How my spirituality deepened

A letter to Toby Guise, written over Christmas 2013

ADULT SPIRITUALITY

I experienced a Christian conversion throu the ministry of Billy Graham c.1966 when I was 19-20. Its effect on me was profound, and I've never doubted the validity of the experience. I tried for about 12 years to live within that milieu, progressing to charismatic experience well before it was ‘profitable or popular’ (as Flann OBrien would say of Irish Nationalism). But ultimately it didn’t work for me: I came to see it as a politically-conformist bourgeois movement with dangerous undertones, long before Thatcher & the rise of the Religious Right. I felt those in the (cap C) Christian music /film biz, in which I tried to make myself useful, had a very narrow, not to say suburban, world-view with no interest in - or indeed understanding of - a genuinely creative dynamic. They could only grasp preformatted concepts that accorded with their narrow perspective: but then neither was the Brave New World in the 70s interested in any Christian idea(l)s - which were thought of as being as old hat as CS Lewis & Tolkein. (What goes around comes around!) I also had some pretty bad experiences of casual treachery with certain leading Christian figures of the time - which demonstrated the dichotomy between public & private morality, or perhaps conscious intention & unconscious behaviour.

By the time I met Clancy I was a member of an Elim Pentecostal Church. She never felt at home in that environment. During the first couple of years of our marriage (1975) I was trying to figure out why certain spiritual experiences were labeled as good, and others as bad. Her theatre career meanwhile continued ever upward, & we were in contact with various intellectual luminaries, whom I could see had not only a genuine personal dynamic but also leverage on the zeitgeist with which the formulaic repetitions of credal Christianity simply didn’t engage. Eventually I realised that the evangelical-Christian world-view is essentially boundaried by vocabulary. You could have ’the gift of knowledge’ but not clairvoyance - even if you were clairvoyant - and so on. Once I saw that the barriers around this conceptual enclave were based rather on linguistic formulas than any perennial or experiential archetype/s I began to see that I had to penetrate beneath this level to free myself from its stultifying effect on my creative anima.

This was a hard time spiritually - because altho Clancy & I were both quite successful the fees weren't ever large and arrived at alarmingly irregular intervals, so despite the great love our children brought us, it was a continual scrabble to keep our little show on the road. This militated against my allowing myself space to engage with my creative unconscious. Tho I didn’t then recognise it as such, I had a deep psychological scar about composing my ‘heart music’ owing to the utter indifference that had greeted my first attempts to compose (which in its turn had triggered my decision to run away) but OTOH I could write music ‘like a sow pisses’ (Mozart’s phrase) if it was for a dramatic situation. My BBC music career was going well & I had a couple of anni mirabili - but the communication between my conscious & unconscious awareness was fitful at best - owing to this glitch.*

I was always trying to develop broadcast projects as a writer in order to get myself out of the tail-end-charlie position which music occupies in the hierarchy of drama. I felt huge energy of ideas within me, but I hadn’t found a way to give myself permission to let them develop /gestate organically. One of the ways I began to find freedom from the tyranny of my left brain was to go out driving at night. We'd bought a house in Leatherhead - where housing was cheapest. I became fascinated by the prehistoric trackways across the North Downs & would drive over them sensing a communion with those who had used them, seeking to unlock my own ancient buried patterns of communication. A poem I wrote at that time: http://msteer.co.uk/creative/poetry/round.html  I needed to penetrate a layer of palaeo-psychological of experience below the glib answers of Evangelical Christianity to where the big questions were open to different interpretations. I'd abandoned the Elim Church, partly as a result of moving, but also because the young pastor’s wife had the hots for me. Their marriage wasn’t working (& for the very reason/s her husband didn’t notice it wasn’t) so an awkward situation was on the cards had I not disappeared.

During this time I got my first script commissions from BBCr3 … by extrapolating my own position as a ‘blocked composer’ to propose a series on composers in a similar situation who had turned to the written word. My first series featured Berlioz (voiced by Bob Stephens), then came The Composer’s Voice with Debussy (David Suchet), Ives, Antheil, Boughton, Lutyens (Liz Spriggs), Milhaud. After that I was able to parlay my way into several 45' & 60' drama programmes, the most ambitious of which was a 2h adaptation of Lord Berners’ camp roman à clef about the young Walton, Count Omega. The excitement of hearing these pieces produced gave me unique experience of longform pacing - of relevance to my ultimate interest in writing opera.

QUAKERY

A couple of years later I picked up George Fox’s autobiography in a secondhand bookshop and found it inspiring. By this time Sefa's birth was imminent & it propelled us to find a larger house; so once again, driven wherever we could afford, we'd bought a 14 room Regency villa (with no electricity) for £25k in Peckham. One Friday I woke up knowing that I wanted to visit a Quaker Meeting, and discovered there was one in nearby Blackheath. My first visit was so rewarding that I returned with Clancy the following week, and she too got transported by the collective meditation. This became the environment in which we brought up our kids, and I know they found it very nourishing. Presently, only one identifies herself as a believer, but all found the ethical foundation valuable, and who knows how the spirit is moving in their lives? For me, to encounter a non-doctrinal living form of Christianity was very much the answer to prayer, and it was a marvelous liberation to delve into Quaker history & discover the social values to which I aspired woven into the very fabric of the Society.Ħ

But this still didn’t solve my creative dichotomy between coming up with what I could sell & my own creative truth. During the 80s Clancy & I continued to explore alternative ideas /perennial wisdom, & while reading Jung my interest was piqued to have several dreams involving random numbers, which I wanted to puzzle out. The moment I began to pay attention to my dreams I entered an enchanted castle. In the late 80s this brought two tremendously significant influences into my life. The first was Sai Baba, who appeared to me in a theophanic dream - far & away the most powerful dream I've ever had.  Id never heard of him, nor was I the least interested in Indian ideas, so when his name was clearly given me in the dream I imagined it was just another weird name dredged up by my subconscious. The web didn’t exist then & thus it wasn’t until about 9 months later that I discovered that Sai Baba was indeed a real person. But meanwhile, whoever he was, he had firmly imprinted himself on me. His effect on me was as if Holy Spirit§ had taken up residence in my consciousness, I began to receive guidance & hope in a very intimate spiritual way at a time when I knew I was going to have to change my life if I was to reach my potential as a creative artist. Needless to say my ego-identity & financial stability (such as it was) was inextricably interwoven with the professional position I had achieved  - and the implications of letting to of either were truly terrifying in terms of the survival of our family unit. BUT I knew this was a darkness I was going to have to go throu if I were to achieving full creative integration & be liberated from my blockage, and his presence never failed me.¤

T’other significant event was that I was attracted to attend a weekend of films called The Way Of The Dream - which featured Marie-Louise von Franz. This was a revelation. At last, here was an incredibly wise old woman explaining how the most fundamental processes of life play out & are reflected inside us. Her explanations were so simple and so thoro that I could scarcely believe, having sought this info all my life, others had not penetrated it before and made it wasn’t common knowledge? Judge for yourself. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEC62024EB58056EC

It was during this period that Clancy & I began to meditate together every morning. I can't over-emphasise the value in a relationship of having regular period of intimacy that isn't predicated on sex. Few people even seek this, but I can tell you that when a relationship gets sticky - as all do from time to time - to have a neutral space which demands nothing of either party beyond being there together is a space where healing can occur spontaneously.

TRANSFORMATION

So I came to 1990-1. These years brought my greatest achievements in the (old) world: Notes From Janàček’s Diary, created in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for BBCr3; Elegy, created over 2 years in the RCM Electronic Music Studio premiered by SPNM, and The Watcher in the Rain, a play about James Joyce’s relationship with his schizophrenic dauter produced at the Rose Theatre. I had hoped that one or all would have set the world afire. Each received respectable notices, but noonelse saw in them what I hoped was there. They'd represented my best shot/s at other people’s targets - from now on I knew that I must shoot only at inner targets & seek to achieve internal subjective coherence since endeavouring to satisfy other people’s expectations had never worked in my life.

I resigned from my position as Head of 20thC Studies at the Junior Royal College of Music with effect from Christmas 1991 and went to Findhorn - a place that has been hugely influential in my development - to discover what I should be doing next. Everything suddenly fitted into place. The first thing I saw was a poster for the screening of a film about Sai Baba that night. It was the first time Id even seen a picture of him. In my initial dream Id been told I must bring him a gift, but Id remembered it the other way round, and had refrained from asking for anything until I was certain that I was willing to will his will. Now it came to me to ask for the gift of joy. And I can honestly say that since that day, even when things have been adverse, I've never lost this inner joy.

As well as my dreams I was ‘receiving guidance’ from Sai Baba. I kept all this and about 10 years ago I uploaded it to http://tlotc.blogspot.com/. I still find it inspiring to reread it from time to time. Some people think this represents an external communication, others that it arises from within the circuitry of the brain. I have no difficulty with either perspective, since what is most truly within us, our unconscious, is also what is most truly outwith us.

T’other thing that happened in Findhorn, where there are dynamic connexions all over the world, was that they’d come to terms with email & I suddenly saw that this created the opportunity for a forum linking new spirituality with eco-activism & liberation politics, so I came up with idea of a weekly newsmag called CataList, a TimeOut of the new age. (Ironically this was also how TimeOut itself had started, tho it had long since lost it.) At this stage the web And within 3 weeks of returning to London Id got a publisher for it in the person of John Brown, who’d bought Viz & Fortean Times & was looking to expand into the alternative market. Finding backing was crucial because financially I was like a cartoon character ’treading air’ over the edge of a precipice.

Suddenly everything was in fast forward, and - since Id always been highly techno-savvy - it was frustr-ilarating to be trying to create a networked office, with the very early Mac protocols. The story of CataList can be told another time. 18 months later it was employing 5 people, but I was never one of them - the money didn’t stretch that far. It was an incredible adventure & the most exhausting thing I've ever done. Finally our little vessel took two direct hits  - either of which we mightve survived, but not both in the same week. Then began the scariest period of my life: I thought I was going to get sued to kingdom come. What was far far worse was I couldn’t figure out how if Id been following my guidance I was not just sinking I was about to lose the roof over my family’s heads. It was almost the strangest time of my life: Id have nights of blinding clarity followed by days of sheet terror; and white nights followed by blissed-out days.      

With hindsight I can see what this was all about. I thought I was being given this great new project to carry out on behalf of the great gods to bring spirit into the world - but the reality was that this was a leela. They were having a laugh. Spiritually the function of this episode was to completely disorient me so that I had to abandon my conscious mind. Of course that’s what Id said I wanted - but the reality horrified me: the most terrifying thing imaginable was to be the last man aboard a ship that had lost its power & was being driven onto the rocks. But that was what was supposed to happen.

Events were all utterly beyond my power to control. But here was the bizarre thing. I thought at least CataList had broken even, but my accountant showed me that Id actually lost £13k over the 2 years it ran. We had to sell the house to clear debts & the damndest thing happened. When we put it on the market a little bidding war erupted which resulted in us getting exactly £13k above the asking price! Similarly, we'd found our present house but while the Natwest was indifferent to our debts if we remained where we were - they refused to allow us to downsize our mortgage if we moved. Id been desperately looking for work, and yet strangely the one job I managed to pick up was a commission from BBCr4 to make a documentary about a pilgrimage I proposed to make to Sai Baba. On the Friday two days before I was due to leave (& which resulted in Clancy having to do most of the house-packing) we didn’t have a mortgage & couldn’t complete on our present house. I spent the whole day in prayer, at my wits end. By 17:30 there’d been no movement. Everything seemed like the most colossal betrayal. I had betrayed by family, and in turn had been betrayed by my dreams.

Then at 18:30 or 19:00 the phone went, and a NatWest senior manager said he'd been checking throu our paperwork and he could see that a mistake had been made. We could have the mortgage. It's strange how it works: you never get the result until you’ve given up hope. It’s as if The Powers That Be want you to know 1) the universe is not a neutral space, but is spiritually responsive to the least whisper of a true heart 2) it’s not your call.  

INDIA

I went to India - which was a strange, marvelous, confounding experience; potentiated by the fact that I was recording everything I experienced. No doubt why ‘Jimi Hendrix’ (the man in the afro) fixed it for me. All I can say is that there is no framework of reference in England by which I can describe the experience to you. The arrival of the Beatles in Shea Stadium didn’t come near it. People queued for hours before the ashram gates opened, and then sat on the floor for 1-2 hours before Jimi made his entrance. At this point, in marked contrast to the West, total silence engulfed the c.20,000 devotees - to the extent that one became superconscious of a bus horns in the street or a distant train. We've had two centuries of rationalism which has eviscerated those who claim apostolic succession. When was the last time anyone in the West became excited by meeting a prelate? But here people followed Sai Baba with the passion of football supporters, or the total submission of pop groupies. It was far from a pretty sight.
    What of the man himself, moving slowly along the gangways, taking letters from some, occasionally producing vibhuti (ash) for another, even more rarely prasad (gooey fudge) to share among a group? [All from his open palm]. I didn’t have a personal audience but I did have a direct encounter when one day he walked down the row where I was & paused to take my letter. Seeing him approaching gave me a chance to appraise closely. His movement was stately & his gestures rhythmic yet deliberate: but the main thing that struck me was his eyes. They were like those of a world leader, seeing absolutely everything going on around him yet remaining aloof from the bustle of subordinates & the pressure of expectations surrounding him. Many people I interviewed told me stories about how he had told them things about themselves that nobodyelse could possibly have known. Without doubt he focussed into the auric or akashic record of those he interacted with and would respond with what met their soul hunger, which couldve been anywhere along a spectrum from the metaphysical (manifestation/s) to the purely spiritual. That’s what his incredible powers were about, not what the vulgar herd thought.
    You tell everything you need to know about a leader from the quality of his entourage; and people around Sai were top calibre folk  from every nation - mostly men, but a small amount of women, mostly American. During my first week adjusting to the ballyhoo & commercialised guru-worship I ivd a serene black elderly American and said that I was finding tremendously hard to reconcile the physical manifestation of Sai with the Sai in my head. He replied: “yes, I had that difficulty too. Never doubt, the Sai in your head is the real one.” which was a huge helping me keep my finger on the plot.
    My most beautiful encounter was with a very old sikh in a blue turban. Long after everyonelse had filed out of the Darshan Hall, he remained on a bench at the side, lost in bliss. When he eventually returned to himself I asked him what as a Sikh he found in Sai Baba? As he looked at me his eyes remained focussed on infinity and he slowly mumbled “all is one.”
    Another penetrating view was offered me by the head of the Sai Academy in Puttaparthi.‡ I provocatively asked his view of messiahs, and without pausing he replied: “Oh, failed messiahs are ten a penny. Nature throws them up all the time. What is extremely rare is the necessary discipline for them to actually develop the powers & put them to the use they were given for.”

SEQUEL

So we took up residence in the womb of Wiltshire in 1993. And then began the very darkest period of the cloud of vnknowing. I was constantly busy with projects but few paid the price of the busfare. There was a long-drawn-out sequel to my Pilgrimage - which really taught me what leelas are and how the gods (/our subconscious) set them up. Having a prog to record had really sharpened my senses for everything I encountered & given me the illusion that I was doing an important job (very much like being allowed to help Daddy) but the underlying spiritual reality was the soul-lesson to be learnt - namely, the Powers That Be don’t need your help or anyonelse’s. The only people they can work throu are those who are totally submissive /responsive to ‘that of God within’ (the meaning of the word muslim). I think sin is an unhelpful & hackneyed word, but another way of expressing the concept is that we’re full of shit & we need to have that shit totally kicked out of us before we can begin to comprehend the magnificence of our environment and the majesty of our potential as co-creators of the future with the heart of the universe.
    I was thrilled with what Id recorded & sent all the tapes to the Ch Prod Religion in M/ter expecting to hear from him. I then immersed myself in moving & the immense task of converting our present house & making it habitable as it had absolutely nothing except water & LX. After a couple of months I became more & more annoyed to have heard nothing whatever, so I called up the Ch Prod Religion - to discover the bastard had taken early retirement & simply dumped me. Knowing of old always to have a note of secretaries’ names I managed to speak to her. She knew which cupboard the tapes were in & said she'd arrange for them to be listened to. Eventually a very nice young producer got in touch & was enthusiastic, but said the Ch Prod Religion had acted on his own say-so (with departmental petty cash as-it-were) & that the prog had not formally been commissioned. This he undertook to do, but in time received the answer from Cr4 that they were holding all Indian subject over to the following year which was the demicentenary of independence. I could see at once that this wouldn’t fit into that concept, so he sent me back the tapes & suggested I try a department called Network Services - of which Id never heard.
    I duly contacted it & found an extremely intelligent woman (let’s call her Helen) who explained that her department’s job was to make features for the local radio network. There wouldn’t be any money in it, but should could arrange facilities for me to edit the piece & they'd punt it around their system if they liked it, but it was up to BBC local radio station managers to air it. Accordingly, I spent the next two months’ Sunday mornings in  tiny cubicle in Radio Wiltshire’s minuscule facility in Salisbury with 2 Studer A80 ¼” reel-to-reel machines (gawdblessem) assembling premix masters. So eventually it was finished as 2x 30’. I didn’t shy away from including awkward material Id recorded about a troubling situation a couple of years earlier where 4 boys from Sai Academy had been shot by police allegedly for trying to rob him. Even if the cover story was true, which I doubt, it was a highly unsavoury & completely wrong response - but nothing could ever be verified because the bodies were buried before their parents could see them. By including a trenchant iv about the unanswered questions with a Bangalore journalist I instantly ruled out any support from the Sai community’s most famous benefactor (Isaac Tigreth, founder of Hard Rock Cafés) - since duality was not welcome in discussion of a God - only hagiography was permitted. But I have no regrets: it was my duty to include it.
    The end of the saga was that about a year later Helen sent out the progs for broadcast. Heaven(!) knows how the info reached them but the Indian community went into overdrive on learning that a prog about Sai Baba was to be broadcast & bombarded the BBC Helpline for info. Eventually I had a call saying they'd had an unprecedented volume of enquiries and had somehow dug out my name. But I could tell them nothing about transmission/s & refered them back to Helen - who also knew nothing, since that decision was down the local managers. In the end as far as I know only 2 BBCLR stations actually did run it somewhere at the back end of their schedules. Thus did I graduate in the karma module – do your work to the best of your ability, leave the masterplan to the master.  It’s none of your fucking business! Or as it says in the Bible “deo (solus) dat augmentum.” There’s a couplet I love from Updike’s poem Midpoint.
Cherish your work, take pleasure in your task:
For doing’s the one reward a man dare ask.
    It goes with his other magnificent one from the same poem
God screws the lukewarm, slays the hear that faints,
And saves his deepest silence for his saints.

