On An Overgrown Path

Whilst working on Sufi Spirit, the theme of love emerged as something concrete and essential at a time of tectonic political shifts in the global landscape. As European and American voters seemingly ratchet to the right, Stephan Grabowski speaks with passion about the need to offer an alternative narrative. One of cross-cultural understanding and love shared between normal citizens rather than the divisions encouraged by 'political leaders who whip up discontent'. That comes from a sleeve essay that challenges comfort zones for a new album that also challenges comfort zones. Sufi rock has had some distinguished advocates, starting with the band that pioneered the genre, Junoon from Pakistan. Rocqawali's Sufi Spirit gives the genre a new twist with its line-up of Danish drummer Stephan Grabowski , Danish/ Pakistani guitarist and sitarist Jonas Stampe, Iranian-born guitarist Tin Soheili , and luminary of one of Pakistan's legendary Qawali dynasties Ejaz Sher Ali . Alt...

As ever 2017 delivered riches in the concert hall, notably William Alwyn's First Symphony in a rare outing at Snape Maltings and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Avignon's inspiringly ephemeral Opera Confluence . But many readers will, understandably, find it deeply ironic that my most memorable listening in the year came via digital technology. My treks in Morocco's High Atlas brought me back to the Dar Adrar guest house in Imlil by mid-afternoon. It was then time to chill on the roof-top terrace and soak up the wondrous view seen above while listening to my iPod. The High Atlas is steeped in magic and mysticism as is Arnold Bax's music; so one afternoon at the top of my playlist was Bax's Third Symphony in Vernon Handley's recording . In a review of Dilys Gater 's speculative book Summer with Bax – a Fresh Take on Reality Christopher Webber explains how "All creative work... requires an opening up of the artist to summoned worlds, more or les...

In his latest 'mine is bigger than yours' boast Norman Lebrecht declares that " it would be remiss on our part not to indicate... statistical shortcomings". A very wise observation that I too will now turn my attention to. In his post Norman states "Slipped Disc is on course to reach 1.5 million readers this month. Google Analytics tells us pretty much who and where they are". But Google Analytics does not measure readers : it measures website traffic volume , which is a different thing altogether. Readers are human beings, traffic volume is a measure of visitors to a website, and those visitors may, or may not be, human. In fact independent research shows that more than half of visitors to websites are bots as opposed to humans. As an example 'feed fetcher' bots that refresh newsfeeds alone account for more than 12% of website traffic, with the Facebook 'feed fetcher' accounting for one third of that traffic. So if Google Analytics is...

Certainly it is our obligation to show to the whole world that we can live together no matter to which culture and religion we belong... Outside of our religious beliefs there is only one God who attracts us to him and invites us to unremittingly build the world with Him, a world in which man is no longer a wolf to his fellow man, but rather a world in which we recognize each other as brothers and as children of our Father. That message was the response by the prior of the monastery of Our Lady of the Atlas in Midelt, Morocco to an ill-judged letter from President Sarkozy of France, who had written to the monks about the need for them to participate "in the process of globalisation"*. The Midelt monastery had been established after Our Lady of the Atlas in Tibhirine, Algeria was abandoned following the murder of seven monks by terrorists in 1996. The photo was taken by me a few weeks ago and shows the Christmas lights in the avenue leading to Marrakesh's Koutoubia mosque...

Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti 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 last post certainly seems to have hit its target .

In defiance of the shift away from blogs and towards the micro-blogging format of social media On An Overgrown Path recorded a modest increase in readership during 2017. Of particular significance are the trends within that remarkably resilient readership and two of these trends in particular are worth highlighting. The first is that social media exposure by the online classical tastemakers now has only minimal impact on readership numbers for my posts. In the world of classical music, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have become a closed loop where the same people say the same things to each other many times a day and every day. These social media addicts have not noticed that the rest of the world outside the loop is not listening and not interested. The second significant trend is that an important part of the Overgrown Path readership now comes from beyond the classical closed loop. Recent widely read posts such as Classical music's biggest problem is ...

