When will they ever learn?


Today BBC Radio 3 broadcast the rondo third movement torn from the radiant and indivisible whole that is Elgar's Second Symphony. On Thursday RAJAR reported that Radio 3's audience had shrunk a further 7.5% year on year.

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Berlin Philharmonic's first woman conductor

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If this had been a Deutsche Grammophon session.....

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In this age of supposed diversity the Egyptian composer, ethnomusicologist and electronic music pioneer Halim El-Dabh is overlooked. While still a student in the 1940s Halim El-Dabh experimented with composing using wire recorders. In 1944 he created one of the earliest known examples of electronic musique concrète . The Expression of Zaar manipulated field recordings of a traditional zaar exorcism ceremony, and predated Pierre Schaeffer's work by four years. In 1950 Halim El-Dabh received a Fulbright Scholarship and moved to the United States, becoming a US citizen in 1961. His composition teachers included Ernst Krenek , Aaron Copland and Luigi Dallapiccola . In New York his circle included Henry Cowell , John Cage , and Peggy Glanville-Hicks , and he composed four ballet scores for Martha Graham  and was an influential figure in the early days of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center .  Halim El-Dabh came from a Coptic-Christian family with ancestral roots in Uppe
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