CLOUDE OF VNKNOWING

And that was what happened next. I don’t know how I came throu it - other, obviously, than the  the love of Clancy, my kids and a handful of close friends (who strangely have all drifted away now my life has mutated yet again). It certainly took me back throu my suicidal impulses before I ran away from school. There were times I thought I just couldn’t carry on in such total silence & isolation. Of course there were bright shafts of sunlight, but it was like groping blindly for some kind of foothold in a fathomless pit. This experience is far from uncommon, and indeed I'm convinced that what we nowadays label as depression is simply a natural element of or prelude to soul evolution which rationalism dare not acknowledge because it has no theory of mind that encompasses the non-rational aspects of the human condition.
    During this time I was continuing to note my dreams - but then I found something changing around the turn of the century. I would wake in the first light of dawn with no memory of a dream yet fully alert. And into that space came sometimes words, sometimes music - so I started to record that just as I had my dreams. And one such ‘dictation’ was http://youtu.be/QQDNPqZtaFs. I haven’t really listened to it since, but I paused to take it in when writing this. Easter is always a tremendously psychically alive time for me, but I was startled to have this poem clearly given to me in 2004. I my ego-self w/could never have written it. Read it here http://msteer.co.uk/creative/poetry/easterdawn.html.  Sometime later I began to set it to music, finishing it at Findhorn the following Easter, while I was there for an Eckhard Tolle conference (rather disappointing, since you ask). 

In some ways, telling you about this set of experiences was the point of this e-pistle. I feel that in this piece & in my other 21stC choral music http://msteer.co.uk/vide/4ndexvscores.htm I have ‘acquitted my soul’ (as Fox said). It’s ludicrously hard & noone will perform it until the right choral conductor comes along who has done the karmic work on hirself to understand it both spiritually & musically. This person will see the healing it offers & will give it to the world. I may not see this with human eyes, but I know that in spirit my eyes will see it - and see it usher in a new era - every bit as certainly as I know those I love. This is the work of love: to place oneself unreservedly in the hands of love, and to build one small section of the building with one’s best craftsmanship, while not attempting to control the overall design. It is the work that Merlin does, casting the spell that holds the sword in the stone, which can only be released by an Arthur whom he may never know yet who somehow, by the grace of God, holds the pas-sword to pluck if forth at the kairos.
    I know that in these pieces my name will live, even tho now it is unknown. But then my name is of no more significance than those of the cathedral builders, or the author of the Cloude of Vnknowing, or the master of the Eisenach Triptych, or anyonelse who allows themselves to become the Blessed Virgin and receive the impregnation of Holy Spirit. Bach would have told you exactly this, despite living in an age when anonymity was no longer possible. Bruckner certainly thought that.
    To me, having written this music is like having paid off your mortgage (still 2 years to go for me!) After that you live rent free. I've written at some length because doing so was a therapeutic activity, since my motors were still revving after successfully concluding the astonishing number of projects I'd had on the go in December - yet with nothing to engage my energy.

TRANSFIGURATION

Slowly the little nuggets of meaning that had cohered one by one in the darkness assumed critical mass - and from that I could feel my authentic voice emerging, as it had only existed before as an attenuated shadow. What is has become (for instance in The Fortress of Illusion or now Unexpectedly Vacant) is still only a prefiguration of what I know I can do once I'm fully in control of my cognitive levers & (grotesquely to mix metaphors) know how to cut out the fat & pare the focus down to the very sinew. But then we're all works-in-progress.
    I had to get to this space without anyonelse’s permission. Because noone would give it to me I had to find out how to how obtain an inner affirmation that came to me throu dreams. (My 3000th recorded last night!). When I was 13 I knew that I already knew all that I needed to know for my life, and my depression arose because I couldn’t make myself comprehensible in the language spoken by those around me - and I felt (rightly or wrongly, who can say) that this had already happened to me in a previous life. So that if I made the choice of quitting then all that would happen in the long run was that Id have to come back & face it all over again. Realising that made me determined, somehow, to tough it out & learn earth-speech. I knew then, as surely as I know everything else I've told you, that my peak years would be 60-80: and that all I had to do was to survive until then.
    I wouldn’t say any of this to any average joe, because they wouldn’t understand it & would just assume I was delusional. But I write to you as a person of faith - “and without faith it is impossible to please him” - sensing that there may be common elements in our journey/s. What Jung shows more than anyone is “that the stone [lapis angularum] the builders rejected is become the headstone of the corner.” That is the trajectory of faith, if we can be still enough to receive it.
    When I met these Blake proverbs as a boy I instinctively recognised they were true, and have cleft to them in all circs:
If the fool would persist in his folly he should become wise. (I think this might have been a saying of my father’s)
The tigers of excess are wiser than the horses of instruction.

WarmBest Wishes
MMxiv

*     There’s an interesting reference in Jules’ e-pistle to Iain McGilchrist’s book below - which I think a very interesting exploration of this topic in terms of brain hemispheres.
Ħ     I consider that Fox’s vision of a non-verbal religious structure of relating /belonging one of the most truly remarkable achievements of all time - which prefigured the West’s discovery of Eastern religious thoughtforms by 3oo years, and whose dynamic-point centredness continues to offer a beacon to the credal churches whose fixed-point centredness has entrapt them in ancient thickets of pre-Darwinian belief.
§     The Bible never gives Holy Spirit a definite article, and I believe it is quite wrong to objectify this quality /experience as if whatever it is can be identified & analysed, far less transmitted by a rite like confirmation. NB I do not say that Sai Baba is or was Holy Spirit, merely that my sensations were similar.
¤     Not the least I have to thank Sai Baba for is introducing me to Vedantic thought.Discovering it was like entering a dark room from bright sunlight. At first I could discern little of interest, but as my eyes accustomed to the new light I began to see that every surface was covered with incredible riches that have stood the test of thousands of generation. The subtlety and clarity with which the Vedas present & foreshadow the spiritual journey each person must make is presented with an authority rooted in the depths of time and exprest in a language, sanskrit, whose very syllables are woven together with an esoteric spiritual coherence to which only Hebrew comes anywhere near. For acting as a guide to this I owe Sai Baba as much as I owe any teacher.
    I'm well aware of the allegations of paedophilia made towards the end of his life, and consider them all too sadly credible; Nevertheless even if proved this does nothing to diminish the extraordinary way I guided throu whole ballet of extremely difficult moves.
‡    The ‘Sai Commonwealth’ ran 5 boys & 2 girls schools, a hospital with worldclass heart facilities, and had provided 70 villages with water filtered for naturally occurring fluorosis, as well as many other initiatives in Southern India.

All the tragedy of the world is exprest in this …

women don't realise that men don't realise.

If you're scanning the horizon …

you'll miss what's at your feet.

A few thoughts about young pianists’ psychological processes

When kids first start the piano their primary responses are geared to /throu their fingers. Very few have sufficient ‘brainwidth’ to be able to process musical information other than as gesture. (See an exception!) ColourMuse Book 1 is intended to cover the phase from single-handed playing to rudimentary 'hands together' and the first stages of independence of the hands.

After learning a while beginners develop sufficient muscular coordination to become dimly aware that there is a bigger picture - where rhythm is perceivable by ear, independently of their gestural sensations. ColourMuse Book 2 tackles this by beginning to teach beginners how to swing. It does this partly throu the semi-familiarity and easy melodic shapes of old nursery tunes, but also by first learning binary rhythms (oom-cha, oom-cha) and then using the same notes in ternary rhythms (where oom-cha-cha, oom-cha-cha rhythms require the player to wait for the middle beat). Most children find the idea of not playing on a certain beat more challenging than doing so, for the reasons outlined above. 

At this point young pianists are acquiring a biofeedback mechanism where their consciousness learns to balance the intellectual /psychological responses from eye and ear with the primary physiological demands of gesture. The knitting together of this holy trinity creates the ‘blue touch paper’ which can then be ignited by engaging the child's aesthetic sense by the choice of child-centred repertoire.