When faced with a three year closure of the city's city's almost 200 year old opera house for a much-needed renovation, the city of Avignon in France came up with a truly innovative solution to keep classical music alive for the city's residents. A temporary opera house/concert hall has been built on vacant ground on the city's outskirts close to the TGV - high speed train - station that links Avignon to Paris and the rest of France. This development area is where the mighty Rhône and Durance rivers meet, so the temporary auditorium is known as Opéra Confluence. The DE-SO architectural practice led by partner Sandrine Charvet has created a temporary auditorium and public spaces using the wooden interior and framework seen in the header photo. This frame is made from gulam bonded timber, with insulation sandwiched under exterior cladding, as can be seen in the external view below. Below are elevations of the new hall. Recycling was a major part of the brief: some ...

Too many world music releases are a fusion of banal Western riffs and soporific Eastern stasis, which has prompted new modal music progenitor Ross Daly to dismiss world music as “an offshoot of the pop music industry with an emphasis on party music”. Not so however the output from the diaspora of Ross's Labyrinth music co-operative in Crete. Among the practitioners of this contemporary music are the newly-formed trio of multi-instrumentalist Efrén López , luthier and lyrist extraordinaire Stelios Petrakis and percussion genius Bijan Chemirani . Their new CD Taos on the independent Buda Musique label is far from world music's madding groove - sample below. No review materials used. 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 .

Our reaching out for singularity these days is not unexpected, given that social media bombards us with opportunities to acquire the latest product or the swiftest device to put us out in front of the crowd. Our jobs are sometimes less about intrinsic value or usefulness than position and status and salary. To be special is to be safe—from criticism, from dismissal. Certainly we are indispensable to our children. And then when they grow up and leave, some of us feel a great emptiness. In our jobs and professions we have the experience of being special to a number of people. And much of our identity and sense of ourselves depends on that relationship. If we stop working, we find out how much we have depended on being so important to others. But there’s another, not so obvious, dimension of being special: being distinguished in our misfortune or our misery. A victim is somebody special. I’m so unlucky, I’m so very ill, I have so much pain, that person really did me wrong and hurt m...

Writing an earlier post The art of the classical maverick prompted me to listen again to David Munrow's 3 LP box Music of the Gothic Era recorded for Deutsche Grammophon shortly before he took his own life in 1976. What is immediately striking is how fundamentally different these performances of Leonin, Pérotin and their contemporaries are to today's approved 'authentic' interpretations. Amazon reviewers reprimand Munrow for being 'dated', for 'overblown instrumentation', for using 'bells, fiddles, lute, bandora, psaltery, harp, organ, percussion, cornetts, recorder and shawms', and for having 'the mindset that everything must be accompanied by some mentalist walloping away like mad on the tabor and a cacophony of other instruments'. Yet David Munrow attracted radio and television audiences and generated record sales that today's classical industry would die for. Isn't there are a lesson to be learnt here? In an earlier pos...

Recording and book of the year listicles don't do it for me. But one of my book highlights of 2017 demands a heads up. Don't Panic I'm Islamic was commissioned in response to the US travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries. Subtitled 'Words and pictures on how to stop worrying and learn to love the alien next door', it includes cartoons, graffiti, photography, colouring in pages, memoir, short stories and more by 34 contributors from around the world. All too often this kind of book struggles to rise above juvenile humour, but this is most definitely not the case with Don't Panic I'm Islamic . Razor sharp humour is combined with cutting edge graphics and commendable design flair. Two of the graphics are reproduced here. Muslim Panik above is the work of Shadi Alzaqzouq , while Nikee Rider below is by the 'Andy Warhol of Marrakech' Hassan Hajjaj . Don't Panic I'm Islamic is published by London-based independent publishing hou...

