tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-164069652024-03-14T02:27:52.394+00:00The Light on the CloudsThe Inner Guidance & Meditative Thoughts of Michael Maxwell SteerMaxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.comBlogger693125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-83323221722705687412021-06-01T17:43:00.002+00:002021-06-01T17:43:24.514+00:00Michael Maxwell Steer: Pavan & Galliard II (My Lady Nevells VB) William...<iframe frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/6_5UfdeXC2I" width="480"></iframe> <div><br /></div><div>This music excites me as much in 2021 as it did when I first encountered it in 1960.</div>Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-71543924558502170692020-12-11T19:23:00.003+00:002020-12-11T19:26:47.393+00:00Roger Scruton on evil – from Wagner's Parsifal<p><i>I have never published anyonelse's words here verbatim before; but this seems to have a lapidary clarity that deserves to shared.</i></p><p><i>"</i>As Wagner was aware, we distinguish people who are evil from those who are merely bad. Bad people are like you or me, only worse. They belong in the community, even if they behave badly towards it. We can reason with them, improve them, come to terms with them and sometimes accept them. Even if they wreak destruction, like Siegfried, it tends to be because, through deception or manipulation, matters have slipped from their control. But evil people are not like that. They do not belong in the community, even when residing within its territory. Their bad behaviour may be too secret and subversive to be noticeable, and any dialogue with them will be, on their part, a pretence. There is, in them, no scope for improvement, no path to acceptance, and their faults are not of the normal, remediable human variety, but have another and more metaphysical origin. They are visitors from another sphere, incarnations of the Devil. Even their charm - and it is a recognized fact that evil people are often charming - is only further proof of their Otherness. They are, in some sense, the negation of humanity, wholly and unnaturally at ease with the thing that they seek to destroy. Their presence in the community involves a mingling of elements that do not belong together, and their charm is sorcery: they are, indeed, the most potent form of pollution. </p><p>That characterization of evil is summarized in the famous line that Goethe gives to Mephistopheles: <br />Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint <br />[I am the spirit that for ever negates] </p><p>Whereas the bad person is guided by self-interest, to the point of ignoring or overriding the others who stand in his path, the evil person is profoundly interested in others, has almost selfless designs on them. His aim is not to use them, as Faust uses Gretchen, but to rob them of themselves. Mephistopheles hopes to steal and destroy Faust's soul and, en route to that end, to destroy the soul of Gretchen. Nowadays we might use the word 'self' instead of 'soul'. But this word is only another name for the same metaphysical mystery around which our lives are built –- the mystery of the 'I', which is the centre of consciousness and the origin of choice. Evil people are not necessarily threats to the body; but they are threats to the self. They open the deepest spiritual wounds in order to fill them with poison. Such is Klingsor in his abuse of Kundry. His failure to belong to the community does not lead to resignation or despair. It lead s to an insightful, almost intimate destruction of the woman whom he tortures, and through whom he also brings destruction to those who have enjoyed the blessedness that he vainly longs for. The world of the evil person is a loveless world, in which intimacy takes the form of domination. To be close to an evil person is to be in his power, since he tolerates no other relationship; hence every intimacy that he achieves merely reinforces his utter loneliness, the metaphysical vacuum of the I that has never said 'thou'. To live without the I/Thou relationship is to lose the benefit of love: it is to relate to others by spells and sorcery, thus by-passing their humanity for the sake of a purely self-centred control. </p><p>Encountering evil of the Klingsor kind we sense the existence of a contest between being and nothingness, creation and destruction, and that we are involved in that contest and are saved or jeopardized by our own behaviour. Seen as part of this contest our faults can weigh us down: we seek exoneration, without knowing the human person to whom an appeal for forgiveness can be made. We exist as though suspended above a chasm, ready at any moment to fall. This is what is meant by original sin, and indeed Schopenhauer rewrote the idea of original sin so that it became 'the crime of existence itself – ‘die Schuld des Daseins,’ the guilt of existing as an individual, in free relations with our kind. </p><p>Such feelings prompt the great yearning that finds a voice in tragic art and which engages with our most urgent loves and fears in this world: the yearning for the blessing that relieves us of our guilt- guilt that is the inevitable result of our free dealings with others. Glimpses of this blessing are afforded by such liminal experiences as falling in love, recovering from illness, becoming a parent, and encountering in awe the sublime works of nature. At these moments we stand at the threshold of the transcendent, reaching out to what cannot be attained or known. And that to which we reach must be understood in personal terms, since only then does it offer an answer to the unspoken question of our being: the question why? It is the soul of the world, which smiles from the meadows at Monsalvat on Good Friday." </p>Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-32495710338355737232020-05-12T13:31:00.008+00:002020-05-25T14:33:39.183+00:00janmot<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Introduction</h2>
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Freely translated and adapted from <i><br />Poème de l’âme – un œuvre intempestive</i> <br />(Poem of the Soul – a timeless work) by Patrice Beghan</h3>
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<font size="4"><b><i>Poème de l’âme </i></b>is a cycle of painting and poetry that is unique in French art. It tells the story of the earthly tribulations of a soul, embodied in an androgynous young man, confronting and evading the forces of evil. Amidst ‘a permanent rustle of wings the soul and its guardian angel undertake the human journey in diaphanous clothing surrounded as-it-were by celestial music within the serene and familiar landscapes around Lyon illuminated in a supernatural light which caresses the pastel whites, saffron, oranges, purples and emeralds. Taking the figure from the safety of home as far as the “wrong turning,” where the menacing figures of a dark nightmare await pilgrims. Thence one pathway, the “Golden Ladder” of arts and sciences, ascends to God; whereas the other descends to a tomb.’</font></div><font size="4">
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<font size="4"><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://youtu.be/X-3ylgqQMJ8" target="_blank"><span>Watch a demo of my translation and setting for chorus and small orchestra of the first painting/poem, </span><span>Divine Conception.</span></a></span></b></font></div><font size="4">
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<font size="4"><b>Louis Janmot</b> himself is all but unknown today, but he was part of an authentic Lyonnais culture that remains as alive and independent of Parisian fashion as it ever was. Born to devout parents in 1814, Anne-François-Louis Janmot was profoundly affected by the childhood deaths of his siblings – an experience that probably lies at the heart of this cycle of paintings to which he devoted much of his life. Another influence was a life-long friendship with his fellow student at the Collège Royale in Lyon Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam, who was to found a lay religious order—initially Le Conférence de Charité, later La Société de St. Vincent de Paul— whose role in French Catholicism was ultimately recognised with his beatification by Pope John-Paul II in 1997. </font></div><font size="4">
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In 1831 Janmot entered the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, winning its highest honour, the Golden Laurel, before going as part a cohort to study in Paris with Ingres and Victor Orsel. </font></div><font size="4">
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Two years later, after graduation, many of the Lyonnais cohort joined Ozanam’s newly founded Conférence and went on pilgrimage to Rome, where they were to meet fellow Lyonnais, Hippolyte Flandrin, a Prix de Rome scholar a few years their senior and another student of Ingres, renowned for his elegant and precise execution.</font></div><font size="4">
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Following his return to Lyon in 1836 Janmot began to attract the notice of Parisian critics with large paintings on religious themes exhibited at the Salon in 1839/40. Five years later his work was praised by Baudelaire, and the influential Théophile Gautier was impressed by his portrait of Lacordaire – whose æsthetic is evidently a precursor of the Pre-Raphælite Brotherhood. </font></div><font size="4">
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<font size="4"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0IqyP22McXk/XrqgygBjlMI/AAAAAAAAEQE/A0_Bnb2obxkDLN_CWtl5C-Th1IjG_O-KwCEwYBhgLKs0DAL1OcqxENtyk3tcsro3c62BjYju2vrLIj0X5jW9eWlMK_6JFLLAg2zg1VkG140i0Rnq0pRwJpGI2bu-qa11yvRjTkRNeyxyKPgiy5rmdaBgHe--k9qrsuSPoKkDS19ne97I_XiIWWLM6QjvHLzc8M0NUe-Giq2abcp3f5S97kSUaxEhfZKB3bomxaoIw__eySPOqtwjbAJsN37nfI-TNwhPzQz10MqUJZ5QmsreOeo5VIkyRFLPSy8t-kT4W8002_67zYc9PvJHu-V8XDI5iXfYHFcLa3RJ1GImKcUjkhQxS92LNdtUfCYVHfrDliQGUJQfosOgvBJWcX1gAHCu4XlVLufyprUaHMKoWeUiXOrqVuwf1IJb6fDOf8l5JVmcO526yFRCnjRdjsU7opMOXbhfYk3v9MmSLJurKB9PAhFnoXWPhVaOrDx1jYAxQU4-Bk9W4HbQ0_xRmywxEBczpqLmAsad6cVV9y6KsYp0Mnt2ghk5EFyUWYK2_XjOOaygxYdSVOw89trakHlrL0tQU6s-HvHYyXSfqeemswXaSwummkbhM1HvgoyboCcFFhDKiTdcgFKtXlwUtmOePqHD84J4Pr0RPkStDMy52eGEwisjq9QU/s1600/Janmot%2BHenri%2BLacordaire%2Bat%2Bsorreze.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1115" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0IqyP22McXk/XrqgygBjlMI/AAAAAAAAEQE/A0_Bnb2obxkDLN_CWtl5C-Th1IjG_O-KwCEwYBhgLKs0DAL1OcqxENtyk3tcsro3c62BjYju2vrLIj0X5jW9eWlMK_6JFLLAg2zg1VkG140i0Rnq0pRwJpGI2bu-qa11yvRjTkRNeyxyKPgiy5rmdaBgHe--k9qrsuSPoKkDS19ne97I_XiIWWLM6QjvHLzc8M0NUe-Giq2abcp3f5S97kSUaxEhfZKB3bomxaoIw__eySPOqtwjbAJsN37nfI-TNwhPzQz10MqUJZ5QmsreOeo5VIkyRFLPSy8t-kT4W8002_67zYc9PvJHu-V8XDI5iXfYHFcLa3RJ1GImKcUjkhQxS92LNdtUfCYVHfrDliQGUJQfosOgvBJWcX1gAHCu4XlVLufyprUaHMKoWeUiXOrqVuwf1IJb6fDOf8l5JVmcO526yFRCnjRdjsU7opMOXbhfYk3v9MmSLJurKB9PAhFnoXWPhVaOrDx1jYAxQU4-Bk9W4HbQ0_xRmywxEBczpqLmAsad6cVV9y6KsYp0Mnt2ghk5EFyUWYK2_XjOOaygxYdSVOw89trakHlrL0tQU6s-HvHYyXSfqeemswXaSwummkbhM1HvgoyboCcFFhDKiTdcgFKtXlwUtmOePqHD84J4Pr0RPkStDMy52eGEwisjq9QU/s200/Janmot%2BHenri%2BLacordaire%2Bat%2Bsorreze.jpg" width="158" /></a></font></div><font size="4">
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Janmot had begun <b><i>Poème de l’âme</i></b> in Rome, and between other commissions he occupied himself with the first series of 18 paintings over the next decade. After the work was exhibited in Lyon in 1854 the reaction encouraged Janmot to take it to Paris in May 1855 during the Exposition Universelle in hope that some official recognition might lead to commissions. </font></div><font size="4">
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“So, it takes or it doesn’t? Who knows? But this is not the end, either way" Janmot wrote to Ozanam. Alas when exhibited at Exposition Universelle the result was not what he hoped for; yet several critics noticed the Poème, among them Gautier who concluded a favourable article saluting Janmot’s ‘rare courage’ and linking him to the contemporary Viennese Lukasbund or ‘Nazarene’ movement. Baudelaire visited too, and while being skeptical about the verse, wrote: ‘it must be acknowledged that as pure art the composition of these scenes and their restrained colours has infinite charm, difficult to describe, but something of the sweetness and solitude of the sacristy or cloister – an unconscious, childlike mysticism.’ </font></div><font size="4">
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The following year an intervention by Eugène Delacroix, then at the height of his fame, saw <i><b>Poème de l’Âme </b></i>presented along with Janmot’s new Fleur des Champs at a temporary Palais des Beaux-Arts on Avenue Montaigne. Unfortunately, as the critic from La Revue du Lyonnais records, the 18 paintings were ‘perched at a height where no one could be expected to see them.’ Once again, Janmot’s intimate œuvre did not appear to advantage amid retrospectives of the large-scale paintings of his master lngres, Delacroix himself and Alexandre Decamps.</font></div><font size="4">
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Nevertheless Delacroix confided this perceptive judgment to his journal after their first meeting which Janmot had requested: ‘this really interesting personality may be drowned out by the vulgar chic that dominates everything here. […] There is a remarkable Dantesque fragrance to Janmot that makes me see the famous Florentine’s angels in the purgatory. I love the green dresses like meadow grass in May, and the heads, inspired or dreamt, like memories of another world. I fear we will not give this naïf the justice which is his due. His primitive style places him beyond convention, for he speaks his own language—perhaps it is does not even count as a language—since we must view his ideas through the confusion and the primitive naivety of his expressive technique. Nevertheless a very singular talent is presently among us.’</font></div><font size="4">
