A Long List — Wordstable

PUBLICATIONS | COMMISSIONS | PERFORMANCES | RECORDINGS

Main entries in chronological order (newest first), preceded by some highlights and ongoing projects.

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.

Publisher’s synopsis. Between 2016 and 2022, a team from the British Museum conducted excavations in the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, the sacred centre of the state of Lagash. On an archaeological mound referred to as the Mound of the Palace, or Tell A, they discovered the ground plan of the fabulous Temple of Ningirsu, built by the ruler Gudea around 2125 BCE. Deep in the heart of the mound, the excavators also exposed the remains of a series of older Sumerian shrines dating back to Early Dynastic times (2900–2350 BCE).

The magnificent remains of Sumerian Girsu were first investigated by groups of French archaeologists between 1877 and 1933. Digging at great speed and using the industrial-scale methods characteristic of their era, the French pioneers unearthed extraordinary buildings and treasures, but they also left behind an unhappy legacy of confusion and gaps in the archaeological record. This two-volume study not only presents the new results of the British Museum team; it also reconsiders and recontextualizes the French reports to produce an indispensable history of the sacred complexes in Girsu over a period of nearly three thousand years. With full-colour reconstructions of the principal buildings and installations, as well as many redrawn plans and sections, this lucidly written study re-examines the history of the exceptionally complete series of archaeological structures built on Tell K and Tell A from the beginning of the third millennium BCE to the fourth and third centuries BCE.

Substantial contributions to volume 1 (Tell K) by Paul Williamson include: The geometry of Gudea’s Pillar of Bricks (pp. 123–9); the orientation of the Lower Construction and the bitumen-coated cavities (pp. 166–73); the Tessellated Earth (pp. 193–202); the revision of the catastrophic fire hypothesis and the post-Ur-Nanshe sequence in the upper layers of Tell K (pp. 223–9); the analysis of the Ur-Nanshe plaques, including the proposed chronology and the cutting down of Plaque B (pp. 229–36 and 278–9); the Brewhouse, including the layout of the building, the functioning and capacities of the open fermenting tank and the conditioning vats (pp. 269–74); the Bull Lyre symbolism (p. 281); the thematic meanings of the silver Vase of Enmetena and the Dudu plaque (pp. 293–7).

Substantial contributions to volume 2 (Tell A) by Paul Williamson include: Gudea’s metrology and the interpretation of Statue B, including the idea of the standard unit, understood with respect to Gudea’s bricks as an early instance of number theory (pp. 581–90); the positioning of Gudea’s temple complex with respect to the North Star (further developing on the tessellated earth thesis proposed in Chapter 14), together with seasonal and mensual solar and lunar cycles as observed from the temple site (pp. 591–7); identifying and locating the positions of Gudea’s Gates, the Monuments to the Slain Heroes and the Gudea Steles, as listed in the Cylinder Inscriptions and correlated with the ground plan (pp. 597–615); the theological meaning of the clay nails (pp. 654–7) and the meaning of the Gudea foundation deposits more generally, including the possible theological influence of Ur-Bau (pp. 665–9); the Bricks of the New Eninnu, including the discussion of the ceremonial production and laying of the first brick (which was rectangular rather than square) and the Lego models of some Gudea walls (pp. 630–42); the Babylonian–Hellenistic revival of the Eninnu after the conquest of Babylonia by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE (pp. 683–6); the pivotal role of Alexander in the creation of a Hellenistic Eninnu dedicated to Ningursu–Heracles (pp. 724–43), including the shrine’s personal significance to Alexander, the meaning of the ceremonial name Adadnadinakhe and the importance of religious and mythical syncretism in its revival (pp. 740–1).

Aspects of Sumeromania: The History of the British Museum’s Girsu Collection. Editing and extensive rewriting of a comprehensive study of objects from the Sumerian city of Girsu acquired by the British Museum between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1930s. Lead authors Sébastien Rey and Gareth Brereton, with contributions by Jon Taylor, Krisztián Simkó and Paul Williamson (approximately 110,000 words). Notable contributions by Paul Williamson include newly located material from an archive of documents belonging to the Louvre curator Léon Heuzey (1831–1922) in the Institut de France in Paris (amounting to many hundreds of letters, maps and photos, dating from the 1870s to the 1920s). Forthcoming 2025.

Dante Alighieri: An Intellectual Biography. Detailed editing of a forthcoming book for a major publisher by Alessandro Scafi of the Warburg Institute, London. Ongoing 2024.

Thunderbird: A Temple Hymn from Ancient Sumer. Retold by Sébastien Rey (British Museum) with new artwork by French artist Christine Rebet. Book edited and produced by Paul Williamson, General Editor for O/Modernt publishing (Cambridge & Stockholm). Designed by Leo Field. Paperback, 180 x 150 mm, 104 pages. ISBN: 9780992891299. Published December 2020. Reprinted 2021.

From the press release: Thunderbird brings to life a temple hymn from ancient Mesopotamia that celebrates the power and splendour of the divine House of Ningirsu, built by the Sumerian ruler Gudea. Dating back 4,000 years, the hymn describes the earliest recorded dream in history – a divine commission sent to Gudea as an omen, along with the construction rituals for the temple of the god Ningirsu, who tamed the impetuous energy of the destructive, yet life-giving storm bird. The artworks shown in Thunderbird animate the metaphors of power and ideograms of the cosmos that are vital features of the hymn’s mythical framework.

O/Modernt and Hugo Ticciati, From the Ground Up: The Chaconne. Fifty-two page CD booklet with editing and main liner notes (3,400 words) by Paul Williamson. Other edited contributions include Irving Finkel (British Museum) on the trumpets of Pharaoh Tutankhamun and Hugo Ticciati on ‘Ground, Breath, Being’. CD released by Signum Classics, May 2019.

From the press release: From the Ground Up explores the history of the chaconne in Spain and Italy, and its acceptance into European high musical culture. In England it became a chief inspiration for Purcell, while in Germany it triggered the sublime achievement of Bach’s ‘Ciaccona’ from the Partita in D minor for Solo Violin. Also springing from this fertile soil are works by contemporary composers Johannes Marmén and Dušan Bogdanović, and three sets of improvisations – ‘Ground’, ‘Breath’, ‘Being’ – in which themes from Purcell are interlaced with overtone singing. Returning to the chaconne’s Renaissance roots, readings from Shakespeare by actor Sam West inspire extempore reflections by beat poet Baba Israel.

Clay: Themes and Variations from Ancient Mesopotamia. Casebound, 340 x 260 mm, 210 pages, 131 illustrations. Designed by Esterson Associates. Paper by Fedrigoni. Published by O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm, 15 October 2018, to coincide with the British Museum’s Ashurbanipal exhibition, curated by Gareth Brereton (8 November 2018–24 February 2019). Available from the museum’s bookshops. Paperback edition, designed by Leo Field, published in 2020.

From the press release: 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 and produced 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.

Sunlight through Stained Glass: An Interview with John Rutter. In this wide-ranging interview, composer John Rutter talks to Paul Williamson about his Mass of the Children (2003), a piece that has its origins in Rutter’s experience of being a member of Highgate School boys’ choir, which sang on the renowned 1963 Decca recording of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, conducted by Britten. From a programme note for Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 2 July 2017.

JR: It was, in a way, quite a life-changing experience, because we were allowed to be at any of the recording sessions we wanted to, including the bits we weren’t singing in. And so, I and my school chum, John Tavener, and a cluster of others of us sat around with those black and white Boosey & Hawkes scores in our hands and watched the work unfold, which was quite remarkable.

The Art of Borrowing: Or How One Thing Leads to Another. Edited book. 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

Contents: Paul Williamson Introduction: The Spider and the Bee | Teresa Monachino Eduardo Paolozzi and the Borrowing of Art | Robin Simon Hogarth’s Borrowings | Edward Baker A Venetian Ode to Borrowing | Catherine Pickstock Airs | Lorenz Kienzle It’s Still There: Döblin’s Alexanderplatz | Debbie Loftus Harvest | Alessandro Scafi Borrowing Sex: Speaking of Divine Love | Simone Kotva Borrowed Gods | Paul Williamson Organic Wholes: Ralph Vaughan Williams and G. E. Moore | Hugo Ticciati Borrowing from Silence: Arvo Pärt, Spiegel im Spiegel.

From the introduction: Shakespeare, as Jonathan Bate writes, was probably ‘the first writer in Western high culture to be praised specifically for his artlessness’. This was a change in aesthetics on an unprecedented scale. Suddenly, the paragons of artistic excellence belonging to the classical past could seemingly be ignored altogether, to be replaced by ‘genius’, defined as an ‘instinctive and extraordinary capacity for imaginative creation, original thought, invention, or discovery’. In England the idea of ‘original genius’ as the basis of poetry took hold in the middle of the eighteenth century; as Bate says, it was ‘at the heart of the “Romantic” aesthetic which dominated the following century’. And there, to put the matter simply, began the long love affair with originality that raged for about 200 years, starting in about 1750, and which – for better or for worse – remains a motive force in western aesthetics.

Panathenaia. UK premiere, live in the Duveen Gallery at The British Museum, 4 June 2015. This special event was preceded by a lecture from Ian Jenkins, Senior Curator, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, and interviews (conducted by Ian) with the composer and the librettist. The event was staged in the context of the museum’s exhibition: Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art, curated by Ian Jenkins, 26 March–5 July 2015. A British Museum film of the live performance (produced by Patricia Wheatley) is available online here.

Review: ‘Powerfully moving … The swaying shadows of the musicians played against the frieze like dancing bacchantes.’ Huon Mallalieu, ‘Bodies Beautiful and Music of Time’, The London Magazine, August/September 2015, pp. 97–102.

Panathenaia. World premiere, Stockholm, 15 June 2014. Cantata in eight movements for soprano, mezzo-soprano, choir and string orchestra, including solo violin, oboe and harp, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones and a libretto by Paul Williamson. Commissioned by Hugo Ticciati for ‘Gluck and Neo-Classicism’, the 2014 edition of Festival O/Modernt, Stockholm. The premiere was preceded by a lecture, The Parthenon Frieze: A Symphony in Stone, given by Ian Jenkins, Senior Curator, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, The British Museum. The concert was accompanied by a rock-balancing exhibition by sculptor, Michael Grab. Performers: Mary Bevan (soprano), Karolina Blixt (mezzosoprano), Alon Sariel (theorbo), Mark Simpson (clarinet), Bram Van Sambeek (bassoon), Johan Bridger (percussion), Henrik Måwe (piano), Nicolas Dautricourt, Matthew Trusler, Hugo Ticciati (violins), Andres Kaljuste (viola), Martin Rummel (cello), Knut-Erik Sundquist (double bass), Will Kunhardt (conductor), and vocal ensemble, VOCES8.

List of movements: 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 (mezzo-soprano, joined by choir and soprano), and Coda (instrumental).

From the programme note: When John Keats saw the Parthenon reliefs he was moved by their tranquillity, a quality which he memorably transferred to his Grecian urn, the ‘foster-child of silence and slow time’. Wary of what Ian Jenkins calls ‘Periclean propaganda’, and again reflecting the spirit of O/Modernt 2014 as a whole, Panathenaia sets out to stress other, perhaps less obvious aspects of the classical example: its creative dynamism and its commitment to human values.

An Etruscan Acrobat. Dramatic monologue in blank verse (320 lines), commissioned by Festival O/Modernt 2014 for distinguished Swedish actor and director, Björn Granath (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2009; The American, 2010). Due to a last-minute change in his filming schedule, Björn was unable to read the piece, which was brilliantly performed as a duologue by Kristina Leon and Ingela Lundh of Stockholm’s English Speaking Theatre, with music provided by Hugo Ticciati. Ulriksdals Slottsteater Confidencen, Stockholm, 16 June 2014. Published by Festival O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm, 2014, in a limited edition, edited and hand-sewn by Simone Kotva, accompanied by a specially commissioned illustration by Martin Huxter.

From the back flap: A recipe for verse: mix together a phrase from Henry James with a little bronze statue from Etruria, a mention of Keats and some exasperation. Now add a clever woman, a sprinkle of hard words, a children’s bear and a few notes from an air by Bach. When all of that is thoroughly combined, place the resulting compound in a receptacle made of Roman streets, the Spanish Steps and the Borghese Gardens. Leave to rest in a warm place for an unspecified amount of time (you’ll know when it’s ready). Serve viva voce, with improvised accompaniment if desired.

Ekphrasis: Serra. A book in blank verse on the sculpture of Richard Serra, with an introduction, ‘Drawing Out’, by Simone Kotva, and an afterword, ‘Phyrrics!’, by Paul Williamson. Published by Festival O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm, 2014 (16 June). Paperback with flaps, 270 x 210 mm, 72 pages, 18 tritone illustrations. Designed by Dmitriy Myelnikov. Distributed by Gagosian Gallery online and in Gagosian Shop, 976 Madison Avenue, New York. ISBN 978-0-9928912-0-6

From the press release: 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 instances of such depictions in poetry are 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 four major works by Richard Serra that were shown at Gagosian Gallery in London in 2008, Paul Williamson’s Ekphrasis sets itself the ambitious task of using blank verse to create a vividly poetic and thought-provoking addition to a literary tradition that is at least three thousand years old.

Incarnation: A Suite of Songs for Christmas. Christmas song cycle in seven movements for SATB choir, orchestra and soloists, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones and words by Paul Williamson. World premiere performance: Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 9 December 2012, with Oliver Lallemant (conductor), Samuel Evans (baritone), Mary Bevan (soprano) and Harriet Hougham Slade (clarinet). Introduced by Petroc Trelawney of BBC Radio 3. The piece, which was subsequently released on a well-received CD (Regent Records, 2013), takes a historical and ultimately secular view of the Christmas story. It concludes with lyrics based on texts by Auden.

Movements: Advent, Falling, Wandering, Nativity, Planting, Revelling, Epiphany.

From the programme note: Depicting ‘luminous details’ with sparse directness and in significant, musical rhythms, Pound's In a Station of the Metro is concerned with the modus operandi of poetry and its strange, invigorating capacity to reveal previously hidden affinities. When St Ephrem juxtaposes images in the form of types and symbols the electric power of art is channelled to a specific end – that of giving the reader (the singer, the listener, the believer) an infinitessimal but spiritually significant glimpse into the ultimately unknowable nature of God himself. In both cases the fact that totality of meaning remains elusive provides a constantly fertile and self-renewing source of inspiration.

