Weird. The Contemporary Music Network doesn't have its own website, just a MySpace page. I know that's the strategy du jour, but, seriously, who do they think they're kidding? This is publicly funded arts initiative: I understand that they want to look hip, and not stuffy, but that's no reason to pretend to be what they're not. And they're not a 15-year-old with saggy-arse jeans mumbling "thanks for the add". What's more, how dare they entrust the legacy of your and my tax pennies to Rupert fucking Murdoch and his Evil Empire?
I used to depend on the CMN. It's different now I live in London and can be all blasé because every kind of music that gets played in this country is within reach of an unreliable train service and woefully erratic (all the way from slow to stationary) bus journeys. But back in Sheffield, I wouldn't have seen John Zorn's Naked City, Jan Garbarek, Michael Nyman (had to go to Manchester for that, actually), maybe Don Cherry, and many others I can't remember now, were it not for CMN. Even my first Yo La Tengo gig had somehow managed to swing a CMN subsidy.
This double CD pretty much does what it says on the tin, compiling composers and performers who have featured on CMN tours, from contemporary classical to the outré end of jazz and world music. Much of it I have some kind of history or connection with, however tenuous. For example, I once went to a performance of Peter Maxwell-Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King. This was actually in London, before I went to Sheffield, and I only saw it from the screen outside the Purcell Room because Jeremy and Katie were late (we got in for the second half, which was Brecht's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, so we were still able to get our Marxism Today loyalty cards stamped — it was 1986, after all).
The CDs come with a hundred-page booklet with a history of CMN and various essays by the likes of (surprise!) David Toop. Needless to say, I haven't read it, but I did skim the short piece about Cornelius Cardew's Boolavogue, because it's more enjoyable than the other stuff of his that I know. Yes, it does quote from The Internationale, but it also swings.
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