Late night thoughts after listening to BBC Radio 3


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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

David Munrow - more than early music

Image
'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. ...
Read more

Happy birthday to the paradoxical Dalai Lama

Image
Today is the 90th birthday of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama . To celebrate this I am republishing, without further editing, the 2014 photo essay about my close encounter with His Holiness at the Kalachakra Initiation in Ladakh, northern India. The Paradox of Our Age , a short but powerful essay credited to the present Dalai Lama, is widely available in Ladakh in northern India, a region known as 'Little Tibet'. The text ends with the observation that: 'These are times of fast foods but slow digestion/Tall men but short characters/Steep profits but shallow relationships/It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room'. Tibetan Buddhism is widely viewed as an appealing alternative to materialistic Western society, so, not surprisingly, The Paradox of Our Age is widely circulated on the internet and Twitter - see photo tweet below . I bought The Paradox of Our Age on an exquisitely printed little scroll in the Tibetan refugee market in the re...
Read more

The Accidental Pilgrim

Image
There are an awful lot of books around about the journey to Santiago de Compostela in particular, and pilgrimages in general; and let’s be quite truthful a lot of them are rather average. But one that stood out from the crowd for me was David Moore’s The Accidental Pilgrim which was published in 2004 as a paperback by Hodder Headline Ireland, and is available in both the UK and US. The serendipitous path that links these posts meant that I bought this book in the departures lounge at Stansted Airport en route to the Danish Thread Subtitled 'Travels with a Celtic Saint', The Accidental Pilgrim is the story of a 1500 mile bike ride by the author from Bangor in Northern Ireland to Bobbio in northern Italy via France and Switzerland. The journey follows in the footsteps of the Irish missionary Saint Columbanus who made the journey in the 6th Century. (Which coincidentally, and linked to other threads , was around the time that Gregorian Chant was emerging as the official musi...
Read more

Soundtrack for a porn movie

Image
"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...
Read more

Art has been hijacked by the addiction-directed internet

Image
Christopher Lyndon-Green 's cycle of Valentin Silvestrov's orchestral works for Naxos is remarkable in several ways. His conducting of the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra does full justice to the music of one of our greatest living symphonists. But there is more. For the new release of Silvestrov's magnificent Symphony No. 8 and Violin Concerto with soloist Janus Wawrowski , Christopher Lyndon-Green contributes an essay that expresses what many of us feel, but with an eloquence we cannot match. Here is an extract:  Is Silvestrov a Postmodernist Composer?  What, exactly, is meant by the term ‘postmodernism’ has yet to be satisfactorily defined.   Jean-Jacques Nattiez has famously written, in his great essay about Boulez’s Répons , ‘Modernism created a gulf with the public, and postmodernism wants to bridge that gap.’  Such a ‘definition’ would seem to give free reign to the all-too-often superficial neo-Romanticism of much contemporary composition, to mim...
Read more

Classical music's biggest problem is that no one cares

Image
These photos were taken by me in 2008 at independent record retailer Prelude Records in Norwich. Jordi Savall's impromptu viol recital and signing session preceeded two performances at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. One was a solo recital by Jordi in Peter Mancroft Church ; the other was an immensely moving performance of his visionary Jerusalem multicultural project at the Theatre Royal*. As reported here Prelude Records closed earlier this year; it was a victim of predatory online retailing, and today its premises stand empty awaiting occupation by a mobile phone or E-cigarette retailer. The Norfolk and Norwich Festival has been the victim of savage funding cuts , but continues in a more modest form due to the dedicated work of its small management team. A few days ago I wrote about a two-thirds empty Snape Maltings concert and proposed that classical music's heartland is facing a perfect storm caused by the convergence of the shifts in consumer tastes and the r...
Read more

Return of the night watchman

Image
BBC Radio 3's mercifully Petroc Trelawny-free Proms relay of Die Meistersinger plays as I write. Listening to Act II reminded me of a long forgotten detail of the legendary 1968 Sadlers Wells production of the opera conducted by Reginald Goodall (and later by Charles Mackerras ) and produced by Glen Byam Shaw and John Blatchley . The night watchman has a small but vitally important role at the end of Act II. As the riot subsides he makes his second appearance to sing 'Watch out for ghosts and goblins, lest an evil affright your soul' and, after a G flat on his horn, peace is restored and the curtain falls. It is one of the most magical moments in all music and for this reason the role attracts top singers. But that is his last appearance as Wagner gave him no part in the valedictory final act. This not withstanding the producers at Sadlers Wells in 1968 created a non-singing role for the night watchman in the festival meadow scene. As the guilds entered he took their emb...
Read more

Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

Image
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...
Read more

This is the house that Elgar built

Image
“I mean successful - but that is rock star stuff” was the comment made by a reader about the chateau once owned by Jacques Louissier when it featured here last year . Which started me thinking about a series of posts showcasing the houses of famous classical musicians. But the problem is that despite - or perhaps because of - rock star salaries there is very little information in the public domain about the homes of contemporary classical musicians. So this occasional series is kicking off with the house that Elgar built; or actually didn’t build, because Severn House, 42 Netherhall Gardens, Hampstead was constructed in 1888 for the celebrated portrait artist Edwin Long and extensively refurbished for the composer before he took up residence in 1912. The front doors of Severn House with their brass panels depicting men in armour are seen in the header photo. The house was demolished in 1937 so all we have are archive photos which I have digitally enhanced. However, despite the p...
Read more

Male American pioneers

Image
As the credit crunches who is going to pass up the opportunity to explore lots of composers for less cash? Budget-priced CDs receive a lot of attention , but budget books are also well worth investigating. 20th-Century Composers is an excellent series from innovative publisher Phaidon . They were originally published in the 1990s and are now reappearing at bargain price. The twenty-five titles range from Bernstein and the Beatles through Minimalists to Hindemith, Hartmann and Henze and György Ligeti , and on to Erich Wolfgang Korngold portrayed by our own Jessica Duchen . Seen above is American Pioneers by Alan Rich which I picked up for £6.95 in Blackwells in Edinburgh (egregious strap-line 'The Knowledge Retailer' ). The book is, as you would expect from a leading art publisher, a visual as well as textual delight, with art direction by New Yorker cover contributor Jean-Jaques Sempé . The main profiles are of Charles Ives , Edgar Varèse , Henry Cowell John Cage ...
Read more