My live premiere of Incantabulation is now on uTube. It’s not perfect but it gets the general idea across. I may re-record it over Easter.
I don’t know what sort of sense it makes to anyonelse but I feel some satisfaction that over the last six months (actually) I have pursued this particular dragon to its lair, wrestled with its attempts to throw me off and ultimately tamed it. For me capturing these twists and turns of emotion represent the refinement of much despair (at my incapacities /imagination /endurance) into a tangible object, as opposed to so many ‘raids on the inarticulate with inadequate weapons’ that have ended in failure, or resulted in me fastening a very fine sword in a silent stone that awaits some other Arthur to draw it out ... my choral music, which is where my real genius lies. But here in this piece my strengths and weaknesses are on display, and indeed integrated, in a way I'm happy to acknowledge, as an important step towards the elusive inner music I’ve spent my life trying to capture.
Does this matter, and if so to whom? Well, from the deep depressions of my adolescence I’ve been driven by the belief that if I could release this inner music I would not merely make myself whole but provide a template of wholing for others. Right or wrong, the many twists and turns of my life have represented an attempt to pursue the wholing process; yes, selfishly perhaps, but from the feeling that unless I could unify my field of vision (find emotional integrity) I had nothing else to give.
Jung believed that making a mandala was an important part of the healing process of externalising and balancing both one’s light and dark within the integrity of a circumference. So you could view Incantabulation as part of that idea.
We live in dark times and it’s tempting to try to sync with that dark zeitgeist to hitch a free ride, but I have always felt a calling to try to find & express a quality which offers hope or belief in light. This cannot (for me) be discovered simply through prettiness but has to be earnt from the muck and mire of existence. So I have always held to the belief that what I have been shown to express in composition are the sounds which await those who are also working to bring about worthwhile change. And the concept of martyrdom shows that sometimes the most effective way of bringing about change is by ‘losing’, submerging the needs of an individual in the greater goal of bringing a new world into existence. So I have felt my enforced silence was a price worth paying if it is the cost of being true to my principles.
We are all descendants of contradictions, and thus our integration is in and of itself an important resolution that our parents and grandparents need to see played out in this ‘only world of choice’ for them to understand that their lives too were ultimately worthwhile. And so it will be for us when our children take on our dreams and grow them into flourishing realities that we could barely glimpse.
I don’t know what sort of sense it makes to anyonelse but I feel some satisfaction that over the last six months (actually) I have pursued this particular dragon to its lair, wrestled with its attempts to throw me off and ultimately tamed it. For me capturing these twists and turns of emotion represent the refinement of much despair (at my incapacities /imagination /endurance) into a tangible object, as opposed to so many ‘raids on the inarticulate with inadequate weapons’ that have ended in failure, or resulted in me fastening a very fine sword in a silent stone that awaits some other Arthur to draw it out ... my choral music, which is where my real genius lies. But here in this piece my strengths and weaknesses are on display, and indeed integrated, in a way I'm happy to acknowledge, as an important step towards the elusive inner music I’ve spent my life trying to capture.
Does this matter, and if so to whom? Well, from the deep depressions of my adolescence I’ve been driven by the belief that if I could release this inner music I would not merely make myself whole but provide a template of wholing for others. Right or wrong, the many twists and turns of my life have represented an attempt to pursue the wholing process; yes, selfishly perhaps, but from the feeling that unless I could unify my field of vision (find emotional integrity) I had nothing else to give.
Jung believed that making a mandala was an important part of the healing process of externalising and balancing both one’s light and dark within the integrity of a circumference. So you could view Incantabulation as part of that idea.
We live in dark times and it’s tempting to try to sync with that dark zeitgeist to hitch a free ride, but I have always felt a calling to try to find & express a quality which offers hope or belief in light. This cannot (for me) be discovered simply through prettiness but has to be earnt from the muck and mire of existence. So I have always held to the belief that what I have been shown to express in composition are the sounds which await those who are also working to bring about worthwhile change. And the concept of martyrdom shows that sometimes the most effective way of bringing about change is by ‘losing’, submerging the needs of an individual in the greater goal of bringing a new world into existence. So I have felt my enforced silence was a price worth paying if it is the cost of being true to my principles.
We are all descendants of contradictions, and thus our integration is in and of itself an important resolution that our parents and grandparents need to see played out in this ‘only world of choice’ for them to understand that their lives too were ultimately worthwhile. And so it will be for us when our children take on our dreams and grow them into flourishing realities that we could barely glimpse.