Child-centred music may be defined as simple melodic shapes, ideally familiar tunes, that are 'finger-logical'. Familiarity either of a tune or of its style is a vital ingredient because it offers a degree of predictability whereby children can intuitively 'make sense' of a tune's shape, which in turns builds confidence. For this reason ColourMuse principally uses 'public domain' music, ie folk tunes, nursery rhymes, carols and blues which, even where the tunes themselves may not be familiar, the music's style/s and shape/s are. It supplements these with a selection of tunes written by children themselves - because often a young learner with a natural melodic gift creates a little piece which is perfectly playable by others of the same skillset and has a quirkiness that matches the 'probabilities' of that mindset and thus engages other young children in a way that adult-composed children's music rarely achieves.

I had a very interesting example recently of how ColourMuse seems to work for children, when other piano methods haven't. A young girl had begun learning at school with one of the well-known piano books featuring adult-composed tunes. She could control her fingers reasonably well but wasn't progressing because had no real idea of why she was playing the piano - the experience wasn't triggering her endorphins. When she came to me I endeavoured to continue with her existing book, but after a fortnight I could see that she felt no 'ownership' of the pieces. Melodically there was nothing in them to 'hug her brain' in that unique way that the best of popular music can, so I changed her to ColourMuse; and on the second week she bounced into my studio note-perfect in her new pieces. It seemed pretty clear to me that this was because the music connected with her by its combination of melodic arc and finger-logic.

Learning how to play swing offers an interactive mechanism for developing the intellectual /psychological skill of perceiving rhythm independently of gesture. Acquirin this skillset is really analogous to teaching kids to ride a bike or swim. They're ways of creating virtuous circles that build self-confidence and thus, ultimately, self-esteem and self-reliance.

The first two ColourMuse books use noteheads of 7 differentiated colours within conventional musical orthography. This means beginners can read pitch intuitively from their first lesson. Colour is handled by a different neural pathway in the brain, and this enables children to register pitch simultaneously while processing rhythm within their conventional monochrome/shape pathway. This sidesteps the problem of 'data choke' that can afflict young children trying to read all-black notation. Children with dyslexia-related issues are among those who find prioritising all the information from a black and white page especially difficult; but a lot children also suffer from confusion about perceiving lines and spaces as representing equal-step pitch values. Coloured noteheads simply eliminate that problem in the early stages, when there is often so much else new to confuse them. [I have written more about this elsewhere.]     

If children have developed rhythmic self-confidence* during ColourMuse Book 2, then Book 3 is designed to help them make the transition to black notation. It prints the first 6 tunes on adjacent pages both in colour and black to enable them to learn in colour then transfer to playing from black notation in order to wean them from the more intuitive appearance to the somewhat sterner appearance of the monochrome page. (*Rhythmic confidence & SELF-confidence go hand in hand. Developing confident rhythmic awareness invariably boosts personal confidence.)

This transformation is easy for most, tho some find it less so. I have noticed that in general boys have less problem with the abstractness of a monochrome page than girls. There is no over-riding distinction between genders but my observation is that girls definitely find colour and pattern are more appealing, and a handful resist going onto black notation. Recent research about how male and female brains develop different neural circuitry in adolescence would seem to support my empirical observations. 

---

This research would also tie into another observation - that males of all ages get far more upset by issues relating to dexterity than females. There seems to be something about tool use that is hard-wired to self-respect in the male brain! (Who knew?) At one time I taught quite a lot of young adult men who were actual or near beginners, and the only two I can remember persisting were already in bands and thus had a motivation to develop their skills. The rest became discouraged when they couldn't make what they hoped to play match their expectations. It is that latter word that holds the key because adult males seem to be particularly unforgiving of their own inabilities to meet the expectations they have. One can see this forming during the adolescent period. Boys below the age of about 17 can usually be helped over these hurdles because they don't have fixed issues around self-esteem and expectation, however these harden fairly rapidly once they're no longer protected by a family environment.

Surprisingly, I have discovered that pre-teen boys are far more prone to tears of frustration than girls! Indeed while I've witnessed a good dozen boys becoming upset or angry at being unable to play something I can only recall one girl reacting similarly - but she had other issues. Girls and women seem much more able to shrug off technical difficulties, and far less emotionally engaged by conquering them. The most awkward experience I've ever had as a teacher was with a popular local GP who decided to partner his son in learning the piano. As a medical trainer and tennis champ he was expecting to find piano an interesting challenge but during his first lesson he found it so hard to control his fingers to his own satisfaction that his whole self-image as a competent and confident person disintegrated before my very eyes. It was as distressing for me as it was for him, especially since I felt that he’dve been able to play reasonably well if he'd been willing to accept his initial limitations and given himself time ... but no second lesson ever took place.

Creating the future

Maybe at the end of my life I shall be able to write genuinely popular music, but that will be after I've clarified my own darkness - and it was to encounter and process that that I entered the wilderness in 1992. I've only lately come to accept the full enormity (& I do mean enormity) of the burden of taking responsibility for the future.

How can other people's un/happiness rest on any decisions I take? Yet we see how within a family setting we all live with the consequences of decisions taken by our forebears, whether deliberate or accidental. How we were educated was also the consequence of decisions taken by others, possibly generations earlier. Could Purcell or Rembrandt imagine how they would still be influencing people 3 centuries later? So we who are creative artists in our turn will condition the lives of people we'll never meet.

Strangely, this task - the most crucial, the most intimate, the most wide-ranging - is simply up for grabs, like an undefended citadel. The only qualification for entrry is anywherelse(the fear of the Lord) and utter passivity. The job involves standing still and allowing light to flow throu you.

It doesn't come all the time, but when it does you have only to be a secretary. Whether or how it reaches other people, I have learnt, is simply not your responsibility. What is however is to keep your channel clear, the conscious-unconscious link; and here dreams are supremely important for unblockinh &/or keeping the inner fluid energy circulating.

What is finished art?

There must be as many attitudes to what constitutes ‘completion’ of a work of art as there are creative artists. And the ‘final’ result depends on the life-perceptions that the artist holds as well as the discipline (solitary /collaborative) in which s/he has been drawn to work.

Some people are impelled by a mix of these factors to a high level of finish – for others their very perceptions may be based on ‘inspired dithering.’ In a way this is the journey for a creative individual. It is each artist’s own psychosomatic makeup that creates their signature quality - as of course it does for all of us.
 
I think however that a distinction lies between those who are driven by inner ideas & those who are processors of sensory experience. I tend towards the former, but I also think that those like Cézanne who tend more to be ‘observers’ often leave more pathways into their work, loose ends if you will, that makes them more accessible to the general public.

An argument between my older & younger self

A friend raised the thorniest question of British cultural life last night, and eloquently articulated the perspective that my younger self espoused about the iniquities of the class system and its symbiotic relationship to private education. It set me thinking why I have come to take a more nuanced view.

One of the reasons is that I now think only the existence of a self-sustaining private education sector makes certain kinds of cultural transmission practical. In theory this could exist within the maintained sector, in practice there are huge political pressures against it, given the gimmicks and quackery of successive education ministers. The is exemplified by a recent remark about the pronouncements of 'The Supreme Goviet.' Every government in my lifetime has come in determined on root & branch reform, and the result is a wasteland of half-fulfilled initiatives any one of which mightve borne fruit if it had been allowed time to integrate.*
    Yet as this Gove’t seeks to draw the rings ever tighter around state schools it is simultaneously encouraging a totally-unaccountable stratum of state-funded autonomous schools - in the untested hope that by exempting a minority from their own constantly multiplying rules some miracle of transformation will occur. With results seen in Derby!
    In my view what is essential for the sake of true scholarship is a kind of bulwark against this level of constant shortterm political interference - and the only defence I can see is an economic one - and the least corruptible form of this is where there is a strong tradition of public service. Of course tradition is essentially conservative, and of course there are the political /social arguments that more equal societies have better outcomes for all their citizens, and particularly that social mobility is to the benefit of the body politic - but living in a country where no party seems to have the balls to take on the tax-dodging clout of the rightwing press, I have been obliged to study how to best to game the status quo for the longterm advantage of the Art I serve & the benefit of those wish to be apprenticed to it.
    I seriously question whether it is possible for all but a hardy few (with ingenious parents) to reach a conservatoire scholarship level with a proper breadth of musical background within the state sector. In certain localities perhaps, but in general …?

The central problem with ‘the least-worst form of government’ (democracy) is that by&large the majority of any population doesn’t know what the significant issues are, can't see wood for trees, and ultimately doesn’t care so long as they have enough to eat. You are entitled to shout at me for espousing such a cynical viewpoint, but far from thinking they deserve whatever they get I believe (with 19thC reformers) they deserve much better than they know how to ask for.
    I passionately want to see real education, not mere technical education: education that covers both right and left brain. But I do question how the former can be delivered within an environment that is wholly geared to the latter. We reward acquisition of intellectual consciousness, while at the same discounting or, at best, ignoring the acquisition of emotional coherence. Over the 20thC  Gove-rnmental structures have proved themselves effective at delivering broad social improvements, but they consistently prove themselves insensitive to, and destructive of, anything resembling autonomy or authenticity - which are the sine qua non of delivering true education or healing. (I doubt that we’ll see another generation of doctors with the robust independence of thought that all the many medics in my family showed.)
    In education, only where there is sufficient stability for traditions of nurture to survive or be grown can it really reflect the idea of drawing out students’ own authenticity. I don’t defend private education per se, but I do think the presence within a school of a coherent sustainable ethical framework with historical depth actively assists students to assimilate such values and fertilises their learning and uptake of the world.

