On An Overgrown Path

Latest statistics show that the average Internet user spends nearly two hours on social media every day. Over a lifetime this amounts to a total of three years and four months on social networks, with Facebook accounting for 35% of the total. To put that into perspective, in a typical week internet users spend four times as much time on social media as they devote to face-to-face social activities, and each day a netizen devotes more time to social media than to meeting the basic human need of eating. Around 100 million selfies are uploaded every day, and our obsession with social media - which is actually an addiction - is very big business. Facebook, which has annual profits of $10.2 billion , sells the personal data it gleans from status updates - remember that one about a relative's illness ? - to Acxiom. This data warehousing giant uses 23,000 servers and 750 billion personal data fields to hold and analyse the intimate profiles of 500 million people. Acxiom then sells that...

The following night’s choral event took us back to the juvenile excesses of the Sixties, as the a cappella group Exaudi sang Antoine Brumel’s sublime ‘Earthquake Mass’ with progressively deafening electronic accompaniment representing an aural simulation of a quake. The earplugs handed out at the door seemed to suggest that even the management had belatedly realised this was not a frightfully clever idea. That is Michael Church - of dumpy soprano fame - resisting paradigm shifts in the Independent . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo via Russell Haswell . Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use", for the purpose of critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Yesterday's post about the Earthquake Mass at the Aldeburgh Festival is, quite understandably, creating a big social media buzz . Above is a photo of what was a REAL performance - a one-off where routine is traded for risk and the musicians become players in a drama. Exaudi's director James Weeks has already become a victim of the earthquake and one of his singers can be seen leaving the stage having reached the point where his part in Brumel's score has rotted away, while Russell Haswell is crouching to the right creating his apocalyptic electronic noise. Will the next seismic shift in classical music be a late night Earthquake Mass at the 2015 BBC Proms? Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo via Aldeburgh Music . My ticket for the Earthquake Mass was bought at the box office. Any copyrighted material is included for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

When did you last experience a true performance? Not one of those musically perfect but soulless concerts by a celebrity maestro and a touring orchestra - Edinburgh yesterday and Salzburg tomorrow - that is more restatement than performance. I mean a real performance, a one-off where routine is traded for risk, where the musicians become players in a drama, an event which, to paraphrae Carl Nielsen , gives us something else, gives us something new, instead of expressing deedless admiration for the conventional. Canadian composer, educator and sound ecologist R. Murray Schafer declared that art should be dangerous , and he would surely approve of last night's Earthquake Mass at the Aldeburgh Festival . Antoine Brumel's Missa Et ecce terrae motus is known as the Earthquake Mass because it is based on the Easter Plainchant from Matthew 28:2: 'And all at once there was a violent earthquake'. Its innovative twelve part writing makes the Earthquake Mass one of the ...

Important information regarding Faster Than Sound: Earthquake Mass We are looking forward to welcoming you to what should be a remarkable late-night event in the Britten Studio this Saturday 14 June, 10pm. This will feature contrasts between quiet, unamplified performance and, as befits the title of the event, intermittently loud electronic sound. EXAUDI will sing Brumel’s Mass unamplified. In between the movements sound artist Russell Haswell has produced electronic interjections which, by way of dramatic contrast, are very loud, harking back to the origin of the piece. During these amplified sections some audience members may wish to use earplugs, which will be provided. Our experience is that this will help comfort levels without diminishing the dramatic impact of the performance. That email arrived today from the Aldeburgh Festival, and sound artist Russell Haswell is seen above. Good to see classical music has not lost its aura at Aldeburgh. And good to see such an imagin...

This is the strangest music I know. It's hardly music at all. Those long wind things... the way the drum rattles in the middle of a prayer... the long roll of cymbals that brings everything to a climax. It is hardly music at all. It is as if the rock were singing; it is as if the wind and the rain were singing. It is not music: it is sound, essential sound. That description of Tibetan Buddhist ritual music comes from Andrew Harvey's classic travelogue Journey in Ladakh . I took the photo of the monks of the Tibetan Buddhist Tashi Lhunpo Monastery playing 'those long wind things' - Tibetan long horns known as dungchen - in 2009 at the unlikely venue of Snape Maltings: for the full story see Wagner and the Tantric Orchestra . Increasingly classical music dwells in suburban comfort zones , but, as readers will know, those regions hold little interest for me. African American author John Francis has described how : 'The 'ragged edge' plays an important part ...

Noteworthy is the upcoming world première of a new work by Hossein Hadisi for voices, percussion and dance. Zahhák: the Dragon King of Persia celebrates the Persian minstrels' art of Naqqáli by re-enacting the ancient myth of Zahhák from the Persian 'Book of Kings'. Hossein Hadisi studied composition with Michael Finnissy and his works include Places I'd Take Michael Finnissy To Visit If He Was Ever Going To Come To Iran for piano. Currently a research associate at Cambridge University studying the traditional Persian improvisation school of Avaz , Hadisi's work spans rock and contemporary music and Bang the Bore XI: Psychobabble based on the Muslim rite of prayer can be sampled here . Zahhák: the Dragon King of Persia is performed by leading contemporary music ensemble Exaudi with dancers from London Contemporary Dance School and the production features paintings by Iranian surrealist master Ali Akbar Sadeghi . Performances are at the RADA Studio Theatre,...