‘I suspect Incarnation may find a place in the repertoire.’ Petroc Trelawny, BBC Radio 3, Breakfast, 19 December 2012.

Gainsborough’s Vision. Taking a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach, and incorporating much new research on Gainsborough’s artistic, literary and religious background, along with his previously ignored relations with British philosophy, this book seeks for the first time to place Gainsborough in his intellectual and cultural context. Gainsborough's Vision provides a comprehensive reassessment of Gainsborough’s achievement with regard to his artistic predecessors and his place in European art. It also represents a new approach to eighteenth-century British art more generally, demonstrating how it moved in a direction that can be described as empiricist and mimetic. Coauthored with Amal Asfour. Liverpool University Press (Liverpool, 1999). Crown quarto, 341 pages, 186 illustrations.

From the press release: 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.

Reviews: ‘Richly informative.’ George Steiner, The Observer, 9 January 2000.

‘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.

‘A very real and original contribution to Gainsborough studies … an important book which will mark future scholarship.’ Martin Myrone, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 142, no. 1172 (November 2000), pp. 711–12.

‘The cumulative consideration of art theory, theories of perception and epistemology, the theme of the pastoral, and religious concepts of the need to find God in nature have been woven together to construct a clear account of painterly handling as an engagement with the alienation, scepticism, and loss implied in both religious and philosophical views of perception.’ Andrew Kennedy and Annie E. Richardson, Oxford Art Journal, 25 (2002), pp. 106–18.

On Reynolds’s Use of De Piles, Locke, and Hume in his Essays on Rubens and Gainsborough. This 9,000-word article shows how Sir Joshua Reynolds uses De Pilesian aesthetics along with ideas deriving from British empiricism to develop a theory of art in response to a kind of painting that demands to be seen as fundamentally mimetic. Coauthored with Amal Asfour. The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 60 (1997), pp. 215–29.

William Jackson of Exeter, A Short Sketch of My Own Life and Twenty Letters. Edited with Amal Asfour, Gainsborough’s House Review, 1996/7. Transcribed from original manuscripts, this edition runs to 110 pages. It includes an expertly annotated edition of the complete text of Jackson’s autobiography, augmented with a selection of previously unknown letters (kept in a family archive in Vienna). Jackson’s activities as a painter, musician and writer make this a relevant text for scholars in three fields. The edition is fully annotated with introductions, chronologies, an appendix and forty illustrations. Jackson’s Life includes the narrative of a journey to Turin taken in 1785, which Jackson illustrated extensively. The edition, which brings together text and recently unearthed pictures for the first time, includes an introduction, an essay on Gainsborough’s portrait of Jackson and an essay on Jackson’s music by musicologist Malcolm J. Bothwell. Published to coincide with an exhibition of Jackson’s paintings and drawings at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, curated by Paul Williamson and Amal Asfour (31 August–12 October 1997). The publication and exhibition were based on extensive primary research into the life and work of Jackson, who was a close friend of Thomas Gainsborough. One letter from Jackson to his diplomat son (Thomas) in Turin contains the previously unknown information that Gainsborough travelled to Antwerp in 1783 to view Rubens’s Descent from the Cross in Antwerp Cathedral. Archival research in in Belgium and the Netherlands revealed that Gainsborough, who was until then conceived of as the most quintessentially English (and insular) of artists, had family and business connections in the Low Countries – a fact that greatly influenced his intellectual and religious outlook.

Gray’s ‘Elegy’ and the Logic of Expression. A seminal discussion (12,500 words) of the two extant versions of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (published 1751), arguing that the changes made to the poem between the earlier and later drafts represent a radical shift from a Christian to a classical secular framework. In Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays, ed. W. Hutchings and W. Ruddick (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 1993), pp. 39–72.

Review: ‘Superb.’ Duncan Wu, Romanticism, 2.1 (1996), p. 123.

*****

Haydn, The Creation (1797). Programme note (1,600 words) for Sloane Square Choral Society’s Christmas concert at Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 8 December 2024.

The Queen Silvia Concert Hall, Stockholm, Autumn 2024. Programme notes and editing for the inaugural full season of concerts at Stockholm’s state-of-the-art new venue, designed by renowned Italian architect Giorgio Palù in collaboration with world-leading Japanese acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota. Notes on ten concerts on the theme of Bridges for a twenty-eight page booklet. Concert titles include: Bridges; Silence and Sound; Accordion Gala Concert – A Three-Part Suspension; The Rubem Farias Samba Jazz Project… Felix Klieser Artist-in-Residence – No Bridge Too Far; Mamie Jotax – Ponts musicaux; The Music of Tomorrow; Emil Jonason and Peter Friis Johansson – Bridging Passions; The Fairytale Bridge and White Light.

O/Modernt Chamber Orchestra: Crossing the Atlantic. Wigmore Hall, London, 25 September 2024. Programme note (950 words) for a Wigmore Hall concert in which Benjamin Britten’s eclectic musical travels, featured in his landmark Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op. 10, are interspersed with songs by three seminal British rock acts – Radiohead, Sting and Pink Floyd. Crossing the Atlantic, the mesmerising strains of Philip Glass’s Third Symphony for nineteen solo strings find companionship with the melancholy ecstasy of rock band Nirvana and the ground-bass driven music of Henry Purcell. Read the programme note here.

Exotic Dreamscapes: O/Modernt Chamber Orchestra, Wigmore Hall, London, 22 July 2024. With Hugo Ticciati violin; Sascha Bota viola; Julian Arp cello; Alasdair Beatson piano; Fleur Barron mezzo-soprano. Programme note for a concert of French music, including Delage, Messiaen and Ravel’s Piano Trio in A minor (1941). Read the programme note here.

The Light Within: O/Modernt Chamber Orchestra Featuring Soumik Datta (Sarod) and Gurdain Rayatt (Tabla), Wigmore Hall, London, 21 July 2024. Programme note for a concert of music by composers including Bach, Pēteris Vasks, Max Richter, Lennon and McCartney, Jordan Hunt and Wojciech Kilar, crowned with a performance of Awaaz by Soumik Datta. (b.1966) On the Nature of Daylight (2004). Commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and first performed at the Proms in 2022, Awaaz engages with the division of India into two independent nations: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.

On Awaaz. Awaaz, meaning ‘voice’ in Urdu and Hindi, though it also carries simpler connotations of ‘sound’ or ‘noise’, interrogates the Partition of India (1947) through the prism of the human voice, probing the emotions conveyed in disjointed sherds of words from Hindu, Urdu and Bengali. In strictly musical terms the piece considers whether a voice-based work, beginning as mere noise (‘disassociated syllables devoid of meaning’, as Datta writes), might slowly journey back towards language, conversation and song. The voyage from the wreckage of exile towards a paradoxically recovered new home is undertaken by the instrumentalists and voices, who engage in a collaborative effort, attempting to reattach the given fragments. (Read the full note here.)

Ein deutsches Requiem. Programme note for Sloane Square Choral Society’s performance of Brahms’s Requiem. Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 7 July 2024.

Schubert and the Sound of Memory. Festival O/Modernt, Queen Silvia Concert Hall, Norrtullsgatan 14, 113 45 Stockholm, 14–16 June 2024. Programme notes and general editing for a slightly reduced 2024 edition of the annual summer festival, following its move to the wonderful Queen Silvia Concert Hall in the heart of Stockholm, with its central stage, ultra flexible lighting and world-beating acoustics. The dual language booklet (76 pages) features Paul Williamson’s essay ‘Like a Hedgehog’ and ‘The World Floats on Water’ – reflections on Heraclitus and the Presocratics by the philosopher Erman Kaplama. Illlustrated artworks by the internationally acclaimed artist and musician Paul Benney. The typically eclectic concerts, which intersperse Schubert’s music with that of composers from a range of eras and geographical locations, include: Memoryhouse; Goldberg Variations: Remembering the Cosmic Whole; The Vicissitudes of Life; The Memory of Water; Fantastical Schubert; and Memories of a Moonlight Wanderer.

From Like a Hedgehog. Music, the unrivalled art of time, thrives on its transient mode of being. Like a ticking clock, music draws us irresistibly towards the future, but it does so by harnessing the power of memory. Structurally, musical forms depend on the ability of listeners to recall key motifs in order to experience the emotional nuances of variations and returns. More generally, music develops from generation to generation by looking backwards, building on (and sometimes dismantling) the achievements of earlier composers. While marching ever onwards into the future, therefore, music simultaneously summons us back to the past, exploiting memory and inspiring a sense of history in an endless quest for newness. The dual impetus is summed up in O/Modernt’s motto: Invent the Past – Revise the Future. These twin pillars of musical creativity are celebrated in the 2024 edition of Festival O/Modernt, which is dedicated to Schubert, a composer whose profoundly avant-garde spirit is charged with the remembrance of things past.

Haydn’s Nelson Mass. Programme notes for Sloane Square Choral Society’s performance of the Nelson Mass, along with Haydn’s sacred motet Insane et vanae curae, based on the composer’s earlier an oratorio, Il ritorno di Tobia (‘The Return of Tobias’). Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 17 March 2024.

The Nelson Mass, completed on 31 August 1798, is the third of the six late masses that Haydn produced after his return to Austria from London in 1795. The problem faced by a Catholic composer writing a new liturgical setting at the end of the eighteenth century was the absence of a clear musical form or template in which to cast the words of the liturgy. Should a composer apply eighteenth-century operatic modes to the sacred text, as Mozart had wonderfully done in his theatrical Requiem (1791)? Or should structural principals be sought in instrumental forms – the sonata or the flexible symphony, of which Haydn was the acknowledged master?

O/Modernt New Generation Winter Festival 2024: Jacob’s Ladder. Editing supplied programme notes for the second edition of the O/Modernt winter festival, staged in association with Lilla Akademien at the Queen Silvia Concert Hall, Stockholm, 9–11 February 2024. O/Modernt players, international soloists and the next generation of musicians from Lilla Akademien come together for three concerts (Blue Skies, The Prayer of Quiet and Ascending and Descending), inspired by O/Modernt and Queen Silvia Concert Hall's first joint commission, Jacob's Ladder, by the revered American composer Steve Reich.

Bach Wachet Auf! and Incarnation by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Programme notes for Sloane Square Choral Society’s performance of Bach’s cantata BWV 140, for the last Sunday before Advent, and Incarnation – A Suite of Songs for Christmas, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones and words by Paul Williamson (see below for the premiere performance and CD release). Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 10 December 2023.

From Incarnation, the Typology of Christmas: In art more generally, the method of juxtapositions (of which typology is one example) can add unexpected contexts to well-known stories and episodes, revitalising what is familiar by showing it in a new light. That is one good reason why biblical typology is an invaluable frame of reference when it comes to treating a subject that has been celebrated in the arts as frequently as the story of Christ’s birth. The lyrics of Incarnation borrow from the typological tradition, but in a way that stresses the human content of the Christmas narrative. From the paintings of the Italian Renaissance (the Botticelli on the cover of this programme, for example) to the music of Bach, the emphasis on the compelling emotional power of the Christian story is ubiquitous. Incarnation therefore builds a humanist ethos on typological foundations, while charting the course of the Christmas season from Advent to the Nativity and on through to Epiphany.

Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs and Brahms’ Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny). Programme notes for Sloane Square Choral Society’s concert of two classic choral works at Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 2 July 2023.

Brahms and New Paths. Festival O/Modernt, Ulriksdal Palace Theatre, Stockholm, 14–18 June 2023, directed by Hugo Ticciati. Programme notes and general editing for the festival booklet (92 pages). Concerts on the following themes: New Paths; Ciphers of Homage and Love; Lineages; Sighs of Sorrow and Ecstasy; Viennese Waltz – Slavic Melancholy and Hungarian Flair; Rising Thirds; Falling Thirds; Wagner the Progressive … Or Was It Brahms?

From Wagner the Progressive … Or Was It Brahms? Two musical revolutions happened in the second half of the nineteenth century. Wagner ushered in the so-called Artwork of the Future – the Wagnerian music drama of words and musical leitmotifs that broke free of traditional formal restraints. But another version of the future was simultaneously being created by Brahms, who turned to the musical past in order to look forward, making radical new music by forensically cherishing and recreating the old. In a fascinating essay entitled ‘Brahms the Progressive’ (1947), which is both an analysis of the glories of Brahms and an apologia for his own modus operandi, Schoenberg praises Brahms as an innovator. Harnessing the resources of the past, says Schoenberg, Brahms used a combination of supreme musical intelligence and inspiration (also referred to as ‘luck’!) to harness the resources of the past in a way that contributed to the development of the ‘unrestricted’ musical language that was valued and cultivated by modernists – not least Schoenberg himself, who declared himself the heir not only of Wagner and Brahms, but also of Mozart.

Mozart’s Requiem: Mozart’s Last Years 1788 to 1791. Programme note for Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 19 March 2023.

O/Modernt New Generation Winter Festival 2023: Magical Worlds. Notes and editing for the programme booklet for the inaugural O/Modernt winter festival, staged at the newly completed Queen Silvia Concert Hall, Lilla Akademien, Stockholm, 15–19 February 2023. Concerts: Otherworldly Harmonies; Love, the Magician; Henry and Harry – Potter and Purcell; Goblins, Elves and Fairies; The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.

Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Programme note for Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 4 December 2022.

O/Modernt at the Arvo Pärt Festival, One Music, Oxford, 18–25 November 2022. Programme notes (each approximately 700 words) for two concerts (Cosmic Spaces and Infinite Dimensions) featuring works by Pärt, Bach, Webern, Luciano Berio, Iannis Xenakis and Sting. For Cosmic Spaces, which was staged in the Sheldonian theatre, the orchestra was joined by trombonist Jörgan van Rijen and percussionist Johan Bridger. Largely devoted to Pärt, the chamber concert Infinite Dimensions also included music by Bach and Webern.

From the note for Infinite Dimensions: In the Art of Fugue, Bach elaborates on the structural qualities of a D minor chord. The ebb and flow of limitless musical spirals and nested circles suggest a poetic relationship with fractals – the whole and its constituent parts being formed of the same fundamental shapes, which can be varied ad infinitum. The infinite potential of Bach’s procedure injects a kind of truth into the enticing, though doubtless apocryphal legend that the Art of Fugue was left unfinished because of the composer’s untimely death, when the pursuit of the transcendent was cut short by human finitude.

