Michael Maxwell Steer: Pavan & Galliard II (My Lady Nevells VB) William...

 

This music excites me as much in 2021 as it did when I first encountered it in 1960.

Roger Scruton on evil – from Wagner's Parsifal

I have never published anyonelse's words here verbatim before; but this seems to have a lapidary clarity that deserves to shared.

"As Wagner was aware, we distinguish people who are evil from those who are merely bad. Bad people are like you or me, only worse. They belong in the community, even if they behave badly towards it. We can reason with them, improve them, come to terms with them and sometimes accept them. Even if they wreak destruction, like Siegfried, it tends to be because, through deception or manipulation, matters have slipped from their control. But evil people are not like that. They do not belong in the community, even when residing within its territory. Their bad behaviour may be too secret and subversive to be noticeable, and any dialogue with them will be, on their part, a pretence. There is, in them, no scope for improvement, no path to acceptance, and their faults are not of the normal, remediable human variety, but have another and more metaphysical origin. They are visitors from another sphere, incarnations of the Devil. Even their charm - and it is a recognized fact that evil people are often charming - is only further proof of their Otherness. They are, in some sense, the negation of humanity, wholly and unnaturally at ease with the thing that they seek to destroy. Their presence in the community involves a mingling of elements that do not belong together, and their charm is sorcery: they are, indeed, the most potent form of pollution. 

That characterization of evil is summarized in the famous line that Goethe gives to Mephistopheles:
Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint
[I am the spirit that for ever negates] 

Whereas the bad person is guided by self-interest, to the point of ignoring or overriding the others who stand in his path, the evil person is profoundly interested in others, has almost selfless designs on them. His aim is not to use them, as Faust uses Gretchen, but to rob them of themselves. Mephistopheles hopes to steal and destroy Faust's soul and, en route to that end, to destroy the soul of Gretchen. Nowadays we might use the word 'self' instead of 'soul'. But this word is only another name for the same metaphysical mystery around which our lives are built –- the mystery of the 'I', which is the centre of consciousness and the origin of choice. Evil people are not necessarily threats to the body; but they are threats to the self. They open the deepest spiritual wounds in order to fill them with poison. Such is Klingsor in his abuse of Kundry. His failure to belong to the community does not lead to resignation or despair. It lead s to an insightful, almost intimate destruction of the woman whom he tortures, and through whom he also brings destruction to those who have enjoyed the blessedness that he vainly longs for. The world of the evil person is a loveless world, in which intimacy takes the form of domination. To be close to an evil person is to be in his power, since he tolerates no other relationship; hence every intimacy that he achieves merely reinforces his utter loneliness, the metaphysical vacuum of the I that has never said 'thou'. To live without the I/Thou relationship is to lose the benefit of love: it is to relate to others by spells and sorcery, thus by-passing their humanity for the sake of a purely self-centred control. 

Encountering evil of the Klingsor kind we sense the existence of a contest between being and nothingness, creation and destruction, and that we are involved in that contest and are saved or jeopardized by our own behaviour. Seen as part of this contest our faults can weigh us down: we seek exoneration, without knowing the human person to whom an appeal for forgiveness can be made. We exist as though suspended above a chasm, ready at any moment to fall. This is what is meant by original sin, and indeed Schopenhauer rewrote the idea of original sin so that it became 'the crime of existence itself – ‘die Schuld des Daseins,’ the guilt of existing as an individual, in free relations with our kind. 

Such feelings prompt the great yearning that finds a voice in tragic art and which engages with our most urgent loves and fears in this world: the yearning for the blessing that relieves us of our guilt- guilt that is the inevitable result of our free dealings with others. Glimpses of this blessing are afforded by such liminal experiences as falling in love, recovering from illness, becoming a parent, and encountering in awe the sublime works of nature. At these moments we stand at the threshold of the transcendent, reaching out to what cannot be attained or known. And that to which we reach must be understood in personal terms, since only then does it offer an answer to the unspoken question of our being: the question why? It is the soul of the world, which smiles from the meadows at Monsalvat on Good Friday." 

janmot

Poème de l'Âme  - Louis Janmot

Introduction

Freely translated and adapted from
Poème de l’âme – un œuvre intempestive
(Poem of the Soul – a timeless work) by Patrice Beghan

Poème de l’âme is a cycle of painting and poetry that is unique in French art. It tells the story of the earthly tribulations of a soul, embodied in an androgynous young man, confronting and evading the forces of evil. Amidst ‘a permanent rustle of wings the soul and its guardian angel undertake the human journey in diaphanous clothing surrounded as-it-were by celestial music within the serene and familiar landscapes around Lyon illuminated in a supernatural light which caresses the pastel whites, saffron, oranges, purples and emeralds. Taking the figure from the safety of home as far as the “wrong turning,” where the menacing figures of a dark nightmare await pilgrims. Thence one pathway, the “Golden Ladder” of arts and sciences, ascends to God; whereas the other descends to a tomb.’