Marketing gurus tells us that classical music needs charts. So we have classical charts for artists, for compilations, for specialist titles - aka core repertoire - and for singles. Medical research into the human brain tells us that audiences become what they listen to. From which the inevitable conclusion must be drawn that what we need to engage new audiences is a classical chart for challenging music. Qualifying criterion is simple to define: any classical work that has never been played on Classic FM , BBC Radio 3's Breakfast and Essential Classics and similar programmes is eligible. Topical nominations from readers for challenging music to populate this new chart are welcome. My own suggestion is Tide , a double CD of music by James Weeks . Cageian connections abound on this new release: the performing ensemble Apartment House , which was founded by cellist and inter-disciplinary artist Anton Lukoszevieze , takes its name from Cage's composition Apartment House 1...

Friday’s post about words as sound shapes segued seamlessly into Exaudi’s Sunday afternoon Aldeburgh open session which featured two newly commissioned vocal works challenging that conceit of the information age that what cannot be articulated in words is beyond comprehension. First up was Matthew Shlomowitz’s a cappella Instrumental Music which investigates the relationship between the human voice and musical instruments – check out the composer’s website for samples of his compositions. Following Instrumental Music was Aaron Cassidy ’s wordless tribute to Francis Bacon A painter of figures in rooms ; this “takes the human voice apart and puts it (mostly) back together again” and could just be the Stimmung for the information age. Much credit goes to Exaudi and their director James Weeks for smashing the fossil and starting all over again , and to Aldeburgh Music for supporting their residency which was the prelude to a Wigmore Hall concert . But, as seen in my header p...

To Alex Ross' growing list of Cage centenary events I would add Aldeburgh Festival's John Cage Musicircus curated by James Weeks and Exaudi on June 23. As the Aldeburgh Festival brochure explains - a plethora of Festival artists and others fling open the doors of the Hoffman Building and let the sound stream out. Centrepiece of the Musicircus is a repeat of Exaudi's performance of the John Cage Song Books . Their first performance at Snape of the Song Books provides my header image and an article here , while you can listen to James Weeks talking to me about Elisabeth Lutyens and more in an iTunes podcast here . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Header photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2012. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

An article in the Telegraph questions whether Pierre-Laurent Aimard is the right man to run the Aldeburgh Festival . Michael White's thrust that we should "leave running English music festivals to English music-lovers" is plainly wrong, but the underlying question as to whether all is well at Aldeburgh is valid. Regular readers will know Snape Maltings is my local hall . I spend more time there than in any other venue and have written more about music at Aldeburgh than any subject over the last seven years. My experience is that truly exciting and innovative things are happening at Aldeburgh; but increasingly they are happening outside the Festival period. Over the last twelve months three of my most intense musical experiences have been at Snape, the Aldeburgh Young Musicians performance of Louis Andriessen's Workers Union , John Cage's Song Books with Exaudi (see photo above), and the Suffolk Youth Orchestra's interpretation of Rachmaninov's Second Sym...

Song Books (Solos for Voice 3–92) is a collection of short works by John Cage , written and compiled by the composer in 1970. It contains pieces of four kinds : songs, songs with electronics, directions for a theatrical performance, and directions for a theatrical performance with electronics. Any may be performed by one or more singers . Song Books was published by Cage in 1970 as three volumes : volume one contained Solos for Voice 3–58, volume two contained Solos for Voice 59–92, and the third volume, titled "Instructions", contains various tables and other materials necessary for performance of some of the pieces. The work explores a very wide variety of notation systems. Some Solos are given in standard notation, others employ a special brand of notation with circles of different sizes and lines instead of notes , still others are systems of dots and lines, etc. Some are not notated at all: the text is given using different fonts and font sizes for different words, or...

Howard Skempton's music has developed without regard for contemporary fashionable 'isms'. He studied composition with Cornelius Cardew and was a founder member Cardew's Scratch Orchestra in 1969. Skempton's music is characterised by its extreme economy and he has writen a large number of pieces for solo piano or accordion. Bolt from the Blue is a new CD from the New York based Mode label which was Alex Ross' 2009 label of the year . It brings together Howard Skempton's piano miniatures and music for voices in an intelligently planned and beautifully executed programme. The pianist is contemporary music specialist Daniel Becker whose contribution, which includes the title track, is captured in the piano-friendly acoustic of Potton Hall here in East Anglia. Exaudi directed by James Weeks provide the choral contribution which was recorded in St Silas, Chalk Farm . This is an outstanding disc of genuinely original and beautiful music. It comes from an im...

New music's sandbox went live last night with the Faster Than Sound contemporary music festival playing in the Britten Studio on Snape's new creative campus. Jon Hopkins and Tim Exile (photos 1 & 6) shaped cool sounds and played with Roland Olbeter's musical robots (photo 10). The Prometeo Quartet performed an Aldeburgh Music commission, Salvatore Sciarrino's String Quartet No 8 (photos 8 & 9); a work during which the composer's fascination with the higher registers of the violin was not shared by all the audience. James Weeks and Exaudi experienced no such problems with the world premiere of a challenging new choral work by Amber Priestley . The ever adventurous Exaudi also performed what was for me the highlight of the evening, Alvin Lucier's simple but sublime Unamuno . As if all this was not enough, visual artist Quayola's installation celebrating Rome's renaisance architecture was playing in the new Jerwood Kiln Studio (photo 5)....

'That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable...