On An Overgrown Path

East Anglia is currently in the grip of heavy snowfall and the extreme weather has brought the region to a standstill . What is particularly striking in our snow-covered Zen garden this morning is the total silence. Zen gardens were a particular influence on Toru Takemitsu (seen above), who once explained that 'I design gardens with music'. In his book In Quest of Spirit: Thoughts on Music composer Jonthan Harvey wrote that: Toru Takemitsu was working in a Western musical language, but, like a Japanese novel translated into English, his compositions contain something different. Takemitsu said he only uttered 80 per cent of any idea, in what could be construed as powerful understatement; the rest is silence, the pregnancy of the unsaid, ma. Ma , a profoundly important concept in Japanese culture, is the silent understanding when friends are together, or when one is contemplating nature or art - when meaning is intense but nothing is expressed. Toru Takemitsu is just one of...

A recent post explained how grovelling to 5% of your audience drives away 8% . Now if you think my criticism of the dumbed down BBC Radio 3 is extreme, try this one for size. On February 12th a Radio 3 broadcast of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius was introduced by presenter Kate Molleson as being conducted by "Sir Edward Davis". OK, we all make mistakes. But bear with me, because it gets worse. At the end of Andrew Davis' moving performance the final 'amen' died away to be followed seamlessly and without a linking announcement by another performance of the complete Prelude. OK, we all make mistakes, and perhaps the Radio 3 presenter was just having a bad Gerontius day and accidently let the music play on. But bear with me, because yet again it gets worse. This could not have been a continuity error. Because the Gerontius complete with fore and aft Preludes fitted exactly into the allocated time slot: if it had been Ms Molleson's mistake the programme...

'In a roomful of shouting people, the one who whispers becomes interesting' ~ Peter Schmidt Photo taken at Zaouia of Moulay Idriss II in Fes, Morocco. Take care while I am away.

Art and music from the deviant Nazi and Communist Russian regimes has received considerable attention. But the culture of deviant militant Islamists has received virtually no attention. Now the Cambridge University Press is attempting to correct this with the publication of Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists . Edited by Thomas Hegghammer , an academic specialist on violent Islamism and Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, Jihadi Culture is an anthology of commentaries from various experts covering topics such as the role of poetry, visual art, cinema and music in jihadism. Particularly interesting are the chapters on the role of anashi (singular nashid ) - a capella songs. The Yemeni-American jihadi preacher Anwar al-Awlaki , who was killed in 2011 in the Yemen by an American drone strike said to have been personally ordered by President Obama, wrote that: "Nasheeds are an important element in creating a ...

Isn't the real problem that classical music is a subtle art and social media doesn't do subtle ?

'That uplifting and deeply-felt emotionally-charged live performance of Mahler's First Symphony was conducted by....' ~ BBC Radio 3 presenter 'Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn' ~ Basho Header image via My poetic side . 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 .

You do not need to be a rocket scientist to explain why BBC Radio 3 lost 8% of its audience during a 12 month period in which the total UK radio audience grew by 2%. Latest RAJAR data reports that BBC Radio 3 has 1.95 million listeners. Radio 3 currently has 101,617 Twitter followers. Which means only 5.2% of the station's listeners follow it on Twitter. Radio 3 has ambitions to reach a wider audience. The total UK radio audience is 48.86 million. So just 0.2% of the target wider audience follow Radio 3 on Twitter. Despite these readily available statistics, Radio 3 continues not only to use Twitter to influence programming, as in the case of the infamous Hovis tweet and the new example above , but unashamedly grovels to Twitter users for approval, see tweet below . Daytime BBC Radio 3 is now a sequence of bleeding chunks of symphonies and concertos punctuated by the presenter's desperate pleas for interaction from the social media 5%. And if you think that description is...

Cyprus together with Greece has suffered from the one-size-fits-all doctrinaire economic policies of the Troika - the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But, as with the Greek island of Crete , creativity flourishes on Cyprus despite recent EU-imposed economic stringency. Cyprus is not noted for its music; in fact my ageing edition of the Rough Guide to World Music covering the Mediterranean makes no mention of Cyprus at all. Which gives totally the wrong impression as there is some exciting agitative new music coming from the island. One example is Monsieur Doumani, an acoustic trio of tzouras - a relative of the bouzouki - guitar and trombone/flute from Nicosia. This latter-day Incredible String Band mixes their traditional Cypriot roots with acerbic social commentary and a style that defies the one-size-fits-all mindset of the corporate music industry. Below is a track from Monsieur Doumani's 2013 debut album Grippy Grappa...

Last night's listening included the CD above of Lou Harrison's exquisite music for guitar and percussion. Lou Harrison's Buddhist tendencies - he famously set the Heart Sutra in Esperanto - prompted me to dip into Robert Thurmann's translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is a misunderstood text that is much better represented by its correct title The Book of Liberation Through Understanding in the Between . Its relevance extends far between the process of shuffling off the mortal coil, because we live in an age which culturally and politically is 'in the between'. In his commentary Bob Thurman , who as well as being a leading authority on Buddhism is together with Philip Glass a driving force in New York's Tibet House , makes a very important thought-provoking distinction between the superficial 'outer modernity' of Western culture and the reflective 'inner modernity' of Tibetan Buddhism. Rereading Robert Thurmann's tra...

