Clay: Themes and Variations from Ancient Mesopotamia
October 2018
Clay: Themes and Variations from Ancient Mesopotamia imaginatively reworks sixty ancient texts in a multiplicity of styles, reflecting the marvellous variety of the source materials and their inextinguishable relevance in the modern world. The first part of Clay includes several tales that have become familiar from other sources: notably two creation narratives, the Mesopotamian flood story and an epic of self-discovery. The second part explores themes of sexual love, marriage, birth, death and atonement. Witty, illuminating, entertaining, and suffused with human feeling, this spectacularly designed book is inventively written in a mix of verse and prose. Clay also includes 129 original images by artist Debbie Loftus, as well as an Afterword, a Who’s Who of characters, a map of ancient Mesopotamia and illustrations of two key cuneiform tablets from the British Museum. Reaching back across five millennia, Clay creatively invites the reader to revisit ideas and customs from ancient Mesopotamia and to consider their ongoing importance for the way we live now.
Images by Debbie Loftus © 2018
Casebound, 340 x 260 mm, 210 pages, 131 illustrations. Designed by Esterson Associates. Paper by Fedrigoni. Published by O/Modernt, Cambridge and Stockholm, October 2018. ISBN: 9780992891268
The Temple of Ningirsu: The Culture of the Sacred in Mesopotamia. Two volumes in a slipcase, 280 x 230 mm, 812 pages, 276 colour illustrations. Lead author Sébastien Rey, British Museum curator and director of the Girsu Project, an ongoing collaboration between the British Museum and the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH). Published August 2024 by Eisenbrauns, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, in association with the British Museum, London. With contributions from Angelo Di Michele, Elisa Girotto, Holger Gzella, Fatma Husain, Ashley Pooley, Jon Taylor and Paul Williamson. Working very closely with Sébastien Rey over a period of about two and a half years (from November 2020), Paul Williamson wrote the complete text of the book (nearly half a million words) and prepared the manuscript for publication, including reworking supplied texts and reports, and researching and writing up numerous original contributions.
For more information see the Long List.
Cutaway view of the Lower Construction on Tell K, dating back to around 2900 BCE. The principal sacred rooms were underground, accessed by a sloping walkway (on the left) and visible from a viewing gallery above.
A reconstruction of the upper layers of Tell K in the reign of Ur-Nanshe (c.2460–2425 BCE), showing the stepped mound, with the temenos wall enclosing the temple (centre) and the newly identified brewhouse (right).
A reconstruction of Gudea's fabulous New Eninnu on Tell A, with the partially completed temenos wall, the impressive temples to Ningirsu (left) and his wife, the goddess Bau (right), and the smaller, older Eninnu built by Gudea's father-in-law, Ur-Bau (front left). Gudea reigned from about 2125 to 2100 BCE.
The Hellenistic Eninnu, built above Gudea's Sumerian temple complex on Tell A, after the conquest of the region by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE. The revived temple was dedicated jointly to Ningirsu and Heracles, who were syncretised at that date. Alexander's operative, Adadnadinakhe, who oversaw the construction works, exhumed the famous statues of Gudea and displayed them in specially designed niches in the Hellenistic shrine.
Written in blank verse, Ekphrasis examines four works shown by Richard Serra at Gagosian Gallery, London, 2008: Fernando Pessoa (2007–8), TTI London (2007), Open Ended (2007–8) and Forged Drawing (2008). The sequence is punctuated by an interlude devoted to Verb List Compilation:Actions to Relate to Oneself (1967–8). Ekphrasis includes an essay by Simone Kotva and Paul Williamson’s afterword, ‘Pyrrhics!’.
Contents
1 Point of View
2 Composition
3 Interlude – Light Continua
4 History
5 Coda – The Thing Itself
Drawing Out by Simone Kotva
Pyrrhics!
In ancient times the word ‘ekphrasis’ meant the oratory of vivid description, a style of speaking that addresses itself to the listener’s imagination. Over many centuries the term acquired a narrower focus: ‘the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art’, runs one influential, modern definition. Famous poetic instances include Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad, John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. Pursuing classical threads through a group of significant works by Richard Serra, Ekphrasis sets itself the ambitious task of using blank verse to create a thought-provoking addition to a literary tradition that is at least three thousand years old.
