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.

What is farthest away is inside us

If people think they've found God without exploring themselves, they're mistaken. Contrariwise, if they claim to have found themselves without acknowledging the 'otherness within' then it's only a self they've found not the Self. For self & 'other' are twin poles of the same magnet. This duality means that what is most profoundly within is also the point throu which we connect to what is transcendentally outwith us. For this is the tangent of I & U, 0 & 1. Each of us has the potential to be the fulcrum of the universe.

Thoughts on BBCr3

The current house style of R3 cant be divorced from the general trends in broadcasting & these cant be divorced from the general trends in society, notably the twin drivers of capitalism & techno innovation.

As pro muso /composer (& BBCr3 producer in the 80s) who now teaches extensively & runs Cherubimtrust.org I've spent my life trying to connect art music to a wider public especially the young. The defining issue in broadcasting is that an audience is attracted by a whole range of factors in addition to the actual timbre of the content. Loathe CFM as I do you cant deny that it has been phenomenally successful. Tx to Darren Henley it's absolutely on the money for its audience. Therefore, as someone with experience of the world Id say why would R3 not want some of that? Broadcasting is a numbers game & it would be political suicide for any part of the BBC to forget that. Given the pressures that exist within the organisation where probably most of the upper management views classical music in roughly the same way politicians view the church - a rather quaint sacred cow! - IMO it's utterly unrealistic to think R3 could resist a strong demotic pressure. Exactly the same thing has happened in the broadsheets which cant escape the magnetic lure of tabloidisation. The various mediums are converging & as nobody's yet sure what shape future media platforms will come in, managers everywhere are trying hedge their operations by grabbing any passing kite & heading for the centre ground. So much for the digital dividend! 

My career as a broadcaster was ended by the Birt reforms (called with totalitarian genius Producer Choice); so I have every reason to hanker for the past. Old BBC hands say the coporation changes completely every 10 years - and I certainly saw that during my time as a broadcaster (not just R3). And it's now 2 (re)generations later. It's a technology driven business & technology creates consciousness which in turn gives rise to new mythologies (balance of probabilities). We who are on the outside may not agree with them & we may, as you do, seek to assert our perspective/s - that is q proper - but IMHO we have to negotiate from a current balance of probabilities. We do live in an age when the ability to read & literacy /raw data & knowledge are taken for the same thing. we cant expect R3 to be immune from such idiocy!

I spent sometime in California last year and was interested to listen to the classical radio stations there. They weren't by any means bad, but it was heavily formatted towards cap-C Classical repertoire, and a style of presentation known as reading the CD liner notes! And of course very little contemporary music & no live or new music whatever. It seems to me that the complaint of traditional listeners is that they're not being catered for. I rather suspect most would rather prefer Californian classical radio. But an attempt is being made by BBCR3 (eptly or ineptly) to interest younger & wider audiences. It's not the balance as Id call it, but I dont think it's a bad one - tho the rajar figures aren't exactly encouraging from the BBC's perspective!

As I think I said earlier, there isn't one answer. There're lots of different potential answers and requires constant experimentation to find which answers click in the current context. Thus it comes down to: how clever do you think the present regime are in handling these issues? Id give them a 7 for effort & a 6 for effect. The problem is when older listeners dont see the bigger picture, or rather use R3 as a whipping boy for the complaints about the modern world that wont stick anywherelse.

I tell you the difficulties of opening the spiritual breadth of 'heritage' music to those who brought up under the 'perpetual erasure' of electronic culture have never been more problematical when (state) schools no longer really even bother to teach it. That's the baseline from we're now all operating & I think we're lucky that R3 still has the budget todo as much asit does. Who can say The Proms isn't one of the greatest music festivals of the world, perhaps of all time?

Once upon a time most secondary schools had choral societies. There almost none of left at schools near here, because of the curriculum pressures & modern lifestyles. Where is the next generation of amateur choral singers to come from?

Nice Diary - 22 Dec 2011

Clancy went to work, I to the Léger museum. Seeing his big crude pictures whilst I am reading nobel psychology laureate Daniel Kahnemann's book 'Thinking fast, thinking slow' put what I wrote yesterday into perspective. Kahnemann talks about our two ways of seeing: the first glance and the considered reflection, which he calls (irritatingly) ‘system 1 and system 2’, but I would prefer to call 'prima facie' & 'second thought'.

