Gone analogue

The moral is not 'less technology' but more 'other things'

Quote is by Huston Smith from his prescient pre-social media book Beyond the Post-modern Mind which was published in 1982. Sunset was photographed by me at Agadir, Morocco.

Will the world end if the master musicians stop playing?

Brion Gysin died in Paris in 1986. I remember he always used to say that if the Master Musicians of Jajouka ever stopped playing, the legend holds that the world will end. He often worried about the chronic poverty of the musicians, and the diluting effect of contact with the modern world upon the ancient music. But the Pipes of Pan survive to this day.

That is William Burroughs writing in the sleeve notes for Apocalypse Across the Sky, Bill Laswell's recording of the Master Musicians of Jajouka. The Master Musicians first achieved global recognition through Brian Jones' LP The Pan Pipes of Jajouka which was posthumously released in 1971. William Burroughs wrote his note in 1992, and the gloomy prognosis that if the master musicians stop playing the world will end has been the repeated message of the classical music industry in recent years. But just how true is that prognosis?

Almost half a century after Brian Jones brought their ancient music to the modern world, the Master Musicians from Morocco play on. As recounted in earlier Overgrown Path posts, the Jajouka musicians have survived commercialisation and an acrimonious split, and one of the Jajouka ensembles played at the 2011 Glastonbury Festival while the other is appearing at the Barbican in London in September. The technology obsessed modern world has certainly impacted on art music, but has it really diluted it? This month Paul Bowles' pioneering 1958 field recordings of Moroccan music have been made available to a global audience in an exquisitely presented 4 CD box Music from Morocco by the independent Dust-to-Digital, a label with the mission "to produce high-quality, cultural artifacts". Recent eloquent advocacy by Amanda Petrusich writing in the New Yorker and Adam Schatz in The New York Review of Books underlines the importance of this new edition of Morocco's ancient music. It is impossible to do justice in words to the presentation of the set - particularly the 119 page leatherette-bound booklet - and the remastered sound belies the age of the original masters captured by Paul Bowles' Ampex 601 reel-to-reel recorder. Photos 2 and 4 here are reproduced from the Music to Morocco booklet. The set includes Bowles' field recordings of gnawa and Jewish music made in Essaouira, and photo 3 below was an archive photo of Jewish cantors that I unearthed in Essaouira when researching my 2010 post Jewish music under the sheltering sky.

In a few days I return to Essaouira, and the mixed blessing that is the iPod means the music captured by Paul Bowles will return to its source and play on through the digital avatars of the musicians that performed it in Morocco more than half a century ago. So also in Western art music, with master musicians such as Bruno Walter - seen in the header photo - playing on for a new generation of listeners via lovingly curated CD reissues. New technologies mean the master musicians of the past will never stop playing, but what about today's masters? Claiming that the world will end if the current generation of Western master musicians stops playing is a convenient way for the music establishment to defend the damaging and stultifying status quo. The classical music industry has an exaggerated sense of self-importance, and the world will not end if the celebrity master musicians stop playing. But, despite this, we still need great art, and if classical musicians are to continue playing in our concert halls we need a a new breed of masters performing more adventurous repertoire, taking a far more positive approach to changes in listening habits, and working under a different and less divisive business model. Just as the Pipes of Pan from Jajouka adapted and play on, so the master classical musicians must adapt if they want to play on. Keep well while I travel.

No review samples used in this post. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter.

It rains on the just and the unjust alike

Both these photos were taken by me at the Nizamuddin Dargah in Delhi. One of the most revered Sufi saints, Nizamuddin Auliya (1238 – 1325) was responsible for the Chishti Sufi Order spreading through India, and was the spiritual master of Amir Khusro (1253–1325), who is regarded as the father of qawwali. We were at the Sufi shrine for a late night Ramadan qawwali celebration; it was June just before the monsoon was due to break, and the weather was stiflingly hot and humid. Cats are cherished by Muslims, and as the celebration commenced we were joined by the cat seen below. Which gladdened us as we had left our own ginger cat in boarding kennels three weeks previously to travel in India. When the ecstatic music started the cat shinned up a pillar of the shrine and sat on a cross-beam listening contentedly. As midnight approached I felt drops of water on my head, and turning to my wife said "At last the monsoon has arrived". I looked up to see thousands of stars and the moon in a cloudless sky, and the ginger cat sitting on a beam directly above me.

Matthew 5:45 (KJV) tells us: 'That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. Also on Facebook and Twitter.

Dumbing up is the way to reach new audiences

Sitting with Jude Mansilla in the CanJam room at the 2015 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest he told me, "When I started the Head-Fi site I imagined it a 'gateway drug' to two-channel room-based audio." Judging by the attendance and activity in the CanJam area, headphones have become more than a gateway - for many young and old audiophiles they're a final destination.

That is Steven Stone writing in the The Absolute Sound. For an audience ranging from young to old the immersive experience of headphone sound has become a destination, yet classical music remains fixated on a different destination - the 19th century convention of the proscenium arch soundstage. In an insightful essay in The New Enquiry Elizabeth Newton posed the question: "Audio fidelity is more a matter of subjective emotion than empiricism. But what are we trying to be true to?" Her question generated considerable discussion on the audiophile website AudioStream, with one protagonist opining that "My idea of hi-fi is to make the possibility of losing oneself in the music happen as often as I choose...".