Festival O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm, 2014. Paperback with flaps, 210 x 270mm, 72 pages, 18 tritone illustrations. ISBN 978-0-9928912-0-6
Ekphrasis | Part 2 Composition
Ekphrasis | Part 4 History
Ekphrasis | Part 4 History
A Cantata in Eight Movements
Music by Thomas Hewitt Jones
Words by Paul Williamson
Prelude instrumental
The Temple choir
The Weaver’s Song soprano
Lyric Suite instrumental
Prometheus soprano, mezzo-soprano
Shadows in a Dream choir
The Birth of Pandora soprano, mezzo-soprano, choir
Coda instrumental
Based on themes deriving from the Parthenon sculptures, Panathenaia is a cantata in eight movements for string orchestra, timpani, soloists and choir. The Parthenon’s famous frieze shows scenes from the Great Panathenaia, the festival held every four years in Athens to celebrate the birth of Athena. Two parallel processions move along opposite sides of the building towards their finishing point on the east wall. Participants are grouped in succession – horsemen, chariots, elders, musicians, water-jar carriers, tray bearers, sacrificial animals, magistrates or tribal heroes and young women. The festival included athletics events, horse races, chariot races, and music competitions in which the winners were given special jars, filled with olive oil, decorated with an image of Athena on one side and a depiction of their sporting or musical discipline on the other. There was also a feast whose centrepiece was the roasted meat of the sacrificed cattle and sheep. The ceremonial high point of this grand public holiday was the presentation of the peplos or sacred cloth, newly woven to adorn an ancient olive wood statue of Athena Polias (Athena the city deity) that was kept on the Acropolis. This is depicted at the climax of the frieze on the east wall where the seated Olympian gods and goddeses wait and the dedication of the peplos takes place.
Panathenaia
Live from The British Museum
Featuring William Kunhardt (conductor), Paulina Pfeiffer (soprano), Karolina Blixt (mezzo-soprano), Hugo Ticciati (violin), Joanna Stark (bassoon), Christine Stevenson (continuo), VOCES8, and the Arensky Chamber Orchestra in collaboration with O/Modernt Kammerorkester.
To download the British Museum programme click here.
Click here to listen to an excerpt from the UK premiere of Panathenaia.
Live performance from the Parthenon Gallery at The British Museum, 4 June 2015.
Founded in 2011 by violinist Hugo Ticciati, the weeklong summer Festival O/Modernt is dedicated to the discovery of vital artistic connections between old and new. A composer and theme spark the creation of an expansive programme that brings together music, dance, art and literature, using daring and imaginative juxtapositions to confound habitual responses. The artistic journey back to the present takes place in June at Confidencen, Sweden’s oldest rococo theatre, set in the idyllic grounds of Ulriksdal Royal Palace on the outskirts of Stockholm.
For artists in every creative field the past provides a perennial source of inspiration. The Swedish ‘O/Modernt’ (translated as ‘Un/Modern’) celebrates this imaginative ‘looking back’ with innovative programming that explores vital connections between old and new.
Since its inception in 2011 Festival O/Modernt has embarked on an ambitious publishing programme, commissioning new pieces in prose and verse for anthologies in Swedish and English, notably Vertical Realities (2013) and Twofold (2015), publishing Ekphrasis (2014), a major work about the sculptor Richard Serra, a collection of articles and miscellaneous surprises about Van Gogh (2015) and a volume dedicated to The Art of Borrowing (2016). Summer 2017 sees the publication of Galileo 24, a book of consummate new paintings and drawings, based on Galileo’s paradox of infinity, by contemporary artist Debbie Loftus.
Festival O/Modernt
Inventing the past, revising the future.
Artistic Director Hugo Ticciati
General Manager Aude-Marie Auphan
Translator Michaela Beijer
General Editor Paul Williamson
Wolfe Von Lenkiewicz
Girl with a Pearl Earring, 2018. Oil on canvas, 450 x 400 mm
Image © Wolfe Von Lenkiewicz
Design: Teresa Monachino. Image: Man with a Vaulted Mouth, oil on canvas, 1992. © Martin Huxter. Click here to download the 2015 flyer.
Design: Deborah Duerr. Image: Trumpetaren, mixed media, 2005. © Didier Mazuru. To see the full programme booklet click here.