What falls into place for me is that Léger and most subsequent 'art lite' is all prima facie stuff. Hunt as you will in Léger's work that isn't anything else: it's all WYSIWYG – and that has been the baseline for everything afterwards: this is art in the age of moving images, if it doesn't hit you at once, forget explanations– the artist has already lost you.

(In auditions you can tell the moment someone walks in the door if they are right for a part: if so the gig is theirs, tho they don’t yet know that, and all they have to do is be an idiot or so incompetent as to talk themselves out of it: contrariwise, you know just as surely if someone is not right and even the most brilliant auditon won't help them get the part. If only someone would explain this to actors how much grief could be avoided!)

In Léger I see the ideas and shapes as being about a clever manipulation of the semiotics of modernism. In his early work you see him trying for a style, but once he has found it the work becomes both more assured but also lazier and cruder, as if he no longer really needed to bother about meanings, because everyone ‘gets’ him – he has become a brand, as we would say today.

By a misfortune returning from Biot to pick up Clancy at the Diacosmie I got funneled onto the Voie Rapide and so was swept away from the banks of the Var where I'd been due to meet her and deposited on the other side of Nice. Luckily one of the Opéra drivers was available to take her home, so I decided to head onto Cimiez for my third attempt at finding the Musée Matisse. There I found what confirmed the thesis I've been evolving here – which is that Matisse was a key figure in what might be called ‘high concept’ art (to borrow a phrase from the film industry when a movie pitch can be summarised within a single breath). The reduction of high art to a single gesture, by stripping away ornament just as the International Style had stript ornament from architecture. From Matisse one can trace the progressive reduction of moral content, ie ‘intentional meaning’ in art. It’s interesting that dealers played off Picasso against Matise between the wars, to the extent that one of Matisse’s earliest collectors sold all his works to ‘get into’ Picasso ahead of the market.

Of course Picasso /Matisse /Léger had a full range of craft skills: but in subsequent generations these have become progressively attenuated until we reached the present position where Tracey Emin is appointed professor of drawing at the RA, no less – & it's far from certain she even knows how to hold a pencil, let alone use it!

Where this comes back to is the issue that if there is no otherness in art, no duende, nothing intangible that the artist is seeking to transmit, then WYSIWYG. There is only prima facie consciousness and no oppositio compensandum as Jung might have said: nothing with the roots that descend beneath the niveau mental, and correspondingly nothing that rises above it.

Nice Diary - 21 Dec 2011

I suggested we visit MAMAC (Musée d’art moderne & d’art contemporain) as we went by it and I imagined it would have a café for lunch. The museum is in the rear part of the National Theatre of Nice – a 70s complex built over the river Paillion in a style that can most favourably be described as misplaced optimism. Climbing the stairs to get there was as much as Clancy could manage. We sat in the foyer area and looked at the catalog. With a few exceptions it just looked like the biggest pile of tat imaginable. Seeing the American-inspired pop and post-pop artists they had we both thought simultaneously that future ages will look at this ugly rubbish and think “what were they are on?"

Before leaving Id watched Andrew Graham Dixon's series on modern American art and a thought arose from what he said; namely that most of the guys who 'hit' in the 50s & 60s saw themselves as outsiders. However, so long as they were outsiders they had a relationship with an ‘inside’ against which they were rebelling that anchored them a kind of counter balance – but once they themselves with all the dissidence and alienation were hailed as the true inside then there was no longer anything left to counterbalance their innate negativity or inner rebellious anarchy. So with their betes noires overthrown they themselves were in the position not merely of having all their dreams come true but of foisting those dreams on others – which is the unique privilege of the ‘insider’ in the mainstream. But that was a trap for them and society as a whole: for there was no longer any archetypal criteria of beauty. Their own conception of ‘beauty’ (aesthetically desirable) was an anti-beauty that they traced back to Duchamp, and really only existed as an anti-beauty – for it had within it no ‘sustainable’ aesthetic rooted in human psychological archetypes. But once they and their successors who desired to emulate their success began to believe their own publicity they were trapped in a mythography of ‘anti-beauty’.