As Alan Davey said when taking over Radio 3 and before losing 8% of his listeners, " I won't be dumbing down ".

Those who read my recent post BBC Radio 3's big mixtake will not be surprised by today's news that the classical station's audience plunged 8% during a 12 month period when the total UK radio audience grew by 2%. I was certainly no fan of Nicholas Kenyon and Roger Wright during their tenures at Radio 3. But at least they dumbed the station down with flair. Current incumbent Alan Davey 's mixtape-led dumbing down is not just 100% flair-free, it is positively cringe-inducing. There is nothing else to say other than repeating the final paragraph of my earlier post . The livelihoods of five leading orchestras and a choir, and the future of the largest new music commissioning budget in the world depend on the healthy survival of BBC Radio 3. You only need to listen to Radio 3's daytime programmes to understand that the patient's vital signs look very bad indeed, and to realise that drastic and painful surgery is urgently required to provide any hope of sur...

In 2005 Godfried Toussaint , a computer scientist at McGill University, published the paper The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms . This showed how using the greatest common divisor of two numbers the Euclidean Algorithm can create the pattern of equidistant beats and silences found in all sub-Saharan African music in particular and world music in general. (The exception is Indian where beats and silences are asymmetrical). At a time when changes to the algorithms that control Facebook newsfeeds is making the headlines , that linkage of algorithm and rhythms in the title of Godfried Toussaint's paper is significant. Many great musicians from Sufi visionary Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927) to avant-garde pioneer Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012) have recognised the seminal role of vibrating energy - frequencies and rhythms - in music, and, indeed, in much else . In a sleeve essay for Randy Weston's 1992 recording of sub-Saharan Gnawa musicians in Marrakech *...

When I mentioned A Love Supreme , Yusef Lateef gave me the same self-effacing response he offered in his memoir, The Gentle Giant : that the inspiration for the composition came from Coltrane's late Muslim wife, Naima. Coltrane heard her recite the fatiha five times a day. "I can only say that John and I, we were dear friends, we were trying to advance our music together. I don't know if I encouraged him to read the Holy Quaran. My guess is his wife, Naima, encouraged him to read the Holy Quaran, Khalil Gibran and Krishnamurti . The prayer that John wrote in A Love Supreme repeats the phrase 'All praise belongs to God no matter what' several times. This phrase has the semantics of the second sentence of the fatiha . The Arabic transliteration is 'Al Humdulillah,' and that means 'All praise is due to God.'" That illuminating perspective on the genesis of a contemporary music masterpiece comes from Rebel Music , an important literary celebrat...

He learned incessantly from the river. Above all, it taught him to listen, to listen with a silent heart, with a waiting, open soul, without passion, without desire, without judgement, without opinion. That quote comes from Hermann Hesse's novel Siddhartha . Written in 1922, it introduced many - including this writer - to the teachings of the Buddha four decades later, while Hesse's 1932 Journey to the East led to him being dubbed the patron saint of the 1960's overland hippie trail to India. In a rare example of generational convergence three of Strauss' Four Last Songs set the poetry of Hesse , which allowed the delicious conjunction of Richard Strauss and psychedelic rock music in an earlier post . Selfies are frowned on, or worse , on this blog. But a relevant selfie can be seen via this link . There is more in yet another post on the vitally important but lost art of listening . We don't need to change the music or the environment it is played in, we just nee...

News that Formula 1 has dropped its titillating 'grid girls' has received widespread media coverage . Which prompts me to republish the photo above. It first appeared two weeks ago in my article about the Marrkaech ePrix . This was a round in the emission-free Formula E motor-racing series that uses electric power for its cars. Instead of the traditional grid girls Formula E uses post-millennial 'grid kids' as seen in my photo. Formula E is a laudable exercise in showing there is life beyond fossil fuels. Oil is one our valuable natural resources and quite rightly considerable attention is focussed on its preservation; just as attention is focussed on the despoiling of other natural resources such as forestry and water reserves. But puzzlingly little attention is paid to the sustainability of those grid kids. We have forgotten that this young generation is our most valuable resource, because without them growing into wise and responsible adults there will be no need ...

A recent post asked why is jazz so underrated? Perhaps one reason is because jazz, thankfully, does not have the media-friendly celebrities who dominate classical music. But that is not quite true. Jazz has Keith Jarrett, whose Koln Concert bankrolled ECM for years*. That publicity photo above was taken from Jarrett's good side. The video below taken on a concertgoer's phone camera at the 2007 Umbria Jazz Festival shows his other side. * Keith Jarrett has also worked extensively in the classical field. For ECM his recordings include Bach , Barber and Bartók concertos , and a double CD of organ improvisations for ECM described by me in a 2012 post as Messiaen takes a trip , and he also made a pioneering recording of the Gurdjieff/de Hartmann piano music for the German label. Elsewhere he has recorded Lou Harrison's incomprehensibly overlooked Piano Concerto which was commissioned by Jarrett and premiered by him, and Alan Hovhaness' Lousadzak . Header photo i...