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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XL - On An Overgrown Path

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XL is the new choral work by English composer Antony Pitts . It uses the same forces as Tallis' sublime 40 part motet Spem in Alium , and was composed as a companion piece. XL is on a new Harmonia Mundi CD sung by the Rundfunkchor Berlin directed by Simon Halsey. It also includes the Tallis motet, Knut Nystedt's Immortal Bach , and Zoltán Kodaly's substantial Laudes organi. Other posts linking to the work of Antony Pitts, and well worth reading are Jerry Springer rebel grabs Gramophone accolade and Raindrops are falling on my chant .
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Travels beyond TripAdvisor

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These photos were taken on my recent spirit quest in Morocco to the Sufi shrine of Sidi Chamharouch, which is seen above. A 75 minutes drive from Marrakech brought me to Imlil where the road ends and the mountains begin. The hamlet of Sidi Chamharouch - which is one of those blessed places which returns a blank in a Trip Advisor search - is at an altitude of 2350 metres and is reached by a tough and potentially dangerous two hour climb up a rocky path. Access is impossible for wheeled vehicles and supplies are brought in by the mules seen in my photos. Beyond Sidi Chamharouch is Jebel Toubkal, which at 4,167 metres is the highest mountain in North Africa. During my trek I was struck by the similarity between the High Atlas and Ladakh on the border of India and Tibet . Film director Martin Scorsese was also struck by the similarity. With Tibet a no-go zone he used this region for location shooting of his 1997 movie Kundun ; this depicts the Dalai Lama 's flight into exile fro...
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Requiem for grandson of Hitler’s pianist

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My recent article on Ernst Hanfstaengl, court composer and pianist to Hitler, and Harvard alumni, attracted a lot of readers. But the final paragraph left a mystery unsolved: Peter Conradi's excellent life of Hanfstaengl (right) ends with his death. But there is a fascinating coda to this extraordinary story, where fact is often far stranger than fiction. On the penultimate page of Conradi's book the author writes: '(Hanfstaengl) took great pride in his grandchildren - especially Eynon, the eldest, who had inherited his grandfather's musical talent, taking an impressive twenty-fourth place in the prestigous Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in June 1974.' The pianist career of the junior Hanfstaengl seem to have been obscured by the mists of time, and my researches found no further information on this. But tantalisingly my search found a German German film actor and writer called Eynon Hanfstaengl . One of his acting roles was Count Durkheim in the 1972 movie Lud...
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Classical music has many Buddhist tendencies

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With 376 million followers Buddhism is the fourth largest belief system in the world. Its core teachings of compassion and non-violence are well-known; but the wider cultural impact of those in the creative community exhibiting what the composer Jonathan Harvey described as "Buddhist tendencies" is underappreciated. Sri Lanka's state religion is Theravada - doctrine of the elders - Buddhism , and it may not be a coincidence that in 1960 elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike , the world's first woman prime minister. The island has been a center of Buddhist scholarship and practice since the introduction of Buddhism in the third century, and the country played a leading role in the preservation of the Pāli Canon of Buddhist teachings. I took the accompanying photos on a recent pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines in Sri Lanka, and to illustrate the influence of Buddhism on classical music I have juxtaposed them with cameos of music with Buddhist tendencies that provided the iPod so...
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Audio perfectionists are an almost extinct breed

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Related to my recent post about Owsley Stanley's recording of Ali Akbar Khan's 1970 San Francisco concert is Robert Greenfield's biography Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III . In my post I described Augustus Stanley as an 'audio perfectionist'. Here is a quote from the biography describing his 1960s sound system:  "Before ever meeting the Grateful Dead, Owsley had already purchased and installed a sound system in his thirty-five-by-fifty-five-foot living room in Berkeley that far surpassed what even the most fanatical hi-fi enthusiast might have dreamed of owning. Looking like "something that someone had rescued from behind the screen at the local movie theater," his Altec Lansing Voice of the Theatre system consisted of two large wooden cabinets, each of which was "about the size of a small fridge". Equipped with a fifteen-inch speaker, a driver that was "about four inches in diameter," and "a ...
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A Philippa Schuyler moment

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An earlier post painted a word portrait of child prodigy, pianist and composer Philippa Schuyler. Her music is rarely heard today and difficult to find. So we are very fortunate that John McLaughlin Williams agreed to record her Nine Little Pieces for piano specially for On An Overgrown Path . His recording can be heard via the YouTube video above, and in the article below he analyses her music Philippa Schuyler. Just hearing the name takes me back to a place in my childhood I have not revisited in memory more than a couple of times in decades. Philippa Schuyler’s name was but one of dozens lodged in my parent’s large sheet music library, occupying shelf space alongside the giants and talented lesser lights of our canonic music literature. Even among those lesser lights Schuyler seemed to me an odd duck a the time, for here peering at me from the cover of the sole piece of music by her in our possession was a picture of a seven year old girl of mixed race, rather than an aged, w...
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When the sound really mattered

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Back in 1971 the first 'serious' loudspeakers that I bought after I left university and joined the BBC were the legendary Acoustic Research AR-7's. I would have bought a pair of the Rogers LS3/5A monitors that were used in the BBC studios, but these were well beyond my budget. The more affordable AR-7s were bookshelf sized speakers with amazingly dense cabinets that produced a bottom end that belied their small size. There was a downside however, when compared with the ultra-transparent BBC monitors, the AR paper coned drive units gave the mid range a signature nasal (transatlantic?) twang. But the AR-7s captured the music of that time beautifully, and I nearly wore them out listening to my first Mahler LP, the superb interpretation of the Fourth Symphony by the grossly under-rated Ukrainian born Jascha Horenstein and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. This was produced by John Boyden and released on the budget Classics for Pleasure label decades before Naxos were acc...
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Is classical music asking the right questions?

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What will have more impact on the future of classical music? Roberto Alagna’s latest “squeeze”, or our ability to organise, search and access digital music files? My view tends to the latter, which is why in a comment on a recent post I said “It has long puzzled me as to why the subject of metadata about music recordings is so neglected”. Now reader Mike has responded with the following comment which justifies a post of its own: Music metadata has been a small bugbear of mine ever since I started digitising music in the 90s. In particular the metadata databases used by Apple's iTunes and Microsoft's Media Players are quite awful when you move out of pop/rock music to classical/jazz/world. I don't let either bit of software touch my collection, especially as you can't trust either to honour their metadata settings, and the penalty for them breaching the trust is the loss of hundreds of manhours of labelling. It's also sad that a great many digital downloads ...
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In memoriam Elisabeth Schwarzkopf

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The photo above is of me talking to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf at the Royal Festival Hall , London in 1979 (you can date it from my hairstyle). Schwarzkopf’s husband, and recording legend, Walter Legge had died the previous month (the lady to the left is Miss Jane Withers, Legge's long-serving secretary). The Philharmonia Orchestra , which Legge created as a vehicle for his recording activities, had asked me to create a tribute exhibition at short notice. Some of the material was taken from my own personal collection. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was delighted with the tribute, but was far less impressed with my description of Legge as an ‘entrepreneur’. When the photo was taken I think I was trying to explain to her that ‘entrepreneur’ was a complimentary description. But I am afraid she was not persuaded (or was I distracted by those pearls?). Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the greatest soprano of the post-war period, died yesterday aged 90. A re-evaluation of her career here. Image copyright On ...
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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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