Category Archives: Music composition

When sound spirals through time…

When I first heard Stevie Wishart’s “Hildegard” it blew me away as though this was the delivery I had been waiting for. Hildegard von Bingen has been a wayshower in my life for many years and wayshowers are not meant to remain pickled in aspic…they are the fluid paths of sensation that take us on voyages of discovery outside of time and tradition! I particularly love that Wishart shows no fear in bringing modern interpretation and methods including electronica to this timeless music’s expression which must, surely, be the way music (of all things) is meant to go now; no longer prepared to remain walled up in a dark tower of tradition and stiff academia. Like the feminine aspect herself, “she” is letting herself down from all such brick towers and is now to be found running and pirouetting barefoot across the grass in a garden of a “place” that HvB was more than in communique with (long before her time). At its heart, her music was all about enabling spiritual ecstasy to be experienced here on earth and, well, that’s here now…as long as we let it out of its box. I suspect this music conveys the very frequency of such a release from darkness and hiding and the reunion with a place of the heart that is full of unmitigated light, hence its powerful effect upon those of us who resonate. Did HvB compose for our times as much (if not more so) than for her own? I suspect that, at some level, she did; knowing someone would step up to the task of carry her sound forwards as she intended…. (read on). Continue reading

Posted in Consciousness & evolution, Divine feminine, Menu, Music & theatre, Music composition | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

When you lose something you find something

Talking about a day of two loses on a very different scale and yet all strangely synchronistic…joined together by a song lyric. And there’s nothing like the “loss” of a living artist (though their offerings live on and on) to bring their work and motivations sharply into focus as we are suddenly inundated with retrospectives of their life’s output via every cultural channel there is; its like everything they were about is suddenly distilled down into an extraordinarily potent brew that we all get to take a sip of (if we choose to). So, maybe saturation in the mentality of an artist who never feared his most obscure offerings being ridiculed or rejected is just what is called for right now in a culture where popularity is courted as a measure of artistic success; a timely reminder that our best output, most probably, lies in a dark room from which we create our own version of light in a state of oblivion as far as the opinions of others are concerned and with no sense of an audience peering in at us. Maybe true creative genius is only unleashed once we learn to please ourselves above all others… Continue reading

Posted in Art, Art as a business, Art purpose, Art transformation tool, Artists, Biography, Consciousness & evolution, Culture, Entertainment, Life choices, Lifestyle, Music & theatre, Music composition, Personal Development, Social media | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Four and three-quarter seasons…

‘The New Four Seasons’ – complete with birdsong, electric guitar and didgeridoo – is all about the total reinvention of a piece of music that we thought we knew by heart…and it is also about very much more than that. When I heard it, I was much more deeply moved than I was prepared for and, in it, I have found an echo of something that is happening on a far broader scale; in our arts, in our world. Is it alright, or even possible, to play with an established composition – one as intricately complex as this – in a new way, to make it your own, to alter it? I find I want to say, the music itself is not sacrosanct; it is our creative urge and the need to allow that free rein that is. Kennedy has dared to show that music is certainly not sacrosanct and all the better for it; its as though the strictly demarcated ‘four seasons’ of our world (even the most intricately complex parts, most learned-by-heart aspects of it) have suddenly found room for something more, their edges blurred and expanded to fit more in, our very experience of them – of everything – softened, leaving us with far more than the sum of their parts. Continue reading

Posted in Art, Art metaphor, Art transformation tool, Consciousness & evolution, Culture, Entertainment, Life journey, Music & theatre, Music composition, Personal Development, Symbolic journeys | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Winter light

For some time now, like one of those playful little projects saved up for nothing but the enjoyment of doing them, I’d been meaning to compile a video made up my of all the tiny snippets of footage of winter … Continue reading

Posted in Animal art, Art, Art purpose, Art technique, Birds, Landscape art, Music & theatre, Music composition, Nature, Seasons, Social media, Walks | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Out of the flames, into the light

This week, a chance encounter with a very familiar piece of music led me to what feels like the final conclusion of a long-running sub-plot of my life; a subconscious sticking-point that has under-layered the whole of my ‘life as … Continue reading

Posted in Art, Consciousness & evolution, Culture, Films, History, Life choices, Light, Music & theatre, Music composition, Personal Development, Remembering, Spirituality | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment