There is no perfect

'The Himalayas taught me there is no perfect - there's only balance with pain and bliss, sea-level and summits, hate and love, samsara [wandering in different states of cyclic existence] and nirvana. The path is our individual responsibility, and it isn't always pretty'  - Jane Marshall Back Over the Mountains 

Recent listening and reading: 
Stephan Thelen, World Dialogue - Kronos & Al Pari Quartets
Gandhi, A Memoir - William L Shirer
Retreat - Nat Segnit

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David Munrow - more than early music

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'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
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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 must be doing something wrong

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Classical music's website of choice Slipped Disc  today runs a story on the latest RAJAR UK radio listening figures . This story states that a "...record number of individual hours was spent listening to [BBC Radio 3]. They must be doing something right". Which is good news; but only for those who believe that facts should never stand in the way of a good story. Because simple arithmetic shows that BBC Radio 3 is not doing very much right, while UK classical radio in its entirety is doing something wrong.   In the quarter ended September 2024, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM audiences were 2.039m and 4.416m respectively. Which gives a total audience for the two classical stations of 6.455m. For the same quarter in September 2023 the audiences were 2.002m and 4.467m, giving a total classical radio audience 12 months previously of 6.469m.  So BBC Radio 3's "something right" turns out to be a fractional increase in its audience year on year, and a contribution ...
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Good news - classical music's audience is getting older

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Widespread euphoria over Classic FM's recent announcement of a "huge increase in under-35 listeners" highlights a potentially fatal flaw in classical music's survival strategy. This flaw is the dogma that changing the demographic profile of audiences is key to the future of classical music. This widely accepted dogma was expressed succinctly by Independent journalist Fiona Sturges when she tweeted that "a large proportion of Radio 3's audience should hurry up and die". If we leave aside Ms Sturges' repellent ageism, we are left with the canard that classical music's ageing audience will dwindle by attrition, and that the only way for the art form to survive is to tap into a mythical high growth market of affluent young people. Yes, it is true that the classical music audience is concentrated in middle and older age groups, with 42% in the age group 41 to 60 and 37% aged over 61. Industry dogma tells us that this older audience profile is ...
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Why Simon Bolivar is important

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The opera Simón Bolívar by Thea Musgrave was a joint commission by the Los Angeles Music Centre and Scottish Opera . Born in Scotland in 1928 Musgrave studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, knew Benjamin Britten , and has lived in the United States since 1974. For more on Thea Musgrave, and other women composers, follow this path . Thea Musgrave's two act opera tells the story of the Venezuelan folk hero Simón Bolívar (1783-1830), who liberated six South American countries from Spanish colonial rule. Bolívar was a passionate idealist, and brilliantly successful freedom fighter (he is seen in the painting above finalising his campaign). But he failed to unite the liberated countries under one flag, and today they are the independent states of Venezuela , Colombia , Ecuador , Peru , Panama , and Bolivia . In the 21st century Simón Bolívar is still revered for defeating the Spanish and liberating the region from colonial domination. There is no commercial recording of the opera Si...
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Where are classical music’s alternative voices?

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"Their style is early cunnilingual, late patricidal, lunchtime in the Everglades, Black Forest blood sausage on electrified bread, Jean Genet up a totem pole, artists at the barricades, Edgar Allan Poe drowning in his birdbath, Massacre of the Innocents, tarantella of the satyrs, L.A. pagans drawing down the moon... Jim Morrison [seen above] is an electrifying combination of angel in grace and dog in heat... The Doors are musical carnivores in a land of musical vegetarians... The Doors scream into the darkened auditorium what all of us in the underground are whispering more softly in our hearts: We want the world and we want it... NOW!" Young music critic of the year contender Andrew Mellor would do well to study that purple prose by Tom Robbins , which describes a 1967 Doors concert in Seattle. Robbins was writing for the underground paper Helix , and his plea of “We want the world and we want it… NOW!" chimes with Mellor’s recent musings in the New Statesman about cl...
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Late night thoughts after listening to BBC Radio 3

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My thoughts about Radio 3 today are summarised very well in this saying attributed to the sixteenth century  Hindu mystic poet Meerabi . I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders, and now you want me to climb on a jackass?   Try to be serious.  More than a thousand sacred songs - bhajans - and Hindi poems are said to have been composed by Meerabi. Header image is cover artwork from the album Ineffable Mysteries from Shpongleland by the Goan trance duo Shpongle .
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Nothing but malice, unchecked egoism, rawness...

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German violinist Christian Tetzlaff has explained his decision to cancel his American concerts saying "I feel utter anger. I cannot go on with this feeling inside. I cannot just go and play a tour of beautiful concerts". Tezlaff then goes on to express a sentiment that many of us share: "There seems to be a quietness or denial about what’s going on". This prompted a post by the ever-wise Alex Ross headlined The Spirit of Casals . Which in turn prompted me to reread articles I wrote many years ago after visiting Casals' beloved Catalonia . These reminded me that Casals' wisdom is still as painfully relevant today as it was when he was railing against Franco's authoritarian regime. Here is one example  of that wisdom: Music must serve a purpose; it must be a part of something larger than itself, a part of humanity; and that, indeed, is at the core of my argument with music today - its lack of humanity. A musician is also a man, and more important than his...
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We could be looking at thousands of dollars

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Yes, that is Glenn Gould. But this path starts with another musician. Steve Reich's Come Out is an electronic composition created from the voice of an African-American youth. No conventional instruments or musical notation are used in the pioneering work. But if I want to broadcast/webcast Come Out there is no problem. Future Radio is party to a performing rights agreement which directs royalty payments to the composers and publishers of music works. Despite not being a conventional music work Come Out is covered by that agreement. So far so good: Come out is broadcast, the listener has access to a seminal 20th century work and the copyright owner is rewarded. Glenn Gould's Solitude Trilogy is a series of three radio documentaries made for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) between 1967 and 1977. Two of the documentaries use short music excerpts but, like Come Out which dates from the same period, they are voice compositions. But, despite using speech as his r...
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