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In December of that year Janmot married Leonie Saint-Paulet of a noble family in Carpentras. Several fresco commissions followed including the new Lyon town hall, and he was appointed professor at the École des Beaux-Arts.</font></div><font size="4">
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In 1861 Janmot decided to move his family to Paris having been promised a religious fresco; but after three years the project had failed to materialise. Finding himself in dire straits, he was forced to take a teaching post at the Dominican School of Arcueil. The family settled in Bagneux, and here he made many beautiful portraits of them, of which only photographs exist in the public domain. He now extended <b><i>Poème de l’Âme</i></b> with a second series of eight large charcoal drawings, enhanced by white gouache, representing the torments of a soul who has cast aside hir guardian angel. This was followed by a third and final series in 1868. </font></div><font size="4">
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By now the rise of historically-informed religious painting by the Lukasbund or ‘Nazarenes’ in Vienna and the Pre-Raphælite Brotherhood in London gave added focus to the first series of Poème, but no comparable movement arose in France, and interest in Janmot’s two later series seems to have been dissipated by their austere monochrome. As he used colour elsewhere in his paintings of this period we must conclude that he intended the monochrome symbolism of the later series to be an allegory of a soul—and indeed a society—which had cast off its spiritual heredity in favour of industrial materialism.</font></div><font size="4">
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But in 1870 catastrophe struck. Léonie died after the birth of their seventh child; and Prussian troops menaced Bagneux. Janmot fled to Algiers where he occupied himself with landscape paintings. (Presumably the children were looked after by his wife’s family?) When he returned the following year his house had been wrecked and there was little work to be had. After producing a fresco for a Franciscan chapel, work dried up entirely. </font></div><font size="4">
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Managing to procure some commissions in Toulon, Janmot moved there to be reunited with children. He was also fortunate to find a patron in the person of Félix Thiollier, an industrialist who financed the publication of the complete painting and poetry of <i><b>Poème de l’Âme</b></i> but it did not arouse much interest. </font></div><font size="4">
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After living in Toulon for 15 years Janmot, now 71, returned to Lyon to marry his former student Antoinette Currat. For the next two years he occupied himself with charcoal drawings on the theme of the After Life, which were in effect a kind of continuation of the Poème. In 1887 a 500-page anthology of his writings <b><i>Opinion d’un artiste sur l’art</i></b> was published in Lyon and Paris. He died in 1892 at the age of 78.</font></div><font size="4">
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In recent decades by the art historian Élisabeth Hardouin-Fugier has written extensively about Janmot, and presents him as a transitional figure between Romanticism and Symbolism, whose work, like Flandrin’s is characterised by an immaculate finish they both learnt from Ingres. While Janmot’s intense mysticism links him stylistically to the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites, he was, as Delacroix noted, sui generis and without interaction with either movement. The influence of his ideas is evident in later Symbolists like Odilon Redon and Puvis de Chavannes, tho their work exhibits a more universalist spirituality than Janmot’s ardent Catholicism.</font></div><div style="text-align: left;"><font size="4"><br /></font></div><font size="4">
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After the fairly limited uptake of Thiollier’s publication the paintings entered obscurity, preserved in the painter's family. Selected in 1921 for an exhibition devoted to the pupils of lngres, the artist-critic Maurice Denis described Janmot’s paintings ‘marvels of invention and poetry.’ Later in that decade, Henri Focillon, a director of the Lyon Musée de Beaux Arts, wrote in La Peinture au XIXme Siècle that Janmot's <i><b>Poème</b></i> was ‘the most remarkable, coherent, and strangest work that spiritual romanticism gave birth to in Europe.’ Adding ‘In [it] there is a depth of poetry and an expressively enigmatic power which far exceeds Blake and the English Pre-Raphaelites.’</font></div><div style="text-align: left;"><font size="4"><br /></font></div><font size="4">
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But not until 1950 was the full cycle once again exhibited at the Lyon Beaux-Arts by its director René Jullian, who cited Janmot’s virtues as ‘the feeling of fantasy and the feeling of grace still capable of attracting lovers of symbolism and the catchers of dreams.’ When a total re-hang of the Beaux Arts collection took place in 1968, Philippe Durey decided to devote a complete room in the museum to this remarkable cycle, which it has occupied ever since. </font></div><font size="4">
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In the year he completed the third series of <i><b>Poème de l’Âme</b></i> Janmot wrote “I sometimes find myself, like everyone else, smiling at my obstinacy in completing a work begun 40 years ago: I will be long dead before people discover it. So my work really is quite similar to that of the Chinese who spending part of their lives decorating their own graves.” It was as if throughout his existence Janmot had been preoccupied with erecting for posterity son propre Tombeau.</font></div>
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-71812138396528784062020-03-26T18:43:00.001+00:002020-03-26T18:43:10.635+00:00Lost Lovesong <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3KoNSjyO0Zo" width="480"></iframe><br />
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How to explain or justify what your unconscious comes up with? As I lay in a lucid state allowing these words to form in my mind I didn’t feel responsible for crafting them into this form. I felt they just emerged of their own volition.Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-53587580703361115772020-02-14T21:26:00.000+00:002020-03-03T10:14:58.343+00:00Poetry - Rhyme & Reason<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A question of form.<br />
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Since last midsummer I have been reading a Mary Oliver poem a day as part of our daily meditation. They are beautiful, mystical, and a poetic window into the profound truth which truly connecting with nature opens for us. The subject of each is resonant, and the words are elegantly and precisely chiseled — but the question I have with certain pieces is are they actually poetry?<br />
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Some are slabs of prose without pretence; and others sentences broken up into lines somewhat arbitrarily. What is the appropriate term for these? Proems? Poetic Writing? The word Prosody would suit, but already has a different meaning.<br />
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From the dawn of time—when verse /lyrics /poetry meant the same thing metre—rhythm and rhyme were coterminous :: because that is what assisted oral memory to capture and retain narrative. Poetry is stronger when it arbours of meaning are welded together ny rhyme, which adds an element of form /abstraction that cements the words into one's brain.<br />
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Who can forget this couplet of Updike:<br />
Cherish your work, take pleasure in your task,<br />
For doing's the one reward a man dare ask.<br />
I read it 30 years ago, and yet it remains fresh because the elegance of craft and symmetry in the form chiseled the words into my mind.<br />
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Or Pope‘s acid sketch of Marlborough:<br />
… Or see him old and sunk in years,<br />
Lost in unmeaning, unrepenting tears.<br />
A verdict on 'achievement' that has constantly recurred to me since I first read it 55 years ago because of Pope's jeweled phraseology.<br />
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But what do I actually remember of any of Mary Oliver’s poetry I’ve spent the better part of a year reading? A beautiful fragrance of thought and the lonely clarity of a wounded healer seeking truth through alignment with nature – but actual turns of phrase? Nothing. This sentence from her poem At Blackwater Pond is typical.<br />
<br />
Every year<br />
everything<br />
I have ever learnt<br />
<br />
in my life time<br />
leads back to this: the fires<br />
and the black rivers of loss<br />
whose other side<br />
<br />
is salvation,<br />
whose meaning<br />
none of us will ever know.<br />
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It’s beautiful, resonant and poetic. But is it actually poetry? I had an english teacher who expressed the cynical view that poetry was just prose broken up into lines with the words in the wrong order. And certainly the first part of that observation applies to Mary Oliver, albeit the words are in the right order! I realise of course that MO pared away every unnecessary or careless word to arrive at a perfect distillation of the experience she wished to convey. That is the epitome of her craft and her quiet gift to the world. No doubt she felt that any kind of literary artifice would undermine the authenticity of her direct simplicity. Yet I do regret that she didn’t occasionally engage with form—like her heroine Edna St Vincent Millay, tho it was a different age—as I think that extra energy would’ve come from the wrestling.<br />
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Later I came upon this piece of Rumi and suddenly understood what Mary Oliver was about.<br />
<br />
What in your life is calling you,<br />
When all the noise is silenced,<br />
The meetings adjourned...<br />
The lists laid aside ––<br />
And the Wild Iris blooms<br />
By itself<br />
In the dark forest... ?<br />
What is drawing your soul?<br />
<br />
I now see that Mary Oliver uses her ‘word camera’ to record /evoke the numinous reality behind the natural world. I also saw a picture of her with Coleman Barks, two old bent figures walking down a street in a fond embrace. This Rumi ‘poem’ does exactly what MO does, walk you through a thought-picture and then twist it so you catch a glimpse of your soul at the end.<br />
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So whether it is (/not) called poatry doesn’t matter. Nor can Oliver’s exquisite simplicity be blamed for imitators (and english teachers) who copy her surfaces but never plumb her depths. Yet the irony remains that while wrestling with form is probably seen by such folk as inhibiting and traducing the spontaneity of their inspiration – the irony is that it might well be the mordant that preserves it.<br />
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In their disregard of craft it’s as if many contemporary poets are saying there is no Ars Longa, no tradition, there is only Vita Brevis. This is not an accusation that can be laid at MO's door, who is exemplarily conscious of deep time and of perennial meanings.<br />
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<br />
Is this just old man's talk? A pedantic nostalgia for the aesthetics of a forgotten age? If it is, then it’s because tradition /continuity matter to what Ezra Pound called The Great Bass – by which I think he meant the Low Frequency Oscillation of culture. The persistence of rhyme remained an echo of literature’s primordial past when strophic form was the sharpest arrow in the storyteller’s quiver of oral enchantment, and conferred majesty and magic on poem and bard alike.<br />
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Is anyone awed by poetry these days? Performance poets certainly enchant their audience—and it's no accident they use rhyme and metre in the most traditional way—but do they awe them? Nowadays we’re distrustful of both majesty and magic—while we crave them—and it's deeply regretable that so much modern poetry has casually discarded one of the fundamental elements of its own numinous power.<br />
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-55121617877048241482020-02-08T04:04:00.000+00:002020-02-08T04:04:08.027+00:00My Darling Grandchildren <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b>My darling grandchildren: Phœbe, Vincent, Daisy, Lyra</b></div>
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What can I say in this wide-awake night to describe my joy and sense of fulfilment at this picture of them together? If this blog is the record of my searching and some of what I found then this is real-isation of dreams I never dreamt. And the super-blessing is that their parents get on so well & share so much of their lives with us. </div>
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So many families are disfunctional, you read about it all the time, what you don’t read so much about is families that just get on with the everyday business of loving each other and making life work. Oh the joy of normal goodness. </div>
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-54439123785294049482020-02-08T03:26:00.000+00:002020-02-08T03:29:47.204+00:00Ram Dass on loving life<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Ram Dass: “All religion is the attempt of the conceptual mind to describe the mystery.” One might add: and what they have in common is ascribing the highest value to loving the mystery of life itself. </div>
Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-38934302967873066692020-01-20T11:16:00.002+00:002020-01-20T11:16:34.829+00:00Thoughts on Love by Rumi<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Love’s dance is both light and shadow. </div>
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Yet it has no cause, no beginning and no ending: </div>
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it is the only one of God's secrets we can never analyse. </div>
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Lover and lovingness are inseparable terms - existing beyond time.</div>
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I may try to describe it but as soon as I feel it I am lost for words.</div>
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If I write about love I lose my way at the lovely place where lover /loving /loved are one. </div>
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My pen gives out and the paper disappears - </div>
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there, where the shadows disappear </div>
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and the very moment is suddenly made glorious by the light of Love.</div>
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Reimagined in english by MMS</div>
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-12935175635464496792019-12-20T15:41:00.002+00:002020-01-20T11:21:39.646+00:00Martinique Landscape - Gauguin<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Battling with questions of honesty I encountered Gauguin</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">for the first time today in the Gallery. Viewed later</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">there's inevitability about a masterpiece:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">but before the act of creation the canvas is blank,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">an immense void with no fixt points or preset scale.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In this desert there is no success or failure,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Only an oasis of experience: but merely</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Unshuttering perception alarms the bourgeoisie </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Whose rules are concrete – one's battle, to uncap <br />A spring</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> of living energy to flood the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Great and Good trade in certainty – for those outside </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The headlong rush meanings are more opaque, shadowed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Cunning old Gauguin knew that the richness of his uncertainty</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Was worth all the money he never got :: for me too the struggle</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Between what I know, and what the world can bear to hear. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Inside each, i</span><span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">nvisible within the thickets of forest</span><br />
<span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">Truth wanders, unseen save by a unicorn-whisperer,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Until the magic kairos when <i>it</i> and <i>I </i>and <i>you</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Align as sudden lightning cracks the darkness open</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And in that sacred second, shadowless, we know.</span><br />
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National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh 24viii79 ®3xii2019<br />
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<a href="http://msteer.co.uk/creative/poetry/martiniq.html" target="_blank">Original version of poem</a></div>
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I have re-expressed the sense of the original by rewriting the thoughts with the benefit of 40 years more poetic experience. My choice was led by a marvelous film about Gauguin just aired on BBC4.<br />
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The film took me back to my first encounter with his blazing canvases at a time when I was a young parent still trying to define myself to myself in order to make headway in the world. My semi-answer worked well enough to finagle a career in broadcasting for 15 years – but ultimately, the more successful I became the more acutely I felt the dichotomy between permitted public discourse and my own private meanings. <br />
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What struck me as forcefully as the image itself (and still does) was Gauguin’s courage in choosing to depict a completely subjective personal vision and executing in a way that must have been completely baffling to his contemporaries. Which of course he went on doing - famously in his final exhibition of work from Otaheite where practically nothing sold.<br />
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Gauguin’s M.V. confirms my conviction that where a work has passion and coherence it embodies the vertu or quintessence of its creator in a projected independent form. And that where these are as-it-were imbued with heart energy (need to tell) naked subjectivity yet in-formed by crafted in-tuition they contain within them the visionary reality which others then come to inhabit - in the sense that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the future’. (Shelley?) We are all now heirs of Gauguin, even tho they meant nothing to his contemporaries.<br />
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I certainly hope/believe that is true of certain unperformed works of my own - tho it took another 25 years to raise my craft skills and lower my intellectual inhibitions sufficiently for them to emerge. <br />
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And so, seeing Gauguin in depth again, I ask myself now as I did 40 y/a: what is this inner knowing? What is the relationship of the dream world to external reality? How does manifestation cone about? In the interim I have had the writings of Mary Louise von Franz to shed light on the energy of the subconscious & how /why to trust it.<br />
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Who knows what outlives us? I have always been driven by a sense of the world beyond this one, and the belief that if we could unify these two fields of awareness we humans could live in harmony with other planetary inhabitants. I believe Gauguin (certainly, and all great creators probably) shared a similar perspective, and that all art worthy the name shares this same characteristic of being an attempt to express the inexpressible. To me, the alternative to this viewpoint is the death and degradation of our physical world. And thus I have to believe, as the evidence of history shows, that all efforts to bring light into the world are worthwhile. Even tho all are (probably) doomed to failure.<br />
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-54247527278936899062019-10-14T10:58:00.000+00:002019-10-14T11:13:44.776+00:00Thoughts about Mary Oliver<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
My Quaker friend Peter Rutter died at a great age on January 15th 2019. By coincidence it was also on this day that Mary Oliver died. I had never heard of her but received this pœm from an admirer, which perfectly summarised Peter’s life and death. I read it at his memorial Meeting.<br />
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<b>When Death Comes</b><br />
When death comes<br />
like the hungry bear in autumn;<br />
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse<br />
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;<br />
when death comes<br />
like the measle-pox<br />
when death comes<br />
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,<br />
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:<br />
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?<br />
And therefore I look upon everything<br />
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,<br />
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,<br />
and I consider eternity as another possibility,<br />
and I think of each life as a flower, as common<br />
as a field daisy, and as singular,<br />
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,<br />
tending, as all music does, toward silence,<br />
and each body a lion of courage, and something<br />
precious to the earth.<br />
When it’s over, I want to say all my life<br />
I was a bride married to amazement.<br />
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.<br />
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder<br />
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.<br />
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,<br />
or full of argument.<br />
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.<br />
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Subsequently I bought Mary Oliver’s Collected Works and have been reading a pœm a day; but not until I encountered the pœm Praying in mid September did I see one that produced an immediate musical response, to the degree that I had sketched out almost all the melodic narrative spontaneously. Then I tackled Thirst with the same visceral response. A couple of days came the lament Lead – so relevant to the eco-cide which the human species is visiting on our planet. The fourth pœm I set last as I knew it would be the most challenging to achieve the right idiom for a quasi-operatic scena the words demanded. The final Pœm (the spirit) Clancy found in a book about Hildegarde of Bingen by Matthew Fox, who regards both pœts as speaking with one orphic voice. This set made me wondering about creating a light-hearted vocal acappella scherzo à la Manhattan Transfer or King’s Singers, but with words of profound spiritual content.<br />
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Stylistically, the closer the performance comes to a barbershop acappella sound the happier I shall be. The words need to be articulated as clearly as possible. However there are some passages, especially in the latter two songs where particular care will be needed to communicate the narrative.<br />
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The process of computerising the score is a long slow business, and I often use one of my screen to keep half an eye/ear on other things. Two personal memories stand out. I was working on the tragic poem Lead while watching the parliamentary debate following the Prorogation judgment, and if anything summed up humanity’s blindness to the needs of the environment, natural justice or the bigger picture it was the aggressive factionalism of Johnson’s Conservative Party. The other is that while I was finalising The Fires I watched a beautiful documentary about Leonard Cohen’s muse Marianna and their life (not/) together, the pre-lapsarian existence on the Greek Island of Hydra in the ’60s, and the tragic consequences for its cast of characters as their dreams evaporated and one by one they were overtaken by the destiny they had been escaping.<br />
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To me, Mary Oliver’s poems are not merely about such hope, they are about a more profound perennial wisdom and forgiveness found in nature, with which we can align ourselves if we set aside the limitations of the human intellect and embrace the non-dual (without drugs). It must seem a paradox, when the music I have written depends supremely for its realisation on a high level of intellectualised skill – and yet the composition is distilled from the subconscious, the inchoate, and can only be effective if performed in that spirit … the consciousness that returns us to the unconscious – that cycle of perpetual motion where the unknowing gives us the knowing that gives us the unknowing.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt;">When I compose is when I feel the greatest intensity of relationship with my Inner Otherness, therefore I have to trust that what I’m doing has some ultimate meaning - even when in the ‘real world’ it has neither </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 16px;">meaning nor </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt;">value. I have to believe that the latency of the beauty I am creating has the power to bring into existence a world in which it </span><i style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt;">would</i><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt;"> make sense. </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt;">This may of course be a complete delusion but it makes a better basis for living my life than thinking I’m a Nowhere Man making songs for nobody. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt;">When I look at my life trajectory and see how everything I blindly struggled for has manifested beyond my wildest dreams, I don’t see why that principle would not also apply to my composition. Therefore if I were to take the view that if noone will pay me I won’t do it, as I used to, I deprive myself of my greatest private bliss and make a mockery of the trust mechanism that has generated everything of value that now surrounds me. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt;">In all of this the one profound grief I have is that I have not been able to learn heuristically by actually hearing what I have composed in the divine sunlight of acoustic sound, for then I think I would’ve been able to escape my own mind. But I cannot change what I cannot change. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt;">I keep thinking that if I have resolved pretty much all my other issues why can’t I call on the Powers That Be to resolve this one too? But that seems to be the big fat God button I can’t find. I know it’s there somewhere, and I figure that if I keep pressing the buttons in sequence and combo then statistically I’m likely to hit it sooner or later. Or sit on it by accident!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt;">And meanwhile walking in the dark is its own ‘proof of concept’ - ie, faith - and nothing is more agreeable than to have a hypothesis proved correct after a difficult process. And if isn’t? Well then it’s still a pleasanter way to wind toward death than the conviction you’ve wasted your time. I regard myself as a Merlin in his Esplumoir fashioning the Excalibur/s some future Arthur will draw from the rock. My job is only to make the thought-form as perfect as I can (& that’s why concessions to amateurs won’t help). It’s the big one or it’s nothing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt;">For me this is a win-win. If I’m busy I’m not spending money (albeit not making it, but I have precious little control over that either! And it seems to work out) :: it doesn’t cost anything, harm anyone or put me within reach of the law. There is only the heartache of each new piece coming off the production line to a deafening silence. But after a lifetime of people not seeing the point of me I’ve come to understand that being understood is not the raison d’être — it’s more pleasant to be sure, but the big game<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>sub specie æternitatis</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>is to listen to the voice and be accurate transcribing it. Did I ever tell you that for my choir school auditions the piece I was given to learn was “I know that my redeemer (/justifer) liveth” ... and at the latter end he shall stand upon the earth? Is more prophetic resonance than this ever offered on the bumpy road to love?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12pt;">So, madness or faith? Shall we ever know?</span></div>
