Dilip Simeon's blog

Ravi Shankar, who has died aged 92 after undergoing heart-valve replacement surgery, was the Indian maestro who put the sitar on the musical map.  George Harrison  called him "the godfather of  world music ", and it was Shankar's vision that brought the sounds of the raga into western consciousness. He was thus the first performer and composer to substantially bridge the musical gap between  India  and the west. He was still winning awards in the new century: in 2002 his album Full Circle/Live at Carnegie Hall (2000) achieved a Grammy for best world music album. Shankar's distinction as a sitar player lay in his brilliant virtuosity, creativity and vast range of musicianship. In the west his name is synonymous with the music of India. Ravindra Shankar – in Bengali, Robindro Shaunkar – Chowdhury was born in the holy city of Benares, now Varanasi. The youngest of five sons, he belonged to a family of Bengali Brahmins from Jessore, now in Bangladesh, who were...

Karima Bennoune Source :  http://www.opendemocracy.net/ 5050/k... Twenty years ago, on 14 February 1994, the Armed Islamic Group sent a Valentine’s Day message of hate to Algerian performing artists and the youth who loved them by gunning down Aziz Smati, beloved producer of the local equivalent of MTV. His legendary show, Bled Music (Bled means “country” or “homeland”), burst onto our screens in 1989 during a unique moment of political opening in post-independence Algeria . As the country lurched away from single party rule, and single party thinking, the program was an intoxicating glimpse of what a truly North African freedom could look and sound like. It featured unmistakably Algerian tunes introduced in uniquely Algerian argot by the dreamy Samia Benkherroubi, a college student who effused a very Algerian warmth from the small screen. Meanwhile, the Muslim majority country’s late 80s democratic experiment was exploited by fundamentalists who flourished in the petri di...

When a scholar is prevented from speaking, that is intolerance. But to prevent a great musician from performing in the national capital is not mere intolerance — it is barbarism. NB : Guha's argument is sought to be refuted in an op-ed piece today, that refers to T.M. Krishna as a 'vicious political activist'. In his twitter page, Guha says:  "You claim no one mentioned you were part of the programme; I did, clearly, in my piece in the Express. You claim the AAI 'specified' reasons; it did not. It gave no reasons whatsoever. Krishna was giving a musical concert, not giving a political talk. It was his concert that was cancelled. By bringing in his politics and his dislike of Modi, you indirectly gave the game away. When commercial film stars become apologists for the Government (any government) it is pathetic. When great classical dancers do so, it is tragic."  Here are some examples of vicious behaviour by the 'Sangh's front organisations: ...

Richard Strauss was wooed, rejected and then hounded by the Nazis. On his 150th anniversary, is his music finally free from the stigma ? The anniversary of the birth of Richard Strauss, 150 years ago this June, is already being marked across the country. In Manchester, the major musical establishments – the Hallé, the BBC Philharmonic, the Camerata and the Royal Northern College of Music – are holding a joint festival of nine concerts spread across the first eight weeks of the year, concentrating on his songs with orchestra and his tone poems. This generous observance is a contrast with the rather cool celebration of his centenary in 1964. Still rumbling on 50 years ago were the prejudices of those who accused him of being a supporter of the Nazis. Strange company: Richard Strauss (left) and Joseph Goebbels in the 1930s.  Photo: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Lebrecht Strauss was born in Munich on 11 June 1864. His father, Franz, was the principal horn in the Munich court opera ...

Teofilo   Ruiz  (born1943) is a Cuban-American medieval historian and professor I left Cuba close to my nineteenth birthday. I was already an adult, filled with experiences of San Francisco de Paula, my small hometown a mere ten kilometers from the center of La Habana — and of the capital city itself, the magical and enchanting La Habana of my early years. I kept a mental map, an intellectual and emotional topography of remembered places. This mental map lived in my mind, a vivid remembrance of things that were no more. In the fifty years since I left Cuba, I have walked my town and La Habana endless times, reaffirming memories of streets, houses, parks, smells, and people. And although I have lived in many different places in the world and have felt somewhat at home almost everywhere, both my hometown and La Habana remained engraved in nostalgic memories, deeply alive in me, even though part of me realized that they had no objective existence anywhere else. I dreamed of them...

Many people got their first taste of South African dance music this year via six Angolans dancing in their backyard, dinner plates in hand. Their viral video, with casual but masterful moves set to Jerusalema by South African producer Master KG, created a global dance craze; the track ended up all over Radio 1 this autumn and topped streaming charts across Europe. Jerusalema is just one track amid what has now become arguably the most vibrant and innovative dance music culture on the planet. In South Africa, dance music is pop music, from townships like Soweto and KwaDabeka to cities like Durban and Cape Town. The country has 11 official languages, each with their own cultural practices, and even the national anthem of the so-called Rainbow Nation is comprised of the country’s five most commonly spoken: Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans and English. Out of this rich cultural heritage, and in a country that has long had distinct dance styles like jaiva, marabi, kwela and mbaqanga, has co...

In 1857 Charles Dana invited Karl Marx to contribute to the  New American Cyclopaedia .  Marx was the European political correspondent for the daily  New York Tribune , of which Dana was the editor; Dana and George Ripley, his former mentor at the utopian colony of Brook Farm, were co-editors of the encyclopedia.  In due time Marx supplied nearly seventy entries (and was paid two dollars per page).  Some were biographical, like "Bolivar y Ponte, Simon," but most were on military subjects and so may have been written by, or at least with help from, Engels, whom Marx's children used to call "the General" because of his presumed expertise on military topics.  Among the entries Marx was asked for but declined to write was "Aesthetics."  He remarked to Engels in a letter of May 23rd, "It is a puzzle to me how 'Aesthetics' should be treated 'fundamentally' on a Hegelian basis, on one page." On the 28th Engels replied, "Dana mu...

At a New York hootenanny in 1946, he was the first to make Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land feel like a new American classic and 23 years later he led half a million anti-war protesters in a chorus of John Lennon's Give Peace a Chance, which, he said, "united the crowd as no speech or song had been able to all afternoon". In 1974, he was the first to record  Estadio Chile , the last song  Victor Jara wrote before his murder by General Pinochet's thugs . Pete Seeger   was a good man. There aren't many musicians you can say that about without seeming simplistic. Music is often progressed by flawed, volatile, glamorous egotists, and thank God for them. But Seeger carved out his place in history with a quieter, rarer set of qualities: nobility, generosity, humility and, when things got rough, breathtaking courage. Perhaps uniquely, he became one of the most important singers in America without ever being a star, because he believed in the song rather than the si...

Here's to you, Nicola and Bart Rest forever here in our hearts The last and final moment is yours That agony is your triumph I have been fascinated by the word and concept of Passion for more than 50 years. I first came across the word in early sixties in a biographical novel of the German musician Mendelssohn (1809-1847), in ‘Beyond Desire’ (1956) by Pierre La Mure. The central theme of the novel is the discovery of the scores of ‘St. Matthew Passion’ (1727), a very important piece of music written by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), in a butcher’s shop in Berlin in 1829, and the subsequent struggle of Mendelssohn to perform it. Bach himself performed it on Good Friday on April 11, 1727 in Leipzig. Subsequently the scores were lost till Felix Mendelssohn rediscovered it in 1829 and performed it on March 11, 1829 in Berlin when he was just 20 year old! The concept of Passion is a very important concept in Christian theology and means suffering of Jesus on the Cross. (I am ...