Watch a demo of my translation and setting for chorus and small orchestra of the first painting/poem, Divine Conception.

Louis Janmot himself is all but unknown today, but he was part of an authentic Lyonnais culture that remains as alive and independent of Parisian fashion as it ever was. Born to devout parents in 1814, Anne-François-Louis Janmot was profoundly affected by the childhood deaths of his siblings – an experience that probably lies at the heart of this cycle of paintings to which he devoted much of his life. Another influence was a life-long friendship with his fellow student at the Collège Royale in Lyon Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam, who was to found a lay religious order—initially Le Conférence de Charité, later La Société de St. Vincent de Paul— whose role in French Catholicism was ultimately recognised with his beatification by Pope John-Paul II in 1997. 

In 1831 Janmot entered the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, winning its highest honour, the Golden Laurel, before going as part a cohort to study in Paris with Ingres and Victor Orsel. 

Two years later, after graduation, many of the Lyonnais cohort joined Ozanam’s newly founded Conférence and went on pilgrimage to Rome, where they were to meet fellow Lyonnais, Hippolyte Flandrin, a Prix de Rome scholar a few years their senior and another student of Ingres, renowned for his elegant and precise execution.

Following his return to Lyon in 1836 Janmot began to attract the notice of Parisian critics with large paintings on religious themes exhibited at the Salon in 1839/40. Five years later his work was praised by Baudelaire, and the influential Théophile Gautier was impressed by his portrait of Lacordaire – whose æsthetic is evidently a precursor of the Pre-Raphælite Brotherhood.

Janmot had begun Poème de l’âme in Rome, and between other commissions he occupied himself with the first series of 18 paintings over the next decade. After the work was exhibited in Lyon in 1854 the reaction encouraged Janmot to take it to Paris in May 1855 during the Exposition Universelle in hope that some official recognition might lead to commissions. 

“So, it takes or it doesn’t? Who knows? But this is not the end, either way" Janmot wrote to Ozanam. Alas when exhibited at Exposition Universelle the result was not what he hoped for; yet several critics noticed the Poème, among them Gautier who concluded a favourable article saluting Janmot’s ‘rare courage’ and linking him to the contemporary Viennese Lukasbund or ‘Nazarene’ movement. Baudelaire visited too, and while being skeptical about the verse, wrote: ‘it must be acknowledged that as pure art the composition of these scenes and their restrained colours has infinite charm, difficult to describe, but something of the sweetness and solitude of the sacristy or cloister – an unconscious, childlike mysticism.’

The following year an intervention by Eugène Delacroix, then at the height of his fame, saw Poème de l’Âme presented along with Janmot’s new Fleur des Champs at a temporary Palais des Beaux-Arts on Avenue Montaigne. Unfortunately, as the critic from La Revue du Lyonnais records, the 18 paintings were ‘perched at a height where no one could be expected to see them.’ Once again, Janmot’s intimate œuvre did not appear to advantage amid retrospectives of the large-scale paintings of his master lngres, Delacroix himself and Alexandre Decamps.

Nevertheless Delacroix confided this perceptive judgment to his journal after their first meeting which Janmot had requested: ‘this really interesting personality may be drowned out by the vulgar chic that dominates everything here. […] There is a remarkable Dantesque fragrance to Janmot that makes me see the famous Florentine’s angels in the purgatory. I love the green dresses like meadow grass in May, and the heads, inspired or dreamt, like memories of another world. I fear we will not give this naïf the justice which is his due. His primitive style places him beyond convention, for he speaks his own language—perhaps it is does not even count as a language—since we must view his ideas through the confusion and the primitive naivety of his expressive technique. Nevertheless a very singular talent is presently among us.’

In December of that year Janmot married Leonie Saint-Paulet of a noble family in Carpentras. Several fresco commissions followed including the new Lyon town hall, and he was appointed professor at the École des Beaux-Arts.

