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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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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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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Leaders destroy followers and followers destroy leaders

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That photo of Marrakech's celebrated Jemma el-Fnaa was taken by me a few weeks ago. One of the books that illuminated my visit to the Red City was Stephen Davis' To Marrakech by Aeroplane . Stephen is best known as the biographer of Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley and the Rolling Stones, and ghost writer for Michael Jackson, but he also collaborated with me on a two part feature about the Master Musicians of Jajouka , who come from the Rif Mountains in the north of Morocco. Performance artist Brion Gysin , who was a long time resident of Morocco, played a pivotal role in bring the Master Musicians to the attention of Brian Jones , and it was the Rolling Stones' posthumously released album of their music which introduced the Master Musicians to an international audience. To Marrakech by Aeroplane , which is rich in anecdotes about Brion Gysin's Moroccan circle, is published by Inkblot Publications , and that Rhode Island based independent publisher has also made available ...
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What was on Hitler's iPod?

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'He was genuinely convinced that he had an infallible musical ear. Heinz Lorenz suggested, 'My Führer, you ought to give a concert in the Great Hall. After all, you could afford to invite the best German musicians, Gieseking, Kempff, Furtwängler and so on. You don't go to the opera or the theatre any more, but you could listen to music. It wouldn't strain your eyes either'. Hitler rejected the idea. 'No, I don't want to trouble such artists just for me personally, but we could play a few records.' A thick book listed all the records that the Führer owned. There must have been hundreds of them. The wooden panelling of the wall turned out to be a cupboard holding records, with a built-in gramophone that was invisible till the cupboard doors were opened. The black discs stood in long rows, labelled with numbers. Bormann operated the gramophone. Hitler nearly always had the same repertory played: Léhars operettas, songs by Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf and Ri...
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If you like Mahler - and who doesn't? - try this

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Malcolm Arnold's music was heavily influenced by his time as a trumpeter with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1940s when he played in pioneering performances of Mahler's symphonies. If you like Mahler but do not know Arnold's symphonies his Fifth, with its mighty Mahlerian adagio second movement, is a very good place to start. My love of Malcolm Arnold's music dates back to the composer's own recordings on Lyrita LPs. But in the 1990s chance brought me to live near to Sir Malcolm here in rural Norfolk, and that led me to editing the composer's personal website for the last years before his death in 2006. Those final years were not easy for the composer or for his tireless carer and champion Anthony Day. The bardo like nature of that period is presaged in Sir Malcolm's Ninth Symphony, written in Norfolk in 1986, with its haunting twenty-three minute concluding slow movement. The Ninth Symphony is dedicated to Anthony Day and my 2005 post about...
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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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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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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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Why composer anniversaries do not win new audiences

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Data from an authoritative source shows that the strategy of focussing on composer anniversaries to raise classical music's public profile is not working. The graph above uses the Google Trends tool to measure online searches for the four main composers with anniversaries in 2013 - Verdi , Britten , Wagner ;and Lutoslawski *. Google Trends plots global volumes for specific search terms and my composite graph maps and compares the trend over eight years of searches for the four main 2013 anniversary composers with results indexed to 100. (Left click on the graphs to enlarge). Three main trends emerge from this analysis. The first is that, as the graph above shows, Verdi is consistently by far the most popular of the four composers. Hardly a revelation in itself; but the trend shows that despite Britten and Wagner undoubtedly receiving more promotional attention in 2013 - e.g. not one complete Verdi opera in the 2013 BBC Proms season and just three concerts including his music ...
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