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Crouching composer, hidden dragon

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My post describing how classical music has many Buddhist tendencies continues to reach a gratifyingly wide audience. So it is now time to confront the elephant in the shrine room - Tan Dun's Buddha Passion . Tan Dun is best-known for his soundtrack for Ang Lee's movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , which was recorded at the Shanghai Radio, Film And TV Bureau Technical Center in 1999. Born in 1957 in the central Chinese district of Hunan, the son of a military officer in the People's Liberation Army, Tan Dun studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. In 1986 he moved to New York City but retained strong links with China. His  Symphony 1997 was commissioned for the reunification of Hong Kong, he is a regular guest conductor in China, and in January 2024 the Buddha Passion was performed under his direction in Macao to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China  The Buddha Passion was inspired by Tan Dun's visit

There is no right reaction to great music

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Quite justifiably the adventurous Matangi Quartet from the Netherlands received acclaim for their recent  recording of quartets by Silvestrov, Schnittke, and Shostakovich . But their  2022 ECM disc of Ruins and Remains , a suite for piano, string quartet and percussion composed by Wolfert Breferode slipped under the media radar, probably because in the meaningless ontology of music genres it is pigeonholed as 'jazz'. Composer Wolfert Breferode again defies those meaningless pigeonholes: he studied classical and jazz piano at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague before establishing a formidable reputation as a leading Dutch jazz pianist and recording four albums for ECM. Ruins and Remain s was composed by Wolfert Breferode in 2018 in response to a commission to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. Since the premiere however the work has evolved to embrace a wider perspective on human frailty, helped by the improvisatory experiments of the Matangi Quartet and

Classical music must not cease from exploration

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Today is a poignant personal anniversary, so I have been listening to Valentin Silvestrov's Stille Lieder (Silent Songs) in the 1986 ECM recording . This morning that performance by baritone and Sergej Jakowenko accompanied by Ilja Scheps was, for me, the most sublimely appropriate masterpiece. But that is because of the personal conditions relating to today. Tomorrow, depending on the conditions, a Sibelius symphony, a Mozart string quartet, Iiro Rantala's jazz improvisations , or Steve Roach's electronica will be sublimely appropriate.   Masterpieces, like every human condition, are impermanent. They come and go, and return and return - Silvestrov's Stille Lieder first featured here back in 2008 , many years before the Ukrainian tragedy gave their composer his 30 minutes of fame. (Newcomers to Silvestrov's music should know that Stille Lieder are the root from which his better known masterpieces, the Fifth Symphony and Requiem for Larissa grew.)  For de

Soundtrack for a porn movie

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"No, you have not landed on Slipped Disc by mistake. Respected electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze tells the story himself.  The origins of " Body Love " are quite funny. I received a call from a movie producer named Manfred Menz and I wound up becoming his principal composer for a period of time. Amongst others, I composed the "Barracuda" soundtrack for him [1978, previously unreleased on album]. This led to a friendship which lasts till today. Menz now lives in Malibu, California where I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, this guy calls me and asks if I would compose the score to a porn movie. I said: "Porn? Nah, I don't do that kind of thing".  As it turned out, the director of the movie, Lasse Braun, had already shot it and had used my albums " Timewind " [1975] and " Moondawn " [1976] as a kind of "working soundtrack". This was obvious because the couples in the film were moving in time to my gro

Wake up and listen to the music

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Elsewhere much brouhaha  about the launch of a BBC Radio 3 extension . This new online channel will offer "peaceful favourites.....ethereal choral music, soothing orchestral textures [ and ] mood-based repertoire [ including ] shows that lean into the mindfulness, wellbeing and sleep space... to create a consistent, calming listening experience". Personally this development does not worry me very much, as I have given up listening to Radio 3 completely since it became a deformed clone of Classic FM. But the hijacking of wisdom practices such as mindfulness to justify a desperate lunge for the Classic FM market does concern me.   Mindfulness has been taken out of context and exploited by many other misguided corporations before the BBC saw it as silver bullet for the moribund Radio 3. Similarly yoga and other components of Eastern wisdom traditions have been  ruthlessly exploited for commercial gain . In fact mindfulness is a key component of Vipassana meditation in the Bu

Why do we always forget the Roma?

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In his absorbing and sometimes outrageous memoir The Way to to the Labyrinth: Memories of East and West the authority on Hinduism and Indian music Alain DaniĆ©lou makes the following thoughtful comment:  I often wonder at the way people who speak of genocide always seems to forget the Gypsies, the homosexuals, and the German dissidents who died at the hands of the Nazis; by limiting their condemnations, they only weaken their argument. It is not just because the victims were Jewish that extermination camps were abominable. I never quite trust the sincerity of people who openly condemn anti-Semitism but conveniently forget the many other victims of Nazism.  Back in 2006 in my post Roma - the forgotten Holocaust victims I explained how the fate of the millions of Jews murdered in Hitler's death camps is well documented and remembered, but less is known about the 500,000 Gypsies who also died. There are not many written accounts of the Roma or Sinti travellers who died in the camp

Not everyone climbs mountains

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These photos were taken by me on my recent trip to India. Listening and reading while in Goa set me thinking about a response to a recent post here. On his excellent The Music Salon Canadian blogger Bryan Townsend wrote: On an Overgrown Path tells us There is no mass market for classical music . I'm pretty sure of two things regarding that: first, I have known this ever since I got into classical music, so it ain't news and two, that is a big part of the appeal. Not everyone climbs mountains and not everyone listens to classical music. Bryan's thoughtful response supports my thesis that for two decades classical music has been chasing a non-existent mass market , as exemplified by the strategy of turning BBC Radio 3 into a clone of Classic FM complete with 'info-commercials'. But, and that is very important but , we cannot overlook that classical music is losing traction with audiences to an alarming extent.  A simple example of this loss of traction is