In the bleak midwinter


Photo was taken by me earlier this year on the upper slopes of Mount Toubkal in Morocco, above the shrine of the pre-Islamic marabout Sidi Chamharouch. A very happy Christmas and diverse new year to all my readers.

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What is the link to Lady Gaga?

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'That inner spirit has been embodied very vibrantly in Benedictine monastic life and liturgy. This helps to explain the paradox of a music which when sung really expresses the spirit of silence; which with almost wordless vocalization really attempts to express the very word of God; which with the action of singing really is meant to be a vehicle of contemplation' - Abbot Marcel Rooney, O.S.B. The glories of Gregorian Chant, or "the mysticism of the octave" as Abbot Rooney describes it, have drawn me back again and again to the Benedictine L'Abbaye Sainte-Madeleine at Le Barroux near Avignon in France. The monastic community at Le Barroux are orthodox Catholics who celebrate the Holy Offices eight times a day in plainsong which respects the scholarship of Solesmes . This glorious liturgy is one of the reasons why I have stayed at the Abbey as a guest of the monks quite a few times over the years despite my discomfort with other aspects of Catholicism . As a resul...
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Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

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In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A...
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Brain Food 2

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Listening................ Bloch Quartets 1 to 4 played by Griller Quartet In an earlier post I aked why Domenico Gabrielli's cello works aren't better known. Now this re-issue of the Griller Quartet playing Bloch's four string quartets prompts me to ask the same question - why aren't these quartets programmed today? Ernest Bloch is one of those unfortunate composers branded by a single work, in his case Schelomo (which I have to confess I wouldn't shed a tear if I didn't ever hear again).. His string quartets, which inhabit a sound world somewhere between Shostakovich and Schoenberg, are very different, and something of a challenge, with the first lasting for almost an hour. But they are most certainly great works which reward exploration. The sound from these mono 1954 Decca studio recordings is staggeringly good. The producer is my old boss from my EMI days, Peter Andry, recorded when he was at Decca. I was talking to a violin playing friend about why early ...
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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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Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

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These photos were taken by me in 2008 at independent record retailer Prelude Records in Norwich. Jordi Savall's impromptu viol recital and signing session preceeded two performances at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. One was a solo recital by Jordi in Peter Mancroft Church ; the other was an immensely moving performance of his visionary Jerusalem multicultural project at the Theatre Royal*. As reported here Prelude Records closed earlier this year; it was a victim of predatory online retailing, and today its premises stand empty awaiting occupation by a mobile phone or E-cigarette retailer. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival has been the victim of savage funding cuts , but continues in a more modest form due to the dedicated work of its small management team. A few days ago I wrote about a two-thirds empty Snape Maltings concert and proposed that classical music's heartland is facing a perfect storm caused by the convergence of the shifts in consumer tastes and the r...
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Should classical music turn up the bass?

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BTW, regarding your most recent blog post about attracting young people to classical music, Jonathan Harvey's comments mirrors something I've been saying for years, that classical music is lacking bass. That was one of the first things I noticed when I switched from being a blues/rock fan to a classical fan was that one expects to have a visceral experience at a concert. That blasphemous email arrived from composer and techno-maverick Jeff Harrington . Or is it blasphemous? There is a strong correlation between the popularity of works such as the 1812 Overture and Ravel's Pictures at an Exhibition orchestration and their bass content. And Gustav Mahler , Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Leonard Bernstein, and Dmitri Mitropoulos all agreed with Jeff and turned up the bass by performing the quartet repertoire with string orchestras. Above is the LP release of Bernstein's recording of Mitropoulos' version for string orchestra of Beethoven's Op. 131 Qua...
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The problem is obvious - there is too much classical music

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In a glowing review in the Guardian Andrew Clements describes the Freiburg Opera's Parsifal at the Norwich Theatre Royal - see production shot above - as "a show that almost any British company would be happy to have in its repertory". Yet despite the production's obvious quality, the four performances by the Freiburg company of Parsifal and Tannhäuser attracted lamentably small audiences. A London based critic blamed low profile promotion by the Norwich theatre for the poor attendance, and given the limited budget of the provincial venue, which has charitable status and no material public funding , there is some truth in that explanation. But the glib analysis of poor publicity is typical of the blame culture that is so prevalent in classical music today - blame elitism, funding cuts, antiquated concert conventions, piracy, in fact blame anything other than the self-harming behaviour of the music industry itself. All the fashionable conspiracy theories miss ...
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Early musician who could have become a great conductor

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Hopefully at least a little of the content from eleven years of On An Overgrown Path transcends the virtual noise that is the staple fare of online music journalism today . For me the most rewarding projects have been the Philippa Schuyler and Master Musician of Jajouka doubleheaders, the profile of Guyanese conductor Rudolph Dunbar , the exploration of contemporary modal music , and interviews with Jonathan Harvey , Jordi Savall , Ali Keeler , and with David Munrow's recording producer Christopher Bishop. Although the latter interview has been available as a sound file it has not to date been transcribed as text. So while tidying up loose ends I have transcribed the interview below. (The photo at the foot of the article was taken during the radio interview and shows me with Christopher Bishop). Although David Munrow is best known as an early music authority the interview ranges widely. Christopher Bishop mentored both Riccardo Muti and Andre Previn early in their careers...
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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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In search of the lost symphony

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Sir Adrian Boult's explorations of less familiar music is obscured by his reputation as the definitive interpreter of mainstream English masterworks. Among these explorations was his 1934 concert performance of Alban Berg's Wozzeck , a performance that predated the first British staged performance by eighteen years. Another tantalising glimpse of this precociousness is given in Peter Lavezzoli's book The Dawn of Indian Music in the West : this tells how "[John] Mayer composed his Jaya Javanti symphony for the London Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult (unfortunately not recorded)". Tantalising, because researching the performance of this symphony, including consulting Michael Kennedy's definitive biography of the conductor and Sir Adrian's own memoir , drew a blank. However biographical information on the Anglo-Indian composer, trans-cultural jazzer and violinist John Mayer who played in the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1950s, is on the ...
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