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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All aboard the Martinu bandwagon

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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 of
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Whatever happened to the long tail of composers?

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Reader Antoine Leboyer writes to point out that the New York Philharmonic has made its programme archive available online and that the archive shows how past programmes were far more varied than those played today. Here are just some of the composers that Antoine highlights from past concerts by the orchestra: Siniaglia, Busoni, Bosi, Chadwick, Stanford, Loeffler, McDowell, Hadley, Goldmark, Pfitzner, Enesco, Vieuxtemps and Grétry. Antoine also remarks on how Webern's music has virtually disappeared from New York concerts in recent years. One of the many confidence tricks of the digital era is how a long tail of cultural riches was promised , but a short head immaculately coiffed by audience whoring celebrities was actually delivered. I suggest that one of the key search criteria for the New York Philharmonic's new music director should be a passion for giving audiences permission to like unfamiliar music . Graphic is grabbed from the New York Philarmonic archive lan
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Can streamed music ever be beautiful?

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Images are of Robert Rich 's double CD Numena + Geometry . CD aesthetics will be too arcane for many. But the ugly environmental impact of streaming in particular and cloud computing in general should concern everyone.  Digital technologies currently use 10% of the world's electricity and produce almost 4% of global emissions. Streamed content accounts for 60% of digital data flows. Netflix alone accounts for 15% of global internet traffic, and 30% of Netflix's energy needs are met by coal. If 70 million streaming subscribers were to lower the quality of their video and audio streams there would be a monthly reduction of 3.5 million tons of CO2e, equivalent to approximately 6% of the total monthly coal consumption in the US.  These are just some of the startling facts in Guillaume Pitron 's book The Dark Cloud , which is an essential read. 
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Programme note for orchestra touring China

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The worst thing for any victim is not the pain that one has undergone, but the knowledge that the culprit is still roaming free, and worse if the victim has to stand in silence while the culprit goes about in the crowd with a show of power. To be in a free country and allowing Chinese leaders to go unchallenged, allowing them to carry on their business as if everything is fine back in China and Tibet, is a DUTY not performed. We protest not because we hate Chinese , but because we want to speak to their conscience or their wrongdoing, and tell them we have not forgotten and that we still protest this, and also to tell the world of the injustice we are suffering at the hands of the brute and the bully, thereby seeking their support.  That extract comes from the essay Protest As Celebration Of Difference by Tenzin Tsundue . After graduating from Madras, South India, Tenzin Tsundue crossed the Himalayas on foot and entered Tibet. He wanted to see the situation in his occupied country
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Master musician who experienced the pain 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 the harpsichordist's 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 d'Assas, Scott Ross 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 b
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Who are the real classical role models?

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Confirmation that geniuses are more often not very good human beings is provided in a highly recommended new book by Matthieu Ricard. Born in France in 1946, Matthieu Ricard's parents were the French philosopher and journalist Jean-François Revel  (1924-2006) and the abstract painter and Tibetan Buddhist nun Yahne Le Toumelin  (1923-2023).  As he describes in his memoir Notebooks of a Wandering Monk Ricard grew up in the company of leading French intellectuals. He received a PhD degree in molecular genetics from the Pasteur Institute in 1972, but then abandoned his scientific career to practice Tibetan Buddhism, living mainly in the Himalayas. He is celebrated for his global advocacy of Buddhism as a science of the mind; all his income from books, photographs and conferences is donated to the humanitarian projects run by the Karuna-Sechel Association which he cofounded twenty-two years ago to alleviate the suffering of the most destitute in India, Nepal and Tibet. The art of
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Great music has no independent existence

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Listening to the Amsterdam Sinfonietta's exemplary performance on CD of the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony reminded me  once again  that I cannot hear that Adagietto without recalling the closing scene of Visconti's Death in Venice . In his autobiographical The Way of the White Clouds Lama Govinda explains how....  Sometimes a glance, a few casual words, fragments of a melody floating through the quiet air of a summer evening, a book that accidentally comes into our hands, a poem, or a memory laden fragrance may bring about the impulse which changes and determines our whole life.   In Mahayana Buddhism the entry point to a transcendent hidden land is known as a beyul . When I first saw Visconti's cinematic masterpiece in 1971 it took me through a beyul to the music of Mahler - which led on to the riches of Bruckner, Wagner and more - and on to an engaging  zeitgeist . For years classical music has struggled unsuccessfully with the challenge of attracting
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He was not an online kind of person

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In a 2013 article Peter Sheeran explained that Vernon Handley (Tod) "...was not an online kind of person, and his telephone answering process was not fool-proof, so if you needed to discuss something you either sent a taxi to drag him out of his home or went down to Skenfrith [his home in Monmouthshire] yourself". Since Tod died in 2008 we have all, whether we like it or not , become online people. But, despite their lack of online kudos, Tod's definitive cycles of the symphonies of  Arnold Bax , Robert Simpson , Malcolm Arnold , Granville Bantock, and Charles Villiers Stanford  remain towering achievements.  Vernon Handley's advocacy even extended further. In 1999 he recorded Edgar Bainton's Second Symphony for Chandos , and eight years later Bainton's Third Symphony  for Dutton. Edgar Bainton (1880-1956) worked and lived in both England and Australia; in 1932 toured India and was a guest  of  Rabindranath Tagore . His path to obscurity was hastened by
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The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

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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
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Nada Brahma - Sound is God

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It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig
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