On An Overgrown Path

My recent article on Les Orientales , a multi-cultural music festival that understands the difference between art and entertainment , attracted a lot of interest. I promised to return to Les Orientales with further posts, and today I am looking at recordings of music from Saint-Florent-le-Vieil. There is no better starting point than the CD seen above and below, which was released by the festival organisers last year to celebrate ten years of Les Orientales . Twelve tracks recorded at the festival by French radio station Jet FM convey the unique atmosphere of the festival and really show what Philip Glass meant when he said : 'By the early 1960’s, the world of new concert music had reached a virtual dead end. By that I mean there were more and more composers writing for fewer and fewer people. That door turned out to be much bigger that I thought,I thought it would lead to Indian music. Actually, it led to World Music – and that continues to this day.' The bad news is that th...

The classical music fraternity has turned demonising airlines into an Olympic sport, aided and abetted of course by click bait meister Norman Lebrecht . Every few days there is an ' American Airlines broke my guitar ' or ' United Airlines smashes viol story'  on Slipped Disc . British Airways are the latest target, with ' British Airways maltreats Indian classical musician ' as today's tasty click bait. Of course loss or damage to a professional musicians's instrument is a very serious matter. But please let's get the facts straight. After they have slapped a baggage label on your cello, guitar or other hold item at the check-in desk airline employees do not touch your baggage . At every airport around the world there is a single contracted ground handling agent. When an airline flies from an airport it must use that appointed ground handling agent. To give an example: the baggage handling agent at London Gatwick is Menzies Aviation . Whether yo...

My essay in the programme book for the Salzburg Summer Festival's celebration of Hindu music and dance contained this little piece of nuanced mischief alluding to a surfeit of Mahler in the mainstream festival: Indian musician Gita Sarabhai declared "the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences"; ragas remain devoted to this purpose, whereas Western classical music has increasingly become a way of expressing existential angst. But, in a powerful example of instant karma, since I wrote that a felicitous dusting of bluesy existential angst has been applied to the raga Vasundhara (Mother Earth) on ' Ragas From Dusk Till Dawn ', a new release from one of my favourite contemporary Indian musicians. I have had the pleasure seeing Debashish Bhattacharya in concert twice; the first time at Les Orientales Festival at Saint-Florent-le-Viel in France prompted a post back in 2009 . Pandit Bhattacharya plays a sel...

When the Soviet invasion started, Radio Kaboul continued to function as did the music school where I was teaching. The government in power exhorted the singers to interpret communist revolutionary songs. In 1992, after the departure of the Soviets and the arrival of the Mujahiddins, the music school was closed and all the instruments confiscated. The University of Fine Arts was closed as well. At the radio all the female artists were fired. With the Talibans this death penalty for cultural life as a whole was reinforced. They strictly forbid singing, even by men, as well as the instruments. Only the religous a capella singing was authorized. I left the country six months after the arrival of the Mujahiddins, when Rābani was president. The greatest tragedy in my life was the closing of the musical lyceum. I am the only surviving teacher, the others died in exile or in the country in poverty. When my brother, Ibrahim Nassim, was forbidden to broadcast his songs, he died from sadness, l...

But the worst consequence of computer-assisted composing is that it is dehumanizing music. With the human touch inherent in any performance autocorrected digitally, we lose much of the element that gives music its emotive contours. Sometimes, playing slightly behind the beat or slightly below the correct pitch is what makes a piece inspiring. And as we continue to formulaically fit compositions into the strict guidelines that computers give us, musicians will cease trying to innovate and taking risks. They become stymied in their exploration of an art whose beauty fundamentally stems from its limitlessness. Although computers must be given credit for a spectrum of art that would have otherwise been inexpressible, this trend could very well change an art form into Paint by Numbers. This quote from an article titled How Pro Tools is destroying music raises many interesting points for classical music, despite its origins in the world of rock. Production software such as Pro Tools has b...