On An Overgrown Path

How do you rate the composers Paul Dessau, Carl Zelter and Albert Lortzing? Well if you were one of the musicologists advising on the restoration of the historic Konzerthaus in Berlin the answer seems to be pretty highly. The Konzerthaus (above) is one of the outstanding designs of the great European neo-classical architect Karl Freidrich Schinkel . It was built as a theatre in 1821, but also had a chequered history as a music venue including the Berlin premiere of the Flying Dutchman, and most notably the first-ever performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1826. In 1789 Mozart attended incognito a performance of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and when the second violins played a wrong note legends says he shouted to the orchestra: 'It's D you're supposed to be playing, damn it'. Romantic opera was born in the Konzerthaus with the first performance of E.T.A Hoffman's Undine in 1816. Among the c elebrated conductors who worked there were Meyerbeer, Men...

Thankfully the BBC has decided to limit the scale of its free music file downloads during the upcoming Bach week (16th to 25th December) - 'Nothing will happen without consultation and, should it happen, it will be nothing on the scale of Beethoven,' a Radio 3 spokesman said . In some quarters this decision is being interpreted as another victory for the 'evil' record companies , as expressed by the Open Rights Group - 'We find the complaints of various parts of the recording industry not only selfish but short-sighted.' This decision by the BBC is not selfish or short-sighted. Nor is it about caving in to pressure from the recording industry. The BBC has realised that its 'shoot first, aim later' experiment with the Beethoven Symphony downloads put at risk not just record companies, but the jobs of many more important individuals in the music supply chain, including musicians, producers, arrangers, and composers. The BBC remembered that it has compl...

'Illegaly downloading music to your gleaming new Christmas iPod could soon be dealt with using the full force of anti-terror laws if the entertainment industry gets its way. Big firms including Sony and EMI want to use new powers designed to track terrorists on the internet to crack down on music and film pirates - including the parents of children who download music - who are estimated to cost the industry £650m a year. Internet companies will have to log all the pages visited by surfers for at least a year so the security services can track terrorists using the web for fund-raising, training or swapping information. But the move has been greeted with alarm by human rights campaigners who say that the step is an example of the "mission creep" of draconian new anti-terror powers.' For the full text of this worrying article see Scotland on Sunday Image credit - Counter-strike Report errors, broken links and missing images to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk I...

In August 1945 atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around 120,000 people, of which 95% were civilians, were killed outright. It is estimated that a further quarter of a million died from the after effects of the explosions. Six days after the second bomb was dropped Japan surrendered unconditionally, removing the requirement for an invasion of the Japanese mainland by Allied forces , an engagement that would undoubtedly have resulted in dreadful casualties on both sides. Hopefully the music community, as well as the world, will remember 2005 as the sixtieth anniversary of these terrible events, as well as the year of the premiere of an opera by John Adams . My attempts to understand the almost incomprehensible events of 1945 led me to the recently published 109 East Palace by Jennet Conant . This is the story of the extraordinary secret community of allied scientists at Los Alamos in New Mexico that, in a race against the clock, created the t...

The BBC has a wonderful history of music patronage which includes commissioning such seminal contemporary works as Tippett's Second Symphony and Vision of St Augustine, Birtwistle's Imaginary Landscapes, and Boulez's Ritue l. So it is great to read in today's Guardian that the BBC's musical aspirations remain boundless .... BBC joins Lloyd Webber in search for Maria Lord Lloyd Webber has struck a deal with the BBC for a Popstars-style talent show to find an unknown singer to play the lead in his new stage version of The Sound of Music due to open at the London Palladium next autumn. The television programme, which is believed to have the working title How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, will show a series of auditions with the winner being offered the starring role for the musical's entire first run. Lloyd Webber has spent four years trying to find someone to take the part of Maria, the governess portrayed on film by Julie Andrews. Picture credit - Panth...

I live in Norfolk, so I'm always keen to feature authors from Norwich. So it's a great pleasure to write about Annie Proulx's 'Private Passions' as she was born in Norwich - Norwich Connecticut that is. Let's answer the obvious question first, how is her name pronounced? It is as if it were spelled Proo, the l and x are silent. Despite the high profile achieved by her Pulitzer Prize wining second novel The Shipping News Annie Proulx (right) has actively avoided fitting into the role of best selling author. She started her career as a journalist, and did not begin writing fiction until she was in her 50s. She has shunned the New York literary circuit, and lives on her own in the foothills of the Rockies at Arvada, Wyoming. In an interview she said about the celebrity status afforded to best-selling authors: "It's not good for one's view of human nature, that's for sure. You begin to see, when invitations are coming from festivals and colleg...

'This recording is the anachronistic result of the conjunction of three factors. To be more precise: a 21st century organist plays 14th and 15th century music on a 17th and 18th century organ. But what is anachronism? Isn't every interpretation or musical performance anachronistic anyway? To be sure, from what we know, 18th century organs do not have much in common with their 15th century counterparts. And the sonic world we live in, even the way we listen to music, has changed. Let us always keep in mind that to think we can listen to early music with a virgin ear is illusory: we have been affected by centuries of musical evolution (or call it musical history).' Fighting words from French organist Louis Thiry. They come from the sleeve notes to a new CD which I found in a FNAC store in Avignon recently, and which has given me much pleasure. Ma fin est mon commencement is a recording of transcriptions by Thiry of polyphonic vocal works from the 14th and 15th century. The...

