Whatever would Ben and Peter say?

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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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Berlin Philharmonic's first woman conductor

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In 2005 the appointment of a woman music director by a major American orchestra caused a storm of controversy . So, it is surprising to find that it was back in 1930 that the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was first conducted by a woman, and even more surprising to find she was an American. But the story doesn't have a happy ending. Despite receiving critical acclaim, Antonia Brico found doors closed to her when she returned to the US, and was forced to form her own orchestras to continue her conducting career. She is seen above conducting in New York in 1945. (Image credit Dr. Ralph Weizsäcker ). Antonia Brico was born Wilhelmina Wolthus in Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1902, and emigrated to California with her foster parents in 1908. She attended high school in Oakland where she gained experience as a pianist and conductor. She went on to study liberal arts at the University of California, Berkeley , and also worked at the San Francisco Opera as an assistant to the director,
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If this had been a Deutsche Grammophon session.....

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Riccardo Muti is 80 and I am adding my birthday wishes to the fulsome tributes elsewhere. As balance is an essential skill of great maestros, I am contributing a little balance by republishing this little vignette which first appeared here in 2019. Back in the 1970s and 80s when sleeve design and liner notes came within my remit at EMI's International Classical Division , all the top artists had the right of artwork approval written into their contracts. Above is the sleeve for Riccardo Muti's 1979 debut recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra which was created on my watch. The venue for the photo shoot, the Philadelphia Museum of Art , was relevant, and in recognition of Muti's already super-sized ego we made sure not a hair was out of place. But the maestro ran true to form and hated the cover with a passion, and it took considerable persuasion and a very thick skin on my part before his approval was given. The recording venue was the old and decrepit Met Church b
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Conductors who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones

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In the photo above Simon Rattle is being interviewed by LÜ Jia, Music Director of the Chinese government funded National Centre for the Performing Arts in Bejiing. Below Rattle is seen while on tour at a press conference in the Chinese city of Guangzhou. The Chinese government is guilty of the mass genocide against 1.2 million people  in Tibet and continues with its policy of eradicating the priceless Tibetan culture by Sinicization , while Guangzhou has been singled out as a centre of human rights abuses . In January 2018, the authorities in Guangzhou forcibly disappeared the wife of a US-based journalist. This forced disappearance came shortly after the journalist interviewed a Chinese billionaire fugitive who exposed corruption among China’s ruling elite. Rattle is also a repeat visitor to Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates. In their 2020 report Amnesty International reports that "Over two dozen prisoners of conscience continued to be detained in the United A
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Sounds of Sufism

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One of the disciples would start to sing a devotional song in praise of their Sheikh. Many of Abdul Qadir's followers were musicians. There was Richard Thompson who sang with Fairport Convention , Ian Whiteman who was with Mighty Baby ; Roger Powell who was with a group called The Action ; and Peter Sanders, a photographer with a beautiful voice. In fact the Zawiya was a veritable den of stunning voices. In no time, the zihr session would be raised to another, more etheral plane. Then the fuqara would stand up, form a circle holding one another's hands, and be led by a high-ranking member of the Zawiya, standing in the middle of the circle, in chanting La ilaha illa'llah ('There is no God but Allah'), La ilaha illa'llah . The dancing disciples would inhale with La ilaha and collectively exhale with illa'llah . The chanting would start gently but as it gathered pace, the circle would become more of an octagon, and fuqara would begin to sway, throwing
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Untold story of the counterculture's Islamic connection

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For many children of the sixties a 'journey to the East' was a mandatory rite of passage. As a result one of the lasting impacts of the counterculture was the assimilation into Western culture of esoteric religions. The embrace of Vedanta and Zen Buddhism is well-documented, as is the music that it produced ranging from the Beatles' Indian period to John Cage's 4' 33". Less celebrated is the counterculture's engagement with the esoteric strand of Islam known as Sufism, an involvement that also produced important but overlooked music. Given the current preoccupation with Islam it is puzzling that more attention has not been paid to the green shoots of Sufism - a tradition with a benign history - that appeared in the West in the late 1960s. Earlier this year the film Blessed are the Strangers directed by young director Ahmed Peerbux premiered. But this film is selective in its coverage of 1960s Sufism, so this post attempts to fill in some conspicuous and
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Music is not a matter of notes, it's a matter of sounds

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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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What the law of diminishing diversity tells us

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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
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Four great albums that are victims of clickbait correctness

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Clickbait correctness - if ain't clickable, don't hype it on social media - means some great albums are not receiving the attention they deserve. My recent rewarding listening has included the new Alice Coltrane release Kirtan: Turiya Sings . Kirtans are sacred Vedic chants, and  Turiya Sings  was originally released exclusively on cassette in 1982 for the students of Alice Coltrane's ashram at the The Vedantic Center, northwest of Los Angeles. For this cassette release synthesizers, strings, and sound effects were added to Alice Coltrane’s voice and organ. Although this mix was never commercially released, it achieved cult status as a bootleg recording. The reason for the absence of a commercial release remains unclear, but the most plausible explanation is that the complete master tapes were not retained, making quality remastering impossible. But in 2004 Ravi Coltrane , who is Alice’s son by John Coltrane and producer of this new release, discovered tapes of just Ali
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How classical music ignored the awakening electronic dream

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Eclectic Dutch composer Louis Andriessen has died at the age of 82. So I am reprising my 2019 post inspired by his brother Jurriaan Andriessen which ran under the headline 'Classical music is not connecting with its rewired audience '. Classical music's new audience is new not just because it hasn't yet learned to appreciate classical music: it is also new because it has different behaviour patterns and value systems to the traditional classical audience. It is an important but overlooked point that the traditional audience is also becoming 'new' as its neural connections are rewired by the extended use of new technologies. The defining characteristics of this rewiring are well documented: shortened attention spans, demand for instant feedback/gratification, decreased reliance on linear thinking, reliance on mobile technologies, increased visual acuity, multi-tasking capability, etc.   A typical American adult spends more than 11 hours each day interacti
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