushes home to dream of his good fortune. Bursting with joy, he sees a letter from her on his desk and tears it open. Then: Boo-hoo boo-hoo! An agonised cry; an anguished sequence of notes which will be woven into the theme of all that follows. It is stark, it is terrible. In real life, countless Russians and not a few Chinese have committed su...

Using 3D Visualizations to Explore and Discover Music, Predicting genre labels for artists using FreeDB, Optimizing raw audio with convolutional networks, Building Musically-relevant Audio Features through Multiple Timescale Representations, The Need for Music Information Retrieval with User-Centered and Multimodal Strategies, and Geometry in Sound: A Speech/Music Audio Classifier Inspired by an Image Classifier. Those are just a few of the papers cited on one page of the Research at Google online resource . Some of these papers were presented at the annual conference of the International Society of Music Information Retrieval , a non-profit organization seeking to advance the access, organization, and understanding of music information, and the graphics for this post are sampled from some of these papers. Amazon, Pandora, Spotify, Google and Shazam are among the partners supporting the International Society of Music Information Retrieval and its current president is Fabien Go...

That Guardian story ran last week proclaiming that Lewis Hamilton "should be applauded" for the anti-Trump sentiments he expressed on social media ahead of the U.S. Grand Prix in Austin. Hamilton had posted on Instagram supporting the #takeaknee protests; however rumours that he would 'take a knee' at the Grand Prix proved to be unfounded and instead his political postings suddenly ceased when the F1 circus arrived in Texas. The fashionably anti-Trump Guardian article delves into the murky past of the F1 franchise under its previous owner Bernie Ecclestone, but totally omits to mention the current franchise owner Liberty Media . And that omission may well be relevant to Lewis Hamilton's decision not to take a knee in Austin. Colorado-based Liberty Media is F1's and therefore Lewis Hamilton's paymaster. As the Denver Business Journal story below reveals, Liberty Media is a major supporter of Donald Trump and the Republican party, with the corporation...

My 2015 post about the new modal music from Crete explained how the mystical strand of Islam known as Sufism was a cultural influence during the two centuries of Ottoman rule in Crete that ended in 1913. That Sufi influence still finds expression in the more progressive parts of Cretan culture such as the music of Ross Daly and the alumnae of his Labyrinth workshops. But the majority of Cretans have never forgiven the Turks for occupying their island; this despite their folk hero Nikos Kazantzakis - creator of Zorba - confessing that his father's bloodline contained Arabic - i.e. Muslim - blood. As a result of this deep dislike of Turkey the influence of Islam and Sufism have been expunged from mainstream Cretan culture. In the city of Chania the waterfront mosque has been shorn of its minarets and is now an anonymous exhibition space. The well-preserved hydraulic system of the historic 17th century Turkish baths in the city, located ironically opposite the Archaeological M...

My post Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares has attracted an astonishing amount of attention. Among those who responded is Douglas Eck who works at Google researching in the fields of music search and recommendation, and generating music using machine intelligence. He posted the following comment about the post on the Facebook page of a member of the Computational Music Analysis forum . It would be nice to have some data to support this claim. (Maybe there already is). That's a great research focus for MIR . My very real sense is that overall my 14 year old has a much more diverse selection of music thanks to Play Music and Spotify than I had in the vinyl era. Both products use recommendation systems heavily. My son for example is really into old-school hip-hop* and is able to explore that area deeply. He uses recommendation features like "Similar Artists" to find new music. The question for me is whether this enablement of exploration balances...

That interview with Jordi Savall about the Catalan independence movement appeared on France24 . There have been many posts On An Overgrown Path celebrating Catalonia and one back in 2011 featured the album Songs from the Thousand-Year-Old Land of Catalonia sung by the much-missed Montserrat Figueras with La Capell Reial de Catalunya directed by Jordi. But, as with Brexit , we must not forget that for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. 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).