'But the cold stones of the Abbey Church ring with a chant that glows with living flame, with clean, profound desire. It is an austere warmth, the warmth of Gregorian Chant. It never wears you out by making a lot of cheap demands on your sensibilities.' Thomas Merton - The Seven Storey Mountain On this Thanksgiving Holiday 2005 sample that austere warmth with this two minute audio file of the superb Choeur Grégorien de Nantes singing Kyrie X1 "Cum Jubilo" in the first mode on the Art et Musique label - Photo credit - Abbey de Solesmes If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to Peerless Portugese Polyphony

The blog Tampon Teabag (yes I know) posted the following very interesting (and long) piece back in September 2005. I missed it first time round, so here it is (language and all) in case you did as well. "Every society throughout history and throughout the world has made and enjoyed music! But we, now, here, in the west are unique… in our hunger for ever more, new music. Music surrounds us: in our houses, blasting out of radios, CD players, computers. It wakes us up, and it sends us to sleep. Outside we pump music into our ears through up-to-the-minute mobile phones and MP3-players... "We cannot get enough of it! We hear it in our supermarkets, and we sing it in our churches and in our karaoke bars. Rock anthems in pubs, and recorder-concerts in schools. We chant it at our football matches, hum along to it in our cars, and dance to it in our nightclubs. We go to Sing-Along-Sound-of-Music evenings. There is no getting away from music. Our lives are musical lives, and our world...

"It is the quality which cannot be acquired by simply the exercise of a technique or a system - it is something to do with personality, with gift, with spirit. I quite simply call it magic, a quality which would appear to be by no means unacknowledged by scientists, and which I value more than any other part of music." From Britten's acceptance speech when awarded the first Aspen Award. Benjamin Britten was born on 22nd November 1913 in Lowestoft, Suffolk. The anniversary of the birth of the most important British composer of the second half of the 20th century is shared with several other events. Happily today is also St Cecilia's Day , and she is of course the patron saint of musicians. Less happily today is the anniversary of the assasination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. I know it is of several orders of magnitude less important than those events, but I also was born on 22nd November. I listened to my favourite travel writer, Patrick Leigh-Fermor , on m...

Fumio Yasuda's album 'Flower Songs' is a fusion of the visual and performing arts. It is one of the fruits (or should that be flowers?) of a long term collabaration between composer and pianist Yasuda and leading Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, and was originally composed as a soundtrack for Araki's film ' Kakyoku' , which translates as 'Flower Songs.' Improvisation is a staple ingredient of Fumio Yasuda's music-making. He was born in Tokyo in 1953, and studied composition at Kunitachi College of Music. Yasuda's music occupies that increasingly important grey area between contemporary classical and jazz compositions. He plays keyboards himself, uses sampling, and has worked with several leading improvisers in Japan. Although experimental his work retains roots in the post-Romantic musical tradition, and pays homage to impressionists such as Debussy . Piano and keyboards are his main interests, but his compositions range from an Accord...

The French painter and sculptor Arman started creating artworks from household waste in the early 60's. He went on to develop his series Colères (anger) which deconstructed objects of beauty, particularly musical instruments (right) . He went on to apply the same techniques to iconic sculptures including the Venus de Milo and Hercule Farnèse . There are parallels with the music of Luciano Berio from the 60's, in particular his Sinfonia which deconstructs the third movement of Mahler's Second Symphony in similar fashion. Arman's best known works are the 18m high pile of 59 cars Long Term Parking in Jouy-en-Josas , France, and Hope for Peace using wrecked military vehicles in Beirut's Martyrs' Square. Arman, born Nice 17th November 1928, died New York 22nd October 2005. For Arman web site follow this link Image of NY Concerto by Arman - PicassoMio Report broken links, missing images, and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk If you enjoye...

'In our cold modern world it seems that everything has to be measured - and now computers are doing it to music. As anyone with an iPod or other digital music player knows, as a song is played, a little black dot moves along the line between "start" and "finish", with an onscreen counter telling us how much time remains. Every chord takes us deeper into the song but closer to the end. These devices for playing music and video seem to think we want to know precisely how long the whole thing is going to last, and how far through the experience we are. Yet for many people, an important element of music is its ability to take us out of a normal consciousness of time. A really good song or piece of music takes us far away from the clock that paces out our more mundane activities. As we listen, we dream - at our desk, at our sink or on the train - with no idea whether our mind has been roaming free for a few moments or much more. Music replaces clock time with musical...

The good news is that On An Overgrown Path is featured in an editorial Comment article in today's Times, and is selected as one of the top five UK blogs on all subjects - here is the full list: Author's Choice: pootergeek.com - Fine satires and parodies dailyablution.blogs.com - Scott Burgess drives journalists crazy by fact-checking their assertions theovergrownpath.blogspot.com - High culture news and reviews nataliesolent.blogspot.com - Libertarianism and sewing chasemeladies.blogspot.com - Surreal humour Tim Worstall , who wrote the article, is the author of 2005 Blogged , a just published anthology of the best of British blogging. The not quite so good news is that Overgrown Path's new found fame attracted the following online review today from Madame Counsellor . I think this is what André Previn once described to me as 'a crouching ovation'...... 'On an Overgrown Path. "High Culture News and Reviews". I couldn't make out exactl...

'For most people these concerns (about intellectual property ownership) may seem abstract - at least until they listen to music, where arguments about ownership are fought over all the time in the courts and, increasingly, inside the gadgets that we use. Only last week, Sony was forced to withdraw software concealed on some of its CDs that installs itself - without the owner's knowledge or informed consent - on a computer, prevents copies being made and breaks the machine if an attempt is made to remove it. At least 47 recent CDs have been infected in this way, and one recent survey suggests that they in turn have infected half a million PCs during the last three months. Any PC thus infected can be attacked by more obviously malevolent hackers who can use the Sony technology to install their own programs on the victims' PCs. But whether it is Sony or some Russian mafia gang that ends up working through these security holes, it won't be you, the poor sap who thought he/s...