From the note for Cosmic Spaces: The ne plus ultra of a musical art that sees the world in a grain of sand, and infinity in the palm of your hand, are Webern’s miniatures. Like Pärt and Bach, Webern proceeds by subduing the claims of personality, finding joy in a single indrawn breath and extending every glance into a poem (to paraphrase a comment by Schoenberg). The music that emerged from these extreme efforts of concentration has a deserved reputation for mathematical purity, realised as abstract angularity. Nevertheless, in common with the other works in this evening’s concert, Webern’s Six Bagatelles and Piano Variations both exhibit a meditative stress on the objective that has the power to open up a universe of emotions.

O/Modernt Chamber Orchestra, Roaming Spirits, Wigmore Hall, London, 28 October 2022. Hugo Ticciati (violin, leader) is joined by Julian Arp (cello), Christoffer Sundqvist (clarinet) and Miklós Lukács (cimbalom) for a concert of music with Romany inflections – traditional works interspersed with compositions by Brahms, Bartók and Boris Pigovat.

On Bartók. A significant figure in the creation of modern ethnomusicology, Bartók was an avid supporter of the Hungarian nationalist movement. His devotion to the cause was catalysed when he heard a young woman singing a Transylvanian folk tune in the summer of 1904. That life-changing experience convinced Bartók to begin systematically collecting peasant music, first transcribing pieces by hand and later making field recordings using a portable phonograph.

The Cosmic Mountain (coauthored with Sébastien Rey of the British Museum). Essay on the primeval symbolism of Mount Ararat, with special reference to Drawing the Line (2006), a short film about Ararat by German photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg. Written for Schulz-Dornburg’s 2022 show, Austromancy, at Gallery Luisotty, Santa Monika (8 October 2022–4 February 2023).

The Mesopotamian myths surrounding Mount Ararat must already have been old when the Sumerians invented writing in about 3200 BCE. It has ever since been a locus of mythological meanings and political struggles. Lately and perhaps most seriously, potential ecological catastrophe has been added to its history. It has been the focal point for a succession of civilisations and nations, including those of Mesopotamia and the ancient kingdoms of Armenia. Indeed, although it now lies in eastern Turkey, it is still Armenia’s national symbol. Schulz-Dornburg’s film casts a contemporary photographer’s eye on this vast archive of connotations, stressing the interplay of flux and permanence, giving visual form to the human states of mind that are encapsulated in the local names of Ararat’s winds. The mountain’s most pressing message for today, however, is also its oldest. It is the need for humanity once again to re-establish our covenant with the earth.

Haydn and the Un/Conditioned Ear. Festival O/Modernt, Ulriksdal Palace Theatre, Stockholm, 10–16 June 2022, directed by Hugo Ticciati. Programme notes and general editing for the festival booklet (96 pages) by Paul Williamson. Concerts and related events on the theme of Haydn and the Un/Conditioned Ear. Notes (approx 10,000 words) on the following themes: Roaming Spirits; The Art of Surprise; Trees, Larks, Chickens and Freaks; Childlike Wonder and Fairy Tales – Part One; Childlike Wonder & Fairy Tales – Part Two; Spinning Yarns, Weaving Sounds; Un/Conditioned Vienna; Opera Un/Bound; Un/Condition your Listening – An Illustrated Talk; Haydn’s Seasons.

From the note for Trees, Larks, Chickens and Freaks: How does music, which is in essence simply a succession of sounds, make meanings? Even more to the point, how does it express the things with which it is most often associated, namely emotions and ideas? As a mimetic art, music is remarkably limited. It can imitate other sounds (the clucking of a chicken or the song of a lark, to name two relevant examples), but what about the colour and scent of a rose? Or the feelings of a beloved to whom the flower is given? Or the dismay of the rejected lover, whose heart bleeds as though pricked by the rose’s thorn, when the token is rejected? One answer is by associating music with words – in madrigals, operas, pop songs and movies, for example, where music might be the servant of the words, or vice versa, depending on the circumstances. When music, in and of itself, aspires to more poetic forms of expression, as in a symphonic poem, then the verbal context can be supplied by an accompanying explanation – a programme note. The programme-based context can also work at one remove, when a composer quotes a theme from Gregorian chant, for example, or from another composer. Add to that the introduction of musical structures or modulations that have recognisable associations, and music might almost aspire to a kind of structuralist semantics in which signs become meaningful in relation to each other and to the system. But can anyone seriously imagine a scholarly treatise on Kant being written in musical form? And this leads back to a very basic point. The tensions and releases of tonality, as exploited by Vivaldi for instance, can guide the responses of its listeners, but is that a mode of signification per se, or is it rather a musical framework for the introduction of extra-musical meanings?

Happily Ever After: Sounds of Estonia. Jazz pianist Kristjan Randalu with O/Modernt at Kings Place, London, 25 March 2022. Programme note (500 words) for a concert in which acclaimed jazz pianist Kristjan Randalu weaves a fairy-tale sequence with the O/Modernt Chamber Orchestra and Sacha Rattle (clarinet), alongside works by Estonia’s leading living composers, Arvo Pärt, Tõnu Kõrvits and Erkki-Sven Tüür.

Happily Ever After. At the heart of this concert is Kristjan Randalu’s set of instrumental interpretations of the voices and themes of some well-known fairy tales, embellished with Randalu’s spectacular piano cadenzas. Amplifying and varying the moods are the UK premiere of Song of the Lakes by Tonu Korvits, Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Action–Passion–Illusion and Arvo Pärt’s beguiling invocations of pure transcendence in Fratres, Wiegenlied and Darf ich. ‘It’s like the final sentence of a fairy tale,’ Pärt remarked of Darf ich: ‘And they all lived happily ever after.’ But as the poignant and exhilarating works on show in this concert reveal, the fairy tale ending is a magical artistic illusion.

Thunderbird: A Temple Hymn from Ancient Sumer. Retold by Sébastien Rey (British Museum) with new artwork by French artist Christine Rebet. Edited and produced by Paul Williamson, General Editor for O/Modernt publishing (Cambridge & Stockholm). Designed by Leo Field. Paperback, 180 x 150 mm, 104 pages. ISBN: 9780992891299. Published December 2020. Reprinted 2021.

Stations. A book of verse by Simone Kotva, with artworks and photos by Debbie Loftus. Edited and produced by Paul Williamson, General Editor for O/Modernt publishing. Designed by Leo Field. Colour management by Chau Digital, London. Paper by Fedrigoni: Arena White Smooth 140gsm, 300gsm. Typeset in Domaine Text by Klim Type Foundry. Paperback, 210 x 140 mm (landscape format), 40 pages with 15 images. Published by O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm, 2020.

Publisher’s synopsis. Stations, by writer Simone Kotva and artist Debbie Loftus, is a twofold reinterpretation of the Easter story. Kotva’s verse frames it as a conservationist engagement with the landscape and inhabitants of the natural world, while Loftus’s images are based on patterns, found in nature, that have been photographed, divided, duplicated, combined and recoloured to create kaleidoscopic forms recalling stained-glass windows and the vaulted ceilings of sacred spaces.

VOCES8: After Silence. Programme notes for the 15th-anniversary recordings of distinguished vocal ensemble VOCES8: a four-part project, with an online prelude released on 16 October 2019. The title comes from an essay, ‘The Rest is Silence’, published in 1931 by Aldous Huxley: ‘After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.’ The four releases that make up After Silence are also associated with the four classical elements, earth, fire, air and water: Remembrance, invoking death, loss and the return to earth; Devotion, focusing on the flames of love, sacred and secular; Redemption, celebrating rebirth and the renewed breath of life; Elemental, returning us to the ebb and flow of nature. The double CD, with a fifty-page booklet, released in the spring/summer of 2020, includes more than two hours of music.

On The Three Kings by Jonathan Dove. Taking his cue from Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote the text set in The Three Kings (2000), Jonathan Dove turns the world upside down. Sayers reverses the traditional sequence of epiphany gifts, brought for the infant Jesus by the three magi, and she also adds to the account in Matthew’s Gospel by making the three visitors stand for the three ages of man: first, the bitter myrrh, used to anoint the dead, is brought by a very young man; secondly, frankincense, a symbol of divinity, is brought by a man in his prime; while gold, a gift fit for a king, is brought by a man of extreme old age. Dove builds from the themes of sleep and death, paradoxically associated with youth and vigorous maturity, to an astonishing golden climax in which old age, transformed with Saturnalian energy, signals transcendent renewal.

Dvořák’s Stabat Mater. Programme note (2,000 words) for Sloane Square Choral Society’s performance of Antonín Dvořák’s ten-movement Stabat Mater (1880). The note is in two parts: Paradoxical Agony and Dvořák: A Brief Life. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 15 March 2020. The concert was cancelled at short notice due to the outbreak of Covid-19.

But the paradox of the intense suffering that presages salvation remains, and of all the arts music is the best equipped to represent that twofold condition. This is because music is a multivalent art that has the power to communicate in more than one voice at the same time: sad words can be couched in hopeful melodies, and sad themes can use musical textures to sow the seeds of uplift. This is exemplified by Dvořák’s setting, based on a division of the Stabat Mater’s twenty stanzas into ten movements, which proceeds from an exhaustive, extended expression of grief in the long opening movement towards consolation and an affirmation of the composer’s deep faith in the final Amen. Several intervening passages find hope amidst the prevailing despair: for example, the lyrical sections of ‘Fac ut ardeat’ (mvt 3); the flowing almost dancelike rhythms of ‘Tui nati’ (mvt 5); the melodic charm of ‘Fac me vere’ (mvt 6), often compared with Handel; and the gorgeous lyricism of ‘Fac ut portem’ (mvt 8), a duet for soprano and tenor.

Charpentier’s Messe de minuit pour Noël. Programme note (1,500 words) for Sloane Square Choral Society’s performance of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Christmas mass, written in the early 1690s for St Louis, the main Jesuit church in Paris, also known as L’église de l’Opéra. The performance included the original noëls or French Christmas carols on which Charpentier based the melodies of the mass. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 8 December 2019.

Charpentier’s refined musical interpretation of the noëls alerts us to the fact that the use of popular elements in the Messe de minuit should emphatically not be misinterpreted as an expression of the saturnalian spirit of misrule that is also often associated with the Christmas season. Everything in French life under Louis XIV was thoroughly politicised to reflect and enhance the power and prestige of the monarch, and to affirm the glory of France. Dancing, which stood beside poetry, drama, painting and architecture in the pantheon of the arts, was a courtly activity that took two forms: ceremonial balls, such as that depicted in the print marking Louis’s triumph at Strasbourg (illustrated), and ballets.

Bach’s Song of Mary: The Magnificat. Programme note (1,500 words) for Sloane Square Choral Society’s performance of Bach’s revised setting of the Magnificat in D major, BWV 243, c.1732. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 8 December 2019.

As Luther remarks, God cannot be ‘magnified’ – made greater or more glorious – because, by his very nature, he enjoys both of those qualities to an infinite extent. It is human souls that are exalted, when, with the help of the Holy Spirit, they are infused with God’s glory, and people’s hearts ‘overflow with joy, leaping and dancing with gladness that they have found God’. In Luther’s view, the example of Mary shows Christians how to prepare for such ‘amazing knowledge and joy’ by emptying themselves of all earthly hopes and fears, and placing their trust in the cross unreservedly and with revolutionary fervour. They must also accept, without the slightest reservation, that there is nothing they can do to affect the outcome: from moment to moment, the soul is poised between deliverance and damnation, helplessly dependent on God’s grace. As interpreted by Luther, therefore, the message of Mary’s song is not an entirely comfortable one, but such beliefs are fundamental to Bach’s Magnificat. The extent to which we are able to hear – or imaginatively recreate – such a degree of religious intensity in today’s secular world, where Bach’s works are primarily performed as concert pieces, is another question.

One Last Little Sin: Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle. Programme note (1,000 words) for the Chelsea Arts Club Singers performance of Gioachino Rossini’s 1864 mass setting for twelve singers, two pianos and a harmonium. Chelsea Arts Club, 143 Old Church Street, London, 17 and 18 November 2019.

‘Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world!’ wrote the novelist Stendhal, describing the meteoric rise of Rossini, who took Europe by storm in the early decades of the nineteenth century with his melodic, full-hearted, unfailingly ingenious music. Born into a musical family in Pesaro in 1792, Rossini was precocious to a degree that almost bears comparison with Mozart. He began by studying harpsichord and singing, and soon started to compose. Having completed his first commissioned opera in 1810, he wrote eleven more during the next three years. Il barbiere di Siviglia, composed in less than three weeks in 1816, was an instant hit. ‘Above all, make lots of Barbers!’ the cantankerous Beethoven wryly advised when Rossini visited him in Vienna a few years later. La Cenerentola, conceived in a haze of Jamaica rum in the early hours of 23 December 1816, had its premiere little more than four weeks later. But could Rossini’s incomparable powers of invention sometimes be mistaken for laziness? Composing in bed on a cold day in Venice in 1813, he dropped a sheet of paper on which he had written a duet. Unable to reach it and loath to get up, he blithely wrote a new one.

VOCES8: REMEMBRANCE (After Silence 1). The act of remembering, songs and prayers for those who have died, a commemoration, or an artefact that quickens memory: variations on these meanings of remembrance are woven into the fabric of the sacred choral works recorded for this release, which includes ‘Drop, Drop, Slow Tears’ by Orlando Gibbons, ‘The Deer’s Cry’ by Arvo Pärt, ‘Bring Us O Lord God’ by William Harris, ‘Ne Irascaris Domine’ and ‘Civitas Sancti Tui’ by William Byrd, ‘There is an Old Belief’ by Charles H. Parry, and ‘Pie Jesu’ by Gabriel Fauré (arr. Barnaby Smith). Digital release, 7 November 2019.

Sir Hubert Parry’s ‘There is an Old Belief’ is poised between the inconsolable pain of doubt and an almost irresistible desire to affirm the ‘old belief’ in a life beyond the grave. Affirmation comes in the extraordinary chanted declamation at the heart of the piece: ‘That creed I fain would keep.’ But that forthright assertion instantly gives way to a sense that the belief is merely a tender hope, and nothing awaits except eternal sleep. An elegy for Parry’s own passing, as well as for the devastation of World War I, the setting transforms words that on the page have an almost jaunty air into a profoundly humane act of remembrance. The work was written in 1907 for a memorial service at the Royal Mausoleum, Frogmore, and published as the fourth of Parry’s Songs of Farewell (1916). It was later performed at Parry’s own funeral in 1918, little more than a month after Armistice Day.

