Saturday, April 02, 2016

Music that does not fit with the narrative


In an email exchange with a musician friend I lamented how my reference in a recent post to the 'sadly maligned Joyce Hatto' and my link to her recording of Arnold Bax's Symphonic Variations were both met with a resounding silence. In reply my friend wrote:
And no wonder the glaring silence around Hatto; that tempest made all the critics look amateurish. It is a shame that fraud on her husband's part has deafened the music world to Hatto's manifestly genuine qualities. I guess her real story just doesn't fit the narrative.
Which reminded me of how relevant these words of Krishnamurti are in our media-moderated age:
We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compiled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.
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