The experience of losing oneself in a performance and thereby being transported to a higher level of consciousness is the raison d'être of art music. Claudio Monteverdi declared that 'The end of all music is to affect the soul', and in the classical field it has been the power of the performance that traditionally has provided the immersive experience. But new technologies now provides a different but equally transcendental immersion through headphones and ear buds (head-fi), and surround sound. The classical industry is, however, unwilling to acknowledge this fundamental change in listening habits, and despite an obsession with reaching new audiences has been puzzlingly reluctant to experiment with the non-notated discretionary variables of spatial location, acoustic and absolute loudness. Digital technologies have become the de facto standard for classical music distribution, yet the potential offered by the same technologies to immerse listeners both in the concert hall and through recordings is resolutely ignored. Instead band-aids such as applause between movements and disco lighting are touted as the snake oil that will rejuvenate classical music. There is a dangerous dogma abroad; namely that using new technology to overthrow anachronistic performance conventions is a form of dumbing down. However there are exceptions, and one notable exception is the Spanish independent label Neu Records. In their artistic manifesto Neu Records makes a very persuasive case for dumbing up contemporary music by exploiting new technologies:

21st century composers are in a unique situation, with an inexhaustible range of technical resources, highly refined musical languages, the aesthetic perspective gained from the cutting edge of the twentieth century, and technological developments that multiply exponentially the ways listeners can access music... Written music, except for certain kinds of religious music, has always been composed to be played on a stage in front of the audience. Since the first multi-channel recordings were made, almost all producers and sound engineers have been faithful to this “frontal” approach to music, using surround channels only for picking up the room’s reverberation. However, listening to a surround recording is not like attending a concert; instead, it means placing yourself at the centre of the sound experience, while contemporary music does not need to comply with the spatial concepts of the classical concert. Playback equipment is a tool permitting the creation and reproduction of acoustic spaces, and allows us, in cooperation with composers, to design tridimensional sound spaces.

Neu Records are pursuing their belief that contemporary music does not need to comply with the spatial concepts of the classical concert, and among their work in progress is a Morton Feldman series with sound described as "almost spaceless" - the header photo shows the 360° microphone array used in their sessions. Past posts On An Overgrown Path have featured Neu Records' surround recording of Ramon Humet's music made with the London Sinfonietta and discussed the philosophy behind the immersive sound, while another post highlighted their first release of the music of the Catalan composer Bernat Vivancos (b. 1973). Now comes the premiere recording of Bernat Vivancos' Requiem made with the Latvian Radio Choir conducted by Sigvards Kļava. Although Vivancos trained at the celebrated Escolania de Montserrat which is one of the oldest choral schools in the world, his Requiem does not adhere to the liturgy of the Catholic Mass. Instead, to quote the composer: "The idea is that this prayer should be new, without linking it to any previously established canon. It is intended to be a luminous meditation on transcendence, in which a selection of open, plural texts and reflections responds to a non-confessional vision of the end of human existence". Accordingly the sources for the syncretic text include Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Denis Diderot, Pope Francis, Kahil Gibran, the New Testament, and Bahá'u'lláh, founder of the Bahai faith.

This contemporary Requiem is truly immersive, and purchasers of the double CD have access to Surround 5.1 and HD FLAC Stereo mixes. But spiritual immersion is achieved without resorting to gimmickry; scored for voices, solo cello and cello quartet, percussion and accordion, this is timeless music that transcends fashionable idioms - sample it here. With this recording Bernat Vivancos and Neu Records show how contemporary music can leverage digital technologies to reach a new audience without compromising artistic integrity, and it is appropriate that the final part of the Requiem quotes Monteverdi's Lasciatemi morire, because this is indeed music to affect the soul. The music's worth can be judged from the provenance of the sleeve notes. Neu Records is an independent label based in Barcelona and has no apparent connection with Jordi Savall's Alia Vox label other than a shared Catalan identity. However the sleeve essay is contributed by Jordi Savall, and his concluding words are eloquent testimony to the power of dumbing up:

Fortunately, thanks to the complex, historical process of discoveries and creation, of recovery and, finally, also, of recognition of the atemporal value of every work of art, we see that, today, a better knowledge of our thousand-year- old musical heritage can act as an element of inspiration and revitalisation in the creative practice of contemporary music; new composers of our own day are being widely incorporated into this veritable, new musical Renaissance that we are experiencing in the twenty-first century. The innovative richness of the works by Bernat Vivancos are, I believe, the clearest and most striking proof of the vitality of this new musical Renaissance. His extraordinary talent and his profound spirituality are placed at the service of a process that is the invention of a new language which, in spite of its complexity and modernity, is capable of transmitting to us pure beauty and emotion. Perhaps this is the great mystery of creativity in any true work of art, in one capable of achieving a perfect balance between technique and emotion, between beauty and spirituality, creating a web of new sounds which, becoming our own, will never cease to move us

Bernat Vivancos' Requiem was supplied as a requested review sample. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter.

There should be an industry award for self-promotion

These days there is a classical music industry award for almost everything. So it is inexplicable that there is no award for self-promotion: because it seems that talent and experience now count for less than self-promotion. So I hereby propose a new award. The winner will be the classical music personality with the highest score calculated as follows: (number of glowing reviews re-tweeted) x (number of selfies on social media) x (number of self-serving advertorials). Sponsors for the Overgrown Selfie award are welcome.

Yes, that header photo actually happened. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Also on Facebook and Twitter.