You will object (as I do) that this inevitably favours the patriarchal & conservative, not to mention that it entrenches privilege, but I would say that the record of alternative ideologies over the last 40 years is patchy at best. I look back in particular at the great hopes of the 70s as embodied by the metropolitan left, of which I was once part, & their legacy in terms of disastrous misjudgments and unmet promises - not least the failure to produce a credible alternative to Thatcher or her successors - until Blair … but that's another story.
    I don’t blame any one party for exammania or examinitis, the frightful descent into the quantification (as opposed to qualification) of education - but it does make me wonder whether, for all their faults, the traditions of scholarship were not safer in the hands of patrons whose concepts of public service were inspired by religious and social obligation.
    I could argue against myself about this, and in particular the role of technology in undermining the status quo ante. I remember how passionately republican & anti-establishment I was, and how I believed that Britain could have the kind of energy Americans have (/had) if we overthrew our social superstructure. But where are all those great iconclasts that led us? Peter Cook died an alcoholic, and few of our 'great hopes' ended well. The 'cultural renaissance' of the 1960s that promised so much ended in smoke-rings and hot air.
    Visiting California cured me of any notion that anyone there had the answer. In general we seem to have imported only Americans' worst characteristics - and I come back to thinking there was much more to be said for the gentler age when people didn’t try to gouge the maximum out of the system & /or demand bonuses simply for doing their jobs properly than I thought at the time! Having spent quite a bit of time in France, I'm convinced that their contrat social worked pretty well; & it isn't their fault that the greedy bankers stole all lolly.

I think Russell Brand has hit the nail on the head. I grieve to say it because he's such a tosser, and also because the last person to nail the issues effectively was Tony Blair – & we all know what happened to him …!

As Pope said
For forms of government let fools contest,
Whate'er is best administered is best.

* My father was in the VIIIth Army & said that the problem in the desert under Auchinlech was not that he had no battleplan but that he had too many, covering all possible eventualities. WTRT everyone was confused as to which they should be following at any given moment. Monty’s genius /courage was to bin the lot & simply tell everyone exactly what he expected them to do & leave them to get on with it.

Neurological Pathways

I wrote this to a mother whose dauter had had serious dexterity problems since starting the piano, but had suddenly managed to play a piece with a repeated LH pattern without difficulty.

R’s ability to remember that LH pattern & ‘disaggregate’ it from her RH (for want of a better word) was extremely interesting. My theory is that ‘contamination’ between physical L-R responses is the result of insufficient insulation between neural pathways. Apparently the receptor sites in the brain that handle L-R traffic are micrometers apart & I think what happens is the neurological equivalent of what in electronics would be called cross-talk between signals.
    What it suggests to me is that when R's brain knows there’s a pattern it actually diverts the signal for that hand via a different pathway - to /from a ‘knowing-memory’ centre as opposed to both going via a raw-info ‘reading-decoding’ centre. According to a docu I saw there are 37 centres in the brain that process different kinds of stimuli. That’s why kids find it so much easier to respond when a music page is broken into colours & shapes rather than shapes alone.
   
To me it makes teaching a lot more interesting if you can discern what responsory ‘inhibitions’ are creating problems for people. That’s one of the reasons why ColourMuse works so well, because I've spent years observing what kinds of gestural patterns kids find it intuitively easy to grasp and adapting the music to optimise them. I've tried without success to interest music psychologists in my observations based on teaching so many small people.

Last term a 7 y/o came to me who had been learning at school: she was quite able but had no real idea ‘why' she was playing the piano because her piano book didn’t offer pieces based on ‘finger logic’. IE, tho she could play them they didn’t make any (neuro-logic) ’sense’ to her as patterns, therefore she played without rhythmic understanding because she couldn’t grasp what effect was intended to be. After just two weeks on ColourMuse, she has been transformed: one can immediately hear that she knows what /why she's playing, because there’s an ‘endorphin payoff’ / neurological satisfaction.
    It would be interesting to get such info into the public domain; but when nobody’s asking the questions, the answers don’t make any sense!

See me in all & you see all in me

Maya

Surface reality (maya), by means of its power to hide true inner nature and to impose the ‘unreal’ on inner reality, makes the underlying unity of ‘all that is’ (brahmam) appear separately as three separate entities: human beings (jiva), God/s (easwara) & the material world (jagath). The distorting factor/s in surface reality only take hold when there is a mind to observe them. At this point the seedlings of the huge tree that is the material world begin to sprout and put forth leaves, which are the mental impulses (vasanas) that guide us to conclusions about the nature of the world (sankalpas). Thus the objective world is to a large degree the product (vilasa) of the assumptions underlying what we see.

Humans beings and Gods are in equal measure products of this process, since what we see them as is inextricably part of our mental projection/s. Imagine everything that informs our physical existence as a painting, in which humans, gods and their interactions are depicted against a backdrop of the physical world. It is all produced by the same mental process of maya, part of whose illusive power is to confer apparent difference, based on human perspectives – the same dance within which we perceive s/he & I, this and that, and mine and hirs.
The seed syllables within the term sohamidam express: ‘sah’, the unmanifest (that transcendent power, easwara, that creates existence): ‘aham’ is I, the jiva or entity within the consciousness of the doer: and ‘idam’ is the material world, jagath. Yet even these, as perceived by humans, have only relative value, and change in interpretation from generation to generation.

In waking and dreaming alike these govern our perceptions, only when the mind no longer retains any form of consciousness, as for instance in deep sleep, do we experience the ultimate reality which in-forms all life-forms. The principal task awaiting those who seek wisdom (jnana) is to gain release from the mental processes which prescribe differentiation. To become grounded in the sense of underlying unity is possess indivisible wisdom (advaitha jnana).

Only the wisdom gained by analysis and elimination of the mental processes can end the reign of illusion. For illusion itself flourishes where there is ignorance and lack of discrimination, thus vidya, instruction, spells the doom of maya.

Love Itself

Humans did not come into existence just to laze around in casual joy and fleeting happiness. There are much bigger purposes to life, which we fail to see so long as we identify our Self entirely with the ego-mind, for attachment to what is 'mine' is the root cause of sorrow.

The ego-mind craves reassurance from people, objects and places. This need creates affection & attachment which ultimately ties us to the object. The effect of this craving is to imprison our consciousness within matter. To keep the psyche free is liberation in the true sense. Thus it is the mind which creates both imprisonment and liberation. It runs after an object - gets attached - the senses are alerted - affection develops - actions result - the mind is rendered happy or unhappy - feeling ensues - and so the the way is left open for fear and possibly anger. That’s how we're caught.

Affection, fear and anger are all close comrades of Attachment. These inseparable companions follow each other around. Which is why great writers assert “happiness and attachment chase each other’s tails." Happiness, in general, comes from the fulfilment of desire. Yet desire also leads to a partiality towards those who feed it, and a hatred of those who thwart it. Thus the inevitable wheel of opposites, of likes and dislikes, begins to turn - within which the ignorant are trapt.

When impure gold is melted in the crucible it emerges shining and bright. The mind, clouded by the impressions of a myriad attachments and desires, can only be restored to its original brightness and sharpness if put into the crucible of Inquiry and heated on the coals of Discrimination. That brightness grows as you begin to become conscious of your quintessential nature or atma (from which the word atom comes).

Like a wind-storm that covers everything with dust: the desires, attachments, thirsts and cravings all darken the mind. They have to be kept at bay so that the splendour of the soul /atma can emerge, reflecting as it does the highest manifestation of the humanity’s best qualities and potential, and the relationship each of us has to the collective identity of those around us, or paramatma.

Whatever the crisis, however deep the misery, do not allow your grip of your inner consciousness over the ego-mind to be dislodged; maintain it by fixing your eyes on these higher values. Subordinate it to your sense the paramatma, the good created by good people. Hold the ego-mind within the holy tabernacle of the heart. Thus one can progress from falling in love with people, objects and places (the differentiated forms of atma) to loving the undifferentiated or formless reality of brahma (all that is). The delusion of a reality created by objects has to disappear without trace. Only when our experience is no longer based on duality do we see the ultimate reality (brahmam) underpinning all existence, and so find genuine freedom from the illusions created by the body-mind complex. From this comes a sense of falling in love with love itself.

Abridged from Jnana Vahini by Sai Baba

Why is there a problem with Secondary Education?

Ever since The Enlightenment we have increasingly come to identify consciousness with rationality & the ego. But rationality is a left-brain concept - and is only capable of describing half the world - while the ego is a product of the monkey mind. The other half, the creative, intuitive aspect of the human animal has no place in our modern world of quantification and control. And until that changes nothing else will change.