Maurice Duruflé, Requiem (1947). Programme notes and editing for a concert featuring Duruflé’s Requiem, along with pieces by Louis Vierne and James Orford’s performance of Duruflé’s organ masterpiece Prélude, adagio et choral varié sur le thème du ‘Veni Creator’ (1930). Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 7 July 2019.

From Duruflé’s Requiem and Gregorian Chant: The Requiem, which was completed in 1947, was dedicated to the memory of the composer’s father, who died in 1945, shortly after the liberation of Paris. Its exquisite emotional colouring surely also bears witness to Duruflé’s tender feelings for his second wife, Marie-Madeleine. Based on the Missa pro defunctis, the Gregorian mass for the dead, the work turns on the delicate fusion of the original chants (varied and elaborated) with twentieth-century harmonies. Gregorian chant, named after its legendary originator, St Gregory the Great, is in essence a vast corpus of melodies, categorised into eight modes (known as the church modes), according to the eight scales on which the melodies are based. In a deeply personal way, Duruflé integrates this modal writing with harmonies redolent of Debussy and Ravel, two modern composers he particularly admired.

Misreading Beethoven. Festival O/Modernt, Ulriksdal Palace Theatre, Stockholm, 14–19 June 2019, directed by Hugo Ticciati. Programme notes and general editing for the festival booklet (132 pages). Concerts and related events on the theme of Misreading Beethoven, an overarching concept that draws on Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misreading (1975). Notes by Paul Williamson (approx 10,000 words): Misreading Beethoven, Mozart’s Spirit from Haydn’s Hands, Immortal Beloved, Dreams of India, Convalescent Souls in the Lydian Mode, Moonlight, Fallen Heroes.

From the introduction, Misreading Beethoven: The leap from literary history to the ‘strife of Eternity’ may seem surprising, but it arises from the nature of poetry as Bloom conceives it. Consider the history of art more generally as a history of influence, traced back through a dominant line of strong exponents into the mists of time. Where does it all begin? Prosaically, in evolutionary biology and the emergence of human consciousness; but every mystical tradition would flatly deny this. Eternal strife is conceivable because of the belief that the human spirit is capable of rising above earthly constraints to discover transcendent values. Formulated by Bloom, this is a version of the doctrine known in early Jewish and Christian circles as Gnosticism, which, simply explained, believes that inside every human being is a divine spark, held in bondage, that can and should be released. Accordingly, as Frank Kermode superbly puts it, ‘Bloom in full splendour is the last romantic’, and his ideas of artistic creation and influence reverberate in many-splendoured ways with characterisations of Beethoven as the paragon of romanticism. There is the faith in the exalted nature of the human spirit and the capacity of the artist to achieve special insight into its potential, as well as the struggle unavoidably faced by the successors of great artists, and the idea that artistic creations are not fixed objects but dynamic interactive events.

Beethoven and Bowie: Where Beethoven expresses a sense that the human spirit is animated by a divine spark, Bowie places his faith in the enigma of change, repeatedly asking a question that is central to modern western thinking: how can continuity be built on the shifting sands of unfixable identities? Accordingly, the heroism he celebrates in ‘Heroes’ (1977) is transient, ‘just for one day’; and the epitaph he left behind in ‘Lazarus’ (2015), from the album Blackstar, is delivered with a poignant sense of melancholy, poised on the edge of despair: ‘Look up here, I’m in heaven; I’ve got scars that can’t be seen. I’ve got drama can’t be stolen; everybody knows me now.’

O/Modernt and Hugo Ticciati, From the Ground Up: The Chaconne. Fifty-two page CD booklet with main liner notes (3,400 words) written by Paul Williamson. Other edited contributions include Irving Finkel of the British Museum on the trumpets of Pharaoh Tutankhamun and Hugo Ticciati on ‘Ground, Breath, Being’. CD released by Signum Classics, May 2019.

From the press release: From the Ground Up explores the history of the chaconne in Spain and Italy, and its acceptance into high musical culture. In England it became a chief inspiration for Purcell, while in Germany it triggered the sublime achievement of Bach’s ‘Ciaccona’ from the Partita in D minor for Solo Violin. Also springing from this fertile soil are works by contemporary composers Johannes Marmén and Dušan Bogdanović, and three sets of improvisations – ‘Ground’, ‘Breath’, ‘Being’ – in which themes from Purcell are interlaced with overtone singing. Returning to the chaconne’s Renaissance roots, readings from Shakespeare by actor Sam West inspire extempore reflections by beat poet Baba Israel.

Joshua in the Eighteenth Century. Programme note (1,650 words) on Handel’s Joshua (1748), focusing on the work’s eighteenth-century ethos. The programme includes an edited text of the 1748 wordbook. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 17 March 2019.

The most salient example of the overhaul of Old Testament values is found in the love scenes between Achsah, the daughter of the tribal leader Caleb, and Othniel, Joshua’s successor, who went on to become the first biblical ‘judge’ (Judges 3:8–11). The few hints given in the Book of Joshua present the relationship between Achsah and Othniel as essentially a dynastic union. The oratorio works up these scant strands into rich pastoral interludes that show all nature participating in the couple’s idealised love. John Ruskin evocatively described the conception that human feelings can exist in a state of unqualified harmony with nature as the ‘pathetic fallacy’, and this is perfectly exemplified when Achsah gorgeously sings of the linnet and the thrush filling the grove with their love songs. Extolling the birds, Achsah inescapably evokes herself and Othniel as their human counterparts.

Mozart, Vesperae Solennes de Confessore, 1780. Programme note (1,600 words) on Mozart’s 1780 vespers, detailing his problematic relationship with Archbishop Colloredo, the Munich premiere of Idomeneo and his eventual dismissal from the archbishop’s service in Vienna in 1781. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 9 December 2018.

Henry Purcell, Come Ye Sons of Art, 1694. Discussion of Purcell’s Come Ye Sons of Art in the context of the Restoration and the peculiarly English genre of the royal birthday ode. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 9 December 2018.

From the press release: 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.

The Children of Cats Catch Mice: Puccini in Lucca 1858 to 1880. Programme note (2,000 words) on Puccini’s early life in Lucca with special emphasis on the Messa di gloria (1880) for Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 1 July 2018.

The problem faced by composers of sacred music in Italy in the nineteenth century was the absence of a mediator between austere sacred music and changing modern styles in other kinds of music. In Britain the English oratorio tradition initiated by Handel had been sustained by a string of subsequent composers and found a popular outlet at the flourishing Three Choirs Festival, devoted to contemporary choral music. In Germany the Lower Rhine Festival, which ran from 1817 to 1958, performed a similar function. In Italy no such national forum existed, with the result that sacred music, written very often for the feast days of local saints, was not usually heard outside the town or city for which it was intended. Puccini’s mass is a case in point. It disappeared from view for approximately seventy-five years until it was published in 1951 by Dante del Fiorentino, a priest whom Puccini befriended when Dante was a young curate at Torre del Lago near Viareggio in the province of Lucca.

Sacred Verdi. A thousand words on Verdi’s sacred works, including Pater Noster, written in the manner of Palestrina, with a text wrongly attributed to Dante, for Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 1 July 2018.

When asked to advise on the reform of the music curriculum in the Italian conservatories during the early 1870s, Verdi made a famous pronouncement: ‘Torniamo all’antico, sarà un progresso’ (‘let's return to the past; that will be a step forward’). The process of renewal through historical rediscovery, known as revivalism, affected all the arts: the republication in 1840 of I Promessi Sposi in the Tuscan dialect, the basis of modern standard Italian, was regarded as a key moment, as were the celebrations held in 1865 to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the birth of Dante. In music the focus was on the Roman composer Palestrina (1525–94), conceived of as the father of Italian music in the same way as Bach had come to be regarded as the prime mover of music in Germany.

Purcell: From the Ground Up. Festival O/Modernt, Ulriksdal Palace Theatre, Stockholm, 15–20 June 2018, directed by Hugo Ticciati. Programme notes and general editing for the festival booklet (134 pages). Nine concerts and related events on themes relating to Purcell and the ground bass. Notes by Paul Williamson (approx 10,000 words): Purcell: Restoration and Revolution, Grounds (the history of the ground bass), Mining Fantastical Grounds (on fairies, fantasias and folklore), Unforgettable Characters (on The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono), Ecstatic Sorrows (on the descending tetrachord as the emblem of lament), Affirmation and Transcendence (variations on the chaconne), The Ultimate Goal of Art (Brahms, Fauré and French twentieth-century chansons), A Place that Never Was (British music), Self-Discoveries (for a concert including Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and music from the Harry Potter films).

On L’Eraclito amoroso by Barbara Strozzi (1651): Barbara Strozzi’s L’Eraclito amoroso (‘Heraclitus in Love’) is brilliantly built on a twofold conceit that is both conceptual and musical. The protagonist of the piece is the pre-Socratic Greek philospher Heraclitus (fl. c.500 BCE), a native of Ephesus, whose philosophy is usually summed up in one memorable quotation that was handed down to posterity by (among others) Plato: ‘You can’t step into the same river twice.’ Whether ascribed to personal identity or to flowing streams, Heraclitus suggests, permanence is an illusion. Nothing stays the same; the only reality is change. The first irony in Strozzi’s L’Eraclito amoroso is that the sage who taught that the world and everything in it exists in a constant state of flux, and who was sometimes known as the ‘weeping philosopher’, bitterly laments his lover’s lack of constancy. What else did he expect?

Festival O/Modernt at Wigmore Hall. Programme notes for four concerts, part of Festival O/Modernt's Purcell weekend at Wigmore Hall, London, 7–8 April 2018. Concerts: Lament and Consolation: Fourths Down and Up, 7 April at 7pm; William Rapped, Henry Sampled (Shakespeare, Purcell and hip hop), 7 April at 10pm; Transforming Spanish Sexuality: The Chaconne, 8 April at 3pm; and Fairest Isle (a programme of British music), 8 April at 7.30pm.

From Transforming Spanish Sexuality: The Chaconne: The Saturnalia, which Catullus called the ‘best of days’, was the occasion for all sorts of topsy-turvy goings-on, including masters waiting on their servants at table. But far too many good parties result in a hangover, and Saturn was also the the god of melancholy – that dark, cold humour linked with contemplative winter nights and hopeless love. It is no accident that Hamlet – arguably the single most individuated character in the entire canon of western literature – is plagued by melancholy. Cloaked in saturnine gloom, he engages in self-scrutiny to an extraordinary degree, which, thanks to the device of the soliloquy, is shared with the listening audience. Hamlet’s pain is our theatrical pleasure, however, just as the lament of Dido and the eyes of the unattainable beloved that embody the je ne sais quoi of love are the cue for one of the great paradoxes of art – pleasurable melancholy. This is the context in which we should understand ‘Yo soy la locura’, in which, as the music makes clear, ‘locura’ might be best translated as ‘melancholy’, filling the world with ‘pleasure and sweetness’. Whether Saturnalian or saturnine – laughing or weeping – the chaconne is a vehicle for self-discovery. As such, it ranges from the fun and games of a good night out to the grounds of Purcell, to the intense contemplation of human tragedy undertaken in Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor. As vigorous today as it was in the seventeenth century, the ‘lamento bass’, as Alex Ross calls it, re-emerges in the walking bass lines of the blues, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and many other recent exponents of the musical art of the self.

Mendelssohn’s Elijah. ‘The Story of Elijah’ and ‘Why Elijah?’ Programme notes (1,600 words) outlining the narrative of Mendelssohn’s Elijah (1846), discussing the genesis of the work and explaining its theology. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 18 March 2018.

From ‘Why Elijah?’: ‘I want to write some more sacred music soon, especially as I see no chance of being able to compose an opera.’ This is from a letter written by Mendelssohn in April 1837 to Karl Klingemann in London, a year after the première of his earlier sacred oratorio, St Paul. Searching for a biblical subject that was full of dramatic incident, Mendelssohn could have done little better than the story of Elijah, told in the two books of Kings. What the story lacks from a quasi-operatic point of view is not stirring incident, but the dramatic foil of quieter, more reflective moments. These were found in other Old Testament texts, notably the Book of Psalms, from which twenty-three verses were interpolated, including the final chorus. As Mendelssohn explained in December 1838 to Julius Schubring, the eventual librettist of Elijah, it was the human drama of the piece that interested him, and this must be expressed by showing not telling.

Pearls | The Blessing of the Light. Two choral songs with words by Paul Williamson and music by Thomas Hewitt Jones performed at the inaugural concert of vocal group Seraphim, directed by Robert Mingay-Smith, The Swiss Church, 79 Endell St, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9DY, 9 February 2018.

Six London Preludes. Six short narratives by Paul Williamson and 317 photos by Debbie Loftus 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. The eclectic contents are designed in a contradictory fusion of styles, with short-page 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. Produced with generous sponsorship from Fedrigoni UK. Published by Festival O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm, 1 December 2017. ISBN: 978-0-9928912-5-1. Chapters: 1. Albertopolis, 2. Ajax, 3. Illustrated London News, 4. Olympia, 5. No Waiting, 6. Requiem.

From the back flap: So many. Who knew a phone could hold so many photos? More than 300, selected from thousands, arranged in six parts. Six London Preludes. Preludes to what? What’s the main event? Surely, there must be one. But could anyone in this age of crisis – fake news, broken politics, the economy, the health service, housing, transport, social exclusion, pollution, ageing populations, immigration, refugees, IT, IP, TTIP and all the rest of it – seriously be expected to supply a main event? No. Do it. Keep doing it. That’s all there is – the end in itself. Six London Preludes, with 317 images fished out from the brown Thames rankly running, and six slivers of narrative, each with interpolated leaves of verse. A sixfold perambulation in words and images, images and words – parallel but interconnecting, as the case may be – that ranges through London’s unreal cityscape, venturing even southwards to the deep salt swell. Six London Preludes. The book. Don’t venture out without it.

‘Highly Commended’. Fedrigoni Top Awards 2019. Featured in the Berlin exhibition of award winners, Radialsystem, Berlin, 8–10 May 2019.

Joseph Haydn, The Creation (1797). Four-part programme note (3,000 words) for Sloane Square Choral Society’s performance of The Creation, using the Carus score with the original English text. Programme sections: 1. Origins, 2. The Words, 3. Ethos, 4. The First Performance. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 10 December 2017.

Mendelssohn’s Hear My Prayer: A Song for Miss Mounsey. A thousand words on Mendelssohn’s celebrated anthem, commissioned in 1844 by William Bartholomew for Ann Shepherd Mounsey’s Crosby Hall concert series. Programme note for the Chelsea Arts Club Singers, directed by Oliver Lallemant. Chelsea Arts Club, 143 Old Church St, London SW3 6EB, 25 and 26 November 2017.

Schubert’s Annus Mirabilis. Programme note (1,500 words) on Schubert’s 1815 Mass in G major (D167) and his sixth setting of St Thomas Aquinas’ hymn Tantum ergo, completed in October 1828 (D962). Chelsea Arts Club Singers, directed by Oliver Lallemant. Chelsea Arts Club, 143 Old Church St, London SW3 6EB, 25 and 26 November 2017.

Now is the Time. A celebratory anthem with words by Paul Williamson and music by Thomas Hewitt Jones: ‘To celebrate artistic collaboration in Havering and to mark milestone anniversaries of Havering Music School and Havering Arts Society. Generously commissioned by The Arts Society on its 50th anniversary.’ September 2017.

Rocking Horse Bay | Cavendish Square. Two vintage oddities for an album of commercial tracks, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones and words by Paul Williamson, Summer 2017. Published by Cavendish Music, Derbyshire House, St Chad’s Street, London WC1H 8AG.

William Blake: Walking Through Eternity. A thousand words on William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ (‘And did those feet’), from the preface to Milton (1804–10), including a discussion of the legend of Joseph of Arimathea’s visit to Britain. Illustrated with Blake’s Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion (1773; 1810) and Joseph of Arimathea Preaching to the Inhabitants of Britain (1794–6). Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 2 July 2017.

Sunlight through Stained Glass: An Interview with John Rutter. In this wide-ranging interview, composer John Rutter talks to Paul Williamson about his Mass of the Children (2003), a piece that has its origins in Rutter’s experience of being a member of Highgate School boys’ choir, which sang on the renowned 1963 Decca recording of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, conducted by Britten. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 2 July 2017.

Joseph Haydn, Divertimento ‘St Antoni’. Published by Breitkopf in 1782, the Divertimento ‘St Antoni’ provided Brahms with the cue for his Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn (1873). Although the piece was included in Anthony van Hoboken’s 1957 edition of Haydn’s works, the Divertimento was probably not composed by Haydn. Usually now arranged for the standard wind quintet, the piece was originally scored for two oboes, two horns, two bassoons, obbligato bassoon and serpent. Programme note for Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 2 July 2017.

Infinities. Introduction to Galileo 24 by Debbie Loftus, with a preface by Professor Ian Stewart. Published by Festival O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm, 17 June 2017. Paperback with wrap, 235 x 320 mm, 44 pages. Designed by Dmitriy Myelnikov. Paper by Fedrigoni. ISBN 978-0-9928912-4-4

Vivaldi and the Art of the Return. Festival O/Modernt, Ulriksdal Palace Theatre, Stockholm, 16–21 June 2017, directed by Hugo Ticciati. Programme notes and general editing for the festival booklet (144 pages). Notes by Paul Williamson include ‘Vivaldi and the Art of the Return’, ‘The Music of Madness’, ‘Once Upon a Time: Two Films by Lotte Reiniger’, ‘Re/Conceptions’ (Vivaldi, Tavener, Pärt), ‘UnModern at O/Modernt: The Three Bs’, ‘The O/Modernt Seasons’ (Vivaldi and Glass), ‘Bobblestones: Creative Education’, and ‘Return to the Roots’ (Bach's Goldberg Variations, Osvaldo Golijov, and Joseph Tawadros).

From ‘Once Upon A Time: Two Films by Lotte Reiniger’, Sunday 18 June 2017: ‘Faraway and long ago in the city of old Baghdad it was the Caliph’s birthday, and jugglers and dancers were doing their best to entertain him…’ So begins The Magic Horse, as narrated in Lotte Reiniger’s 1953 film for Primrose Productions, a company founded in London by the son of Reiniger’s early supporter, Louis Hagen. The story is loosely based on a tale from the Arabian Nights, but Reiniger’s treatment takes a very different path from that followed in the original. For one thing, Reiniger moves the setting of the tale from Persia to ‘old Baghdad’. Was this perhaps because Persia was very much in the public eye in 1953? This was the year in which British and American intelligence agencies planned and executed a coup in Iran that overthrew the elected government and strengthened the rule of the Shah, who held power for the next twenty-six years. Concerned with the marriage of princes and princesses from the region’s ruling houses, the story told in the Arabian Nights interweaves fairy tale elements with evocations of dynastic intrigue. By contrast, Reiniger’s Magic Horse does away with all such complexities, replacing them with a fantasy journey, undertaken by Prince Ahmed (a generic name, changed from the original), who flies on the magic horse to an exotic wilderness. There he meets and woos a wonderful princess, who owns a bird dress that enables her to fly as well. Won over by the prince’s charms, the princess says goodbye to her attendant ladies (all equipped with flying dresses), leaves her natural paradise behind, and returns to Baghdad on the magic horse in order to marry Ahmed and live happily ever after. Reiniger’s charming short film is, in every sense of the word, a flight of fancy!

The Late Emperor: After St Ephrem the Syrian. Fifteen-minute oratorio for unaccompanied choir with words music by Malcolm Bothwell. The piece is based on St Ephrem the Syrian’s encounter with the corpse of Julian the Apostate in Nisibus in the year 363.

From the programme note: Ephrem encounters Julian’s dead body lying in its coffin beneath the city ramparts. Above, flying from a watchtower, he sees the Persian flag, a token of the fall of Nisibus. The scene inspires in Ephrem a mixture of violent emotions and swirling ideas that he resolves with reference to his Christian faith. In his characteristic synthetic manner Ephrem sees the dreadful loss of Nisibus in the context of the gratifying demise of Julian and the joyful return of a Christian emperor – Jovian, the true successor of Constantine and Constantius. The death of Julian is, he says, ‘a miracle of justice’.

Church Music in France 1789–1853. A thousand words on the development of sacred music in France from the French Revolution to 1853, the date of the foundation of École Niedermeyer, concluding with a brief discussion of César Franck (1822–90). Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 26 March 2017.

Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924): Dolly Suite, op. 56. Programme note for a performance by Oliver Lallemant and James Orford. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 26 March 2017.

This Little World. SATB choral anthem on the theme of tolerance, based on UNESCO core values, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Published by Banks Music Publications, Wath Court, Hovingham, York YO62 4NN, Spring 2017. First performed by The Arcubus Ensemble, directed by Julian Collings and accompanied by Russell Hepplewhite, Helmsley Arts Centre, York, YO62 5DW, 2 July 2016.

Many Realities. Review article (1,750 words) on Picasso Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London, 6 October 2016–5 February 2017; Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 17 March–25 June 2017. Curated by Elizabeth Cowling. The London Magazine, February/March 2017, pp. 31–7.

The Christmas Road. Christmas carol, linking the Lukan travel narrative (Luke 9:51–19:10) with the Christmas story. Music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Christmas 2016.

Born on Christmas Night. Unaccompanied Christmas carol on themes taken from Ecclesiastes. Music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Commissioned by Shean Bowers for the Advent Service, Bath Abbey, December 2016.

Dawn Breaks, Night Falls. Music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Summer 2016.

Heading through the Night to Christmas Day. Christmas song with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. December 2016.

Camille Saint-Saëns, Oratorio de Noël (1858). Programme note (1,400 words) for Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 4 December 2016.

Saint-Saëns offers a distinctly reassuring vision, worlds apart from the rigours of Bach’s Lutheranism, and this raises an interesting question that anyone hearing the piece will answer in his or her own way: how exactly does the Oratorio de Noël interpret its Christmas subject matter? Is the focus primarily on the sacred mystery of the occasion, the beauty of the Latin words, the sensibilities of those listening, or the sumptuous warmth associated with the Christmas season?

Eine Kleine Mozartgeschichte. Programme note for the Chelsea Arts Club Singers’ ‘Magnifizent Mozart’ Concert, directed by Oliver Lallemant. Chelsea Arts Club, 143 Old Church St, London SW3 6EB, 19 and 20 November 2016.

Elegy for MJB. Requiem for musician, musicologist and calligrapher Malcolm J. Bothwell (1958–2015) with music by composer Vincent Bouchot. The structure of the text derives from Tuba Sacra by Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361). Memorial service, Temple du Foyer de l’Âme, 7 Rue du Pasteur Wagner, 75011 Paris, 19 November 2016.

Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924): Cantique de Jean Racine, op. 11 (1865), Pavane in F-sharp minor, op. 50 (1887). Programme note (1,400 words) for Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 3 July 2016.

It is not only because it is a beautifully crafted piece of religious music that it remains a favourite to the present day, however. It is because music and words combine to make Fauré’s setting of Racine’s text a heartfelt expression of his own sensibility – bright optimism and youthful intensity, couched in seductive melody, are infused with an overriding sense of serenity. As a whole it manages to seem both muscular and delicate at the same time – a public expression of established faith that is also very personal in tone. Twenty-five years later Fauré’s genius for song achieved another of its peaks in his breathtaking, magical and melancholy Claire de lune, op. 46, no. 2 (1887), his setting of a poem by Paul Verlaine (1844–96). The capacity to take a text and make it his own by responding to it with sympathetic intelligence is already in evidence in the Cantique de Jean Racine.

Organic Wholes: Ralph Vaughan Williams and G. E. Moore. The Art of Borrowing, Chapter 9, pp. 130–43. On the relations between the early music of Vaughan Williams, notably the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910), and Moore’s philosophy up to the publication of Principia Ethica (1903).

Illustrated London News. Viv is giving a talk on the Victorian attraction known as Mr Wyld’s Model of the Earth. Her alter ego, Genie, steps in to liven things up. Semi-dramatised performance, illustrated with 50 photos by artist Debbie Loftus. First performed by Kristina Leon and Ingela Lundh of The Stockholm English-Speaking Theatre, with music by Hugo Ticciati and Evelyn Glennie. Festival O/Modernt, Handel and the Art of Borrowing, Confidencen, Ulriksdal Palace Theatre, Stockholm, 12 June 2016.

Handel and the Art of Borrowing. Festival O/Modernt, Ulriksdal Palace Theatre, Stockholm, 10 –15 June 2016, directed by Hugo Ticciati. Programme notes for the festival booklet (130 pages): 10,000 words for ten concerts and related events on a wide variety of topics, including ‘Yo soy Maria’, ‘Getting a Handel on the Past’, ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith’, ‘O/Modernt Messiah’, ‘Not-Modern at O/Modernt’ and ‘The Harmonies of Judgement’, available online at www.festivalomodernt.com.

On Handel’s Concerto Grosso, op. 6, No. 7 in B-flat major: ‘If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.’ Thus spake the great Groucho Marx, but how many composers might in all seriousness be tempted to say something remarkably similar? Music is, in one important sense, a flower that springs from the seed of repetition – borrowing from itself in order to propagate itself. Nowhere is the principle more playfully elaborated than in Handel’s Concerto Grosso, op. 6, No. 7 in B-flat major (1739). The second movement opens with a fugue that is built on a single note, repeated over three bars, in which ‘melody’ is achieved through rhythmic halving: two minims, four crotchets, eight quavers. It is, says Richard Taruskin, ‘a famous joke … mindless jabber, “put on” like a comic mask’. Handel’s aim was to break the mould of expectation and startle his listeners into attentiveness – to defamiliarize the all-too-familiar. But is this reductio ad absurdum mere mindless repetition or artful self-borrowing? The interest paid on the loan is (to beg an adjective from Taruskin) ‘whimsical’ amusement, a quality that is explicitly showcased in the final movement of the concerto, where Handel introduces an animated hornpipe – an English dance, also called the ‘whim’ or the ‘delight’. It began as a solo dance for sailors, but by Handel’s day had been appropriated by the urban gentry, who performed it in long lines at their fashionable assemblies. Full of syncopated rhythms, Handel’s hornpipe surprises and delights not in equal measure (as the saying goes) but with stylized whimsy.

Good Education. A sequence of nine themed songs for children’s choir, orchestra and baritone soloist. Music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Commissioned by Shean Bowers for Bath Abbey and the Melody Makers choir. Premiere 7 June 2016, with Craig Bissex (baritone) and Shean Bowers (conductor).

Song titles: A Hedgehog on the Beach, Reproduction in Flowering Plants, Poor Binky, Amadé, The King’s Wedding, I Scored a Goal!, Snowingham, Welcome the Summer, Fire Drill.

From the programme note: Imagine some prehistoric troglodyte children (cave-dwellers), outside their cave, playing a game called Bobblestones. Each child rolls a stone across the ground (no throwing allowed!) and the one whose stone rolls furthest is the winner. One of the children (her name is Dawn) selects the roundest, smoothest stone she can find and launches it across the dusty earth. Yes! Dawn is the winner! Dashing off to retrieve her champion bobblestone before her brother gets to it, Dawn catches sight of her parents, wearily plodding home, struggling with a heavy burden of meat. Suddenly, Dawn stops fighting with her brother. ‘Hmm,’ she thinks, ‘imagine if I could roll like my bobblestone does! Imagine if my parents and my brothers and sisters and me (and the meat!) could all roll along together just like a bobblestone!’ And in a flash of inspiration worthy of the greatest genius in human history Dawn invents the medium-sized family car.

Handel’s Messiah: An English Oratorio. Two-part programme note (2,500 words), including Operas and Oratorios and The Plan of Messiah. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 20 March 2016.

Panathenaia: Live from the British Museum. Live recording of the UK premiere performance of Panathenaia in the Duveen Gallery at the British Museum released on iTunes on the Vivum label, 14 December 2015.

Ralph Vaughan Williams and English Music. Programme note (1,500 words) on RVW’s Fantasia on Christmas Carols (1912). Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 6 December 2015.

Josef Gabriel Rheinberger (1839–1901). Twelve hundred words on Rheinberger’s Missa St Crucis, op. 151. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 6 December 2015.

A Golden Tree. Three-minute Christmas carol with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, published by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd, London 2015.