In 1861 Janmot decided to move his family to Paris having been promised a religious fresco; but after three years the project had failed to materialise. Finding himself in dire straits, he was forced to take a teaching post at the Dominican School of Arcueil. The family settled in Bagneux, and here he made many beautiful portraits of them, of which only photographs exist in the public domain. He now extended Poème de l’Âme with a second series of eight large charcoal drawings, enhanced by white gouache, representing the torments of a soul who has cast aside hir guardian angel. This was followed by a third and final series in 1868.

By now the rise of historically-informed religious painting by the Lukasbund or ‘Nazarenes’ in Vienna and the Pre-Raphælite Brotherhood in London gave added focus to the first series of Poème, but no comparable movement arose in France, and interest in Janmot’s two later series seems to have been dissipated by their austere monochrome. As he used colour elsewhere in his paintings of this period we must conclude that he intended the monochrome symbolism of the later series to be an allegory of a soul—and indeed a society—which had cast off its spiritual heredity in favour of industrial materialism.

But in 1870 catastrophe struck. Léonie died after the birth of their seventh child; and Prussian troops menaced Bagneux. Janmot fled to Algiers where he occupied himself with landscape paintings. (Presumably the children were looked after by his wife’s family?) When he returned the following year his house had been wrecked and there was little work to be had. After producing a fresco for a Franciscan chapel, work dried up entirely.

Managing to procure some commissions in Toulon, Janmot moved there to be reunited with children. He was also fortunate to find a patron in the person of Félix Thiollier, an industrialist who financed the publication of the complete painting and poetry of Poème de l’Âme but it did not arouse much interest.

After living in Toulon for 15 years Janmot, now 71, returned to Lyon to marry his former student Antoinette Currat. For the next two years he occupied himself with charcoal drawings on the theme of the After Life, which were in effect a kind of continuation of the Poème. In 1887 a 500-page anthology of his writings Opinion d’un artiste sur l’art was published in Lyon and Paris. He died in 1892 at the age of 78.

In recent decades by the art historian Élisabeth Hardouin-Fugier has written extensively about Janmot, and presents him as a transitional figure between Romanticism and Symbolism, whose work, like Flandrin’s is characterised by an immaculate finish they both learnt from Ingres. While Janmot’s intense mysticism links him stylistically to the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites, he was, as Delacroix noted, sui generis and without interaction with either movement. The influence of his ideas is evident in later Symbolists like Odilon Redon and Puvis de Chavannes, tho their work exhibits a more universalist spirituality than Janmot’s ardent Catholicism.

After the fairly limited uptake of Thiollier’s publication the paintings entered obscurity, preserved in the painter's family. Selected in 1921 for an exhibition devoted to the pupils of lngres, the artist-critic Maurice Denis described Janmot’s paintings ‘marvels of invention and poetry.’ Later in that decade, Henri Focillon, a director of the Lyon Musée de Beaux Arts, wrote in La Peinture au XIXme Siècle that Janmot's Poème was ‘the most remarkable, coherent, and strangest work that spiritual romanticism gave birth to in Europe.’ Adding ‘In [it] there is a depth of poetry and an expressively enigmatic power which far exceeds Blake and the English Pre-Raphaelites.’

But not until 1950 was the full cycle once again exhibited at the Lyon Beaux-Arts by its director René Jullian, who cited Janmot’s virtues as ‘the feeling of fantasy and the feeling of grace still capable of attracting lovers of symbolism and the catchers of dreams.’ When a total re-hang of the Beaux Arts collection took place in 1968, Philippe Durey decided to devote a complete room in the museum to this remarkable cycle, which it has occupied ever since.

In the year he completed the third series of Poème de l’Âme Janmot wrote “I sometimes find myself, like everyone else, smiling at my obstinacy in completing a work begun 40 years ago: I will be long dead before people discover it. So my work really is quite similar to that of the Chinese who spending part of their lives decorating their own graves.” It was as if throughout his existence Janmot had been preoccupied with erecting for posterity son propre Tombeau.

Lost Lovesong

How to explain or justify what your unconscious comes up with? As I lay in a lucid state allowing these words to form in my mind I didn’t feel responsible for crafting them into this form. I felt they just emerged of their own volition.

Poetry - Rhyme & Reason

A question of form.

Since last midsummer I have been reading a Mary Oliver poem a day as part of our daily meditation. They are beautiful, mystical, and a poetic window into the profound truth which truly connecting with nature opens for us. The subject of each is resonant, and the words are elegantly and precisely chiseled — but the question I have with certain pieces is are they actually poetry?

Some are slabs of prose without pretence; and others sentences broken up into lines somewhat arbitrarily. What is the appropriate term for these? Proems? Poetic Writing? The word Prosody would suit, but already has a different meaning.

