On An Overgrown Path

One of several notable new publications in 2025 was Susannah Cahalan 's life of Rosemary Leary. Her biography  The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life of Rosemary Woodruff Leary is a much-needed account of Timothy Leary's often overlooked third wife. Importantly, this meticulously researched and sympathetic book provides an objective counterbalance to the many Leary hagiographies. Synchronicities include my unlikely brief personal encounter with Timothy Leary's second ex-wife, and and the surprising story of how Elgar took a trip . And more synchronicity in this passage from The Acid Queen .   ....It took a full day to reach the foothills of the Ahl Srif Mountains in Morocco to visit the famed Master Musicians of Joujouka, musical healers who mended broken people with their ancient songs. The show begins with a violin. Pennywhistles joined in. Rosemary placed a tab of LSD on Timothy's tongue and then one on her own. Men in hoods rose and lifted wooden pipes that sounded ...

Maria Farantouri went into exile when Mikis Theodorakis' music was banned after the 1967 military coup in Greece. By performing Theodorakis' songs around the world she nurtured international resistance to the military dictatorship and made the Greek public familiar with the poetry of the Nobel Prize-winning poets George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis and other important Greek poets.   On the  1967 LP  seen above Maria Farantouri and John Williams perform Theodorakis' music. (Farantouri is the usual transliteration of the Greek, rather than Farandouri as on the record sleeve.)  After the military coup d’état in 1967 the new regime banned Theodorakis’s music and he was eventually arrested. But he managed to send a short message to Maria Farantouri, advising her to leave Greece.  Maria Farantouri was just twenty years old when she left Greece for Paris, and she gave many concerts supporting the anti-dictatorship movement.  Through her political engagement...

These photos show me with Jonathan Harvey in 2010 recording an interview for Future Radio. As I will be away from blogging for a while I am leaving you with a long listen. My broadcast interview is available via this link from the archive website of the then Future Radio station manager Tom Buckham. The 87 minute broadcast ends with a performance of Jonathan's masterpiece for large orchestra and electronics Speakings with Ilan Volkov conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. (For those with 2025 attention spans a transcript is available via this link .)   Jonathan Harvey was a composer with Buddhist tendencies . His composition ... towards a Pure Land for large orchestra evokes the state of mind in Buddhism beyond suffering where there is no grasping. Two years after I recorded the interview Jonathan left us far too early to travel towards the Pure Land - Nibbāna . Since then his eclectic vision of a new music for a new audience has been swamped by a tsunami of cl...

In his Lebrecht Weekly column Norman Lebrecht declared that: ' Too much Mozart makes you sick .  M ozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours. Beyond a superficial beauty and structural certainty, Mozart has nothing to give to mind or spirit in the 21st century. Let him rest. Ignore the commercial onslaught. Play the Leningrad Symphony. Listen to music that matters'. Most readers will recognise this outburst as typical self-serving Lebrecht click bait . But those who have any doubt should listen to the five CD reissue of Sir Charles Mackerras conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in nine Mozart symphonies and the Requiem. These are arguably the finest Mozart interpretations  since Bruno Walter's .   Ignore Lebrecht's meaningless onslaught. Mozart's music matters today and has never been more relevant. Because it is music of truth at a time when the truth is being devalued...

A recent post highlighted Jazz Raga , a John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar tribute, as one of the few notable new albums in 2025. Another standout among too many dreary derivative new releases is CPO's 16 CD box  Michael Haydn: Complete Symphonies; Wind Concertos .  Michael Haydn's music is overlooked because of meaningless comparisons of 'greatness' with his older brother of Joseph and his contemporary and friend Mozart. As Ajahn Sumedho has explained : "...which is the best is not important. 'The best' is merely a condition we create with thought. When we think about which is the best, we are going into opinions, preferences, conditioning and attachment". Just like the music of Joseph Haydn and Mozart, Michael Haydn's music 'is' and should simply be appreciated for its 'isness'.  

Slipped Disc , the self-acclaimed "world's most-read cultural website" recently ran the story and image shown above. In a clumsy piece of ethnic stereotyping the photo was cropped, cut and pasted without attribution from the website of Angel Island Immigration Station . This notorious station of detention and exclusion for Asian immigrants in San Francisco Bay closed in 1940.  In the interests of shedding just a little light to counter Slipped Disc 's click bait heat, the following is extracted with full acknowledgement from the Angel island website :  Between 1870 and 1940, more than 25 million immigrants arrived in the United States, with a major peak in annual arrivals between 1900 and 1914, when nearly 900,000 persons came per year on average. Those arriving in San Francisco, especially Asian immigrants, encountered very different legal regimes and social circumstances than those passing through Ellis Island in New York. On the West Coast, immigration was medi...