Stumblingly, I'm trying to talk about Dharma in the arts – the sense of what we sense as truth or authenticity or vertu about and within an aesthetic experience. It is governed by one’s instinctive response/s to what the Japanese call shibui, the aesthetic of perfect economy, and/or GM Hopkins idea of ‘inscape’ – what irreducibly inherent within a work of art. If I call this ‘beauty as truth’ I don’t in any sense mean mere prettiness, I mean ‘what is primordial within a realised form'. The Sanskrit word satya is useful here, for it is used to denote truth but it literally means ‘what is enduring’. How long a thing persists in human experience is probably the best, if not the only, validation.

Ive always seen The Rake’s Progress as representing a comparable turning point in music, and it can be no accident that its 1951 premiere is roughly contemporaneous with what Dixon was describing in art. IMO The Rake’s Progress ushered in a whole sequence of composers who were misled by Stravinsky's brilliant gestures and surfaces but utterly failed to understand that the operatic medium demands the evocation of archetypal emotions as sine qua non and so English composers such as Goehr, Blake, Maw and others composed a kind of anti-opera which, while it may have been ‘good music’ utterly failed in its raison d’être as Opera. The old magician Stravinsky, like Nick Shadow in TRP, pulled off the emotion trick himself, but /and succeded in seducing a whole generation of composers who followed this false dharma and effectively shunted the whole ‘modern opera’ scene off into an art ghetto – as also happened to jazz.

As I write I have been listening to one of Frank Perry's tracks – a guy who really knows everything there is to know about dharma in music. And then on came Django and Stephane. The way Django keeps the sound live through an almost vocal vibrato is the playing of someone who understands that evoking empathy is 90% of entertainment.

Thought as Mass

During the night I had a significant dream – in which I was being interviewed by a couple of journalists in a tiny office crammed with bookshelves. We crowded around a card table which served as a desk. Underneath it there was an awkwardly-shaped box occupying the space where our legs wanted to go.

From this I saw that ideas actually do have mass. This led me to reflect on the relationship between ideas, their generation &/or exposition, and the deevelopment of mass. The ‘mechanism’ by which consciousness us converted into matter is the etherial property of numen – the excitement or ‘magical’ interaction between the stated idea and the response it triggers in others. This in turn is a reflexion of the extent of the probabilities it reflects or expresses in the minds of its audience.

This is most clearly seen in mass market music – whose raison d’être, as the title suggests, is to commodify the articulation by individuals of inchoate feelings arising within the zeitgeist. This process also exemplifies the power of certain ideas to achieve mass. And at the same time illuminates the relationship between intentionality and chance in the reification or concretization of ideas – namely, that ideas arising from predetermined coordinates (ie, traditional ethical or æsthetic perspectives) inherently lack the self-adjusting flexibility to assume dynamic coherence within the greater volatility of transient experience/s offered by today’s electronically-enhanced world.

Franz Liszt as teacher

In general, Liszt was over-indulgent, above all with female students. His kindness and his severity were expressed according to a special system that not all knew. When he saw that a pupil had absolutely no talent, he waived his right to correct the player, because, in truth, it served nothing. He began then to speak French – a bad sign that caused smiles among the initiated. When a female pupil finished her lesson and offered her forehead in order to receive the obligatory kiss if he commented "Trés bien" in a serious voice, she would leave radiantly, but the inner circle knew that the master spoke ironically.

Memoir by José Vianna da Motta

'The Fear'

Recently I finished uploading the last of my second dozen of Bach's 48 Preludes & Fugues which comprise Das Wohltemperierte Clavier. To me it's one of the great holy books of music & I know no better way of starting the day than playing one or two of them. In another two years(?) I hope to complete my project of recording the entire set.
    I started to think of recording them 3 years ago as I've played these pieces informally all my life (my copies are 50 years old next year!) but at that point I saw the colossal gulf that separates playing for personal re-creation & the rigours of recording - where you encounter all your short-comings in pretty brutal close-up!