I was wrung-out: Sun Ra's music is pagan, religious, simple, complex and almost everything else at the same time. There is no pigeon-hole for it. It is ugly and beautiful and terribly interesting. It's new music, but I have been hearing it for ages. That is from a 1967 Village Voice review by Michael Zwerin . Danny Goldberg's In Search of the Lost Chord tells how Sun Ra and his Arkestra were a fixture at rock shows, countercultural benefits and outdoor celebrations on the East Coast in the 1960s, with the Arkestra's flamboyant performances and mystical intensity complementing the zeitgeist. Elsewhere Barry Miles explains that Sun Ra was on Paul McCartney's stoned playlist in the 60s alongside John Cage and Luciano Berio. The loose Fluxus grouping included Sun Ra and John Cage, and they performed together at the Coney Island Museum in June 1984. There is a commercial recording of the collaboration; but as Cage's contribution was cursory this archive document...

Remembered Music : Abdulmalik Dyck, Alki Keeler, Daud Khan, Sheikh Hassan Dyck In the Light of Air by Anna Thorvaldsdottir: International Contemporary Ensemble Ravi Shankar: The Living Room Sessions : Ravi Shankar, Tannoy Bose, Kenji Ota, Barry Philips The Beauty of Disaster : J. Peter Schwalm If Man But Knew : The Habibiyya Jonathan Harvey String Quartets and String Trio : Arditti Quartet Synaygia : Ross Daly, Rufus Cappadocia, Girogos Symeonidis, Chemirani Trio Edmund Rubbra Symphonies 6 & 8 : Norman del Mar, Philharmonia Orchestra Songs and Guitar Pieces by Theodorakis : Maria Farandouri and John Williams Jetsun Mila : Eliane Radique That is just some of the music I listened to recently on my iPod when visiting the remote Greek island of Gavdos . By choice during three weeks of travelling I did not have access to email, Facebook, Twitter or other online services. That experience reinforced my concerns about our 'always connected' existence and prompted my re...

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...

Georg, who is the the proprietor of the idiosyncratic Pocoloco Hotel in Chania, is also an alpine guide. Crete was the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting of the Second World War and on his treks in the island's back country Georg has found these old army boots which now decorate his hotel. The first one seen below is a Greek army boot. This, like many modern Greek governments, was a compromised concept that did not stand the test of time. Next is a British army boot; nothing fancy but it clearly did its job. Finally, below is a German army boot which displays notably superior technology in its construction compared with the Greek and British footwear. So the moral of this little story is that the best technology does not always win . 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).

That staunch defender of humanitarian and cultural values the Guardian has enthusiastically spun the story of the Brexit-triggered tragedy of the European Union Youth Orchestra moving its head office from London to Rome. The reason the orchestra's chief executive gives for the move is "You can’t ask for EU funding and then not be in the EU". Neither the newspaper nor its many readers who compulsively re-tweeted the story have mentioned that the European Union Youth Orchestra's principal corporate partner - i.e. funder - is based not in the E.U. but in America. The orchestra's principal corporate funder is the world's fourth largest aerospace and defence company United Technologies Corporation , the aerospace and defence businesses of which generate revenues of almost $20 billion . Among UTC's military products are the Pratt & Whitney engines in service with 34 armed forces worldwide , their drone technology is deployed in the General Atomics MQ-...

Last night I was at Snape Maltings for the first day of the William Alwyn Festival . The centrepiece of the evening concert was a powerful and persuasive performance of Alwyn's Fourth Symphony with John Gibbons conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Complementing the little-known symphony were Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture, Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia and Elgar's evergreen Cello Concerto with Jamie Walton as soloist. Although William Alwyn was a Suffolk resident  his music did not find favour with Benjamin Britten . However and despite this, the blessed venue that Britten created allowed John Gibbons and his forces to remind us - if any reminder was needed - of the scandal of Alwyn's neglect. But...... The screenshot above was taken on the day of the concert. The grey seats were sold, the coloured seats were unsold. Which means Snape Maltings was two-thirds empty for the concert. Many explanations can be proposed for the poor attenda...