Bridge over troubled cultural waters


So Clara Schumann is the greatest composer of all time. Which means it is time for me to disappear off and try to reconnect with reality. Geo-culturally appropriate soundtrack for my bardo is Gnawa multi-instrumentalist Majid Bekkas' album Al Qantara. In Arabic Al Qantara means a bridge, and the title of the album is a reference to Morocco's position as a bridge between the all too often conflicting cultures of Africa, the Middle East and the West. Let me leave you with an anecdote about reality told by the anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson:
There was a man who had a powerful computer, and he wanted to know whether computers would ever think. So he asked it, no doubt in his best Fortran: 'Will you ever be able to think like a human being?' The computer clicked and rattled and blinked, and finally it printed out its answer on a piece of paper, as these machines do. The man ran to pick up the printout, and there, neatly typed, read the following words: 'THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY.'
Anecdote is retold from Uncommon Wisdom by Fritjof Capra. Any copyrighted material is included for critical analysis, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). New Overgrown Path posts are available via RSS/email by entering your email address in the right-hand sidebar.

Comments

Post a comment

Recent popular posts

How to reach a big new post-COVID classical audience

Image
Bruno Walter's 1938 Vienna Philharmonic interpretation of Mahler's Ninth Symphony still has the power to move and enlighten, despite the technical limitations of the recording. Similarly Wilhelm Furtwängler's Berlin Philharmonic concert recording from 1949 of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony still reminds us that beauty is more powerful than hatred, again despite considerable technical limitations. Today, blowing 866 million euro on a not quite acoustically perfect concert hall is the go-to solution for saving classical music, which means a celebrity conductor can  throw his batons out of the pram  when he is not rewarded with a blinged-out new hall. So why, given these contemporary priorities, can great recordings from the past touch us so deeply when heard through the technology equivalent of a tin shed concert hall?  The answer lies in the little-understood but vitally important process of listening . There is no such thing as perfect sound , or historic sound, or bad
Read more

All aboard the Martinu bandwagon

Image
Depressing, but predictable, to see the mainstream media scrambling aboard the Bohuslav Martinů bandwagon as soon as BBC Radio 3 announces a cycle of his superb symphonies . Equally depressing, but a sign of the times, to see the Independent publishing an appreciation of the composer's symphonies by a writer who confesses elsewhere to never having heard a single note of them. As Norman Lebrecht famously wrote in the Evening Standard back in 2006: ‘... until bloggers deliver hard facts … paid for newspapers will continue to set the standard as the only show in town’. Sadly the hard facts now show that Norman is no longer at the Evening Standard , and, as from next Monday, the Evening Standard will no longer be a paid for newspaper . But you can find pre-bandwagon appreciations of Martinů here and here . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request o
Read more

What the law of diminishing diversity tells us

Image
A quick scan of the online postings from classical music's cultural commentators proves the law of diminishing diversity. This law tells us that a commentator's commitment to true cultural diversity is inversely proportional to their social media presence. In this context cultural diversity does not mean the standard 'Mirga', 'Sheku', 'Brexit doom' and 'woman composer' box-ticking. It means reflecting the truly rich cultural diversity of art music at the expense of the holy grail of audience size.  The mechanism propelling the the law of diminishing diversity is easy to understand. Popularity in the form of readership numbers, audience size, site traffic and other social media metrics is now the end game for cultural commentators . So if a topic pulls eyeballs, you provide more of the same to generate more eyeballs, which results in cultural tunnel vision.  This dynamic of giving more of the same in the interests of audience size is multipl
Read more

Classical music must face the facts - click bait pays

Image
Above are the latest accounts for SlippedDisc Limited, which has Norman Lebrecht as a director*. These accounts show that the profit and loss account surplus** increased in fiscal 2020 to £203,719, an increase of 41% over the previous year***. To put that £203,719 trading surplus into context, the average salary for a Metropolitan Opera musician converted into sterling is £138,990 , that of BBC Radio 3 Controller Alan Davey is £182,000 , and Boris Johnson earns £161,401 . Let's be clear at this point: the filed accounts fully comply with the requirements of Companies House and are in the public domain , and Norman runs a legitimate business. This post is not being driven by malice or sour grapes. On An Overgrown Path has never had commercial aspirations: I was well rewarded during my career in the music industry and I am very fortunate to have adequate pension provisions. This post is driven, like so many on my blog, by context and facts.  Regular readers know that, to put it mi
Read more