Review: ‘A meditation on Isaiah 11.1 … a mystical text, evocative of William Morris.’ Rebecca Tavener, Organists’ Review, June 2016, p. 66.

The Miracle of Christmas | Born in Bethlehem. SATB versions of two Christmas carols, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, commissioned by Shean Bowers for Kingswood Preparatory School, College Road, Bath BA1 5SD. Published by The Royal School of Church Music, RSCM Music Direct, Salisbury 2015.

On Christmas Morn. Christmas carol with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, published by Banks Music Publications, Wath Court, Hovingham, York YO62 4NN. Featured composition at the Association of British Choral Directors, 30th Annual Convention, 28–30 August 2015, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester.

Come to the Stable | Where is the Child? | On Christmas Morn | A Child that Cries | Dream Carol. Five Christmas carols, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, published by Banks Music Publications, Wath Court, Hovingham, York YO62 4NN, Autumn 2015.

The Miracle of Christmas | Born in Bethlehem. Two Christmas carols, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, for a choir of sixty Year 5 children (aged 9) at Kingswood Preparatory School, College Road, Bath BA1 5SD. Commissioned by Shean Bowers of Bath Abbey. First performed at Kingswood Prep, December 2015.

Dream Carol. Christmas carol, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Commissioned by Jane-May Cross, July 2015.

Review: ‘An attractive and atmospheric arrangement of a poem by Paul Williamson that relies on imagery from a northern-hemisphere Christmas for its effect.’ Gordon Appleton, The Royal School of Church Music Reviews, December 2016.

Esquissateurs. Review of Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market, National Gallery, London, 4 March–31 May 2015, The London Magazine, August/September 2015, pp. 11–17.

Dvořák’s Mass in D Major, op. 86. Programme note (2,000 words) on Antonín Dvořák’s original version of his Mass in D with organ accompaniment (1887). Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 5 July 2015.

Brahms: Back to the Future. A discussion of Brahms’ place in the nineteenth-century debate about ‘absolute music’ vs Zukunftsmusik, with a special emphasis on Brahms’ Geistliches Lied (1856). Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 5 July 2015.

And here, in a radically simplified form, is the fundamental divide that separated two schools of musical thought in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany, Austria and beyond (the so-called ‘War of the Romantics’). On the one hand, Zukunftsmusik or programme music offered composers a nonmusical stratagem that would free them from the burden of the past; on the other, represented here by Hanslick, Joachim and Brahms, was the idea of pure or ‘absolute music’ (a term coined, ironically, by Wagner), which embraced the music of the past as the source of what Taruskin describes as ‘timeless values’. Timeless it may be, but the music of the past also provides a potent source of inspiration. As we hear exemplified in Brahms’ Geistliches Lied, the art of the present may spring from a creative return to the art of the past.

The New Potato Eaters: Van Gogh in Nuenen 1883–1885. Edited book. Published by Festival O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm, 13 June 2015., Price £50, Paperback with jacket wrap, 272 x 240 mm, 136 pages, 100 illustrations. Designed by Teresa Monachino. Paper by Fedrigoni. ISBN 978-0-9928912-1-3

Contents: Paul Williamson Introduction: Before Nuenen | Ton de Brouwer Van Gogh in Nuenen, 1883–1885 | Paul Williamson Vincent and the Gospel of Work | Colin Wiggins Head of a Peasant Woman | Laura Prins Towards The Potato Eaters: The Long-Awaited Genesis of a Masterpiece | Stephen Hackney Van Gogh’s Colour | Simone Kotva Fields: Vincent to his Brother | Martin Huxter Self-Portrait with the Pastor’s Boy | Catherine Pickstock In Many Places | Stephen Hackney Van Gogh and the Camden Group: Reflections and New Directions | Robin Simon The Trouble with Rembrandt: British and Dutch Portraiture in the Eighteenth Century | Amal Asfour Bacon and Potatoes: A Marvellous Vision of the Reality of Things | Hugo Ticciati Afterword.

From the press release: In December 1883 Vincent van Gogh went to live with his parents in the Dutch town of Nuenen where his father was the pastor at the Dutch Reformed church. Having spent three and a half years struggling to forge a viable career for himself as an artist, Van Gogh arrived home hungry, impoverished and emotionally spent. His immense efforts had so far yielded nothing of substance, and the retreat to Nuenen was intended to give him time to repair his health, improve his finances and calmly pursue his art. When he left Nuenen two years later in November 1885, he had amassed a large body of work, including The Potato Eaters, his first masterpiece, but his time there had been fraught with incident. The New Potato Eaters looks back at Van Gogh’s Nuenen period, tracing his artistic development and setting his work in a broad historical context. Two pieces in verse and a set of new portraits of present-day Nuenen residents reflect creatively on Van Gogh’s achievement. Innovative, original and beautifully designed, The New Potato Eaters takes a fresh and distinctive look at Van Gogh in Nuenen.

Anamorphosis. A semi-dramatised piece for two voices, performed by Kristina Leon and Ingela Lundh of Stockholm’s English Speaking Theatre, including a new setting by Malcolm Bothwell of ‘Take o take those lips away’ from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Act IV, Scene 1. Performed as part of Dubbelspel, the literary event at Festival O/Modernt 2015, curated by Paul Williamson, with further contributions from designer Teresa Monachino and artist Martin Huxter. Festival O/Modernt, Confidencen, Ulriksdals Slottsteater, Stockholm, 13 June 2015.

About Dubbelspel: A game of doubles! That’s the theme of Festival O/Modernt’s 2015 literary event. But this isn’t a game of snap where the aim is noisily to slap a hand on two identical cards that appear in succession. What’s at stake in Dubbelspel played O/Modernt-style are familiar notions of sameness, difference and identity. The new instantiation is not a straight facsimile of a given original but a creatively varied counterpart. To borrow some terms from a revered French philosopher, this is non-identical repetition: finding inspiration in the difference between old and new and thus shedding light on both.

Twofold. Book coauthored with Simone Kotva. Published by Festival O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm, June 2015. Paperback with flaps, 270 x 210 mm, 48 pages, 13 illustrations. Designed by Dmitriy Myelnikov. ISBN 978-0-9928912-2-0

Contents: Paul Williamson Don’t Read this Book! (After D.H. Lawrence), Anamorphosis, Two Ledas | Simone Kotva Devices, The Twofold, Endpoints.

From the back flap: Twofold is an anthology of new works in verse and prose, by Simone Kotva and Paul Williamson, inspired by themes of binaries and doubling. Published under the auspices of Festival O/Modernt 2015, Twofold includes eight drawings from George Levantis’ Leda and the Swan suite (2008) and two specially commissioned images by Debbie Loftus, Etruscan and Miwoks (both 2015). The book also contains a new setting by composer Malcolm Bothwell of ‘Take, o take those lips away’ from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.

Scarlatti and the Twofold. Programme booklet notes prepared by Paul Williamson and Hugo Ticciati. Festival O/Modernt, Confidencen, Ulriksdal Palace Theatre, Stockholm, 12–17 June, 2015.

The New Best Tour of Bath with Songs. Seven songs for children’s choir and baritone soloist, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Commissioned by Shean Bowers for Bath Abbey and the Melody Makers choir. Premiere in Bath Abbey, 9 June 2015.

Song titles: The Ballad of Bladud, The Roman Temple, The Alderman’s Ball, The Portrait Gallery, It’s Not That Kind Of Circus, Little Acorns – Mighty Oaks, Children of The Light.

From the programme note: There may be no clowns in Bath’s famous circus, but did you know that the architect who built it believed in druids? And tonight, possibly for the first time anywhere (drum roll!), especially for your listening pleasure (more drums!), we will reveal the time-honoured wisdom of the oak tree. Finally, take to the skies with the angelic children of the light who will transport you to empyreal realms. Our primary concern at the New Best Tour of Bath with Songs is your comfort and safety … No, it isn’t! (Important though those things undoubtedly are!) … Our primary concern this evening is to entertain and delight you, to fire your imagination and to touch your heart. So settle back (or sit up, whichever you prefer) and enjoy the journey!

Panathenaia. UK premiere, live in the Duveen Gallery at The British Museum, 4 June 2015. This special event was preceded by a lecture from Ian Jenkins, Senior Curator, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, and interviews with composer and librettist. The event was staged in the context of the museum’s major exhibition: Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art, curated by Ian Jenkins, 26 March–5 July 2015.

St Pantaleon Mass. The premiere recording of Malcolm Bothwell’s a cappella mass, sung by Liturgical Voices of London, directed by Oliver Lallemant. Engineered by Alex Barnes, produced by Thomas Hewitt Jones. CD booklet written by Paul Williamson, designed by Dmitriy Myelnikov with new artwork by Debbie Loftus. Recorded on Wednesday 22 April 2015 at Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London SW1X 9BZ. Released 15 May 2015. Executive producer: Paul Williamson.

Leonardo 1452–1519. Exhibition at Palazzo Reale, Milan, 15 April–19 July 2015. Audioguide written and read by Alessandro Scafi. Edited English version by Paul Williamson.

Panathenaia. Broadcast on Sveriges Radio, P2 Live, Musik från festivalen O/Modernt, produced by Evert van Berkel, 8 April 2015 at 7pm.

Nelson, Haydn and the Nelson Mass. Three-part, illustrated programme note (3,100 words) on Haydn’s Missa in Angustiis, known as the Nelson Mass. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 22 March 2015.

Insanae et Vanae Curae | Sudò il guerriero. Programme note on two pieces deriving from Haydn’s oratorio Il ritorno di Tobia (1774–5): the choral motet Insanae et Vanae Curae, a parody of a chorus from Tobia, and Sudò il guerriero, an aria from part one of the oratorio sung by Tobit’s wife, Anna (performed by Benjamin Williamson with Oliver Lallemant on piano). Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 22 March 2015.

This Joyful Eastertide. Programme note for the publication of an Easter anthem with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones and words by George R. Woodward (1894). Published by The Royal School of Church Music, RSCM Music Direct, Salisbury 2015.

Pleasing People Seriously. Review essay of Benjamin Britten, War Requiem, Royal Albert Hall, Remembrance Sunday, 9 November 2014 at 3.30 pm, with Evelina Dobračeva (soprano), Stephan Rügamer (tenor), Bryn Terfel (bass-baritone), The Royal Choral Society, Trinity Boys Choir directed by David Swinson and The London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Richard Cooke. Introduced by Angela Rippon. The London Magazine, February/March 2015, pp. 41–7.

Things that Go Bump in the Night. A song for six-year olds, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, commissioned by Nicola Coldstream for Balfour Primary School, Balfour Road, Brighton, BN1 6NE.

Hear the Angels Sing. Christmas carol, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, published by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd, London 2014.

One Voice: The Calypso Carol. Christmas carol with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, published by The Royal School of Church Music, RSCM Music Direct, Salisbury 2014.

A Golden Tree. Christmas carol with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, commissioned by Manvinder Rattan and the John Lewis Partnership Music Society for first performance at the society’s annual Service of Nine Lessons, Westminster Cathedral, 23 December 2014. Premiered by The Cavendish Singers, directed by Manvinder Rattan.

The Gift That I Receive. A three-minute Christmas anthem with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. A Christmas song with a humanist ethos, commissioned for the wedding of actor Sarah Winter (An Adventure in Space and Time, 2013; Versailles, 2015), Bath, 12 December 2014.

Come to the Stable. Christmas carol with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones for a choir of sixty nine-year-old children at Kingswood Preparatory School, College Road, Bath BA1 5SD. First performed at Kingswood Prep, 9 December 2014.

Johann Sebastian Bach, Christmas Oratorio, 1734: An Introduction. Three-part, illustrated programme note (3,600 words) on J. S. Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium BWV 248. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 7 December 2014.

Hear the Angels Sing. World premiere concert performance of the Christmas carol, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, given by The Choir of Gonville & Caius College Cambridge, St Marylebone Parish Church, 17 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LT, 6 December 2014.

Verbum Caro Factum Est. Christmas carol with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Recorded at Tewkesbury Abbey on 4–5 February 2014 by Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum, directed by Simon Bell, for inclusion on a CD engineered by Gary Cole: Christmas From Tewkesbury: Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum, Regent Records, 17 November 2014.

Chop chop! English version of the lyrics of Kopf ab! from the German musical Alice im Wunderland by Shay Coen (music) and Mathias Weibrich (German words), commissioned by Bettina Migge-Volkmer, Managing Director, Gallissas GmbH, Berlin, October 2014.

Bilbao’s Other Serras. Essay on Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time (1994–2005, Guggenheim, Bilbao) and Pere Serra’s two paintings, St Peter Preaching and St Peter and St Paul before the Judge, here retitled The Fall of Simon Magus (c. 1400, Bilbao Fine Arts Museum), The London Magazine, August/September 2014, pp. 35–45.

The Lindley Bell | Small Sacrifices. Two songs from Wildflower Meadows with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones (see below), performed at Oakham Castle by a choir of thirty schoolchildren under the direction of Peter Davis, Director of Music at Oakham School, to celebrate a royal visit by Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, 28 July 2014.

Glendower! School song with piano accompaniment for Glendower Prep School, 86/87 Queen's Gate, London SW7 5JX. Music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Commissioned by Sarah Knollys (Head), Jill Walker (Deputy Head) and the Parents’ Association. First performance at Glendower Leavers’ Assembly, 10 July 2014.

Carmina Burana and the Third Reich | Circling Round Carmina Burana. Two programme notes on Carmina Burana. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 29 June 2014.

Isn’t it peculiar that nobody saw any irony in the fact that the message of the medieval words Orff had chosen to set could be subversively applied to the regime itself? Didn’t anybody realise that the stomping feet in the opening chorus are heard marching to meet their own destruction? One man who did perhaps have an inkling of this was Goebbels.

Witold Lutosławski, Variations on a Theme by Paganini (1941). A note on Lutosławski’s Variations, performed on two pianos by Oliver Lallemant and Peter Foggitt. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 29 June 2014.

Ekphrasis: Serra. A book in blank verse on the sculpture of Richard Serra, with an introduction, Drawing Out, by Simone Kotva, and an afterword by Paul Williamson. Published by Festival O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm, 2014 (16 June). Paperback with flaps, 270 x 210 mm, 72 pages, 18 tritone illustrations. Designed by Dmitriy Myelnikov. Distributed by Gagosian Gallery online and in Gagosian Shop, 976 Madison Avenue, New York. ISBN 978-0-9928912-0-6

Pyrrhics! Afterword to Ekphrasis (Cambridge & Stockholm 2014, pp. 65–8), discussing the use of the pyrrhic, the metrical foot with two unstressed syllables, in English blank verse.

