Yet more on classical music's muddled priorities

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
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David Munrow - more than early music

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'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
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Mahler 8 - Symphony of a Thousand Mistakes?

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What stunning sound the BBC engineers achieved for their live broadcast of Valery Gergiev's Mahler 8 with the London Symphony Orchestra this evening. Yes, the close miking of the instruments necessitated by the very long resonance of the building was evident. But St Paul's Cathedral is one of the most difficult spaces in the world both to perform and record in, and the BBC Radio 3 technicians produced some of the best sound I have heard from my B & W Nautilus 803 loudspeakers for a long time. Valery Gergiev's operatic approach to symphonies is not usually to my taste, but it worked a treat with Mahler's flawed but exhilarating Eighth. Quite unmissable radio, catch it for the next seven days here. One of the talking heads introducing the performance recounted how the work fell out of favour after Mahler's death and how surprising it was that the work was considered for a time to be lacking the genius of the composer's other symphonies. Well that is a view t...
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BBC Radio 3 audience crashes by 11.4%

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Latest RAJAR figures for UK radio audiences report that the BBC Radio 3 audience dropped by a whopping 11.4% year on year. This was a loss of 233,000 listeners from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025. Average hours per listener were also down, by 4.9% to 7.7. (Elsewhere, in an attempt to boost Radio 3 and talk down the loss, R3 presenter Norman Lebrecht compares the latest quarter - Q3 2025 - with the previous quarter - Q2 2025. As any industry insider knows, this is a meaningless comparison as radio audiences vary substantially by season. Most importantly Q3 audience is always boosted by Proms listeners compared to Q2.)  This dismal performance comes as no surprise. It was inevitable that Radio 3's strategy of aping Classic FM  would result in short term gain followed by the long term pain which is starting to emerge. Classical radio - and classical music in general - needs to build a strong franchise of a loyal audience that is prepared to be challenged . BBC Radio 3 in its present ...
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Soundtrack for a porn movie

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"No, you have not landed on Slipped Disc by mistake. Respected electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze tells the story himself.  The origins of " Body Love " are quite funny. I received a call from a movie producer named Manfred Menz and I wound up becoming his principal composer for a period of time. Amongst others, I composed the "Barracuda" soundtrack for him [1978, previously unreleased on album]. This led to a friendship which lasts till today. Menz now lives in Malibu, California where I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, this guy calls me and asks if I would compose the score to a porn movie. I said: "Porn? Nah, I don't do that kind of thing".  As it turned out, the director of the movie, Lasse Braun, had already shot it and had used my albums " Timewind " [1975] and " Moondawn " [1976] as a kind of "working soundtrack". This was obvious because the couples in the film were moving in time to my gro...
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Male American pioneers

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As the credit crunches who is going to pass up the opportunity to explore lots of composers for less cash? Budget-priced CDs receive a lot of attention , but budget books are also well worth investigating. 20th-Century Composers is an excellent series from innovative publisher Phaidon . They were originally published in the 1990s and are now reappearing at bargain price. The twenty-five titles range from Bernstein and the Beatles through Minimalists to Hindemith, Hartmann and Henze and György Ligeti , and on to Erich Wolfgang Korngold portrayed by our own Jessica Duchen . Seen above is American Pioneers by Alan Rich which I picked up for £6.95 in Blackwells in Edinburgh (egregious strap-line 'The Knowledge Retailer' ). The book is, as you would expect from a leading art publisher, a visual as well as textual delight, with art direction by New Yorker cover contributor Jean-Jaques Sempé . The main profiles are of Charles Ives , Edgar Varèse , Henry Cowell John Cage ...
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EMI - it's a dog's life

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First the bad news. The fluctuating prospects of my EMI pension have been the subject of two previous posts . Now comes the news that Guy Hands , the new owner of ailing EMI, has removed the chairman of the company's pension fund and appointed his own nominee to the post. This is Money comments: The move was unusual since chairmen of pension fund trustees must be seen to be able to represent the interests of pensioners without fear of censure from the company financing the fund. Fortunately we still have many principled small businesses in the UK. But then there is the BBC and EMI ; not to mention HBOS, the bank that cost us, and many others, a serious amount of money . But now for the good news. The fine drawing above depicts that great conductor Sir John Barbirolli, who made many fine recordings for EMI . His masterly accounts of Elgar's First and Second Symphonies, recorded for HMV with the Philharmonia and Hallé Orchestras respectively, have been absent from their catalo...
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Musicians against indifference

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On his new ECM album  After the Last Sky  oudist  Anouar Brahem  is joined by jazz multi-instrumentalist  Django Bates  and bassist  Dave Holland . Plus, in a serendipitous link to that  ultimate opposer of musician's indifference Pau Casals, long-time ECM maverick cellist  Anja Lechner  plays with Brahem for the first time, In his 1986 book After the Last Sky , Edward Said evoked Palestinian history in musical terms, as a "counterpoint (if not cacophony) of multiple, almost desperate dramas, with "no central image (exodus, holocaust, long march)... Without a center. Atonal". In a thoughtful booklet essay  Adam Shatz explains that Brahem's " After the Last Sky is in no way a didactic work of art and still less an anthemic expression of protest" and goes on to point out that "Brahem is Tunisian, not Palestinian, but he is no stranger to the tragedy of the Palestinian people". Most tellingly Shatz recounts how we are all t...
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The purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness

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Two contrasting responses from America to my post Third rate music on Naxos' American classics? Flinging merde - ' Granted some of the stuff that Naxos has packaged in that series has been less than distinguished but operating in a cultural establishment where critics treat every cow patty ever dropped by the likes of Alwyn (above) and Bax and Finzi and Michael Tippitt (sic) as if it were fois gras, Clements is hardly in a position to fling merde' - from Sequenza21 , and I'm sure Norman Lebrecht would approve of that misspelling of Tippett. The true beauty of the effort - ' Personally speaking I expect listener reaction to concert music is heavily dependent on emotional mood and cultural/historical context . The concept of "ratings" and "tiers" for composers is pretty much an over-rated specialization of critics, which serves the purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness. My father is the American composer George Frederick McKay (photo be...
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Wagner, Mahler and Shostakovich all sound like film music

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In a typically thoughtful contribution to my post Why not play the premier league composers more often? Richard Bratby - who is professionally involved in classical music - mused "speaking solely from my own experience - there is a very noticeable falling-off in ticket sales when a symphony orchestra programmes pre-Beethoven repertoire, irrespective of the quality of the performance or the music, or the energy with which it is marketed. But why?" Now Kea has answered Richard's question with the following comment: Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich, etc, all sound more or less like film music (or -- more accurately -- film music sounds more or less like recycled bits of Wagner, Mahler, Shostakovich, etc) and therefore don't require any intellectual involvement or serious effort to listen to. Understanding the music of Bach, Mozart or Haydn, etc (or for that matter Schumann, Brahms, Webern, Cage, etc) actually requires people to listen actively rather than being pulled alo...
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