This is a global curse afflicting the Western thought & acts reciprocally with the nuclear reductionism of science to create a mind-lock, every bit as powerful to contemporary consciousness as voodoo to a primitive one! And since the impulse to control is one thing that unites educrats & pols everywhere I don’t foresee anything changing unless we reach some unimaginable kind of crisis. That is, unless there is someone with the necessary charisma hangs on inside the system & becomes a catalyst articulating a coherent alternative in the echelons of the pyramid. Probably these people exist. It’s just that the current archetype is so powerful that it dominates the landscape, and people are such absolute sheep that they can't /daren't oppose the dominant thought-form of the age. That’s why Gove has the wind in his sails.

The subsidiary problem I’ve come to realise is that probably only a single digit percentage of a population actually thinks for themselves - or indeed is even capable of it. The overwhelming majority (at least of the British) will willingly allow themselves to be herded into cattle pens provided they're adequately fed & watered. I see the state educational system as a vast sausage machine designed to grind out a literate compliant workforce, trained to respond to a series of ever-receding carrots placed in front of their faces. There’s a very helpful remark of Jung’s: 'Love & Power cannot coexist’ - which we might rephrase as ‘Love & Gove cannot coexist!’

People bemoan the success of private education in preparing people for leadership positions; but the one thing it bestows on its pupils (apart from a sense of privilege) is the power to think for themselves. Now this could be provided within the state system, but only by freeing teachers from central control & allowing schools to create their own culture, as private schools do. But that is the one thing pols & educrats will never agree to. The rhetoric is that Free Schools & Academies will do this. On another planet! So, there isn't an answer.

I'm not the least bit pessimistic, because - in Gershwin’s lyric - ‘I know how many many times the worm has turned.’ Humanity has an extraordinary ability to sleepwalk to the edge of the cliff & suddenly wheel round spontaneously as enough people see the disaster coming to convince the rest. Another of Jung’s dicta is that it isn't lust that is the besetting sin of humanity it's laziness. People collude in their own worst interest. [See research on why the poor vote Republican & against Medicare by Jonathan Haidt] Between elections they say the public answers polls by saying they wouldn’t mind paying more tax if they got better health & education. In practise they NEVER vote for it, & are ALWAYS swayed by the party offering tax cuts - which is invariably the ‘propertied’ party whose constituency by & large can afford not to use public services. Paradoxically, research in The Spirit Level conclusively demonstrates that in societies where a social equilibrium is maintained by an element of redistributive taxation (Scandinavian countries & Japan) every index of health, social cohesiveness and  personal wellbeing is superior to societies that permit colossal disparities of wealth (the Anglo-Saxon model).

So, the issue is far wider than education. Maybe examinitis or exammania will change in my lifetime. Maybe it won’t.

The genesis of They

The acappella ‘canticle' of mine called They represents the work I've been engaged on ‘in the darkness’ for the last decade. The text began as a dictation in the lucid period after waking. Later I set it to music for double choir, which is a uniquely beautiful combo that allows for antiphonal effects. The last part is the best fun. Nobody has ever written for voices exactly like this, and it’s tremendously demanding. It would take state-of-the-art session singers to bring it off - especially at its great length, about 17’ - but I know that it is performable. All I can show is a synth demo which provides a simulacrum of the effect. But in this and other work there lies, I believe, great healing which is partly musical & partly the result of people co-vibing as choral demands – and when the world is ready for it, it will emerge.

I see myself as a humble brick-layer working on a tiny aspect of a vast design of which I can make neither head nor tail; but this is my assigned position & all that is required of me is to do it with my best craftsmanship. When we talked about the requirement for art to engage with people, I thought about my own position - or rather lack of it. When I was young I thought I could be both Moses & Aaron - but actually all I was doing was working from my monkey mind. What emerged from it may notve been too bad but it hadn’t been encoded with the power of spirit – WITS with the ‘innergy’ or vertu of allowing the unconscious or Self to speak unmediated by mere rationality. This I believe to be the true rebirth of which Christ speaks to Nicodemus in the first chapter of John, and is (in one form or another) the core teaching of all faith traditions and Jung.

It was a blind instinctive search for this inner reality that impelled me to jump from the moving train 22 years ago; and is what I found - where it can only be found - in the wilderness. It has taught me that there is a necessary distinction between the function of a Merlin or a Moses, and that of an Arthur or Aaron. The introvert world a seer must develop cannot cope with the pressures of the extravert world that the leader must necessarily inhabit: yet for one to set the pasSWORD & the other to crack it both must glimpse something of each other’s milieu - and in that ‘marriage’ of complementarity is wholeness created, which cannot exist otherhow since no single person can encompass their full circumference.

On the one hand, I'm frustrated that I cannot make my music heard - & believe me I've tried - but the time simply isn't ready for it. My youthful response was to adopt other voices & pass myself off as a member of the great unwashed simply in order to gain access to the zeitgeist. To a degree I succeeded, but then I realised the wind was beginning to change (as Casanova says: I had reached the point where fortune no longer smiles on men) & I would be stuck for eternity with a face that wasn’t my own.

The bit that torments me, is that I could be completely deluded & what I write really is rubbish & as totally irrelevant everyonelse thinks it is. But then I listen to something like Ives’ Concord Sonata or Housatonic at Stockbridge, and think ‘yes everybody thought this was rubbish too’ until Bernstein decoded his spiritual vision & made sense of it for his contemporaries. As far as is known Ives never actually heard his own music performed, but for the arrow a composer fires into the night sky performance is where it falls to earth. That’s what everyonelse witnesses: the first part they know nothing about. 

What I so much admire about what my dauter Sefa has done is that at some level she knows all this stuff. To a young person, being understood and accepted as part of a group is almost the raison d’art, and the fact that Sefa’s had the courage to grit it out and learn to stand in her own truth /voice is an astonishing achievement: and it’s thrilling that after a long and tricky path people are really beginning to respond.

To the parent of a young musician

I don’t think B will be the kind of musician conventional teaching can help. She's very musical but in musical academe music reading is the be-all & end-all; and I don’t think she's ever going to find that easy. In any case I suspect her whole interest is geared towards popular music, and around here I haven’t discovered a single school I know of with a music department with the staff or attitude capable of taking her in that direction.

So where to go? Apart from the Brit School in Croydon & LIPA in Liverpool I don’t of anywhere that offers the popular music equivalent of Wells. Most of the major public schools do now have proper recording studios etc but we'd be talking about the £33k+ bracket, and I'm afraid B isn't yet in the scholarship bracket.
  
The problem is one of demand: popular music doesn’t lend itself to academicism, ergo most people do it in spite of not because of school (which is really just as it should be!), ergo schools aren't geared up to offer it. Where there is a high standard of music it will generally be because there is a far-sighted HofM who has made it his life’s work to develop a virtuous circle by picking good teachers (& paying them properly) who in turn attract talented pupils who win awards thereby raising the school’s reputation and so retaining the excellent teachers. But even this can be ruined in two years if the school appoints an eejit as a replacement.
  
There are more choices at VIth form. And it may be that B is better off staying where she is now, but planning ahead for where she wants to go in (… do they now call it?) Year 13. There used to be a super music course at Andover FE, run by a guy who went on to become H of Kb at the RNCM, but when he left they appointed a deadhead & so it went back to being averagely rubbish.
  
But even if you think you’ve found somewhere suitable it’s not easy. I'll tell you a true story. Someone I know had an attractive & bright personality but utterly unacademic son, so after struggling at a number of schools where regardless of expense he managed a couple of GCSEs at most, my friend sent him to a private so-called technology college. At the end of the first year his parents were called to see the Head, who very politely asked them not to send the boy back for the second year as he was predicted to get no A levels, and the school couldn’t afford to see its OFSTED ratings dragged down. So be warned, it aint easy no matter how much you pay!  

I see all this with incredulity & can't imagine just how out of touch with the needs of young these so-called professionals can be? The real problem tho is that educrats everywhere are mesmerised by ‘solutions’, namely imposed curriculums & constant quantification. It could be different but just about every government (& this one more than most) believes that the answer to educational ‘standards’ is to rain new initiatives down on schools on a weekly basis and terrorise the very people who, if given a free hand, would improve children’s education. 
  
There simply isn't an answer that I can see, unless you're fortunate enough to live near a good school. Maybe we’re near the high water mark of this strange exam-mania? 

If one is the only one marching in step it’s hard to work out why noonelse is! But it just seems to be this herd phenomenon in human nature (last seen in the bankers) that as long as everyone’s all wrong at the same time then noone is to blame, and ’noone’ could have foreseen disaster looming. I just think we're stoking a social timebomb by failing to understand the needs of kids & forcing them throu an educational system which prescribes the hoops they must all jump throu uniformly, yet deprives them of the opportunity to take personal responsibility for actually doing so. I just try to help those who come to me to develop their uniqueness so that it helps them to find themselves. That’s what I can't forgive conventional education for failing to do.  
  
I rant like this because I constantly think: it really can't be that hard to get it right if you look in the right direction - & yet apparently it is, especially since the world is looking in completely the wrong direction at the present time! But mutatis mutandis!

My observation of B is that she is 'too willing' accept goals set by others. For her to consider any sort of career as a musician she would need to be able to evolve & meet her own goals. For instance, altho we are struggling with & will doubtless master our current piece - which will have a valuable effect on her piano technique; she needs simultaneously to begin to think entirely outside such boxes. I don’t see much evidence that she has begun to do that, & that above anything will come to define her ‘will to self-realise’. That’s the bit we need to make grow if she's to do anything more than fanny about with music. But it’s impossible to force this without adverse consequences.