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-80179930177787721012019-07-31T13:37:00.000+00:002019-07-31T13:37:41.204+00:00Thoughts on recording Bach<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I now know why old people get cranky – it’s too much effort to appear<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>normal</i>! As you go under the hill your view of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>normal</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>changes and you have to consciously reconnect to the ever-evolving<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>normality<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i>of younger people encountering the world afresh. </div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Ive been thinking this because Ive been gazing intensively at myself while editing the third movement of my<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://youtu.be/NGGL4--1HBM">Bach Organ Trio Sonata V</a>. It's far&away the hardest piece I’ve tackled in my organ renaissance; and one of the problems I have found in recording it is that my stamina is inexorably withering. I can now only do about 90’ of worthwhile recording at a stretch, the mental effort demanded by acute concentration on the movement of limbs as well as maintaining full consciousness of the ‘recording architecture’ (where there are errors that need to be patched, consistency of tempo, uniformity of phrasing) wears me out sooner than it used to – that means that it’s a fight to get it all right while the window is open.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There is a glib solution: do it right in the first place—as Dan & Kieran did so brilliantly the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://youtu.be/fsqJbNb0uv0">Dodgson Duo ®</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>last week—but the reality is that in the heightened nervous attention recording demands you actually make mistakes you’ve never made before, and so you have to have a system that handles your own idiocy (like forgetting to turn the camera on, or accidentally deleting files) in order to get across the finishing line by yourself. And trying to look<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>normal</i> on top of all that can be the straw that sends the camel stark staring bonkers!</div>
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If you want a definition of the word<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>supererogation</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>it is this: to practise a Bach Trio Sonata for four years alone in a church for two hours a week and then to record it without another living soul ever hearing it. If that is not ‘beyond what is called for’ (since nobody called for it) what is?</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>So why? For me wrestling the notes of this beautiful but intractably hard piece into my feet and fingers was probably the same reason others climb mountains or do endurance running. In facing your limits and not allowing yourself to be beaten by your incapacities and human frailty you do touch the void that is within /around /beyond us, yet also intimately part of us. </div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>For some this place beyond language and controlled emotion arouses fear. And in that place lies<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>awe</i> – awe at the coherence of the macrocosmos and microcosmos, awe at the existence of existence, awe at the nature of life and the phenomenon of love; and more than anything awe at how all these elements are held in balance. So doing these ‘weird’ things is just my way of honouring and being present with this ‘presence’. </div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Maybe it’s just the mettle from which composers are struck; but I’ve always had a strong sense of this inner Otherness. From its mysterious darkness arises the impulse to make music which is akin to the impulse of a spring to flow or grass to grow. For most of my adult life I’ve endeavoured to configure the shape of my ideas to other people’s expectations; but my return to organ playing after the age of 60 was of no interest to anyone. It was within the ’s-/place’ of solitary organ practice that I was alone with the great glistening peaks of the organ repertoire – as alone with them as a mountaineer grappling with the external elements – yet here it was me against myself. A true definition of idiocy </div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Normal people do such things with others and so their world requires no analysis and thought – and if I knew anyone who wanted to the same things Id do it with them, but I dont, so I do it alone.</div>
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Eventually the challenge of a Trio Sonata hove into my sight line. They’re marvellous music, but stinkingly hard because Bach treats the pedals as a third equal manual and, with only one line of music in each part, there is simply nowhere to hide - every aspect of the performance is exposed to scrutiny at all times. </div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The inherent difficulty of playing with your feet is mitigated when the pedal part is in contrast to the manuals, because this gives your brain a way of differentiating the action of your lower limbs from your fingers, but when they’re treated as equals, as Bach does in the Trio Sonatas, the nature of the mental complexity parallels and magnifies the physical demands. Anyway, that has been the grist of my organ grinding for the past four years, not exclusively, for I have learnt and recorded a range of other music as my uTube site shows. </div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It has been said that Bach is the best argument for the existence of a God; I would prefer to say that the extraordinary /graceful /resourceful order within Bach’s music puts us in touch with a profound wholeness in which it is possible to believe that there is an <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">implicate</span> ordering within the universe that is too consistent to be accidental. </div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I have always believed Bach was a savant, which is why he was capable of multidimensional calculation far exceeding the capacity of normal minds. Yet even this doesn’t explain why or how he did what he did; and an explanation for that, it seems to me, must lie in the relationship of his conscious mind to his inner ‘otherness’—his continuous, practiced openness to the wellsprings of Life. Choose your own vocabulary for this. For Bach didn’t just write music ‘the way a sow pisses’ (to quote Mozart) he did it always with conscious intention to express a quality of order that was real to him. He could have got away with the sort slapdash approach to craftsmanship that his great contemporary Handel exhibits, but Bach never does that. Every manuscript is exquisitely finished and all the musical arguments elegantly dovetailed into a perfectly proportioned space. And I believe he did that because he knew he was profoundly ‘heard’; he knew or felt that he was performing the opus dei - paying tribute to source of existence. Tho Bach could never have known of the Indian mystic Kabir’s phrase <b style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me - for the ear of the universe is itself the hearer </span></b>Yet, to me, this offers the most credible explanation for the dedication and devotion that Bach showed in everything that he wrote, and forms one of the greatest free gifts any individual gave to humanity. </div>
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So that’s what I spent 4 years doing while noone was watching!</div>
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-83369221909872484352019-04-12T14:48:00.002+00:002019-04-12T14:48:50.379+00:00Incantabulation<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
My live premiere of <a href="https://youtu.be/HnlpAIOT81s" target="_blank">Incantabulation is now on uTube</a>. It’s not perfect but it gets the general idea across. I may re-record it over Easter.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-20581139639155850312019-03-06T09:42:00.002+00:002019-03-06T18:22:58.347+00:00Poem: The Secondhand Book<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">I am a book, remaindered on a shelf.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK1;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK3;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK5;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK18;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK21;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 150%;">I can’t believe it’s over and I must<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<!--EndFragment--><br />
Reflections on poetry hunting to compile a program of Savile poets. March 2019.</div>
Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-1742962026273403762019-02-05T10:58:00.000+00:002019-02-25T11:48:04.671+00:00Poem: Clouds<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: times; font-size: 11pt; text-align: justify;">I wish I could
cherish </span><br />
<span style="font-family: times; font-size: 11pt; text-align: justify;">The uncertainty. I wish </span><br />
<span style="font-family: times; font-size: 11pt; text-align: justify;">I could float above </span><br />
<span style="font-family: times; font-size: 11pt; text-align: justify;">The void like a cloud,</span><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK23;"></span><br />
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK23;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK11;"></span></span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: times; font-size: 11pt;">Happily ignorant </span></div>
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK23;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK11;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK12;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Of the precipices</span></div>
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK13;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">And chasms, and of </span></div>