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
Read more

'John Cage had been one of my heroes since the age of seventeen'

Image
Recently I have found new books far more engrossing than new classical recordings. One of my most rewarding reads has been the first volume of Richard Thompson's autobiography Beeswing .  Richard Thompson is best known as co-founder of the legendary folk-rock group Fairport Convention . A few years ago I wrote about his exploration of the Sufi path , and I have also recounted the untold story of the counterculture's Islamic connection in an exclusive interview with Ian Whiteman - aka Abdallateef Whiteman - who with Richard Thompson was a member of the fabled Bristol Gardens Sufi commune in 1970s London. Beeswing is much more than a rock memoir. It name checks, among others, Delius, Bliss, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Wagner, Satie, Granger and Stockhausen, and includes this John Cage anecdote:     "During that tour, our driver, Walter Gundy, needed to pick something up from his house in upstate New York, and I went with him. There were two units in his rental, and he men
Read more

Elgar's other enigma

Image
Like Pliable Elgar was a keen cyclist , here he is in Malvern with his much-used Sunbeam tourer. Jessica Duchen's classical music blog about Edward Elgar's birthplace at Broadheath, Worcestershire reminded of a link to him sitting on my bookshelf. The score of Elgar's Violin Conerto contains an enigmatic dedication in the form of a mysterious Italian phrase - "Acqui esta encerrada el alma de" - followed by five dots; meaning that the identity of the dedicatee of this perenially popular work is unknown. Some years ago I bought a second hand copy of the autobiography of Mrs Richard Powell, 'Dorabella' of the tenth of the Enigma Variations ('Edward Elgar - Memories of a Variation published by Methuen). Stuck into the book are hand written letters and postcards sent to the original owner by Mrs Powell who was then living in East Grinstead. A letter of 12th Feb 1950 from Mrs Powell in her own hand writing says the following ... "What a c
Read more

Roma - the forgotten Holocaust victims

Image
The fate of the millions of Jews murdered in Hitler's death camps is well documented, but less is known about the 500,000 Gypsies who also died . There are not many written accounts of the Roma or Sinti travellers who died in the camps, because, their culture is traditionally oral, not literary. By contrast the majority of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust came from educated middle-classes, and left behing written records of their terrible fate. The photograph above shows Roma prisoners in the Belzec concentration camp . The genocide of the Roma by the Nazis is the most shocking example, but the history of the persecution of Gypsies goes back to their first appearance in Europe in the 15th century, when they were often confused with the hated Muslim invaders from the east. Laws were enacted against them across the whole continent, and centuries of persecution, forced assimilation, enslavement and extermination followed. In England the last executions for the crime of being
Read more

A vintage year for blasphemy and heresy

Image
2010 was a vintage year for blasphemy and heresy. A post on Salvador Dali drew attention to his forgotten audiovisual opera-poem Être Dieu inspired by the Cathar heresy, Jonathan Harvey stirred things up on my Chance Music programme by saying "the future must bring things which are considered blasphemous like amplifying classical music", while yet another path took me to new heights of heresy. In fact the path reached 2400 feet, which, as the photo above shows, is a serious challenge for anyone who, like me, who has a vertigo problem. I took the photo from the fortress of Quéribus in Languedoc, France and the view is towards Mont Canigou, the holy mountain beloved of Pablo Casals and Thomas Merton . Quéribus castle was the last Cathar stronghold to surrender in 1255 and Jordi Savall's The Forgotten Kingdom had led me to Languedoc and Catharism and on to Gnosticism. The Cathar heresy has its roots in the "dualist" religions in the Indus basin which origi
Read more

Word quickly spread that the old composer had lost it

Image
October 2021 brings the centenary of Sir Malcolm Arrnold's birth. But it is unlikely that the photo above* will appear in any of the fulsome tributes to this still sadly neglected composer . It shows Sir Malcolm towards the end of his life with Anthony Day. In 1984 Anthony was appointed by the Court of Protection as Sir Malcolm’s chauffeur-companion, and he fulfilled that role until the composer's death in 2006. Anthony Day, who died of cancer in 2019, is known because of his involvement in the long and bitter battle  over the inheritance of the Arnold Estate. However, the Malcolm Arnold Society offers a refreshingly balanced overview of his role, saying that "Anthony was responsible for the not-always-easy Malcolm... Anthony’s life was not without its controversies, but through his long administrations, the distressing infirmities of Malcolm’s old age were at least tempered by the recognition and many honours Malcolm received as the grand old man of British music"
Read more