In preparation for returning again to Papal Provence I have revisited David Munrow's 1973 three LP set The Art of Courtly Love . With so much soul-searching about how classical music can reach a new young audience it is worth remembering that David Munrow's BBC Radio 3 Pied Piper programme was broadcast four times a week for five years and introduced a huge audience to the riches of early music. He also presented the TV series Ancestral Voices, a title described as sounding like the greatest Led Zeppelin album never recorded; which may help explain why Munrow's popularity peaked in the early 1970s, when the young and alternative dominated the zeitgeist . David Munrow was truly multi-talented , and much of his appeal came from his advocacy of composers such as Guillaume de Machaut, Gilles Binchois and Guillaume Dufay, who were totally unknown and alien in style to the wider public in the 1970s. Today Simon Rattle, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and Gustavo Dudamel are undoubtedly...

My recent post lamenting the shortage in classical music of mavericks, technologists and other agents of change attracted fewer readers than the joke post about Norman Lebrecht precededing it. Which I guess proves my point. But I don't give up that easily, so I am now returning to the subject of technology and agents of change. In my article I said that classical music desperately needs radical projects that capitalise on the opportunities offered by digital technologies to engage new audiences. So this post provides a heads up to a project that does just that, but which has received very little recognition. Here is the description from the University of Salford website : Forget what you thought you knew about orchestral concerts; this new and innovative series requests that you DO turn on your mobile phones and tablets. The BBC Philharmonic, in partnership with the University of Salford, will be exploring new and rarely performed pieces – bringing audience immersion and...

Discussions of neglected symphonists invariably neglect to mention Michael Tippett. So it is good to see that Hyperion are releasing Martyn Brabbins conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Tippett's First and Second Symphonies - sample here - as the first instalment of a Tippett symphony cycle. Excellent accounts by Colin Davis and Richard Hickox failed to persuade the wider audience of the indisputable merit of Tippett's symphonies, so it will be interesting to see how the new Hyperion release fares. The problem is that unfamiliar works such as these require repeated concert hall outings to engage audiences, not the one-off pseudo-event treatment that is now standard for non-mainstream repertoire. To treat Tippett and his neglected peers as more than a solitary freak show requires courage and commitment from conductor, orchestra and promoter. So I'm not holding my breath. Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material is included as "...

There are longstanding overlaps between classical music and Buddhism. Wagner's study of Buddhism is confirmed by his short prose sketch for a Buddhist themed opera titled Die Sieger (The Victors), a theme developed by Jonathan Harvey in his opera Wagner Dream . Jonathan Harvey is one of a number of contemporary composers influenced by Buddhism and his Weltethos was premiered by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic *. Iconoclast Claude Vivier's masterwork is arguably his Siddhartha for orchestra in eight groups , while Philip Glass, whose style has impacted well beyond classical music , is a Tibetan Buddhist adept and composed the score for the film Kundun which portrays the flight into exile of the Dalai Lama. Most famously John Cage, who was a major influence on both 20th century music and culture, is closely linked to Zen Buddhism. At the heart of Buddhism is the acceptance of impermanence. This is the concept that reality is never constant and everything is i...

Rumours of Norman Lebrecht retiring to open a technology store in Marrakech seem to have substance.

Over time, we create a mental model of the real world that is strongly influenced by our beliefs, prejudices and experiences, and our model will differ from that of other people in far greater ways than is usually accepted. The world that we consciously inhabit increasingly resembles our own 'world view'. Should an optimistic person walk down a street, for example, they would be inclined to register happy couples, pleasant weather or playing children. A cynical person walking down exactly the same street might completely miss those details, and see instead the homeless population and the graffiti. Of course, the street itself hasn't changed between the two observations, but this is almost irrelevant, as no one is aware of the 'true' street in its entirety. The same principle applies to every aspect of life, from the mechanism that decides which news stories grab your attention, to the personal qualities in others that you respond to or overlook. The result of this ...