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK16;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">The beautiful river plains </span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Times; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">As well – just drifting, </span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Times; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Fulfilling the role </span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Times; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Assigned to me </span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: Times; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">By circumstance.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 14.6667px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Looking ahead </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">I would know that whatever </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">I did was going to </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Turn out OK; not </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Because I knew </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">What was coming,</span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">But because I didn’t. </span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 14.6667px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Looking behind </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">I could see no trace</span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Of where I’d been,</span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Or what I’d done.</span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">But that wouldn’t matter </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Because I rained </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Or shaded </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Or evaporated</span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">On cue. </span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 14.6667px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">I had a shape on earth</span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">But left no mark. </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">I belonged but </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Never over-stayed. </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">I made life possible </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">For others without </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Colouring their minds. </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">I removed myself </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">For their celebrations;</span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Yet enfolded their doubts</span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">With gloomy darkness. </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">I had no need of companions</span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">But never traveled alone. </span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 14.6667px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">I was but was not. </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">I became without form. </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">I made no move but</span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">encircled the earth. </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">I was always </span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">The obedient servant</span></div>
</span><span style="font-family: "times";"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times"; font-size: 11pt;">Of the sun</span><span style="font-family: "calibri"; font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: "times";">.</span></span></div>
</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK11;"></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK11;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK11;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK12;"></span></span>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK11;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK12;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;">5/2/19</span></span></span></div>
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK11;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK12;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK13;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK16;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; font-size: 13.5pt;">
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-75519369322862492822019-02-05T10:02:00.000+00:002019-02-14T12:00:12.087+00:00Poem: The Big Bang<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A long time ago a meteor struck the earth:<br />
Life is its echo.<br />
A long time ago the paradox of life struck me:<br />
I am the echo.<br />
<br />
Researchers are just beginning to find out about the one –<br />
I am just beginning to find out about the other.<br />
<br />
Both were given shape by forces beyond their conception;<br />
Forces noone can unwind.<br />
<br />
No dream can be undreamt:<br />
It can only be lived..<br />
<br />
What all these things have in common is that we only discover<br />
Long after the event<br />
What they really meant.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
<i>Written in the night 0530. 5/2/19</i><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-6042036169082780962019-01-31T15:15:00.000+00:002019-02-05T10:05:01.833+00:00Poem: The Trouble with Politics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Without cost. We resent taxes <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Yet expect schools and hospitals <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">To spring up where we need them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">We moan at the state of the world,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Dismiss politicians as useless;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">And expect things to get better <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Without anyone rolling up their shirt sleeves <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Or putting their shoulders to the wheel. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">We look to politicians to give us a lead, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Yet we crush the poetry out their souls<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">And still expect them to sing in our key. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">When something frivolous crosses our minds <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">We expect them to implement it without delay –<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">The big things we ignore, they’re too hard. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Migration? We’re against it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Where should the desperate go?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">– Answer came there none. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Is child poverty bad? Yes obviously ...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Unless tackling it involves higher taxes. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Is ‘small government’ good? Of course ...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Unless you want new motorways.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">The arts? Can’t afford them. Yet casually <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">We wave through billions on nuclear arms –<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">which would destroy us if we used them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Europe? Don’t even go there. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">There is no solution to anything <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Unless it involves We The People - <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Not We The Businesses, not We<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">The Tax-avoiding Trans-national,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Not We The Wealthy-who-don’t-use-public-services.
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">We The People demand that YOU <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">engage with US. Don’t expect us<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">To do anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It’s not our job. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">It doesn’t make a great poetry does it –<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;">Life so raw and lumpy?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Where nowadays are noble thoughts, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>words that rhyme with climate change?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Or sentences that rearrange <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A world disordered, out of sorts?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"></span> They’ve all been used and done no good.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The simple truths we understood <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Now owned by cynics, whose one aim<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Is to make us all the same:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Mindless consumers, unaware <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That what we’ve lost is how to share<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The traits which confer on us humanity:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Compassion, joy and equanimity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-63921726999666042782019-01-31T15:11:00.000+00:002019-01-31T15:15:35.772+00:00The abdication of responsibility<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">The problem is that we cannot abdicate the political sphere to the cynics who say that decency and fairness are no longer possible, for that is what the power-hungry monsters want. (Look at Hungary or Israel.) They seek to corrupt normal society in order to declare that traditional rules no longer apply and grab power while the bourgeois are disorientated. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">That’s the Trump/Bannon playbook, and like the Nazis they tap into a deep memory within the indigenous population of ‘good times’ before whatever current instability has threatened their social values - using im/explicit racism to “explain” hugely complex geo-financial issues (which no one can easily summarise) to create a narrative that ordinary people can lock onto in their uncertainties and parrot as fact. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">I haven’t been to Paris for 15 years maybe, but I was shocked then by the way that parts of it no longer appear to a European city. And I’m sure it’s far worse in Italy. When I visited a friend in Arezzo 6 y/a there were black prostitutes in caravans in lay-bys all along the mountain roads. The scale of the problems is beyond anyone’s capacity to resolve. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">We curse our politicians for failing to deal with what we the people cause by our conflicted priorities: EG demanding low taxes but also good civic services and effective social care. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">The </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">EU and its member governments tried to create a fair framework for handling migrants, but it was wishful thinking; because the northern states simply refused to share the burden. And this all the pretext the demagogues for destroying the remaining social fabric of the European ideal. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Suzi gave me a book on migration which shows that longterm solutions are impossible, because political instability around the Mediterranean and the range of satellite TV publicising western consumerism mean that Europe is an irresistible magnet, just as the USA is to SAmerica. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">If you look at the history of population movements from the Celtic era, there seem to have been these great migratory moves at many points in history. In Lyon for instance two distinct tribal settlements beside the Rhone stood alongside the Roman town on the hill, in a sort of functional apartheid; and of course the origin of the Jewish nation lies in migration mythology. But before today it didn’t matter because there was enough room for everyone. Now there isn't. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">I see this as the twilight of liberal democracy, and among the reasons is that we the people are largely ignorant of Christian principles. We have become a deracinated people, whose psyche no longer has roots in the transpersonal, with the result that we are blown by the winds of pleasure, and morally defenceless in the teeth of corporate forces. We were told that all the old ideas were irrelevant to the modern world, but nobody has come up with a better vision to replace them. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">It’s true that a new spirituality is growing, but much of it is consumerist in character, and being heterogeneous and individualistic it is incapable of putting down deep collective ethical roots. And thus its capacity to be a moral fulcrum is lacking. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">The Right seeks to exploit this moral vacuum by an appeal to the slogans of imperialistic Christian past, but ignores altogether the ethical heart of what it claims to promote. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">Yet we remain herd animals, and part of our psycho-somatic makeup is that we need to belong. How do we create those ethical magnets of elective affinity in the modern world that tap into and draw from the deep wellsprings of perennial wisdom that manifest in the best of all religious cultures, namely to honour the numinous within ourselves and to bring out the best in others? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12pt;">For all my difficult relations with the Religious Society of Friends I still think it’s a great space for exploring the dilemmas of existence in a respectful silence, and that Quakers have historically got a great deal right about social organisation. </span></div>
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-85755207908324523062019-01-13T20:51:00.002+00:002019-01-31T15:12:01.028+00:00What happens after the end?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I recently read a review, which I can’t give an exact reference for, in which the writer quoted an AngloSaxon archbishop writing in 1054 saying that the world is over, nothing more is to be expected before the return of Christ. (And we know what happened 12 years later!) I feel this an appropriate response to those today who feel the West is broken beyond repair. It probably is, but the reality is that something else will follow it – whether we like that something or not. So the choice is between embracing the uncertainty of changing times or allowing them to crush us. </div>