    I believe that teachers should be forced to perform because it helps them to remain in touch with 'the fear'. From the comfort of a teacher's chair it's all too easy to forget this; and thus to lose contact with the core experience of a young learner.
    By 'fear' I mean the sense of uncertainty /anxiety that discovery of a new world always involves. If people wonder why teenagers become so bolshy, may not a lot be to do with the fact that they're herded like cattle throu all sorts of experiences they're not given time to assimilate, by an industrialised process of education that allows no variation for individual need/s?
    In music you see the downside of the current obsession with exam-mania & winning competitions at ever younger ages in the rising epidemic of stage fright which brings the hopes far too many high-fliers to a bitter end.  
    My system of using performances for motivation rather than exams is based on the belief that children benefit from developing a positive relationship with this 'fear'. In other words, of learning to respect 'the fear' & harnessing it, instead of just dismissing it so that it recurs in aberrant way. This means creating an environment where it's OK to fail - people gain the courage to jump higher if it doesn’t hurt to fall. 
    I've said elsewhere that I hold the educational system's drive to colonise & formulate every aspect of learning responsible for punk & the manifestations of underground music. If you were a young person confronted by people who were attempting to control & examine every aspect of an activity like music - which is pointless if not pleasurable - why would you not invent an anti-music that teachers & adults couldn’t 'invade & rule' as your own kind of tribal identity for oppressed youth?
    IMO teenagers need music as a 'rumpus room' where they can experiment with the subtle feelings it has the power to evoke, and become comfortable with the immense range of experiences it offers, at a pace and in a musical language they can relate to and, to a degree, control.
   That, even on paper, is likely to produce better balanced adults than the current system where those who can adapt to being pulled backwards throu hedges are given prizes and everyonelse has to fight their way past the thorns as best they may.

    After nearly 15 years of empirical experimentation with what leads youngsters to enjoy & gain value from piano my observation is that concerts provide youngsters with a controlable amount of 'fear', surmounting which builds their self-esteem, so encouraging an optimal learning pattern - which the young pianist can take as far & as fast as s/he wants. I take as much pleasure from the ex-pupil who is now a Porsche mechanic and, according to his mother, still plays (whose uTube 2006 video of Einaudi has now received 24,750 hits!) as the two who are now professional musicians.
    Don’t exams also do this? Maybe & no. Whatever you encounter within yourself in a performance motivated by communicating with an audience (& our parents are the only audience that ever really matters to us) is truly your own & remains with you. It is a nascent version the self-awareness you get from 'battle conditions', with the benefit that in an environment nurtured by a parental response you acquire confidence to extend your comfort zone. In exams you reach you peak nervous excitement by going into a room with a stranger in order to be judged. I just don’t think that is the experience that music exists for - & if you want to know what's at the heart of the central problem of why so many young learners just give up and the more ambitious suffer from nerves, then this partly explains it. And it also explains why so many young musicians have a kind of nervous breakdown after leaving college adapting to a world where the structures offered by this kind 'cruel cradling' fall away & they have to construct their own raisons d’être from scratch.
    In any education system worth the name, its ultimate purpose should be to encourage pupils to be present in their own learning process. The bigger issues are of course much more complex, but this underlying simplicity is often lost sight of; and I feel that it lies within the power of the arts to keep it alive when often elsewhere it is crushed by the dynamics of political control.
    (I should clarify that I don’t oppose all musical exams, I just don’t think they're relevant for most people in the early stages. I was interested to learn that as a general policy Eton no longer enters instrumentalists into the exams below Grade 5. This is the first institution I've heard of taking such an enlightened approach.) 
    So my way of keeping in touch with the creative uncertainties which my pupils necessarily experience is by such projects as recording Bach. Keeping such timeless beauty alive for its own sake is also how cultural memory is preserved.

Four Poems

Where you belong
may be a thousand miles away
or a millimetre.

The journey there
takes an instant
or a lifetime –

With the password allow
it’s short and tough:
without it, tough and endless.

Certain things cannot be said.

Certain things are.

Discovering silences within the babble

is like viewing the whole valley from a tower.

I see people
who have all life’s possesssions
yet know nothing.

Having nothing
yet possessing the pearl
I know which I prefer.

I battle to be heard;
yet to tell the truth
is to be heard.
Not yet, but forever.

