On An Overgrown Path

In Marrakech storks are considered to be holy birds, and historically they have nested in the minarets of the city's many mosques. But recently they have moved to the top of telecommunication towers. If those antenae are 5G and QAnon is correct there will soon be two headed chicks in that nest.

This year's BBC Proms season includes ' Nick Drake - An Orchestral Celebration ' with Jules Buckley and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. That is Nick in the photo above; on the night in 1974 he died at the tragically young age of 26 a disc of the Brandenburg Concertos was on the record player in his room , and Black Eyed Dog , one of the last tracks he recorded before he died, has striking similarities to the Preludio of Bach's Lute Suite in E Major. But there is also an important and little-known contemporary connection between Nick Drake and the world of classical music. While at Cambridge University Nick met and worked with fellow student Robert Kirby. When Nick recorded his first album Five Leaves Left he chose Robert Kirby to arrange and conduct the backing for the majority of the tracks using strings, brass and woodwind. It is widely acknowledged that these arrangements were a major contribution to the success of the album and also to Nick's next LP Bryter Late

Shortly after it was released I bought the young Finn  Klaus Mäkelä's new complete cycle of Sibelius symphonies recorded for Decca. Sibelius symphonies are very well represented in my large CD collection , in fact I have more Sibelius symphony cycles than for any other composer. Yet I have returned to Mäkelä's interpretations a surprising number of times. No, they will not replace the accounts of Sanderling , Colin Davis,  Barbirolli , and others. But they are not worse or better: because subjective dualist judgements of better or worse, like or dislike, good and bad, definitive or otherwise, etc etc no longer mean anything to me . There is no concrete reality in a music performance, only what we individually perceive as reality. A performance is an endless flow of constantly changing conditions. The score is not the performance, and the performance is not the score. Between score and performance lie an infinite number of overlapping variables - tempi, dynamics, performanc

One important reason why classical music is failing to attract a new young audience is being ignored - today's much sought-after digital natives are fast becoming tomorrow's hearing loss natives. As the Clínic de Barcelona explains , until recently, hearing loss had always been related to age: the older you are, the worse your hearing is. This situation, however, has changed in recent years, as increasingly younger people are suffering from hearing loss. There are many reasons for this widespread hearing loss. There are now high levels of ambient noise - for instance the average daytime ambient noise  without PA announcements inside a US airport terminal is 66 decibels which approaches that of a a washing machine. Then there is the noise from the headphones, earbuds, etc used for long periods with digital devices. In addition the overlooked widespread  use of ototoxic drugs , including macrolide drugs and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), contributes to hearin

In David Hepworth's recommended history of EMI's Abbey Road studios he makes an observation that may just hold the key to unlocking the new younger audience that classical music has sought for so long in vain. Writing about the increasing importance of pop music in late 1950s Hepworth explains that "whereas the people working in classical music wanted to record music, the people in pop increasingly wanted to record sounds". The ultimate example of studio-created sound taking priority over music culminated in the seminal “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" which  took five-and-a-half months of sound-shaping at Abbey Road for the album's13 tracks to be completed. Classical dogma dictates that the music takes priority - note perfect interpretations, historically informed performances, pedigree of the musician, concert hall etiquette etc. In the classical world sound is the servant of music, as in the never-ending search for the acoustically perfect

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