Wise words about the social media feeding frenzy

'If I have to choose between gossips and gospels, my preference is for gossips.
They are juicier, more alive.
Gospels look sad, dead, heavy.
If you have to listen you can manage to listen, but it is not a dance of the heart.
Gossip as aesthetically as possible, as religiously as possible!
And gossip something beautiful, something ecstatic'
~ Osho Rajneesh.
Photo taken by me at Khajuraho, India. This blog is no longer linked on social media. But new posts - beautiful and ecstatic or otherwise - can be received by RSS/email by simply entering your email address in the right-hand sidebar. Any copyrighted material is included for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

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Scott Ross and the paradox of genius

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On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of his great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the château, the harpsichordist gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos below were taken by me on a
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...and the musicians were paid £800

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Back in 2008 I curated what was probably the first and only broadcast of a complete lilal  night healing ritual performed by the sub-Saharan musicians known as Gnawa. As a result of that broadcast, eight years later I was invited to a Gnawa trance ritual in Essaouira on Morocco's Atlantic coast. That  lilal was a private devotional event which I was privileged to attend with a Moroccan Sufi friend. But like all musicians, the Gnawa rely on commercial performances for their income. That source of income was abruptly terminated by the Covid pandemic. Which has left many Gnawa musicians facing extreme hardship in a country where fiscal safety-nets are much more fallible than in the West, and as a result  a priceless cultural tradition is at risk. Now there has been a heartwarming attempt to alleviate, at least in part, the musicians' hardship. A UNESCO intiative led to 75 gnawan master musicians gathering in Essaouira in December for the filming of a two hour TV special
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Have all the really great musicians come and gone?

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Bernard Haitink's 2016 recording of Mahler's Third Symphony is arguably the greatest interpretation of that towering work committed to record. It is also one of the last testaments from a conductor who together with Georg Solti, Herbert von Karajan, Sir Adrian Boult, Colin Davis and others defined a golden age of classical music. In response to my post ' Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares ' reader David has posted a comment that starts by asking "...have all the really great performances, recordings indeed all the greatest musicians come and gone?" He then goes on to observe that  "I haven't heard anything in the last twenty or more years that compares with previous generations". The classical industry has spent much time agonising over its failed attempts to reach a new audience. But an even bigger problem has received little attention. Not only is the new young audience remaining elusive, but the older lon
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A Negro in front of a white symphony group? No - I'm sorry

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It is reported that Everett Lee has died at the grand old age of 105. Everett Lee was an early victim of the institutionalised racism that still pervades classical music, and he deserves far more than to be lauded in a trite obituary and then forgotten again. My Overgrown Path articles about him ten years ago were in the vanguard of the movement to give musicians of colour the recognition they deserve. So here again are three of those articles: 'I don't believe in Negro symphony conductors': July 25th 2011 'Oh, come in, young man. I'm reading these reviews. They are out of this world. You really have something. But I might as well tell you, right now, I don't believe in Negro symphony conductors. No, you may play solo with our symphonies, all over this country. You can dance with them, sing with them. But a Negro, standing in front of a white symphony group? No. I'm sorry.' That is the impresario Arthur Judson discussing career opportunities with
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New classical audiences need new music

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A reader's  perceptive comment  explained that to reach a new audience classical music must help listeners across the classical/non-classical divide.  Electronic Dance Music  (EDM) is the immensely popular staple fare of classical's elusive new young audience, and EDM lacks any narrative progression. Classical music can also be non-linear: one example is John Luther Adams' Become Desert , a seamless 40 minute sonic mirage which   abandons the horizontal narrative structures of works such as Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony  with its 'Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside'.  Become Desert sits comfortably in the concert hall, yet it would not be out of place in a sunset session at Ibiza's Café Del Mar or a full moon trance party on Koh Pha Ngan . As John Luther Adams described in a New York Times essay ,  Become Desert  literally entrances its audience - "You find yourself listening in ways you never have before. The scale of yo
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The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

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Another pianist with a religious habit

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Yesterday I pointed out that Norman Lebrecht was wrong in saying that French pianist Jean-Rodolphe Kars had entered a monastery in 1981 and had not been heard of since. But in a fascinating twist reader Leo Carey, who sparked my recent Hans Schmidt Isserstedt post , has reminded me of another French pianist who did indeed disappear into a Benedictine monastery. Thierry de Brunhoff was born in 1933. His father was the writer and illustrator Jean de Brunhoff (1899-1937) who was famous for creating the Babar the Elephant books. When he was nine years old Thierry de Brunhoff became a pupil of Alfred Cortot at l'Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. Brunhoff's father had died when he was just three and he was encouraged as a pianist by his mother who had also been a pupil of Cortot's. He was a favourite pupil of Cortot and his career developed in the early 1960s to include acclaimed recitals and records, notably of Schumann. Some of his recordings from this period remain ava
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All we are saying is give convergence a chance

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Wenatchee the Hatchet has left the comment below on my post ' Have all the really great musicians come and gone? ' For those with a maximum attention span of 280 characters the money quote is "I think working across all the musical genre boundaries to sustain a synergistic theoretical and practical cross-genre collaboration among musicians and composers could help people across the pop/classical divides... but music journalism and scholarship too often seems set on antagonizing the scene rather than exploring possible convergences". I suggest those words of wisdom should be the New Year's resolution for the classical industry. The accompanying graphics are from the predictably ignored  The Arabian Passion according to J.S Bach from the genre-defying early music ensemble Sarband : music samples here and here . Now this is Wenatchee the Hatchet's quote: 'I know Doug Shadle is working hard to get [Florence] Price heard more but what I've heard is &q
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When classical musicians fought against tuxedo fascism

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