On An Overgrown Path

That book was published in 1996. Today aspirational art has been  netflixed  and  enshittified . Thankfully in an era of AI slop and mid TV and radio some still defend cultural snobbery .

'The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who won't do anything about it' - attributed to Albert Einstein Pau Casals resources On An Overgrown Path include Remembering Pablo Casals , In Search Of Pablo Casals , and most importantly A Musician Is Also A Man .

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...

These photos were taken by me last week in a village in the Ouirgane valley on the lower slopes of Morocco's Atlas Mountains. In the photo above a ruined house can be seen in the background, and this area was close to the epicentre of the terrible earthquake in September 2023 which killed around 3000 people. More than forty people died in Ouirgane village, and the impact of the earthquake is still only too evident.  For obscure reasons , almost two years later some villagers are still living in temporary accommodation. The shelters have a shiny silver finish to reflect the temperature extremes experienced at 3500 feet. On the day I took these photos the temperature was 32 degrees C. When I asked the lady living with her family in the shelter seen below if I could take a photograph, she asked me in for mint tea.  The title of this post is derived from the Missa 'Et ecce terrae motus' of Antoine Brumel (1460-1512). This work is known as the 'Earthquake Mass' becaus...

You won't find  Khandroma  from  Patti Smith  and the  Soundwalk Collective  in the Apple download chart. But does that reduce its worthiness? Today audience size is used to measure the worthiness of not just downloads, but also live music,  websites, and every other aspect of classical music . Which is a big mistake: because art music is not about attracting the largest possible audience. It is  about meeting human needs . Every human is complex and different, and every human has a different musical need, and these unique needs also  vary with circumstances . So there is  no 'one size fits all needs' classical music . Which means that, despite industry dogma,  there is no mass market for classical music . Patti Smith and the Soundwalk Collective have had a long involvement with psychogeography . In 2016 their exploration of the effect of geographical location on emotions and behaviour took them to Upper Mustang in Nepal . The ...

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...