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Perhaps our era is not so dissimilar to the era of Charles 1, which saw a late renaissance full of delicate spirituality (George Herbert and the metaphysical poets, Orlando Gibbons etc): yet it was also full of anger at the corruptions of privilege and the indifference of the monarchy to rising tide of proletarian literacy which was to explode as the puritan revolution. The same sensibility existed all over Europe among the intelligentsia (Rilke, Mallarmé, Yeats) before WW1, only to disappear entirely ithereafter. </div>
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I don’t know what’s coming next, but if we want what we value to be part of it we have to throw ourselves into the ‘ungodly’—as it seems—tide. Standing Canute-like on the bank is to be sidelined by the new—perhaps deplorable—history being made and from which gestation a new stasis will sooner or later emerge. </div>
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We don’t know what happens if we try something, but we do know what happens if we don’t. There’s nothing the matter with K’s arguments, but sadly there are no prizes for being right in abstract – or I might’ve won one! The big prize is for weaving a strand of rightness (clear-sightedness) into all the wrongness (which isn’t wrongness so much as stupidity parading its blindness). </div>
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If you can do this job right, like a commando action in enemy territory, and find the sweet spot where the strand will fit and so be absorbed into the main weave – then your only real reward is to return to know that you have been a small organic link in the great chain of those who have carried the silver torch of what I call Yahwism, the inner unmediated wordless encounter with I AM. Like any secret mission, there are only a few people you can tell – to most it wouldn't make sense. But to me that is where dharma and karma meet. </div>
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So: the game is lost: <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">the game is all to play for. </span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In every moment both statements are true.</span> </div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Love / truth / joy are words with no meaning unless WE make them true in our own lives. We cannot allow ourselves to be buried by the statistical evidence that change is impossible – or entropy wins :: the forces of hopelessness.</span> </div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">And perhaps ultimately that is the flaw in K's book,—he limits the capacity of g/God or 'divine otherness' to work within the sprawling mess we have made of (and I would argue were designed to make of) creation because his mind is limited to the imaginable. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But the Powers That Be /Tao aren't – the unimaginable is stock in trade to him/her/it/them. So renewal / rebirth / regrowth is always possible, even if we totally duff up the planet and extinguish our own and other life-forms.</span> </div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">But on a slightly less apocalyptic note, all that is certain is that when the new thought-forms do emerge they are unlikely to resemble the old. </span></div>
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-66372057627707276262018-12-06T09:36:00.000+00:002018-12-28T13:23:57.407+00:00Setting Sally Purcell's Songs<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Setting poetry to music involves a psychic intimacy which leaves the composer with a sense of a poet’s fragrance similar to the physical memory of a lover. To call the experience erotic is too easy, for it leaps right over that territory to end within a domain of the soul where memories of relationships are stored as a dynamic accretion to one’s own self.<br />
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A few years ago I made this journey into Sally Purcell’s poetry, and it was one of the most rewarding of my creative life. There is often a tension as to whether text or music is the senior partner—a clue lying in whether the term poetry or lyric is used—but in my experience of setting Sally’s poetry there was no tension of a hierarchy; just a reciprocal flow of language and music entwining to enhance the emotional meaning.<br />
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I feel I can use her Christian name even tho I didn’t ‘meet’ Sally until 14 years after her untimely death. An Oxford contemporary gave me her collected works in 2012, and I was immediately transported to another world. It was like entering a stranger’s house and knowing you were going to fall in love. There was an immediate openness between souls. ‘My friend speaks my mind’ is the phrase used in Quaker circles.<br />
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Entranced by her delicate precision of language and the refined awareness it displayed, each night before falling asleep, for a couple of weeks I enjoyed reading a couple of her poems. Immersing myself in the dense and richly mysterious images was like nodding off in a perfumed room.<br />
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There seemed to be two main themes in her poetry: erotic love and the spiritual dimension/s of life. Or if you prefer, a single theme: the relationship/s formed by personal and trans-personal love. And what makes her writing so luminous is that, unusually for an educated modern, she saw no a distinction between the two.<br />
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Being first attracted to set her <i>Sestina</i> for soprano, tenor and piano that June, I followed it immediately with a themed selection of 11 short poems I titled <i>The Arc of Love</i>. But I could see further diamonds buried within the pages hinting in perfect metaphor at aspects of the perennial mysteries of faith; and in August one of these, <i>Temenos</i>, caught my meditative eye as an ideal text for a poor man’s <i>Spem In Alium.</i><br />
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The poem evokes the magic of sacred space created between humans, and I first thought to emulate the majesty of Tallis’s 40 voices; but as I began I encountered some of the logistical problems that Tallis himself must have faced notating 40 staves of music four centuries ago, the first being to find manuscript paper large enough, compounded by a contemporary consideration now that all scores are computerised, that I would’ve required a 60” screen to be able to read and work on the whole score vertically at any reasonable resolution. As I have only a pair of 27” screens to work on I compromised by using 20 voices as five spatially separated quartets who share and echo canonic exchanges. To be honest noone can actually hear a difference between 20 and 40 parts since there are only seven notes in the scale.<br />
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Sally was truly a poet of <i><b>kairos</b></i>. She captured jeweled snapshots of rainbow moments where all the mercurial elements that float in the ether of our lives align. Hers was a quantum craft wherein she crystallised the randomness of life into moments of moral coherence, like a great photographer who uses even ambiguities of focus for expressive effect.<br />
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Where I feel kinship is that Sally didn’t write for approval or applause, she wrote because she had seen truth. She understood that truth is both eternal and transient, and that <b><i>kairos</i></b> lies in the momentary intersection between them; and it was her faith in an ultimate reality, an ultra-reality that transects and interpenetrates terrestrial existence, that gave her the courage to see and to live under the perpetual whiplash of a vulnerability most of us dim by allowing as-it-were a protective moral cataract to form :: which is the world’s lie disguising the nature of the power, privilege and precariousness of existence.<br />
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The pieces I’ve referred to setting were all solitary creative experiences as performers have not yet shown interest in them; however my final excavation of Sally’s rich seam of poetry was to make sequence of poems which trace the outlines of the liturgical year, which I called<a href="https://youtu.be/3iHLymkkKus" target="_blank"> <i>The Quiet Spaces</i></a>. And I am delighted that six years on these have been brought vividly to life by Greg Skidmore’s Lacock Scholars.<br />
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My decisions about how to treat these poems: <i>Eternal Image – First Mystery –Poem for Lent or Advent –Magi – I see them walking in the Air of glory – Rilke</i>: came about this way. I’d had a composition performed in Manchester, whose timing allowed us to take a circuitous route home via a unique concert of William Byrd’s late motets given by The Cardinalls Musick in Stondon Massey, Byrd’s ‘own’ parish church in Essex.** Hearing his five-part motet <i>Beata Viscera</i> exquisitely sung in this resonant space—accompanied by the spectacular aerial display of an excited bat—was to feel the veil of time dissolve.<br />
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On my return the music for each poem came to me as fast as I could write out the previous one. My intention was that the first five motets should be performed together as they share a transpersonal dimension, and then after applause, the sixth, Rilke, be offered as a subjective encore featuring solo voices singing ...<br />
Even if we know love’s landscape<br />
and the little churchyard with its mourning names,<br />
and the frighteningly silent ravine for which others are bound,<br />
time and again we walk together under ancient trees,<br />
time and again lie down among the flowers opposite the sky.<br />
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To enjoy <i><a href="https://youtu.be/3iHLymkkKus" target="_blank">The Quiet Spaces</a></i> I recommend turning captions on to display the text.<br />
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What I adore about Sally is how she illuminated the mystical realities of faith real without surrendering an iota of the complexity of a modern viewpoint. Like Olivier Messiaen she retains a naive belief in the ultimate goodness of Life with a kind of intensity that Tallis or Byrd would have recognised. Both modern visionaries offer a way forward for contemporary consciousness which sidesteps the sterility of intellectual art, and in Sally is the more remarkable for sustaining an authentically feminine vision within a life that offered precious few material comforts, and probably an unfair amount of gender discrimination.<br />
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<i><a href="https://youtu.be/bmf8cALOSEQ" target="_blank">Temenos</a></i>, the 20 part motet, exists only with synth voices. As it makes great demands of the singers, time alone will tell whether I shall hear it with my physical ears or the ears of spirit – but I know that I will eventually because it speaks of the perennial truth that Sally expressed, which cannot be crushed or extinguished because it is Life itself. Whatever my state when it is performed I expect to clasp Sally’s spirit hand, and we shall be like two separated parents acknowledging the graduation of the child they conceived but could not raise together.<br />
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**Ironically, as a fierce recusant Byrd was regularly fined for his refusal to attend Anglican services. <span style="font-family: "constantia"; font-size: 11pt;">Notwithstanding
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-28004689001234784252018-10-03T11:13:00.001+00:002018-10-11T11:44:43.051+00:00The Quiet Spaces<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">The birth fairies give some people things they don’t understand or necessarily even want. Mine was to be given Faith. All my life has been about coming to terms with an experience of confidence in my life’s eventual outcome which many people search for with a life of nighttime tears - and yet I feel I might have been better off without. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">These thoughts are in my mind because I’ve just published the Lacock Scholars’ exceptional recording of my <a href="https://youtu.be/3iHLymkkKus" target="_blank"><b><i>Quiet Spaces</i></b> on YouTube</a> using subtitles to provide complete clarity. If the business of art is projecting one’s inner world into or onto the outside world, then this could not have been done better than by Greg Skidmore’s committed performance of my choral songcycle to words by the mystical poet Sally Purcell. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It lifts a burden from my shoulders because I feel this piece at last represents perfectly what I have striven for during so many decades of silence – to project what is not merely a musical voice but a spiritual one. Altho I have always been conscious of what my authentic voice (/meaning) was, I could not make it audible to others because I could not find people to perform what I wrote. Notwithstanding; I remained convinced that my 'children' were as deserving of a fair hearing as anyonelse's; so it was only my faith that 'my redeemer liveth, and at the latter end he shall stand upon the earth' that kept me sane and on track. (Prophetically, this aria from Messiah was my audition piece for choir school.