Design: Deborah Duerr. Image: Sylt, Kampen, Nordfriesland I (altered). © Natalia Mikkola 2017. To download the 2017 flyer click here.
Six London Preludes contains 317 photos by artist Debbie Loftus and six short narratives by writer Paul Williamson created in response to the contemporary London scene. Words and pictures tell the same stories in different ways, mixing genres, tones of voice, viewpoints and frames of reference. The design by James Lunn showcases and complements the content by including a range of Fedrigoni papers and page sizes, and using assertive typography to achieve a provocative urban feel characterised by edgy glamour. The result is a graphic novel that’s also an artist’s sketchbook, a luxury brochure and an unorthodox city guide.
Combining street art with classical motifs, the subject matter and design of Six London Preludes reflects the ‘Un/Modern’ ethos of its publisher, Festival O/Modernt, Cambridge and Stockholm. The eclectic contents are designed in a contradictory fusion of styles, with short inserts at the beginning and end of each chapter adding tangible variety. The debossed gold foil cover titles enhance the discordant luxury feel, and the book is section-sewn and Otabound. Exploiting digital technology, the exclusive first edition of 175 is numbered and each copy has a unique cover image.
Published by Festival O/Modernt Cambridge/Stockholm
Paperback 250 x 176mm / 342 pages + 13 inserts
175 numbered copies with 175 individual covers
1 December 2017
ISBN: 9780992891251
‘Highly Commended’. Fedrigoni Top Awards 2019. Featured in the Berlin exhibition of award winners, Radialsystem, Berlin, 8–10 May 2019.
Nothing comes from nothing.
For most of its long history western art has been governed by that precept. Visual artists, writers and composers have gladly taken inspiration from their predecessors. The interest paid on artistic borrowings is new art – pre-existing forms refashioned to suit the ethos of a new age. In the seventeenth century a noisy debate erupted about the relative excellence of classical models compared to the newfangled discoveries of the wilful moderns. Then came the Romantics, worshipping at the shrine of original genius. In the twentieth century things turned full circle, with artists borrowing from the classics but also creatively reimagining the products of popular culture. Containing chapters devoted to the history of art, poetry, painting, photography, philosophy, theology and music, The Art of Borrowing takes a multifarious look at how, when the imagination reigns supreme, one thing leads to another.
Contents
The Spider and the Bee Paul Williamson
Eduardo Paolozzi and the Borrowing of Art Teresa Monachino
Hogarth’s Borrowings Robin Simon
A Venetian Ode to Borrowing Edward Baker
Airs Catherine Pickstock
It’s Still There: Döblin’s Alexanderplatz Lorenz Kienzle
Harvest Debbie Loftus
Borrowing Sex: Speaking of Divine Love Alessandro Scafi
Borrowed Gods Simone Kotva
Organic Wholes: Ralph Vaughan Williams and G.E. Moore Paul Williamson
Borrowing from Silence: Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel Hugo Ticciati
To read an extract from Paul Williamson’s introduction to The Art of Borrowing click here.
The Art of Borrowing
Edited by Paul Williamson
Published by Festival O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm 2016. Paperback with flaps, 190 x 265 mm, 160 pages, 73 illustrations. Designed by Teresa Monachino. Paper by Fedrigoni.
ISBN 978-0-9928912-3-7
Most people take great pleasure in listening to music, despite the fact that they often have little or no technical knowledge of how a piece of music is put together or how the principles of construction in western music have developed over a period of two and a half thousand years since Pythagoras passed the blacksmiths’ yard and heard the smiths harmoniously hammering on their anvils. So here’s the question: as well as enjoying music, how might we try also to understand it, armed only with our listening habits and possibly a sketchy knowledge of Grade 5 music theory? Answer: we do as the poor page did when he trailed along behind King Wenceslaus through the deep snow and the wild lament of the rude wind. We follow in the footsteps of the master, who in this case is Richard Taruskin.
The reason Taruskin is the master in this field is not simply because of his epic Oxford History of Western Music (2005) and his many other publications on a grand variety of musical topics. It is because of his method. Taruskin is, via a ‘commodius vicus of recirculation’ (to quote another master), a disciple of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), author of the first systematic attempt at a theory of history. The ‘world of the nations’, Vico said, was made by people like ourselves, and is therefore comprehensible to all of us. In order to understand the things that human beings have conceived of and accomplished, no matter where or when, we must try to rediscover the principles of their thoughts and actions within ourselves. We must strive, in Vico’s phrase, to rediscover their principles in ‘the modifications of our own human mind’.