The important thing to remember is that every plant unfolds at its own rate. Nowadays we have a neurotic obsession that everyone has to accomplish everything at least 2(0) years before they're ready to. S is 31, and it’s taken her 10 years of an exiguous existence after college where she won prizes as a classical performer to evolve into the persona that is now being feted. All the time we'd nag at her about constantly running out of money & getting into scrapes, yet turning down the sort of work she that couldve made her a reasonable living in the background: but she would say ‘you just have to trust me.’  And because we both understand the process we did.

The heart knows its own joys best, nor can another share its sorrows. If that sentence doesn’t resonate for a creative artist, then they probably aren't one. Even the crudest entertainer must have something of the need to seek validation of hir inner world by expressing it to others & getting some kind of response. No amount of book learning provides this: indeed it probably suppresses it. But that’s what needs to precede anything.

What interests me is that all these questions which appear to be merely educational are, in the broadest sense, spiritual. WITS that they are about imaginative or non-materialistic reality: and that is the desperate loss in contemporary education - that humans are more than a quantisation of their productive capacity.

To manifest a new reality ...

Create the thought-form you wish to see. Embrace it whole-heartedly. Give thanks for it as if it already exists. Hold on to it and allow it to transform you until you manifest this new reality.

It won't all be easy - if it was, you'd already have it - because part of what creates the new reality is the energy that arises from the stress you experience. Almost always, there's some element, some old pattern, that needs to be purged before this new thought-form can become grounded in reality. This testing (in old language 'temptation') validates both the thought-form and you, and forms the cooking process by which a new alloy is fused from a marriage of different realities.

Signature Sound

Each whale has one song - and this they repeat as their ID. It can evolve over a lifetime, and sometimes a pod of whales synchronises their song, but each individual's version is never identical. We humans think we have many songs, but the reality is that we have only one true heart-song and all the rest are variations on it.

I have been thinking about this over the last 9 months as I have been evolving an idiom for my current opera project: As I was going to Strawberry Fair. The answer always seems to emerge after a process of subconsciousness reconciliation between one's native inner voice and the musical context in which you wish the result to be heard. Yet ultimately, if I look back over my music I find there are consistent, if constantly evolving, harmelodic patterns - a preference for evoking certain qualities of sound & feeling in music, which must qualify as 'my song' when taken as a whole. In Indian music this would be described as a rasa, a flavour or essence. You could compare it to the unique odour each of us gives off.

I am frequently accused of making things too hard. If I write for people I know I tune into them, but there is noone then I write what I hear. With known collaborators I can easily adapt my ideas, indeed much prefer to model something directly for the capacities of an actual human being: but since that isnt an option that my solitary life often yields I feel free to write what I hear, as-it-were for an optimum performer, rather than for the specific limitations of an individual. Unfortunately this tends to result in difficulties for performers. So if more of them made themselves available it would be easier all round ...!

One of the 'decisions' I had to make was exactly what height of brow to pitch the opera at. I found all my initial ideas came out as a bit cheap & cheesy. There's nothing wrong in this per se, except that if one is pitching to the popular end of the musical market things can never be cheap & cheesy enough since the whole thing is entertainment-driven - moreover the market /audience is so segmented by social & idiomatic prejudices I couldnt feel any musical /moral centrewhere my own musical authenticity could ground itself in a collective (musical) awareness. I therefore needed to allow the process of refining my ideas to continue until I felt that what was emerging was calculated to appeal some-how/where/when to the great tradition of opera.

The other point of contention in my mind was, and has always been, the conflict between the natural voice & the produced voice. The essential point is that I'd like my work to be sung by natural voices; however noone who hasnt had training can sing my music, ergo I cannot avoid trained voices. 

As I was going to Strawberry Fair is a working title. The piece is my attempt to express the cognitive dissonance between the magical world of imagination and beauty where people are open to each other (which is the Glastonbury/Avalon of our dreams) and the workaday world of money & contracts where people seem to consider themselves unfettered by any principle of compassion or cooperation. IMO finding a way to pitch this light against the engulfing darkness is a calling for everyone on a spiritual path.

The control which computers have given those who manage money means that more and more of human society can be controled by those who hold the purse strings. People must be taught that they have the power of individuality. It is not obligatory to surrender your existence to a bourgeois concept of career and comfort. To me whatever Glastonbury signifies, for better or worse, it is that there are people for whom the spiritual search is paramount. From where I am it sometimes feels as if noone is searching, but it's important to remind oneself that whatever the adharmic present there is, and has always been a solid core of men and women of goodwill who are seriously searching for their way to connect with the spiritual heart of existence.

To those people my piece is dedicated. Whether I have penetrated to & exprest the deepest archetype/s with my music I may never know. Is there a resonant truth within it? Validation would be a great bonus. There are so many questions I would ask the future, but I just have to put my hand in the hand of my saviour/s and trust.

Native Turf

Visiting the Royal Academy Bronze Exhibition recently I was struck by the fact that while so many of the Italian exhibits had been loaned by the churches and galleries of their indigenous locations, most of the remainder were on loan from galleries or private collections with no indigenous relationship to the artefact. This made me think about the political questions of public ownership, privatisation, and the cultural needs of a country or nation. 

Nowadays the technocratic solution to a nation's or a community's financial woes would be to sell off or lease its cultural assets; but at the end of it what would be left but a series of gutted cities whose heart had quite literally been ript out - like the old market towns of Kingston, Surrey where I grew up, and which the planners eviscerated in the 1980s in favour of the car and in order to fill the empty spaces with soulless shopping malls that all contain the same national retailers? Even as I write this the ENO announces its intention to auction naming rights for the Coliseum. What is not for sale? It might be financially 'efficient', especially to those advisers who would profit from the process, to sell off all the Greek treasures - but where would that leave Greece? Who would take pride in living there, let alone going there?

In the world of money there is no loyalty to anything other than money. Its practitioners are like electrical appliances that offer dazzling pictures and sound, but only for as long as they're plugged into the juice. Unplug their 'power' - divorce them from their context - and they're dead. The pursuit of money really is the root of all evil: it eats out people's souls. It isn't surprising that deluded folk  pursue it to the exclusion of all else (there are weirdos everywhere!) what is truly revealing about our culture is the attention lavished by the public on these vacuous people.

Knowing who we are, individually or collectively, depends on knowing who we have been. And even if the most people are content to ignore their national treasures in favour of the latest ephemeral slebrity - as Im sure most Italians do - ultimately even the most culturally insensitive person derives identity from their heritage. The biannual circuses of traditional Christianity may be ignored by the majority, yet they're nevertheless part of a nation's mental furniture.

Like Christianity itself, any thought-form that loses its grounding in the popular psyche loses its currency. If art becomes yet another specialist ghetto of intellectually controlled values, demanding an entrance qualifcation either in the form of an art degree or millions of disposable dollars, then it dies. And if proof of this is wanted, one has only to look at the moral bankruptcy of the 'Turner' Prize, whose winner was announced today. While some cynics might argue that the lazy, fashion-driven, craftlessness of the Turner Prize is a perfect way to connect and reflect contemporary social values, it nonetheless fails at the first hurdle of any definition that a primary function of art is to reflect a transcendant reality of those feelings that lie beyond words.

Just as money is an intellectualised commodity valuation system that drains the emotional reality out of whatever it leaches onto; and you have only to look at ogres like Donald Trump to see how those who worship it lose all contact with their human-ness.

Advice for pupils

Performers demonstrate their mastery by restraint.
    Just blasting away as loud & fast as you can impresses only the ignorant (admittedly 98% of the population) but even they will grow tired of it eventually. Like a racing driver you need to keep power in reserve for when you really need it - when showing off can have maximum effect. In any case, going flat out all the time doesn’t show good judgment & is likely to result in a crash.

Who are you playing to?
    A performer’s career depends on impressing - not the general public - but discerning professionals, be they professors, managers or producers. These are the 'gate-keepers' who control funding &/or college admission. Just as important as learning the notes is 'learning the rules’, discovering the aesthetics as well as the technicalities of performance valued by the ‘gate-keepers’ - and then giving it to them. You may not agree, but you can’t bend the rules until you’ve understood them.
    My personal opinion is that exams don’t really contribute to this process but competitions do as you can hear other performers, receive direct feedback from the adjudicator, and see whom s/he considers the best performer … tho not always why!


The most important thing about SIGHT-READING is to keep the musical narrative clear so that the listener gains an impression of the whole piece, no matter how sketchy. This is far more important than playing all the notes. In practice this means

1. Keep the beat at all costs - which gives overall coherence to your effort.
2. Prioritise the melody so that the listener can follow ‘what you're saying’.
3. Leave out whatever interferes with them. (As your skills improves you’ll find you can include more, but also part of your improved skill shows itself in judging what can be omitted.)