It sounds like it should be a mild imprecation. ‘Two small drops of dark brown coffee the size of pennies seeped into the fabric of his fresh white shirt. Pyrrhics! he breathed, with muted exasperation.’ On the contrary, despite its naturally explosive phonics, the term ‘pyrrhic’ describes two weak sounds – a metrical foot of two short or (in English) unstressed syllables.

Wildflower Meadows. Seven Songs for children’s choir and baritone solo, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, written to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. Running time thirty minutes, with piano accompaniment. Commissioned by Peter Davis and Oakham School, Rutland, in association with Arts for Rutland, with funding from The Arts Council and Rutland Music to as part of the Rutland Remembers 1914 series of events. Produced in partnership with the British Army. First performed as the massed choral finale for the World War I commemoration, Mobilisation, at Kendrew Barracks, Cottesmore, Rutland, 15 June 2014. At Peter Davis’ request I prepared some teaching materials to go with the piece. These became a thirteen-page illustrated booklet, Notes on Wildflower Meadows.

Song titles: The Lindley Bell, Autumn, Over the Top!, Hold Hard!, Remember Me, Small Sacrifices, Wildflower Meadows.

An Etruscan Acrobat. Dramatic monologue in blank verse (320 lines), commissioned by Festival O/Modernt 2014 for distinguished Swedish actor and director, Björn Granath (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2009; The American, 2010). Due to a last-minute change in his filming schedule, Björn was unable to read the piece, which was performed as a duologue by Kristina Leon and Ingela Lundh of Stockholm’s English Speaking Theatre, with music provided by Hugo Ticciati. Ulriksdals Slottsteater Confidencen, Stockholm, 16 June 2014. Published by Festival O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm, 2014, in a limited edition, edited and hand-sewn by Simone Kotva, accompanied by a specially commissioned illustration by Martin Huxter.

From the back flap: A recipe for verse: mix together a phrase from Henry James with a little bronze statue from Etruria, a mention of Keats, and some exasperation. Now add a clever woman, a sprinkle of hard words, a children’s bear, and a few notes from an air by Bach. When all of that is thoroughly combined, place the resulting compound in a receptacle made of Roman streets, the Spanish Steps and the Borghese Gardens. Leave to rest in a warm place for an unspecified amount of time (you’ll know when it’s ready). Serve viva voce, with improvised accompaniment if desired.

Panathenaia. Cantata in eight movements for soprano, mezzo-soprano, choir and string orchestra, including solo violin, oboe and harp, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Commissioned by Hugo Ticciati for ‘Gluck and Neo-Classicism’, the 2014 edition of Festival O/Modernt, Stockholm. World premiere performance 15 June 2014. The premiere was preceded by a lecture, The Parthenon Frieze: A Symphony in Stone, given by Ian Jenkins, Senior Curator, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, The British Museum. The concert was accompanied by a rock-balancing exhibition by sculptor, Michael Grab. Performers: Mary Bevan (soprano), Karolina Blixt (mezzosoprano), Alon Sariel (theorbo), Mark Simpson (clarinet), Bram Van Sambeek (bassoon), Johan Bridger (percussion), Henrik Måwe (piano), Nicolas Dautricourt, Matthew Trusler, Hugo Ticciati (violins), Andres Kaljuste (viola), Martin Rummel (cello), Knut-Erik Sundquist (double bass), Will Kunhardt (conductor), and vocal ensemble, VOCES8.

All for One and One for All. School song with piano accompaniment and optional orchestration for Dulwich Prep London. Music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Commissioned by Michael Roulston (Headmaster) and Philip Brooke (Director of Music). First performance Dulwich Prep London, Alleyn Park, London SE21 7AA, June 2014.

Daydreams. A volume of six children’s songs, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, published by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd, London 2014.

The Ship of Theseus. Review essay of Repetition and Identity by Catherine Pickstock (Oxford University Press, 2013), The London Magazine, April/May 2014, pp. 58–62.

Developing her thesis in response to Kierkegaard, Pickstock rhetorically asks (p. 147) whether ‘human identity, and the identity of all things … is secured through the historical reduplicating, and so continuous representation of the atonement achieved by the God-Man?’

Here by this Spreading Tree. Additional stanza for a funeral setting of Shakespeare’s Under the Greenwood Tree, with music by Malcolm Bothwell, 14 April 2014.

In Search of Franz Danzi, 1763–1826. Programme note to accompany Danzi’s Wind Quintet in G minor, op. 56, no. 2 (1821), performed by members of Sloane Square Orchestra at the 2014 Easter concert given by Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 23 March 2014.

Francesca Lebrun, 1756–1791. An outline of the life of Franz Danzi’s sister, Francesca Lebrun (née Franziska Dorothea Danzi), to accompany a discussion of the portrait of her painted by Thomas Gainsborough in London in 1780, now in the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Programme note for the Easter 2014 concert given by Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 23 March 2014.

Backgrounds to the Magnificat. Programme note to accompany Magnificat (1990) by John Rutter (b. 1945). Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 23 March 2014.

Hello World. Recitative and aria, lasting eight minutes, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, for for countertenor, solo accompanied by piano, cello and synthesised sounds. First performed at the Poetics of Verticality, curated by Simone Kotva, Robinson College, Cambridge, 21 January 2014. Performed by Benjamin Williamson (countertenor – no relation!) and Thomas Hewitt Jones (piano, cello, electronics). The recitative is a blank verse interpretation of the sequence of commands in the programming language, Python, required to produce the introductory string, ‘Hello World’. The aria is based on Plato’s Phaedrus. For an anonymous review see ‘Phaedrus’, The Whichcote Society Blog, Proceedings and Notes, March 2014.

From the programme note: It’s strange how the journey down the column of text can lead upwards: from obscurity to illumination, say, so that what appears to be the bottom is really the top and vice versa. The end really is in the beginning. The end lurks in the beginning like a code. Even where there seems to be no settled purpose at the outset, the end shapes the rest. As you tumble down the text you tumble into form. It’s like happily falling upwards into knowledge.

A String of Pearls. Six-minute Christmas carol for upper voices with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, commissioned for Philip Berg and the Recital Choir at Colet Court, St Paul’s Preparatory School. First performances, directed by Philip Berg: St Mary’s Barnes, 5 December 2013 (Home-Start Carol Service with readings by Jack Whitehall, Hayley Mills, Gary Lineker, Peter Bowles and Patricia Hodge); and St Mary Abbotts Parish Church, Kensington, 13 December 2013.

Where is the Child? Christmas carol with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, commissioned by Joy Hill and Reverend Lucy Winkett for the Royal College of Music Vigala Singers. First performed at St James’s Piccadilly, 17 December 2013.

From the programme note: In its depiction of the Nativity, Where is the Child? invokes an invisible dividing line between the transient glories of the natural world and our human sense that what is beautiful has enduring value. The sound of the child’s cry reaches across this divide, striking a chord that retains its capacity to touch the human heart from generation to generation. Where should we look for words and images that can capture such undying emotive power? In the music of the dawn chorus that sings at midnight, perhaps, when nature’s processes are temporarily suspended; or in the magical words that herald the humble birth of a child who was destined to change the world: Gloria in excelsis deo.

Verbum Caro Factum Est. Christmas carol with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Commissioned by Dean Close School for the Chapel Choir and Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum. First performance Tuesday 10 December 2013 in Tewkesbury Abbey, conducted by Simon Bell. Published by The Royal School of Church Music, RSCM Music Direct, Salisbury, 2013.

Benjamin Britten 1913–1976: The Trials of Innocence. Three-part programme note (4,400 words) on Britten’s Jubilate Deo in C (1961), Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac (1952) and Saint Nicolas: A Cantata (1948). Sloane Square Choral Society, Christmas Concert, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 8 December 2013.

Snowingham. Christmas encore for SATB choir and orchestra, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. First performed by Sloane Square Choral Society, Christmas Concert, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 8 December 2013.

Daydreams. Six songs on themes reflecting on Benjamin Britten’s Friday Afternoons, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Commissioned by Peter Davis and Oakham School, Rutland. The commission had special resonance for Oakham as Britten’s elder brother, Robert (known as ‘Bobby’), the dedicatee of Friday Afternoons, attended Oakham School from 1921–6. First performed on 22 November 2013, the centenary of Britten’s birth.

Song titles: Friday Afternoons, Traffic Lights, –ER Verbs, Chocolate Crackle-Tops, New Year and Audio Guide (a Christmas piece based on The Nativity, c. 1475, by Piero della Francesca, National Gallery, London).

From the programme note: To try to capture the energy, chaos and quirkiness of a child’s way of looking at things: that was the inspiration for Daydreams. The lyrics depict a world in which the curious logic of the artless imagination delightfully outshines the usual mechanisms of cause and effect, and where the mess and muddle of childhood can produce beautiful surprises. The music is capricious in its use of tonality, aiming to evoke a sense of childlike innocence combined with playful rebelliousness in order to create a mischievously entertaining set of companion pieces to Britten’s Friday Afternoons.

Building and Smoking. Song for children’s choir, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. Commissioned by Suzi Digby and the London Youth Choir in partnership with the Friday Afternoons Project, run by Aldeburgh Music as part of the Benjamin Britten Centenary. First performed along with Britten’s Friday Afternoons and Hymn to St Cecilia at Middle Temple Hall, London, 22 November 2013, conducted by Greg Hallam. (The performance was broadcast live on the Snape Maltings Friday Afternoons website. Licensed by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd for publication by Faber Music Ltd, London, 2013.

Incarnation: Christmas music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. CD recording, with the Chamber Orchestra of London and Sloane Square Chamber Choir, conducted by Oliver Lallemant, Mary Bevan (soprano), Samuel Evans (baritone), James Sherlock (organ), Christine Stevenson (piano) and Harriet Hougham Slade (clarinet). CD released by Regent Records, REGCD429, 11 November 2013.

From the sleeve note: Incarnation tells two interwoven stories. The piece recalls the familiar tale of the Christmas season that begins with Advent and progresses, via the Nativity, to Twelfth Night and Epiphany. Embedded in that seasonal succession of events, however, is another story. That is the large-scale narrative of the Bible, a synthesis of divine cosmology, history, legend and theology, that starts with the creation of the world and the establishment of Eden, soon followed by the fall of Adam and Eve. This slow-moving tale then winds its way through the Old Testament towards Christ's birth in the stable in Bethlehem, finally reaching out to touch the present day and look ahead into the future.

Reviews: ‘The aesthetic of the recorded pieces of Incarnation: Music for Christmas as a whole is thus one of a reflective "modernism", if we may ascribe this term loosely to Hewitt Jones’s and Williamson’s engagement with rather than rejection of tradition … In our own age of twice-removed modernity (are we now post-modern?), Incarnation is a welcome reminder that the unlooked-for which characterises artistic novelty arises not ex nihilo, "out of nothing", but comes to us by way of variation – a non-identical, typological recapitulation of a theme which will always be new.' Simone Kotva, ‘Music for the Newer Rite’, The London Magazine, December 2013/January 2014, pp. 72–7.

‘I recommend very highly this Regent CD.’ David Mellor, The New Releases Show, Christmas edition, Classic FM, Saturday 14 December 2013.

‘The words need – and repay – careful study.’ John Quinn, MusicWeb International, December 2013.

‘The performances are excellent throughout … an unusual Christmas offering but one which deserves critical attention.’ Richard Popple, Organists’ Review, March 2014, p. 64.

‘These are all highly accomplished works with immense commercial appeal, which deserve to be included in the festive programmes of every symphony orchestra and chorus.’ Clare Stevens, Choir & Organ, November/December 2014.

‘The sequence might suggest something like the sequence of Traherne’s poems which became Dies Natalis.’ Curtis Rogers, The Organ, 367, February–April 2014, p. 47.

Hear the Angels Sing. Christmas carol with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, included on the Regent Records CD release of Incarnation, 11 November 2013, accompanied by a brief sleeve note.

Subtitles for Ariane sur le fil. The Tightrope, a short film, written and directed by Agathe Debary, featuring Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga, Fred Eggington, and Kévin Pérodeau Latini, released in September 2013. English subtitles cowritten with Malcolm Bothwell.

The Centenary of The Rite of Spring. Review essay of Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories (Naxos Books, 2013), including a CD of The Rite of Spring recorded in 2007 for Naxos by the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Robert Craft. Published in The London Magazine, October/November 2013, pp. 47–53.

Eclectic and anecdotal, the book abstains from developing topics systematically, but that is perhaps its principal purpose, namely to ensure that no scrap of testimony connecting Craft with the magical, glamorous world of soaring twentieth-century modernism is left unrecorded … For thoroughly compulsive reading, one would far rather go back to Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, where Craft is at his sparkling best.

Untamed Elegies. Seven-minute SATB choral work with organ accompaniment, commissioned by Claire Innes-Hopkins and Lincoln Cathedral Consort, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. The text evokes the life of St Hugh of Lincoln (c. 1135–1200), in particular his time at the Grande Chartreuse (the mother house of the Carthusians), his strange friendship with a wild whooper swan (his principal attribute in pictorial representations), and his work on rebuilding Lincoln Cathedral. World premiere: Lincoln Cathedral, Readers’ Service, 12 October 2013.

From the programme note: The lasting truth of the legends surrounding the exceptionally close relationship with wild creatures enjoyed by St Hugh, St Francis of Assisi and many others lies in their celebration of childlike simplicity and incorruptible integrity. An unaffected rapport with animals suggests an almost Edenic innocence – a quality that never loses its fascination. In the case of St Hugh, it seems he was able to establish inside himself a place of quietness and serenity that remained inviolable despite all external pressures. He was able, as it were, to rediscover the inaccessible wildness of the Grande Chartreuse in the flatlands of Lincolnshire. In so doing, Hugh invoked a sacred space that found tangible form in the great cathedral he commissioned, but which is also most touchingly commemorated in his friendship with the fierce and proud whooping swan of Stow.

Another Way. Title track (7.31 minutes) of Another Way: English Vocal Music, recorded by the German ensemble Quartonal for their debut album released on Sony Classical, 13 September 2013. Quartonal: Mirko Ludwig (tenor), Florian Sievers (tenor), Christoph Behm (baritone) and Sönke Tams Freier (bass). Music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. The CD booklet includes a German translation of Another Way and a sleeve note by Nico Schneidereit.