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">People, other than family, who know me would probably not have detected this cognitive dissonance I carried. My family alas probably saw or felt it all too clearly. For there has always been a paradox within the idea of meaning (/voice). For most people, I’m guessing,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b style="font-family: -webkit-standard;"><i>Meanings</i></b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>are forms of shared communications with families, lovers, friends and the wider world. In a word they are, in the classical sense, <i style="font-family: -webkit-standard;">eros<span class="Apple-converted-space"> – </span></i>the ‘relatingness' dimension of existence. But for me Meaning was always the voice inside me,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>logos</i> the intellectual antithesis of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>eros –</i> which I had to find a way to project if I was to have any place or raison d'être in the world. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Because these issues were not yet clear to me, in my youth I espoused demotic music, and sought to compensate for the isolation which my <i>voice</i> seemed to enforce by seeking work within broadcasting where I could borrow shared musical Meanings, and pretend to belong. But this was not how I experienced authentic inspiration, and eventually in the late eighties it became increasingly clear to me that if I was to reach my potential as a creative and spiritual individual I should have to voyage throu darkness to find where /what /how my true meanings were. The ordeal by fire, where everything is reduced to ash, and only the refined gold remains. By that time I had fashioned a lot of the tools by which to extract meaning from my inchoate interior, namely how to cognise and make imagery of my Inner Otherness – whether or not it held value for others<not-i>. </not-i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><not-i>A central tenet of </not-i>Jung’s was that our Unconscious always shows us the face (/respect) we show it. My sense of my Unconscious has always been so strong (through dreams and direct inspiration) that I would almost turn the dictum around and say that I have had to learn how to show my Unconscious the respect it has always shown me. And to do that truthfully was something I felt that noonelse could help with—which was why I refused all higher education after running away from school—for instinctively I felt any form of ready-made answer would contaminate the authenticity of the thought-form I sensed taking shape within me, but which as yet was painfully lacking in coherence. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The nature of this sacred obligation is one that I tried to run away from, like Jonah, because it aroused impossibly conflicted emotions in me. Due to the complete lack of encouragement to express myself from my parents or teachers, composition, to which I was inwardly impelled, was at one and the same time the most acutely painful activity because I had been taught that the end process of engaging with my unconscious was unwanted; and thus to produce a gift for the world was to be brought face to face with my isolation from the Meanings of others. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Thus I felt as if I had to make my entire creative personality from scratch. The responsibility seemed utterly overwhelming; and I have described the process by which I did so in <a href="http://msteer.co.uk/analyt/creativoxframes.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">The Creative Voice</span></a>. A</span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"> main event for me has been to determine the nature of this Otherness I experience? Is it</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"> </span><b style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><i>my</i></b><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">mind? Is it access to a greater collective Mind? And/or is there a transpersonal element, and if so what is its nature? When I first became aware of this concatenated tangle of issues, at the age of 13, it was bound into questions of identity and sexuality and my alienation from almost everybody in the world. The result was an intense depression, from which I thought it impossible to be released. And yet within me was the conviction that it would all make sense one day; and if I could survive the next 40+ years, in old age people would be willing to hear from me what in youth there were unable to. I would therefore describe my life as a crescendo of happiness, which was begun by the intervention of Jane Clark Dodgson in my life, followed by meeting and marrying Clancy in 1975; and the joy that children and grandchildren and other relationship have brought.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Yet the meaning of these <i>eros</i>=relating relationships existed in parallel with the <i>logos</i>=inner-arising Meaning which I felt it my <i>dharma</i> to express; and my <i>karma </i>to overcome the barriers which inhibited its expression – on whatever plane of reality these may (/not) have existed. I knew, in fact, that I could not die until I had accomplished it; and so, in a way, I knew that no lasting harm could come from my hurling myself and those I love into difficult situations because I had to reach (by the blind guidance of the unconscious) the destiny and destination of accomplishing some kind of autonomous authenticity before as-it-were converging with my soul at the point of death. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Despite writing a setting of Dylan Thomas's <a href="https://youtu.be/SVEAkLrJOwY" target="_blank">There was a Saviour</a> when I was 21, which I believe stands comparison with what anyonelse was doing at the time, I was quite unable to obtain any performances. (I eventually conducted a recording of it myself with a volunteer choir in 1999.) I had not found a way for my Meanings to gain traction in the minds of others, far less in the collective Mind. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The thing that terrifies us about some forms of (mental) illness and addiction is that they are without periodicity. There does not appear to be an intervention able to bring an end to anguish, which is as painful for observers as for patients. I was in the interesting position of being able to see and chart this experience (which I did in my play <i><b><a href="http://msteer.co.uk/creative/watcher/synopsis.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">The Watcher in the Rain</span></a></b></i>) – since so long as my 'voice' could not be heard, to passing musicians (those whose only meanings are ones they can eat off) I was</span> just another ‘time-waster with a manuscript’. While I could not exhibit what my Meaning/s <i>meant</i> in the real world was because there was no defining output distinguishing intention from accomplishment for others to grasp. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The music and the ideas behind it did not synchronise with contemporary cultural discourse, for reasons known only to the Ancient of Days. So until this point, at the age of 72, a meniscus of silence around my major works (written after 2003) has been preserved, and it is only now, thanks to Greg and the Lacocks, that the ambrosia can seep out. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I am not claiming these experiences as unique. I suspect they're perfectly normal for such individuals who—by whatever accident of genetics—have mindsets where there is a strong awareness of Inner Otherness, regardless of the vocabulary or medium in which describe what appears <i>real</i> to them. </span>What has been important to me however, and for which I found the perfect vehicle in Sally Purcell’s pœtry, is that my music embodies a Christian spirituality that moves beyond the straightjacket of formalised religious thought to embrace a world in which all faiths can meet and respect each other. All true Art represents the small nuggets of <i>eros</i>-meaning we refine from the <i>logos</i>-enigma from the privilege of existence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I would love what I compose to be popular, in the sense that I would love it to be a vehicle for others bringing people together to share its Meaning/s – but this outcome is unlikely for such thoughts that lie outside the general discourse. All I can do is be a witness to a view of humans that acknowledges their 'within-ness' is simultaneously their access to 'outwith-ness'. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">And the role of Faith in this? Well without this ‘delusion’ I wouldnt’ve built what I have, because for one thing I wouldnt’ve had the plan. And now at last, hearing <b><i>The Quiet Spaces</i></b>, I feel vindicated – that my redeemer or advocate does indeed stand upon the earth. </span></div>
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-59245112562747178682018-08-19T08:31:00.000+00:002018-08-19T08:31:19.861+00:00What is great music?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Maybe music falls into two main categories? One that meets our current expectations – the other that takes us beyond them on a journey to a larger space.<br />
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Giving people what they’re familiar with is a laudable and honest enterprise – mostly! But to me what is exciting is to lay out a beautiful sound-path that leads listeners to musical experiences that go beyond their expectations. I believe that the unique feature of all true art is that it allows our own personal ‘meanings’ to engage with the evidence of our senses; and in the merging of the inner and outer to derive a greater sense of Meaning, or, if you prefer, a sense of greater Meaning. <br />
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A matter of the greatest sensitivity therefore is selecting and presenting music that attracts people to join this ’space trip’. And what we call ‘great' is music which is a proven vehicle for the experience. <br />
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This explains what a Bach violin concerto and the entertainment Façade are doing on the same bill on <a href="http://cherubimtrust.org/festival18" target="_blank">Saturday 15th September </a>2018 at Compton Marbling Barn. The Cherubim Chamber Soloists will perform four complementary concertos in the first half, which give four of our Cherubim Musicians a chance to show what they can do: and they make a super sequence, being linked by a beautiful string orchestral accompaniment. Those who have been to our Festivals before already know flautist Octavia Lamb, violinist Gabriella Jones and cellist Josh Salter. Only vibraphonist Diogo Gomes is new, but what a sonorous instrument the vibraphone is, and the Séjourné concerto shows its range of colours to superb advantage.<br />
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So we hope you will come and support them. But those concertos then prepare us to crack open the jack-in-a-box that is Façade, and out jumps a cornucopia of fireworks. There really isn’t another piece like it – witty, sad, flat-out mad and touching all at the same time.<br />
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And why? Because it’s held together by William Walton’s wonderful music. Each movement is a little jewel perfectly expressing the mood of the poetry – which the 19 y/o Walton probably didn’t even understand! So what appeared to everyone in 1922 as an ephemeral jeu d’ésprit has stood the test of time and grown into work of intriguing ‘greatness' that people are still performing and enjoying 100 years later.<br />
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I urge you to give it a listen. I can’t guarantee you that inner space journey; but I think it’s safe to say that music-lovers who have come to our events have found the experiences they were looking for as well as being offered intriguing glimpses of the worlds that lie beyond.<br />
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Book here for a great night out and a chance to share the magical energy our young performers bring.<br />
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-53995786890352327242017-12-03T06:24:00.000+00:002017-12-03T15:30:55.272+00:00Lament for Jo Cox <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Nine months from conception to realisation. A group of friends and Cherubim recorded it at the Savile on Guy Fawkes night. Not a bad record given that some of the compositions that mean most to me have languished in limbo for years.<br />
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<a href="https://youtu.be/CUsLHXoC6O0" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="623" height="179" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-McXR-6cYljU/WiQYKZuiJlI/AAAAAAAAAXg/wQwyG-mWnC4jrGAQEc1U4wFiWwgfp32eACLcBGAs/s320/Cox-Ensemble-title350.jpg" width="320" /></a><br /><a href="https://youtu.be/CUsLHXoC6O0" target="_blank">Listen</a></div>
<br />
<div>
There is a sense of completion when the <i>hypothesis</i> which is composition is validated by <i>proof</i> which is actual sound. Of course the greatest prize is if others come to love it like the one who loved it into existence, but moving it from mind to external form to independent reality is a start. The rest is the gods’ business.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-43550038822020386912017-11-18T11:38:00.000+00:002017-11-18T11:38:36.655+00:00Donald J Trump at the Pearly Gates<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-top: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/null" name="OLE_LINK44"></a><a href="https://draft.blogger.com/null" name="OLE_LINK43"></a><a href="https://draft.blogger.com/null" name="OLE_LINK42"></a><a href="https://draft.blogger.com/null" name="OLE_LINK41"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK42;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK43;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK44;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Gabriola; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Hey howya doin’ St Peter?<br />