Lakshmi

Our Labrador died on Monday at the ripe old age of 16. I was struck by how Clancy & I acted to suppress the great emotions aroused by the death of a much-loved friend with a 'keep calm & carry on' response. She was, as Clancy said, one of the truly good people who brought blessings into the lives of all who knew her.
But this experience made me think how rare death and incurable illness are these days, and how we've built up such protections against what 'undermines' our conscious control of our lives. When you couple that with the fact that so many one-time miracles are now part of everyday life, it's very hard for people to find numen or 'true magic' in their lives. Possibly the only easily-accessed route is sex, but the problem is that if you overload that with expectations you often bury the very thing you're hoping to find.

Rock of Ages

My composition starts as a private engagement, an act of listening to the otherness within, a kind of peering into the darkness /silence to encounter what might be there apart from one's own ego. Of course, objectively, there is nothing 'there' - for it is all within you: but subjectively one is looking for or responding to subconscious ideas, inklings, that have some kind of hook to them, like the end of a riddle of string that one can grasp and slowly tease out. It is then pure chance whether one can keep that original emotional reality alive during the time it takes to unravel the knot into a single piece of string. The demands of everyday life can bring distractions that sever one's connexion to the original emotional reality and cause one literally to lose the thread: tho paradoxically it can work the other way, for if the distractions are destructive, fighting (/surrendering) to retain an inviolate inner world can nourish both.

Some composers are fortunate: paid commissions and royalties buy time. But I have neither, and from experience of the way my subconscious works it seems that substantive ideas don’t come to me until I'm overloaded with obligations: THEN my psyche adds a straw to the burden which feels like my 'next step' that is imperative that I honour if more are to follow (in other words it's my Live Channel) even if this involves the wrestling of a 25th hour from the day.

For most people ideas come in response to their social milieu. But that is never how it's been for me. When I first became conscious of having an autonomous inner world when I was about 13 (I see now it had begun about 4 years earlier with disturbing dreams) I had no idea that everyonelse didn’t. Gradually it dawned on me that I was immersed in an educational system that had only one purpose: not to encourage personal discovery but to manufacture conformity. My failure to find a composition teacher then or subsequently has meant that I had to evolve into the kind of teacher I needed to find, but couldn’t manifest. This process has a) taken all my life & b) involved so many blind alleys filled with broken glass, so many seductions by the lazy blandishments of normality or cheap acceptance, so much weighing of honour with need, and so much sheer lostness that I've learnt to function as a sociopath.

After 25 years of furiously refusing to fit into anyonelse's box I realised I was never going to capture the castle from outside. By my social deviation the front door was permanently barred to me: but who needs front doors when you're a sociopath & can just as easily enter by a rear window? So I spent the next 25 observing & copying 'normal' people (with the cover offered by the supreme grace of a loving wife & family). At first I had no rapport with my inner world, and what little understanding I did have came throu my involvement with evangelical Christianity. Whereas in professional music my versatility was viewed with suspicion, in drama it was greeted with open arms: in 1976 alone I had 34 drama commissions, and I loved the technical challenges of broadcast music.

After about 10 years, what triggered a change was awaiting my turn to edit a commercial at Moving Picture Company. Behind the smoked glass of each cubicle the cream of Britain's film-making talent were all involved in fine tuning ecstatic hymns to consumerism. I thought: humanity has created the greatest information medium of all time & all the smart money is on prostituting it in order to corrupt people for profit. I as much as anyonelse was involved because I couldn’t make anything else work for me; but OTOH I knew by then that what I had been given was, if not unique, at least rare: and none of what I was then doing was bringing me closer to what was authentic to the inner world I occasionally glimpsed.

It was not longer after, 12 Dec 1989 to be precise, that I had an overwhelming dream which empowered me to take the first tottering steps towards walking off the edge of that world. I rationalised the hazard to which I was exposing my family by my feeling that I was useless to them as much as anyonelse unless I could discover who I truly was. The dream involved the classic alchemical symbol of the midnight sun, a blazing numinous darkness, in which I was given the name of Sai Baba. It, & he when I discovered who he was, gave me light that guided me in a dark period that lasted nearly 20 years. Gradually in that dark wilderness (tho I always had dreams & schemes that generally failed) little nuggets of gold began to cohere; little clusters of gases that swirled around in my mind, slowly giving rise to solid matter: some formed into coherent ideas, some evaporated. One of the first of the former was what I now call Canticle 1, Easter Dawn in 2004.