Students of Vico include Erich Auerbach, author of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (first published in German in 1946), who said that criticism is ‘an art that works with scholarly material’; and the philosopher R.G. Collingwood, who said ‘all history is the history of thought’, and you only succeed in actually doing history when you can finally say, Yes! Eureka! [I added that bit] ‘I see what the person who made this (wrote this, used this, designed this, &c.) was thinking.’
In other words, in the study of music, as in every other human discipline, the technicalities are a means of expressing ideas. Focusing on the technicalities is vitally important (and there are few better at it in the study of music than Taruskin) but the context of ideas is what brings the technicalities to life – history, as Collingwood said, is the ‘history of thought’. In any case, the two are inseparable because the study of notes, adjectives or brushstrokes helps us to understand the turn of an artist’s mind, and the study of the broader purposes helps us to understand the notes, adjectives and brushstrokes. Criticism, as Auerbach said, is essentially imaginative and creative – ‘an art that works with scholarly material’. And this, I think, is the lesson of Taruskin.
In June 2012 Taruskin lectured at Festival O/Modernt in Stockholm. His subject was ‘Music and Words: Who’s Really on Top?’ – a discussion of Monteverdi’s dictum, ‘Music is the servant of the words.’ The lecture began at 6.00 p.m. At 8.30 (or thereabouts) there was a break for refreshments. At 10.30 the caretaker popped his head round the door of the beautiful rococo theatre (Confidencen, Ulriksdal Palace Theatre), where the lecture was held, and said we’d really have to stop because it was time for him to lock up and go home. Taruskin, as he said himself, lectures on a Wagnerian scale!
To read an article published in The London Magazine about Taruskin in Stockholm and Festival O/Modernt 2012 click here.
To read a programme note on Bach’s Christmas Oratorio click here, and to read about Benjamin Britten click here. To read about Pythagoras and the origins of music theory click here.
Posthumous portrait, painted by Barbara Kraft in 1819.
Programme notes for SSCS, 2011–17. Programmes designed by Peter Williamson (no relation!) whose company for many years worked very closely with Wigmore Hall. For details about individual programmes please browse the Long List here.
Programme note: HT/RT Epistolary.
Gainsborough’s Vision
This groundbreaking study of Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88), one of the most enduringly popular of British painters, provides a comprehensive re-examination of the intellectual and cultural context in which Gainsborough lived and worked. Close readings of individual pictures are supported by illustrations and citations drawn from an unusual range of sources: the populist and emotive culture of religious nonconformity; a philosophical and scientific outlook, epitomised by John Locke and Isaac Watts, based on self-scrutiny and careful observation of the external world; pastoral and emblem literature; eighteenth-century music theory; and the work of writers, including John Bunyan, Francis Quarles, Jonathan Edwards, William Cowper and Laurence Sterne. Detailed pictorial analyses clarify Gainsborough’s relationship with the work of his artistic contemporaries and predecessors – Hogarth, Hayman and Reynolds among Gainsborough’s British contemporaries; Rubens, Van Dyck, Ruisdael, Claude and Watteau further afield. The product of exhaustive research, Gainsborough’s Vision draws on previously unknown or neglected primary sources to demonstrate that the style, themes and ideas of Gainsborough’s images constitute purposeful expressions of an intellectual and visual culture whose significance in the development of eighteenth-century British art has gone unrecognised.
Gainsborough’s Vision
Coauthored with Amal Asfour. Liverpool University Press (Liverpool, 1999). Crown quarto, 341 pages, 186 illustrations.
‘Richly informative.’ George Steiner, The Observer.
‘A brilliant and original contribution to British art studies, combining new insights into Gainsborough’s social and intellectual context with fresh analysis of the works.’ Robin Simon, The British Art Journal.
Read more here.
Thomas Gainsborough, Ann Ford (later Mrs Philip Thicknesse), 1760. Oil on canvas, 196.9 x 134.6 cm, Cincinnati Art Museum.
‘On Reynolds’s Use of De Piles, Locke, and Hume in his Essays on Rubens and Gainsborough’, JWCI, 60 (1997), pp. 215–29.