From the dawn of time—when verse /lyrics /poetry meant the same thing metre—rhythm and rhyme were coterminous :: because that is what assisted oral memory to capture and retain narrative. Poetry is stronger when it arbours of meaning are welded together ny rhyme, which adds an element of form /abstraction that cements the words into one's brain.

Who can forget this couplet of Updike:
    Cherish your work, take pleasure in your task,
    For doing's the one reward a man dare ask.
I read it 30 years ago, and yet it remains fresh because the elegance of craft and symmetry in the form chiseled the words into my mind.

Or Pope‘s acid sketch of Marlborough:
    … Or see him old and sunk in years,
    Lost in unmeaning, unrepenting tears.
A verdict on 'achievement' that has constantly recurred to me since I first read it 55 years ago because of Pope's jeweled phraseology.

But what do I actually remember of any of Mary Oliver’s poetry I’ve spent the better part of a year reading? A beautiful fragrance of thought and the lonely clarity of a wounded healer seeking truth through alignment with nature – but actual turns of phrase? Nothing. This sentence from her poem At Blackwater Pond is typical.

    Every year
    everything
    I have ever learnt
   
    in my life time
    leads back to this: the fires
    and the black rivers of loss
    whose other side

    is salvation,
    whose meaning
    none of us will ever know.

It’s beautiful, resonant and poetic. But is it actually poetry? I had an english teacher who expressed the cynical view that poetry was just prose broken up into lines with the words in the wrong order. And certainly the first part of that observation applies to Mary Oliver, albeit the words are in the right order! I realise of course that MO pared away every unnecessary or careless word to arrive at a perfect distillation of the experience she wished to convey. That is the epitome of her craft and her quiet gift to the world. No doubt she felt that any kind of literary artifice would undermine the authenticity of her direct simplicity. Yet I do regret that she didn’t occasionally engage with form—like her heroine Edna St Vincent Millay, tho it was a different age—as I think that extra energy would’ve come from the wrestling.

---

Later I came upon this piece of Rumi and suddenly understood what Mary Oliver was about.

    What in your life is calling you,
    When all the noise is silenced,
    The meetings adjourned...
    The lists laid aside ––
    And the Wild Iris blooms
    By itself
    In the dark forest... ?
    What is drawing your soul?

I now see that Mary Oliver uses her ‘word camera’ to record /evoke the numinous reality behind the natural world. I also saw a picture of her with Coleman Barks, two old bent figures walking down a street in a fond embrace. This Rumi ‘poem’ does exactly what MO does, walk you through a thought-picture and then twist it so you catch a glimpse of your soul at the end.

So whether it is (/not) called poatry doesn’t matter. Nor can Oliver’s exquisite simplicity be blamed for imitators (and english teachers) who copy her surfaces but never plumb her depths. Yet the irony remains that while wrestling with form is probably seen by such folk as inhibiting and traducing the spontaneity of their inspiration – the irony is that it might well be the mordant that preserves it.

In their disregard of craft it’s as if many contemporary poets are saying there is no Ars Longa, no tradition, there is only Vita Brevis. This is not an accusation that can be laid at MO's door, who is exemplarily conscious of deep time and of perennial meanings.


Is this just old man's talk? A pedantic nostalgia for the aesthetics of a forgotten age? If it is, then it’s because tradition /continuity matter to what Ezra Pound called The Great Bass – by which I think he meant the Low Frequency Oscillation of culture. The persistence of rhyme remained an echo of literature’s primordial past when strophic form was the sharpest arrow in the storyteller’s quiver of oral enchantment, and conferred majesty and magic on poem and bard alike.

Is anyone awed by poetry these days? Performance poets certainly enchant their audience—and it's no accident they use rhyme and metre in the most traditional way—but do they awe them? Nowadays we’re distrustful of both majesty and magic—while we crave them—and it's deeply regretable that so much modern poetry has casually discarded one of the fundamental elements of its own numinous power.

My Darling Grandchildren

My darling grandchildren: Phœbe, Vincent, Daisy, Lyra

What can I say in this wide-awake night to describe my joy and sense of fulfilment at this picture of them together? If this blog is the record of my searching and some of what I found then this is real-isation of dreams I never dreamt. And the super-blessing is that their parents get on so well & share so much of their lives with us. 

So many families are disfunctional, you read about it all the time, what you don’t read so much about is families that just get on with the everyday business of loving each other and making life work. Oh the joy of normal goodness. 

Ram Dass on loving life

Ram Dass: “All religion is the attempt of the conceptual mind to describe the mystery.” One might add: and what they have in common is ascribing the highest value to loving the mystery of life itself.  

Thoughts on Love by Rumi

Love’s dance is both light and shadow. 

Yet it has no cause, no beginning and no ending: 

    it is the only one of God's secrets we can never analyse. 

Lover and lovingness are inseparable terms - existing beyond time.

I may try to describe it but as soon as I feel it I am lost for words.

If I write about love I lose my way at the lovely place where lover /loving /loved are one. 

    My pen gives out and the paper disappears - 

    there, where the shadows disappear 

    and the very moment is suddenly made glorious by the light of Love.

Reimagined in english by MMS

Martinique Landscape - Gauguin

Battling with questions of honesty I encountered Gauguin
for the first time today in the Gallery. Viewed later
there's inevitability about a masterpiece:
but before the act of creation the canvas is blank,
an immense void with no fixt points or preset scale.

In this desert there is no success or failure,
Only an oasis of experience: but merely
Unshuttering perception alarms the bourgeoisie 
Whose rules are concrete – one's battle, to uncap
A spring of living energy to flood the world.

The Great and Good trade in certainty – for those outside 
The headlong rush meanings are more opaque, shadowed.
Cunning old Gauguin knew that the richness of his uncertainty
Was worth all the money he never got :: for me too the struggle
Between what I know, and what the world can bear to hear. 

Inside each, invisible within the thickets of forest
Truth wanders, unseen save by a unicorn-whisperer,
Until the magic kairos when it and I and you
Align as sudden lightning cracks the darkness open
And in that sacred second, shadowless, we know.

National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh 24viii79 ®3xii2019

Original version of poem

I have re-expressed the sense of the original by rewriting the thoughts with the benefit of 40 years more poetic experience. My choice was led by a marvelous film about Gauguin just aired on BBC4.

The film took me back to my first encounter with his blazing canvases at a time when I was a young parent still trying to define myself to myself in order to make headway in the world. My semi-answer worked well enough to finagle a career in broadcasting for 15 years – but ultimately, the more successful I became the more acutely I felt the dichotomy between permitted public discourse and my own private meanings.   

What struck me as forcefully as the image itself (and still does) was Gauguin’s courage in choosing to depict a completely subjective personal vision and executing in a way that must have been completely baffling to his contemporaries. Which of course he went on doing - famously in his final exhibition of work from Otaheite where practically nothing sold.

Gauguin’s M.V. confirms my conviction that where a work has passion and coherence it embodies the vertu or quintessence of its creator in a projected independent form. And that where these are as-it-were imbued with heart energy (need to tell) naked subjectivity yet in-formed by crafted in-tuition they contain within them the visionary reality which others then come to inhabit - in the sense that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the future’. (Shelley?) We are all now heirs of Gauguin, even tho they meant nothing to his contemporaries.

I certainly hope/believe that is true of certain unperformed works of my own - tho it took another 25 years to raise my craft skills and lower my intellectual inhibitions sufficiently for them to emerge. 

And so, seeing Gauguin in depth again, I ask myself now as I did 40 y/a: what is this inner knowing? What is the relationship of the dream world to external reality? How does manifestation cone about? In the interim I have had the writings of Mary Louise von Franz to shed light on the energy of the subconscious & how /why to trust it.

Who knows what outlives us? I have always been driven by a sense of the world beyond this one, and the belief that if we could unify these two fields of awareness we humans could live in harmony with other planetary inhabitants. I believe Gauguin (certainly, and all great creators probably) shared a similar perspective, and that all art worthy the name shares this same characteristic of being an attempt to express the inexpressible. To me, the alternative to this viewpoint is the death and degradation of our physical world. And thus I have to believe, as the evidence of history shows, that all efforts to bring light into the world are worthwhile. Even tho all are (probably) doomed to failure.

Thoughts about Mary Oliver

My Quaker friend Peter Rutter died at a great age on January 15th 2019. By coincidence it was also on this day that Mary Oliver died. I had never heard of her but received this pœm from an admirer, which perfectly summarised Peter’s life and death. I read it at his memorial Meeting.

When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Subsequently I bought Mary Oliver’s Collected Works and have been reading a pœm a  day; but not until I encountered the pœm Praying in mid September did I see one that produced an immediate musical response, to the degree that I had sketched out almost all the melodic narrative spontaneously. Then I tackled Thirst with the same visceral response. A couple of days came the lament Lead – so relevant to the eco-cide which the human species is visiting on our planet. The fourth pœm I set last as I knew it would be the most challenging to achieve the right idiom for a quasi-operatic scena the words demanded. The final Pœm (the spirit) Clancy found in a book about Hildegarde of Bingen by Matthew Fox, who regards both pœts as speaking with one orphic voice. This set made me wondering about creating a light-hearted vocal acappella scherzo à la Manhattan Transfer or King’s Singers, but with words of profound spiritual content.

Stylistically, the closer the performance comes to a barbershop acappella sound the happier I shall be. The words need to be articulated as clearly as possible. However there are some passages, especially in the latter two songs where particular care will be needed to communicate the narrative.

The process of computerising the score is a long slow business, and I often use one of my screen to keep half an eye/ear on other things. Two personal memories stand out. I was working on the tragic poem Lead while watching the parliamentary debate following the Prorogation judgment, and if anything summed up humanity’s blindness to the needs of the environment, natural justice or the bigger picture it was the aggressive factionalism of Johnson’s Conservative Party. The other is that while I was finalising The Fires I watched a beautiful documentary about Leonard Cohen’s muse Marianna and their life (not/) together, the pre-lapsarian existence on the Greek Island of Hydra in the ’60s, and the tragic consequences for its cast of characters as their dreams evaporated and one by one they were overtaken by the destiny they had been escaping.

To me, Mary Oliver’s poems are not merely about such hope, they are about a more profound perennial wisdom and forgiveness found in nature, with which we can align ourselves if we set aside the limitations of the human intellect and embrace the non-dual (without drugs). It must seem a paradox, when the music I have written depends supremely for its realisation on a high level of intellectualised skill – and yet the composition is distilled from the subconscious, the inchoate, and can only be effective if performed in that spirit … the consciousness that returns us to the unconscious – that cycle of perpetual motion where the unknowing gives us the knowing that gives us the unknowing.

---

When I compose is when I feel the greatest intensity of relationship with my Inner Otherness, therefore I have to trust that what I’m doing has some ultimate meaning  - even when in the ‘real world’ it has neither meaning nor value. I have to believe that the latency of the beauty I am creating has the power to bring into existence a world in which it would make sense. This may of course be a complete delusion but it makes a better basis for living my life than thinking I’m a Nowhere Man making songs for nobody. 

When I look at my life trajectory and see how everything I blindly struggled for has manifested beyond my wildest dreams, I don’t see why that principle would not also apply to my composition. Therefore if I were to take the view that if noone will pay me I won’t do it, as I used to, I deprive myself of my greatest private bliss and make a mockery of the trust mechanism that has generated everything of value that now surrounds me. 

In all of this the one profound grief I have is that I have not been able to learn heuristically by actually hearing what I have composed in the divine sunlight of acoustic sound, for then I think I would’ve been able to escape my own mind. But I cannot change what I cannot change. 

I keep thinking that if I have resolved pretty much all my other issues why can’t I call on the Powers That Be to resolve this one too? But that seems to be the big fat God button I can’t find. I know it’s there somewhere, and I figure that if I keep pressing the buttons in sequence and combo then statistically I’m likely to hit it sooner or later. Or sit on it by accident!

And meanwhile walking in the dark is its own ‘proof of concept’ - ie, faith - and nothing is more agreeable than to have a hypothesis proved correct after a difficult process. And if isn’t? Well then it’s still a pleasanter way to wind toward death than the conviction you’ve wasted your time. I regard myself as a Merlin in his Esplumoir fashioning the Excalibur/s some future Arthur will draw from the rock. My job is only to make the thought-form as perfect as I can (& that’s why concessions to amateurs won’t help). It’s the big one or it’s nothing. 

For me this is a win-win. If I’m busy I’m not spending money (albeit not making it, but I have precious little control over that either! And it seems to work out) :: it doesn’t cost anything, harm anyone or put me within reach of the law. There is only the heartache of each new piece coming off the production line to a deafening silence. But after a lifetime of people not seeing the point of me I’ve come to understand that being understood is not the raison d’être — it’s more pleasant to be sure, but the big game sub specie æternitatis is to listen to the voice and be accurate transcribing it. Did I ever tell you that for my choir school auditions the piece I was given to learn was “I know that my redeemer (/justifer) liveth” ... and at the latter end he shall stand upon the earth? Is more prophetic resonance than this ever offered on the bumpy road to love?

So, madness or faith? Shall we ever know?