Easter is always a spontaneously significant time in my inner calendar. Nearly all my big changes seem to crystalise around that time. If I imagined that this piece would easily find an audience, I couldnt've been more wrong! Gradually I became aware that just as I had had to find my-self without a teacher so I would have to validate my inner hearing without the 'luxury' of outer hearing. (This is somewhat akin to learning to love yourself without a partner: tough, but it can be done.)

Whereas I couldn’t do much about making my choral music heard, because it's too difficult for amateurs & I can't command professional resources; when I'd composed Fortress of Illusion in 2009, after an epic battle with my 'Nessies', my personal demons of lostness, hopelessness & pointlessness, I realised that here at least I could endeavour to give my child a voice. When composing, if Id thought of my own limited pianistic abilities Id've self-censored what I wrote. And the final result was so far beyond what Id ever tackled that learning it took me a year (it took my final duo partner just 10 days, but that's the difference between our skill levels!). I imagine many composers find the journey from a work's silent & eternal perfection in their mind to its squawking imperfections during preparation & real-isation involves both exciting and painful experiences.

Prophets has yet to make that journey, and I don’t know if it ever will. But that’s cool. What is important to me is to improve my inner hearing and amanuensiary capacities. Here is where I stand before that inner otherness (that some people choose, and other people choose not, to call God) in a meaningful relationship in which I both hear and feel heard. And from this, as slowly as water drips from rock, emerge these little piddles of spring water. This nourishes me, regardless of what it does for anyonelse, and that reflects how karma works: we are only required to do what is constructive, then leave the outcome open.

Sonnet: Seasons

So great to have the gift of words return!

For like virility, it comes unearned,

indeed if sought more likely stays away

leading to greater alienation. Pray
tho you may, or pay what you will,

when winter comes you must endure until

your spring returns.
                            While summer is less than half
the year, we still expect a sunny life path
all year long; and quickly run for pills

when autumn mists enfold us with their ills.

Each winter tries what use we make of sun:

whether we nurture gifts, or allow fun
to seduce our better selves with pointless thrills.

A harvest rich in words … or unmet bills?

Sonnet: Pœtry

Pœtry is a season of the soul,

elusive as the autumn mist; whose role

is in contrast to the summer heat

when all is out of doors and plain to see –

and so for me tonight as words return

unexpectedly. From which I learn
my soul’s once more in reflective mood
after nine months’ stürm und drang, with time for soul food

and relaxation after work well done.

Time now for pause and thought and new beginnings,
a time to listen more than speak; once more 

to go within, and start anew to explore

being not doing, heedless of gaining and winning …

re-formed from many atoms into one.

Brhadaranyaka Upanishad

Book 4. Chapter 3

2] Yajñavalkya, what is the light which everyone sees?

The sun, your majesty. By sunlight everyone sees whatever they need.

3] But when the sun has set, Yajñavalkya, what guides them then?
They have the moon your majesty. By moonlight everyone finds what they need to.

4] When both Sun and Moon are covered by clouds, then what guides them?

Fire. By firelight everyone is led to what they need.

5] And when there is no fire?

The voice is their guide. Even when you cannot see your own hand before your face, you can still go towards the sound of voices.

6] And if there is no voice?

One’s inner self becomes one’s light. By it you guide your steps.

7] What is the self, Yajñavalkya?
Among all the senses there is an inner consciousness which consists of intelligent understanding, like a light within the heart: this is the self. A constant presence, this consciousness, which ultimately transcends death, moves freely between the two worlds in sleep, transcending our physical constraints by appearing to contain both the power of thought and movement.

8] At birth this consciousness is formed within temporal reality. At death it relinquishes it. 

9] This consciousness has two states: that of this world and that of the other world. Yet there is also an intermediate state, the twilight world of sleep. From it we see the other two, this world in which we live now, and the other world that is beyond it. Entering the intermediate /dream state we see into the other world and encounter both positive and negative messages.
When you fall asleep, you carry with you all the matter of your waking experience. (But within dream) it is actually your own self which creates and destroys whatever appears. And here the light of your own consciousness is your guide.
10] There are no chariots, no distances, no roads; yet within there appear chariots, distances and roads. There are no joys, no pleasures, no delights (yet you experience them nonetheless). There are no baths, no lotus-pools, no rivers; yet you find baths, lotus-pools and rivers - for your self is the creator.

11] On this there are these verses:
In sleep you sift and blend physical sensations: 

and conscious in the world of dreams you see all.
Like a lonely crane on a long flight you absorb 
this pure energy
and so return to your body transformed.
12] Having placed protection around your earthly nest (your sleeping body) 

you are free to soar to the realm of the immortals. 

Wherever you choose to go you are that high-flying bird 

searching for transcendence and transformation.
13] In dream you visit both heavens and hells with the powers of a god – 

amazing the manifold forms of which you’re creator. 

You take your pleasure with partners, laugh – 

or else encounter nightmares: everything appears real.
People you know may appear in this world at your will:
but you they never see.

14] They say you should not waken a deep sleeper - for someone whose spirit doesn’t reunite with hir body can become deranged. Some claim there’s no difference between sleep and waking – for one sees similar things whether awake or asleep – yet everything you see in sleep is created by your own imagination.
Worthy sir, continue! said King Janaka. I will give you a thousand cows for guiding me toward liberation.

15] Serene in sleep, you follow your bliss and encounter many experiences, both good and bad, yet before returning to your body you will have encountered truth (whether you recognise it or not). Here whatever you see does not imprison your soul, for this state is free from all attachments. 17] Awake, you (also) follow your bliss and encounter many experiences, both good and bad, before returning to your dreamworld. 18] So as a great fish swimming freely hither and thither between the banks, in sleep your consciousness swims freely between the other world and everyday life.
19] Eventually, as an eagle tired after a high flight folds its wings and swoops back down onto its nest, so too this inner self hastens back to your sleeping form, desiring nothing further and forgetting what it has seen.
20] A 1000 times smaller than the arteries (hita) of the heart are the meridians down which the body’s energies run – (which we call) white, blue, yellow, green, and red.


Now when it seems you’re about to be killed, or captured, or chased by an elephant or that you fall into a pit, this is only the ignorant mind reliving waking fears – but when, like a god or king, you experience wholeness then that is the highest state of being. 21] This is a person’s deepest place, beyond desire, free from evil, free from fear.
Just as someone making love to their partner is oblivious of everything else, so in this inner embrace of self and soul humans experience the fullest wisdom of which they're capable. Here all wishes are fulfilled, for one is preoccupied with the transcendent self alone, and thus without material desire there is no consequential sorrow.

22] Here the father is no longer a father, mother no longer a mother, ecstasy no longer ecstasy, the Vedas no longer Vedas. Here a thief is no longer a thief, an abortionist no longer an abortionist, an outcast no longer an outcast, a mendicant no longer a mendicant, an ascetic no longer an ascetic. Each one now attracts good not misfortune, for all are beyond heart-sadness.
23] Tho in this state your eyes cannot see, yet in your inner vision there is no distinction between seer & sight since both are part of one integrated being. For there is nothing else, nor can anyonelse see what you see.
25] Tho in this state your cannot taste, yet in your inner world there is no distinction between taster & what is tasted, since both are part of one integrated being. There is noonelse to taste anything.
27] Tho in this state you cannot hear or speak, yet in your inner world there is no distinction between what is heard & what is spoken, since both are integrated. Noonelse can know what has been uttered.
28] Tho in this state you cannot think or touch, yet in your inner world there is no distinction between thinker & thought, or toucher & what is touched, since both are one integrated being. Noonelse’s senses or understanding are involved. 30] Similarly, encountering wisdom within oneself is an indivisible experience.

31] When someonelse is present you can compare your comprehension of what you’ve experienced. 32] But in great ocean of dreams you become one unified being, without duality: this is the world of Brahman (universe /universal consciousness). This is at once the highest path, the highest attainment, the highest reward and greatest satisfaction a human being can know. It is this bliss from which all other activities borrow: yet in those, people declare themselves thrilled by the merest fraction of what can be encountered within.

Aphorism

Don't play poker with a snake – the snake always wins.