I got better gates than that.<br />
Pearl’s such a mess,<br />
You need gold to impress –<br />
And out front you’re missing a greeter<br />
With a radio mic and top hat.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></a></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK41;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK42;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK43;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK44;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Gabriola; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now here’s what you gotta do<br />
To<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> Make Heaven Great </b>once again.<br />
Start selling sin <br />
To get ’em all in:<br />
And guns can do business for you …<br />
You understand what I’m sayin’?<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK41;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK42;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK43;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK44;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Gabriola; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Look around you, who are all these bums –<br />
The poor and the lame and dumb?<br />
Just clear ’em away<br />
And get folks who’ll pay.<br />
Tell God He’s not doing His sums:<br />
Get ’em right, and the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">R</b>ight people
come. ;)<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK41;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK42;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK43;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK44;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Gabriola; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And all this stuff on forebearance!<br />
These days who thinks it worth bigging?<br />
When I’m feeling bitter<br />
I take to Twitter<br />
And never lose sight of a chance<br />
When I’m in a hole to keep digging.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK41;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK42;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK43;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK44;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Gabriola; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Sompnelse that you’re getting all wrong –<br />
the approach road so steep and unsteady.<br />
Just do it my way<br />
And build a broad highway;<br />
Those footpaths to wisdom? Too long!<br />
They’re sad and old-fashioned already.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK41;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK42;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK43;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK44;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Gabriola; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">St Peter was moved to reply<br />
But Trump held up his hand like an oar:<br />
Don’t argue with me:<br />
Here’s how it’ll be<br />
From now on! St Peter just sighed:<br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This we’ve all heard before.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK41;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK42;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK43;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK44;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Gabriola; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But now he replies with impatience<br />
To this ignorant comb-over fool<br />
With inherited money<br />
And no sense of funny –<br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It seems you learnt nothing at school<br />
And considerably less from experience!<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK41;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK42;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK43;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK44;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Gabriola; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Trump, I don’t know how to
say this,<br />
But really you haven’t a clue.<br />
Peace demands trust –<br />
Which you never discuss –<br />
While another <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">must</b> is<br />
A desire to see justice.<br />
Would you say that you helped other races?<br />
No. You simply don’t care who you screwed.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></span></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK41;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK42;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK43;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK44;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Gabriola; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Good day to you Mr Trump!<br />
The last thing we want is a dump<br />
Of your nuclear arsenal<br />
Or anything personal<br />
Here. So do us a favour: stomp<br />
Off and return to your swamp.<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></span></span></div>
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-top: 12.0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK41;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK42;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK43;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK44;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Gabriola; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">You think we lack ‘modern amenities’,<br />
So given your taste for obscenity<br />
Not far away<br />
Is a great place to stay –<br />
Where they’re sure to look after you swell –<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK41;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK42;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK43;"><span style="mso-bookmark: OLE_LINK44;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Gabriola; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">May I cordially recommend Hell?<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></span></span></span></span></div>
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Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-29448104400188022502017-11-18T10:28:00.001+00:002017-11-18T10:28:24.637+00:00Tawai<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Bruce Parry is known to a wide audience from his BBC ethnographic documentaries where he has undergone tribal initiation rituals in many different aboriginal cultures. But now he has moved far beyond this with <a href="http://www.tawai.earth/" target="_blank">Tawai</a> - a luminous feature film exploring the states of mind of two hunter-gatherer tribes’ spirituality of place in their respective rain forests in the Amazon and Borneo. The title is untranslatable but covers the ideas of <i>Belonging</i> and the sense of <i>Presence</i> within the harmony of the natural world.<br />
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Parry handles all the issues with supreme sensitivity. Both communities are under threat from logging for palmoil or oil pipelines; but Parry compares the balanced consciousness they hold within their environment and unbalanced consciousness held by we Westerners who are driving the destruction not merely of their world but our own. He does this with the aid of psychologist Ian McGilchrist whose book on brain hemispheric function, <a href="http://iainmcgilchrist.com/" target="_blank">The Master and his Emissary</a>, is a valuable new model for understanding how perception works and how consciousness and human cultural behaviour interact.<br />
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I hope that doesn’t make it sound dry, because the film is incredibly rich in spiritual insight and most sumptuously shot by Mark OFearghail with stunning drone footage of the rain forests and the Kumbh Mela – where Parry goes in search of further understanding, and receives eloquent guidance from sadhus.<br />
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Why does this matter? And what would anyone gain from seeing it? Because I have not seen any other film that so clear demonstrates the word-defying experience that lies at the heart of shared consciousness. In this film Parry goes far beyond the permitted bandwidth of TV discourse and gives two peoples under threat from global capitalism the space to show the authenticity of their hunter-gatherer world and their sense of complete and conscious spiritual identification with their natural environment.<br />
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For this alone it would be valuable – I would say among the best 100’ I’ve spent in a cinema – but what is truly impressive is that in his own search for <i>Meaning</i> Parry not only manages to make 'the subtle voices of magic' heard but to present an extraordinarily compassionate and penetrating picture of how the human race is eating itself, destroying the very infrastructure on which life itself depends. Parry blames noone, hectors noone; he simply joins up a tremendous number of the puzzling dots and dashes that dance before contemporary eyes to show anyone with eyes to see what spirituality means in the 21stC and how it cannot be divorced from the environment we all inhabit and compassion for all lifeforms.<br />
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Bruce Parry is touring the film in cinemas at present. I saw it in a packed cinema in Glastonbury. Visit www.Tawai.earth to find where it’s on near you or to consider organising a showing yourself. It is about being present and compassionate in the world. </div>
Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16406965.post-226700242092529552017-10-31T19:41:00.000+00:002017-10-31T19:41:02.202+00:00How did Music originate?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The view that music evolved from animal calls is psychologically implausible. I would suggest the evolutionary pathway is as follows.<br />
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The mechanism that permits human speech is a tiny bone called the hyoid, which anchors the glottis and makes its usage consistent and reliable for the vocal <i>articulation</i>, as opposed to mere vocalisation. Obviously human language evolved from similar survival requirements evident in other animal ‘languages’. But beyond this an evolutionary byproduct of the earliest bicameral brain would have been the capacity to become aware of and articulate the reflexive sensations of pleasure /pain /attraction /disgust – which might be called proto-aesthetics.<br />
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I would hazard that the discovery of <u><b>S</b></u>ong can be traced to enjoyment of the duality between the speech and calling - and the discovery that sustained vocalisation by its psychological nature induced a heightened awareness which, when used in a ’safe’ context, was amplified by listeners’ inner responses to the emotional vibrations (or intention) encoded onto it by the caller/singer.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
Again, bicamerality has to lie behind the other major characteristic of <b><u>M</u></b>usic: rhythm. No animals have access to continuous metricality, because it is an acquired skill wholly dependent on aesthetic discipline. Animals and children perform ‘musical’ actions by virtue of physical responses to brain impulses, and the nature of these impulses is conditioned by motor response (muscular energy) to the passing mental focus motivating it. It depends entirely on the evolution of bicamerality to be able to conceive of the existence of a right or wrong way of performing an action other than in terms of immediate pain or reward. And without that conception of a beat as existing abstractly from our own gesture/s, rhythmicality is impossible. I think one can see within the difference between single percussive sounds and sustained coherent rhythmic activity a very similar psychological mechanism unlocking the aesthetics of entertainment (or entrainment, if you will).<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>For further thoughts on the relationship between of timbre & consciousness<br />
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Many years ago, in VHS days, St Attenborough made a TV film exploring Animal ‘Music'. Essentially his conclusion, which I paraphrase, was that while animals make sounds for many purposes, there are no real examples in nature that would correspond to the self-reflexive intentionality which lies within human <u><b>M</b></u>usic. (Well, some of it!)<br />
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Some animals, elephants for instance, can be trained to drum a beat just as they can be trained to paint pictures; but it is manifestly impossible for them to understand or attach emotional significance to actions which they would never have performed naturally - since the mental circuitry by which they could have invented them autonomously is not present within their limbic system.<br />
<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We learnt from Blue Planet II this week that whales appear to be the only non-human species where sustained vocalisation (song) is shared equally between genders, and not an evolutionary trait of males. <br />
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But there’s a further reason why birds or animals can’t be seen as the origins of music; and that is because if they were we’d still be doing it like them. Whereas the near-universal bedrock of evolved musical languages is a version of the stepped scale. </div>
Maxwell Steerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04486360050683692434noreply@blogger.com0