Thoughts on recording Bach

I now know why old people get cranky – it’s too much effort to appear normal! As you go under the hill your view of normal changes and you have to consciously reconnect to the ever-evolving normality of younger people encountering the world afresh. 

Ive been thinking this because Ive been gazing intensively at myself while editing the third movement of my Bach Organ Trio Sonata V. It's far&away the hardest piece I’ve tackled in my organ renaissance; and one of the problems I have found in recording it is that my stamina is inexorably withering. I can now only do about 90’ of worthwhile recording at a stretch, the mental effort demanded by acute concentration on the movement of limbs as well as maintaining full consciousness of the ‘recording architecture’ (where there are errors that need to be patched, consistency of tempo, uniformity of phrasing) wears me out sooner than it used to – that means that it’s a fight to get it all right while the window is open.

There is a glib solution: do it right in the first place—as Dan & Kieran did so brilliantly the Dodgson Duo ® last week—but the reality is that in the heightened nervous attention recording demands you actually make mistakes you’ve never made before, and so you have to have a system that handles your own idiocy (like forgetting to turn the camera on, or accidentally deleting files) in order to get across the finishing line by yourself. And trying to look normal on top of all that can be the straw that sends the camel stark staring bonkers!

If you want a definition of the word supererogation it is this: to practise a Bach Trio Sonata for four years alone in a church for two hours a week and then to record it without another living soul ever hearing it. If that is not ‘beyond what is called for’ (since nobody called for it) what is?

So why? For me wrestling the notes of this beautiful but intractably hard piece into my feet and fingers was probably the same reason others climb mountains or do endurance running. In facing your limits and not allowing yourself to be beaten by your incapacities and human frailty you do touch the void that is within /around /beyond us, yet also intimately part of us. 

For some this place beyond language and controlled emotion arouses fear. And in that place lies awe – awe at the coherence of the macrocosmos and microcosmos, awe at the existence of existence, awe at the nature of life and the phenomenon of love; and more than anything awe at how all these elements are held in balance. So doing these ‘weird’ things is just my way of honouring and being present with this ‘presence’. 

Maybe it’s just the mettle from which composers are struck; but I’ve always had a strong sense of this inner Otherness. From its mysterious darkness arises the impulse to make music which is akin to the impulse of a spring to flow or grass to grow. For most of my adult life I’ve endeavoured to configure the shape of my ideas to other people’s expectations; but my return to organ playing after the age of 60 was of no interest to anyone. It was within the ’s-/place’ of solitary organ practice that I was alone with the great glistening peaks of the organ repertoire – as alone with them as a mountaineer grappling with the external elements – yet here it was me against myself. A true definition of idiocy 

Normal people do such things with others and so their world requires no analysis and thought – and if I knew anyone who wanted to the same things Id do it with them, but I dont, so I do  it alone.

Eventually the challenge of a Trio Sonata hove into my sight line. They’re marvellous music, but stinkingly hard because Bach treats the pedals as a third equal manual and, with only one line of music in each part, there is simply nowhere to hide - every aspect of the performance is exposed to scrutiny at all times. 

The inherent difficulty of playing with your feet is mitigated when the pedal part is in contrast to the manuals, because this gives your brain a way of differentiating the action of your lower limbs from your fingers, but when they’re treated as equals, as Bach does in the Trio Sonatas, the nature of the mental complexity parallels and magnifies the physical demands. Anyway, that has been the grist of my organ grinding for the past four years, not exclusively, for I have learnt and recorded a range of other music as my uTube site shows. 

It has been said that Bach is the best argument for the existence of a God; I would prefer to say that the extraordinary /graceful /resourceful order within Bach’s music puts us in touch with a profound wholeness in which it is possible to believe that there is an implicate ordering within the universe that is too consistent to be accidental. 

I have always believed Bach was a savant, which is why he was capable of multidimensional calculation far exceeding the capacity of normal minds. Yet even this doesn’t explain why or how he did what he did; and an explanation for that, it seems to me, must lie in the relationship of his conscious mind to his inner ‘otherness’—his continuous, practiced openness to the wellsprings of Life. Choose your own vocabulary for this. For Bach didn’t just write music ‘the way a sow pisses’ (to quote Mozart) he did it always with conscious intention to express a quality of order that was real to him. He could have got away with the sort slapdash approach to craftsmanship that his great contemporary Handel exhibits, but Bach never does that. Every manuscript is exquisitely finished and all the musical arguments elegantly dovetailed into a perfectly proportioned space. And I believe he did that because he knew he was profoundly ‘heard’; he knew or felt that he was performing the opus dei - paying tribute to source of existence. Tho Bach could never have known of the Indian mystic Kabir’s phrase  The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me - for the ear of the universe is itself the hearer Yet, to me, this offers the most credible explanation for the dedication and devotion that Bach showed in everything that he wrote, and forms one of the greatest free gifts any individual gave to humanity.  

So that’s what I spent 4 years doing while noone was watching!

Incantabulation

My live premiere of Incantabulation is now on uTube. It’s not perfect but it gets the general idea across. I may re-record it over Easter.

I don’t know what sort of sense it makes to anyonelse but I feel some satisfaction that over the last six months (actually) I have pursued this particular dragon to its lair, wrestled with its attempts to throw me off and ultimately tamed it. For me capturing these twists and turns of emotion represent the refinement of much despair (at my incapacities /imagination /endurance) into a tangible object, as opposed to so many ‘raids on the inarticulate with inadequate weapons’ that have ended in failure, or resulted in me fastening a very fine sword in a silent stone that awaits some other Arthur to draw it out ... my choral music, which is where my real genius lies. But here in this piece my strengths and weaknesses are on display, and indeed integrated, in a way I'm happy to acknowledge, as an important step towards the elusive inner music I’ve spent my life trying to capture.

Does this matter, and if so to whom? Well, from the deep depressions of my adolescence I’ve been driven by the belief that if I could release this inner music I would not merely make myself whole but provide a template of wholing for others. Right or wrong, the many twists and turns of my life have represented an attempt to pursue the wholing process; yes, selfishly perhaps, but from the feeling that unless I could unify my field of vision (find emotional integrity) I had nothing else to give.

Jung believed that making a mandala was an important part of the healing process of externalising and balancing both one’s light and dark within the integrity of a circumference. So you could view Incantabulation as part of that idea.

We live in dark times and it’s tempting to try to sync with that dark zeitgeist to hitch a free ride, but I have always felt a calling to try to find & express a quality which offers hope or belief in light. This cannot (for me) be discovered simply through prettiness but has to be earnt from the muck and mire of existence. So I have always held to the belief that what I have been shown to express in composition are the sounds which await those who are also working to bring about worthwhile change. And the concept of martyrdom shows that sometimes the most effective way of bringing about change is by ‘losing’, submerging the needs of an individual in the greater goal of bringing a new world into existence. So I have felt my enforced silence was a price worth paying if it is the cost of being true to my principles.

We are all descendants of contradictions, and thus our integration is in and of itself an important resolution that our parents and grandparents need to see played out in this ‘only world of choice’ for them to understand that their lives too were ultimately worthwhile. And so it will be for us when our children take on our dreams and grow them into flourishing realities that we could barely glimpse.

Poem: The Secondhand Book

I am a book, remaindered on a shelf.

  O take me down and dust me off,

    I still can bring delight.

Once I was new and valued for myself,

  My pages bright, my boards of cloth –

    Ah then I brought delight.

Now on the lower shelves the readers browse,

  While I look down and mutely sigh

    I still can bring delight.

There once I welcomed readers to carouse

  With me enthralled and hold me tight,

    For then I brought delight.

I can’t believe it’s over and I must

  Resign myself to indifference

    While still I hold delight?

Tho faded my jacket and on my top sits dust

  If opened up my heart holds sense

    And still can bring delight.

Reflections on poetry hunting to compile a program of Savile poets. March 2019.

Poem: Clouds

I wish I could cherish 
The uncertainty. I wish 
I could float above 
The void like a cloud,

Happily ignorant 

Of the precipices

And chasms, and of 

The beautiful river plains 

As well – just drifting, 

Fulfilling the role 

Assigned to me 

By circumstance.

Looking ahead 

I would know that whatever 

I did was going to 

Turn out OK; not 

Because I knew 

What was coming,

But because I didn’t. 

Looking behind 

I could see no trace

Of where I’d been,

Or what I’d done.

But that wouldn’t matter 

Because I rained 

Or shaded 

Or evaporated

On cue. 

I had a shape on earth

But left no mark. 

I belonged but 

Never over-stayed. 

I made life possible 

For others without 

Colouring their minds. 

I removed myself 

For their celebrations;

Yet enfolded their doubts

With gloomy darkness. 

I had no need of companions

But never traveled alone. 

I was but was not. 

I became without form. 

I made no move but

encircled the earth. 

I was always 

The obedient servant

Of the sun.

5/2/19