On An Overgrown Path

'This magic comes only with the sounding of the music, with the turning of the written note into sound - and it only comes (or comes most intensely) when the listener is one with the composer, either as a performer himself, or as a listener in active sympathy' - Benjamin Britten Recent articles here about whether classical music responds to mass marketing and social media have generated considerable interest. So I thought it worthwhile to create a straw model which summarises the thrust of the articles and that is the purpose of this post. The straw model is remarkably simple and is built around the following four propositions. 1. Classical music engages new audiences most effectively by direct transmission to what Britten describes as as "a listener in active sympathy". 2. Despite this classical music today is characterised by hypermediation, meaning there are more and more intermediary layers appearing between performer and audience. 3. These intermediary la...

Aleister Crowley was a practicioner of the occult, ceremonial magician and recreational drug experimenter. Sir Edward Elgar was Master of the King's Music, practising Catholic and composer of Land of Hope and Glory . A connection between the two may seem highly improbable. But this post explores a little known path linking Elgar to Crowley's world of the occult. In 1915 the actress Lena Ashwell asked Elgar to write the incidental music for a play she was producing. The Starlight Express was based on the recently published novel A Prisoner in Fairyland and the adaption was by the books' author Algernon Blackwood and Violet Pearn. Elgar's original intention was to reuse music from his early composition The Wand of Youth, but as the project progressed he added a substantial amount of new music to the score. The Starlight Express opened in London on 29th December 1915 to mixed reviews. The critical consensus was that the play was too long and the staging inappropriat...

George Martin's production credits include all the Beatles' masterpieces except Let It Be . He has worked with other artists ranging from the Mahavishnu Orchestra to Celine Dion and Elton John. So ask any rock fan to name the finest George Martin album and the answer is very likely to be Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or another classic from the charts. But legend has it that the man himself chose as the finest album he ever made a little known LP recorded by a pioneering American ensemble five years after Sgt. Pepper . Despite the celebrity endorsement the Paul Winter Consort's 1972 Icarus remains almost unknown to the extent that it is currently not available on CD . Yet you only need listen to the first few tracks to realise that not only is this a truly great album, but it is also the fountain from which flowed a lot of influential music trends that are still around today. George Martin's production credit coupled with this personnel listing gives a...

UK recorded music sales decline for the sixth consecutive year . Pink Floyd signs a new five year contract with EMI . HMV to close sixty record stores . Simon Rattle and Berlin Philharmonic release contemporary music on an independent German label . Classical music online portal Dilettante.com closes . Unrelated chance factoids - or maybe not? Apeiron for large orchestra by Austrian composer Johannes Maria Staud (b. 1974) was given its world premiere in June 2005 by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Simon Rattle. Staud's background as a student of Brian Ferneyhough and Michael Jarrell gives a good indication of his style as does this extract from the composer's own notes for Apeiron : The complete work (ca. 20 min), scored for 101 players, consists of six large sections of sometimes diverse duration. It moves from quiet repose to orgiastic ecstasy, from concertante passages of chamber-music character to sections using block-scoring, which in their turn are suc...

Wonderful to read news of the first concert of the Palestine National Orchestra under a Swiss conductor in the West Bank city of Ramallah. But the media feeding frenzy around the event did start me thinking. Last year I ran a post about the Gaza based Musical Ensemble of Palestine which was formed back in 2004 and is seen in my photo above. There is a big disparity between the profiles of the two ensembles which is not just explained by their different geographic locations. The new Palestine National Orchestra was reported in the media as playing Mozart, Beethoven (Symphony No 4) and Ligeti plus, in some reports , unspecified Palestinian music. In contrast the Musical Ensemble of Palestine is dedicated solely to promoting the Palestinian musical heritage which draws on Arab music traditions. Which set me re-reading Titi Robin's thoughts on the economic, social and cultural order that prevails in music . Also on Facebook and Twitter . Photo credit Ad Vitam Records. Report broke...

More and more people are swimming without getting their hair wet. In our local pool there is not a swim cap in sight, instead back and forward they go with their immaculately coiffed heads held at an awkward angle out of the water. As I pounded up and down the pool this morning it struck me that one of the problems with classical music today is that concert, broadcast and recording schedules are devised for audiences who want to swim without getting their hair wet. Many years ago when I was learning to sea kayak off the Cornish coast one of the first things the instructor did was to tip us out of our canoes, and the CD seen above is the musical equivalent of those involuntary duckings in the Fowey estuary. The Schola Gregoriana Pragensis made an appearance here some time ago when they released a disc on which plainsong met Tibetan Buddhist chants . Their new CD Dialogues continues the meetings theme but this time early music meets new music from the Czech Republic. In the opening seq...

Just before Christmas I described the UK specialist classical chart as a "shambles". Now a reader has pointed out that today, Jan 4, the UK official classical specialist chart for the week ending Jan 8 is available online , as seen in the screen grab above. This chart is used by the Gramophone , BBC Radio 3 et al . As he of the "bloody rucksack " said about the classical chart - "It should prove thoroughly entertaining and enlightening and I'm sure it'll scupper some crusty old preconceptions." I am just a retired guy living out in the country so I will leave it to the experts to enlighten us. Also on Facebook and Twitter . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk