How did Music originate?
The view that music evolved from animal calls is psychologically implausible. I would suggest the evolutionary pathway is as follows.The mechanism that permits human speech is a tiny bone called the...
View ArticleTawai
Bruce Parry is known to a wide audience from his BBC ethnographic documentaries where he has undergone tribal initiation rituals in many different aboriginal cultures. But now he has moved far beyond...
View ArticleDonald J Trump at the Pearly Gates
Hey howya doin’ St Peter?I got better gates than that.Pearl’s such a mess,You need gold to impress –And out front you’re missing a greeterWith a radio mic and top hat.Now here’s what you gotta doTo...
View ArticleLament for Jo Cox
Nine months from conception to realisation. A group of friends and Cherubim recorded it at the Savile on Guy Fawkes night. Not a bad record given that some of the compositions that mean most to me have...
View ArticleWhat is great music?
Maybe music falls into two main categories? One that meets our current expectations – the other that takes us beyond them on a journey to a larger space.Giving people what they’re familiar with is a...
View ArticleThe Quiet Spaces
The birth fairies give some people things they don’t understand or necessarily even want. Mine was to be given Faith. All my life has been about coming to terms with an experience of confidence in my...
View ArticleSetting Sally Purcell's Songs
Setting poetry to music involves a psychic intimacy which leaves the composer with a sense of a poet’s fragrance similar to the physical memory of a lover. To call the experience erotic is too easy,...
View ArticleWhat happens after the end?
I recently read a review, which I can’t give an exact reference for, in which the writer quoted an AngloSaxon archbishop writing in 1054 saying that the world is over, nothing more is to be expected...
View ArticleThe abdication of responsibility
The problem is that we cannot abdicate the political sphere to the cynics who say that decency and fairness are no longer possible, for that is what the power-hungry monsters want. (Look at Hungary or...
View ArticlePoem: The Trouble with Politics
The problem isn’t politicians, it’s us. We don’t want to think about things:We expect to be handed answers on a plate. We want our whims to be catered for Without cost. We resent taxes Yet expect...
View ArticlePoem: The Big Bang
A long time ago a meteor struck the earth: Life is its echo.A long time ago the paradox of life struck me: I am the echo.Researchers are just beginning to find out about the one – I am just...
View ArticlePoem: The Secondhand Book
Reflections on poetry hunting to compile a program of Savile poets. March 2019.
View ArticleIncantabulation
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...
View ArticleThoughts 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...
View ArticleThoughts 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,...
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Martinique Landscape - Gauguin
Battling with questions of honesty I encountered Gauguinfor the first time today in the Gallery. Viewed laterthere's inevitability about a masterpiece:but before the act of creation the canvas is...
View ArticleThoughts 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 -...
View ArticleRam 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.
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My Darling Grandchildren
My darling grandchildren: Phœbe, Vincent, Daisy, LyraWhat 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...
View ArticlePoetry - 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...
View ArticleLost 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...
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janmot
Poème de l'Âme - Louis Janmot IntroductionFreely translated and adapted from Poème de l’âme – un œuvre intempestive(Poem of the Soul – a timeless work) by Patrice BeghanPoème de l’âme is a cycle of...
View ArticleRoger 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...
View ArticleMichael 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.
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