Imagine you were listening to someone reading a chapter that neither of you had seen before. If they read it out in a flat voice stumbling over words & pausing for breath in the middle of phrases you’ll have only the haziest clue about the sense of the piece.
    It’s the same in music. You can sight-read text because you’ve done it every day since the age of 6. To develop the same skill with music demands a similar amount of sight-reading practise.

• Excellent sight-reading comes from the experience of simply doing it day-in day-out.
• With experience you learn to perceive recurring patterns.
• With good pattern recognition you gain an intuitive understanding of how music is structured into sections (governed by cadences in art music & choruses in mass market music) and see how/why certain chord sequences are more frequently used.
• This all goes into the experience that creates excellent sight-reading.

There are also some very important wider lessons in this about prioritising decision-making on the fly. In the long run, mastery of sight-reading confers an ability to think abstractly - to perceive the underlying patterns not merely in music, but more widely in life, both in terms of making life decisions and assessing probable outcomes of human interaction/s.
    In my observation it is quality of decision-making that most distinguishes people who achieve something worthwhile in their lives & relationships from those who don’t . Successful decision-takers are those who are close to their intuition, but able to interrogate it consciously, and thus avoid the twin traps surrendering to blind instinct or being indecisive 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought’. This is exactly the lesson that sight-reading forces you to learn: to perceive patterns intuitively and discard what isn't essential.
    This is also the quality of a good communicator - keeping the narrative clear. Good communicators don’t tell people things they don’t need to know. They listen with a ’third ear’ to avoid deluging the public with unwanted info that only serves to confuse. Music demands the development of this third ear - the ability to listen to the sound you are making independent of the cyber-noise created by your gestures & exertions - and sight-reading helps this almost more than any other musical activity.
    

Example: Microsoft used to build hugely complex GUIs (graphic user interfaces) because they weren't sure exactly how people would use it. Apple (under Jobs) kept to extremely simple GUIs because they'd worked out what created a user-friendly experience. That is the goal of becoming a musician - giving listeners a user-friendly experience.
  

Is Christian renewal even possible?

Until the churches admit to their role as brutal oppressors they will never regain its moral power, let alone the respect of free-thinking people. But this would demand more than just a superhuman institutional backflip – it would demand that believers take on board the Jungian perspective that the Christian trinity is actually a quaternity – and that the concept of a devil is an integral part of the Christian world-view. It is, I believe, only when humans take responsibility for their own evil that things can change.

So long as institutional Christianity remains in denial about this, &/or the sexual abuse it has fostered – & it has such a colossal investment in its world-view & heritage it’s hard to see how this could ever occur – I don’t see how any renewal is possible. And that entirely leaves aside post-Darwinian issues! The outworking of this perspective is visible in the devastation the Judæo-Xtian civilisation has wrought on the entire planet. (Whether that accounts for the China’s effects is another question.)

It may be integral to human nature that we are all conditioned to see only the conscious /willed aspects of our thought-forms not the unconscious or involuntary results? Yet it remains a paradox that the spirit of Christ, not institutional Christianity, has inspired some of the noblest philanthropy and art, not to mention the evolution of science & healing, so both are part of the whole picture.

To me, individuals like Giles Foster represents the best hope that the lumpen dough of the church/es can be leavened by the spirit of free thought, and recaptured from the timidity of placeholders like Rowan Williams & the rampant bigots who seek to perpetuate their predecessors oppression by the nauseating focus on gender issues.

This of course leads to the question: what does it mean to call oneself a Christian at all? I don’t think it req uires one to say that one is not a Buddhist or adherent of any another faith tradition. They are all metaphors for expressing the human condition & embodying a wisdom tradition, which has to be learnt & then discarded in order to discover the mystical core of existence. To me, it matters not a whit what label people apply to themselves (or others) the real issue is: are they true to the highest ethical & spiritual perceptions of which humans are capable. I am conscious that my introduction to these issues came throu the Christian tradition, within which I have met some of the finest people I know, and thus it’s convenient to wear that badge, but ultimately it is just a badge. The issue of who anyone is independent of the words they use to delineate themselves.

To the degree that I am an heir to the Christian tradition I too acknowledge my own complicity in the brutality of my tradition’s history: however expressing coherently that, let alone seeing such thoughts infiltrate the mainstream, is altogether another matter. My perception is that unless institutional Xty can come to own this process collectively - which it can only do throu the advocacy of committed visionaries like Fraser or Huddleston or Teilhard de Chardin - it is destined to an ossified irrelevance. But then I do not see the church as custodian of the spirit of Christ.

To a biographer of Karl Amadeus Hartmann

I read your thesis with interest. There was a concert of Hartmann’s music on BBCr3 last year, as a result of the evangelism of a newly appointed conductor whose name I can't remember. I listened to a bit of it, because it had been trailed with something of his story, but the music didn’t make a tremendously memorable impression on me. Before that he had merely been a name to conjure with - like Berio’s reference to ‘… and afterward Mayakovsky’s name hanging in the air' in Sinfonia - like the anti-Nazi painter landscape painter who was reduced to painting on scraps of paper & hiding them.
    I especially sympathise with his plight because I watched a tv doc about Orff - who was so clearly a loathsome human-being that even those who had loved him struggled to find anything agreeable to say.
    Hearing Hartmann’s music, yet it not really impacting on me, made me think how there is a window within which a composer’s music needs to be heard if it is to bind itself to listeners’ expectation. Suk is another example of a superb composer whose time can never come I fear - indeed I only know of him throu Bjelohlavec’s advocacy during his recent tenure at the BBCSO.
    There is a v interesting question about the degree to which a composer uses ‘ready-made idioms’ - ie those that are relational to the musical language of the composer’s age - and those who pioneer their own language. The former only really fare well if they are first heard within the era where composer's style of chimes with that of the musical public. If, for whatever reason they do succeed in establishing their 'voice', like Shostakovich or Britten, then they are assured of a place at least in history, even if not in the enduring love of a fickle public taste.
    Exceptions however are those like Janacek or Ives, who were little heard in their lifetimes, but whose radical language was seen as a career opportunity by certain performers. Indeed the way in which Janacek’s music has travelled from the eccentric margins to the centre of the operatic stage during my lifetime is one of the most inspiring stories. It all seems to depend on the ‘undiscovered’ music in question having an ‘edge’ which sits at an acute angle to the psyche of the succeeding generation/s.

As a composer who grew up in the 60s when the 'Darmstadt orthodoxy’ ruled, I didn’t even bother applying for music college, because there seemed to be only unthinking conservatism & unthinking modernism to choose from. As a result I have certainly felt very much like an un-person on the musical scene, despite having held posts at the RCM & BBC – indeed Messiaen was very much sneered at as an un-person at the Conservatoire in his lifetime – to the degree that I decided in 1991 to abandon any attempt at trying to create a relationship between my own ears & those of the musical world. This led me to bury myself in the countryside, where I have become a successful local piano teacher – http://uk.youtube.com/MaxwellsPupils & http://colourmuse.com – & work instead on expressing  what my ears hear. Tho I am happy to write ‘ready made music’ for my pupils to enjoy developing their skils, in the wider world the result has largely been incomprehension towards what I think are my most significant choral works: a set of 3 Canticles which remain unperformed. http://msteer.co.uk/vide/4ndexvscores.htm
    This week I'm recording two song sets (a live performance of parts is at http://vimeo.com/savile) but the open questions of who is actually interested & why I might actually be doing it are uppermost in my mind? (I always have the example of Ives sending 50 printed copies of 50 of his songs to 50 leading singers on his 50th birthday, & receiving not one single reply!) I long ago accepted the idea that the only listener that matters is ‘the cosmic ear’ of Kabir’s poem who alone hears the unstruck drum. But like anyone on the earth, & not in some celestial vacuum, composers necessarily require the collaboration of performers who, in my experience, are rarely interested in straying far from the profitable mainstream. So there is always a tension there.
    Thus, in terms of the argument I frame above, from a contemporary perspective I could be said to have ‘missed the bus’; yet from my own perspective I feel that I am actually creating ‘a new bus’ which encodes my spiritual realities. And to the degree that I feel myself like some Merlin who encodes a sword in a stone that some unknown Arthur must crack in order to meet some future need. Fanciful? Well, I waste noone’s time but my own.

But for me the issue is even more poignant, because our composer-dauter, Serafina Steer, is home this weekend & last night played us her long-awaited fifth album of original songs, which is a quantum leap beyond anything she has achieved before, both in production & self-expression. It has been produced by a major leag figure & as a result has taken all year to reach the point of a production master, and won't now be released until February 2013 as the label don’t want it to disappear without trace in the pre-Christmas rush. Such a long gestation is immensely difficult for her as she writes in a style which might loosely be generalised as art-pop – and of course within this world ‘currency’ is all. Altho Sefa's creative depth transcends the superficial she is at the stage in her life she is supremely dependent on tides which noone can control. And naturally as a parent I am concerned for her, but doubly so knowing something of the unpredictable way tides operate.

So Hartmann’s misfortune in being caught twice on the wrong side of history is one I can relate to. He seems to have dealt with it as well as anyone could; and is luckily to have found such a coherent advocate as yourself.