Reviews: ‘The sound is wonderfully clean, meticulously balanced and full. An impressive debut.’ Marcus Stäbler, NDR Kultur, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, 13 September 2013.

‘Every delicate breath of wind and scent of fresh-blown blossom that the wanderer seeks out in nature drifts through these interpretations of late romantic vocal music, shaped with the utmost eloquence and feeling.’ Sören Ingwersen, ‘Spuren von schlichter Eleganz’, concerti (www.concerti.de), October 2013.

‘Quartonal’s Sony CD, Another Way, is a total success.’ Christian Strehk, Kieler Nachrichten, 4 December 2013.

Rameau and the Vertical. Review essay of Festival O/Modernt, Confidencen, Ulriksdals Slottsteater, Solna, Sweden, 9–17 June 2013, The London Magazine, August/September 2013, pp. 126–33.

Harmony, to put the matter simply, is an intricate and infinitely engaging web of artifice whose capacity to express emotion depends on the interrelationships between arrangements of chords in given contexts.

Traumreise. A seven-minute encore for SATB choir and orchestra, paying homage to Franz Schubert, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. The text is based on themes deriving from Schubert’s song cycles, Winterreise (1828) and Schwanengesang (1829). First performed by Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 30 June 2013.

The Genesis of Poulenc’s Organ Concerto. Programme note on the Concerto in G Minor for Organ, Strings and Timpani by Francis Poulenc, performed by James Sherlock (soloist) and the Sloane Square Orchestra, conducted by Oliver Lallemant, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 30 June 2013.

Mendelssohn’s Hear My Prayer: Contexts and Symbolism. Programme note on Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Hear My Prayer. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 30 June 2013.

Unreal City: Schubert’s Vienna 1814–1815. Programme note on Franz Schubert’s Mass in G (D167), Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 30 June 2013.

If the sheer quantity of music composed in 1815 is remarkable, still more so is the quality and originality of Schubert’s work at this early stage in his short career. In ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, for instance, Gretchen (Little Margaret) sits at her spinning wheel recalling the glamorous, seductive presence of Faust. ‘Meine Ruh’ ist hin,’ she laments, ‘mein Herz ist schwer’: ‘My peace of mind is gone; my heart is heavy.’ Conveyed by the piano, the motion of the spinning wheel is metronomic but increasingly responsive to the rhythms of Gretchen’s reveries as she dreams of Faust’s noble appearance, his winning smile, his forceful glance, his eloquent turn of phrase, the pressure of his hand … ‘und ach sein Kuss!’ At the culminating moment when Gretchen remembers the thrill of Faust’s kiss the overwhelming immediacy of that memory causes the external world to dissolve into unreality: the wheel ceases to turn and the piano breaks off, staggering and swooning, so to speak, before regularity is haltingly re-established. At this climactic instant there is nothing but consciousness. Gretchen’s world consists entirely of her state of mind, and that is represented in Schubert’s musical depiction with an urgency and conviction that is dramatic, delicate, utterly persuasive and superbly moving. The psychological insight that Schubert demonstrates in ‘Gretchen’, composed when he was just seventeen years old, is quite as astounding and compelling as his sheer musical brilliance.

A Scent. Dramatic monologue in blank verse (fifty lines), included in the anthology Vertical Realities | Vertikala verkligheter, ed. Simone Kotva, published by Festival O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm, to coincide with the festival's 2013 edition. Performed by distinguished Swedish actor and director Björn Granath with musical accompaniment by Hugo Ticciati. Confidencen, Ulriksdals Palace Theatre, Stockholm, 16 June 2013.

Another Way. A cappella piece with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones, commissioned by the German ensemble Quartonal. World premiere: Himmelfahrtskirche, Munich, 14 June 2013.

From the programme note: The musical direction taken by Another Way draws on bold melody and dense homophony, with added harmonic alterations, in order to evoke the subtle changes in sensibility portrayed in its expressive text. The narrative at the heart of the piece depicts a fork on a mountain path where a traveller contemplates taking the way down through cultivated terraces to an inviting scene of simple rural comforts. A second route leads upwards through alpine woods towards a barren, mountainous summit. After pausing for a moment, the traveller is irresistibly drawn to take the long ascent, beset with difficulties, towards a destination characterised by discomposure and uncertainty. Musically, Another Way opens in a rich, mellow vein that slowly builds in passion and strongly felt emotion. Harmonic turns decorate the text, while a distinctive melody emerges that is characterised by a prevailing nostalgia. Tensions remain, however, and continue to grow until the final section of the piece, where the musical journey culminates in a sense of quiet ecstasy.

Amadé. SATB encore on themes deriving from Mozart with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones: an affectionate portrait of the young Mozart, concluding with a spirited rendition of one of Mozart’s best-loved melodies. First performed by Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 17 March 2013.

Imperial Mozart 1788–1791. Three-part programme note (4,000 words), including The Myth of Mozart’s Requiem, Mozart’s ‘Ave verum corpus' and Requiem in Context, and Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 17 March 2013.

Love, Grace and Faith: J. S. Bach Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140. Programme note for Sloane Square Choral Society, Christmas Concert, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 9 December 2012.

In a postlapsarian world how can flawed human love be made worthy of the divine beloved? The answer is through faith. As Luther expressed it: ‘faith is the substitute and completes what love lacks by receiving the Lord Christ, who is Himself Love.’ In the final movement of BWV 140, the profoundly subjective, unashamedly human experience of love, couched in affective musical forms borrowed from Italian opera, is grounded in an unadorned rendition of the third verse of Nicolai’s chorale sung by the whole choir and possibly, in Bach’s time, by the congregation as well. The ecstatic emotional charge, built up through the cantata’s central movements, is now earthed in a plain, cheerful and above all communal expression of faith that completes Bach’s depiction of love in all its aspects, human and divine.

Incarnation: A Suite of Songs for Christmas. Christmas song cycle in seven movements for SATB choir, orchestra and soloists, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. World premiere performance: Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 9 December 2012, with Oliver Lallemant (conductor), Samuel Evans (baritone), Mary Bevan (soprano) and Harriet Hougham Slade (clarinet). Introduced by Petroc Trelawney of BBC Radio 3.

Movements: Advent, Falling, Wandering, Nativity, Planting, Revelling, Epiphany.

‘I suspect Incarnation may find a place in the repertoire.’ Petroc Trelawny, BBC Radio 3, Breakfast, 19 December 2012.

Richard Taruskin: Music, Words and the Idea of History. The London Magazine, October/ November 2012, pp. 104–11.

Taruskin’s approach is everywhere shaped by the dynamics of ideas. Understood as a series of problems to be solved, questions to be answered, the resulting narrative acquires a vivid sense of urgency that makes it both gripping and compelling but also inspiringly open ended. This is history built on the disciplines of creative thinking. As Taruskin suggests, it is the way the story ought to be told.

The Consolations of Music: Così fan tutte. Review essay, based on the performance by Opera Holland Park, Holland Park, London, with the City of London Sinfonia and Opera Holland Park Chorus, conducted by Thomas Kemp, The London Magazine, August/September 2012, pp. 16–21.

And yet, the very medium in which Alfonso’s demonstration has taken place has all along confirmed the existence of an overarching order (to which the philosopher himself ineluctably subscribes) in which higher values movingly do prevail and harmonious resolutions are not only possible but essential.

The Harmonium. Programme note about the development of the harmonium (a kind of reed organ) to accompany Gioachino Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle (1863). Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 8 July 2012.

The Paradox of Beauty: Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle. Programme note for Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 8 July 2012.

Grace. A short song of thanksgiving for SATB choir, commissioned by Sloane Square Choral Society, with music by Thomas Hewitt Jones. First performed by Patrons of SSCS, directed by Oliver Lallemant, at the Sloane Club, 52 Lower Sloane Street, London SW1, 30 April 2012.

Telemann and the Enlightenment. Programme note on Telemann’s viola concerto in G major (TWV 51: G9) for Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 25 March 2012.

Telemann’s viola concerto in G major conjures up a different world, a world in which form seems supremely to count. The relationship between the orchestra and the single instrument – the viola – invokes a protocol of interaction that advocates the reassuring authority and value of the musical structure in and of itself. The solo passages are less about virtuosity than about dialogue; the orchestra is not a platform from which the individual instrument shoots off towards the stratosphere, but an encompassing order that both contains the instrument but also liberates it, creating conditions in which the viola can delightfully and enthrallingly express itself. There are emotional dynamics and a capacity to surprise, but no Vivaldian sensationalism. On the contrary, the beauty of the piece is what one might call philosophical, built on an insight into the pleasures of order, of design – of understanding the contribution made by the empowered individual component to the overarching, sustaining structure. The word ‘concerto’ has two possible (and not incompatible) origins in the Latin verb concertare, which means both ‘to work together, to arrange, to agree’ and also ‘to contend, to dispute, to debate.’ If we imagine that ‘debate’ here means not what happens in the House of Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions, but the kind of discussion Socrates conducts in the Symposium, then the second of those etymologies very neatly captures the dialogue between viola and orchestra that makes up the ordered whole which is Telemann’s concerto.

‘Dissolve me into extasies’ – Vivaldi’s Sacred Music. Programme note for Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 25 March 2012.

Constantine vs. The Barbarians. Programme note for The Dream of Constantine with music by Malcolm Bothwell and words by Paul Williamson, performed by The 24 at St Paul’s Covent Garden, 18 February 2012, and St Saviourgate Unitarian Chapel, York, 19 February 2012.

Treated with a generous infusion of poetic licence, the story told in Malcolm Bothwell’s The Dream of Constantine is a distant relative of the version of Constantine's vision narrated in Cyenwulf’s Elena. The threat faced by Constantine comes from barbarous Huns, while Christ’s cross is revealed to the sleeping emperor in the form of a marvellous immense tree, decked with jewels and illuminating the night sky. The dramatic heart of the piece comes at its still centre, where the fretful emperor, personally responsible for the fate of a whole world, drifts into a dreamful sleep in which emotional and spiritual forces bring about a moment of recognition and revelation whose impact will change the course of history.

Evelyn Waugh’s First Eight Books. Review essay in The London Magazine, December/January 2011–12, pp. 146–52.

Borrowing a phrase from the first edition of Brideshead, Frank Kermode refers to Waugh’s ‘historical intransigence that equates the English aristocratic with the Catholic tradition.’ It is a doctrine that seems to give upper-class Catholics (particularly those from the landed classes) an almost antinomian right to deliverance.

Christmas Carols: The Sacred and the Secular. Programme note for Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 11 December 2011.

A Ceremony of Carols and the Fortunate Fall. Programme note on Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, plus an edited and annotated text of the piece. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 11 December 2011.

The Dream of Constantine: After Cynewulf. Oratorio for unaccompanied SATB choir with music by Malcolm Bothwell. The text is loosely affiliated with Elena by the Old English poet Cynewulf (fl. 9th century). The piece was commissioned as part of a series of concerts in Serbia, London, Paris and York, commemorating the 1700th anniversary of the proclamation Edict of Milan (February 313). First performed at the Philharmonic Orchestra Concert Hall in Niš, Serbia, the birthplace of Constantine the Great, 28 October 2011.

The York Mystery Cycle – A Corpus Christi Play. Programme note on Genesis by Peter Foggitt, based on the Barkers’ Play, The Creation and Fall of Lucifer, from the York Mystery Cycle, including an edited and annotated version of the text. World premiere performance: Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 3 July 2011.

Ein deutsches Requiem. Programme note on Brahms’ Requiem. Sloane Square Choral Society, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 3 July 2011.

The absence of an explicit statement of the central tenet of Christian belief from Ein deutsches Requiem was noticed from the outset. Carl Martin Reinthaler, organist of Bremen Cathedral, led rehearsals for the piece prior to its first full performance (minus the 5th movement – a later addition), conducted by Brahms himself in Bremen on Good Friday, 10 April 1868. Reinthaler wrote to Brahms, urging him to modify the work to include direct Biblical reference to Christ the redeemer. In his reply Brahms stressed that he had selected texts from his ‘revered poets’ to serve his needs as ‘a musician’, and that he would gladly have omitted the word ‘German’ from his title in favour of the word ‘Human’. Brahms' ‘Human Requiem’ – a requiem mass without a liturgy, a Lutheran Trauerkantate that makes no reference to Christ. To invoke the real spiritual power and beauty of sacred music in the absence of specific theological meaning seems to have been Brahms' intention – casting aside 'every confessional frock, every ecclesiastical custom’, as the influential contemporary critic Eduard Hanslick put it, in order to allow the ‘mind and heart of the listener’ more intimately to participate in ‘the truest nature of the music’.

Singing Handel. On the experience of William Jackson of Exeter (1730–1803), who came to London at the age of fifteen and later recalled his experience of singing under Handel. Programme note for Sloane Square Choral Society’s performance of Handel’s Messiah, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London, 27 March 2011.

Poor Jackson sought solace in the music of Handel and was fortunate enough to ‘squeeze in’ (as he puts it) among the chorus singers at the first performance of Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus, given at Covent Garden on 1 April 1747. Whether Handel thought the young interloper was making an April Fool of him or whether the great composer wanted to demonstrate his own All Fool’s Day wit, I don’t know, but when Handel noticed the youthful stranger in the choir he gave him a piece of advice with which many amateur choristers might be all too familiar! ‘Who are You?’ Handel boomingly asked him, ‘Can you play? Can you sing? If not, open your Mouth and pretend to sing, for there must be no idle Persons in my Band!’

Gainsborough’s Cottage Door Scenes: Aesthetic Principles, Moral Values. Chapter in Gainsborough’s ‘Cottage Door’: Sensibility and the Cult of Special Effects, ed. Ann Bermingham (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2005), coauthored with Amal Asfour. The book was shortlisted for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2006.

See: John Brewer, ‘Sensibility and the Urban Panorama’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 70 (2007), pp. 229–49. ‘As Asfour and Williamson conclude, Gainsborough’s cottage door scenes, owing to their artificiality, “affirm and at the same time … make provisional a dream of contentment by re-creating reality in the figurative realm of the imagination.”’

E. Derek Taylor, ‘A Sentimental Journey through Gainsborough’s “Cottage-door” Paintings’, in Swiftly Sterneward: Essays on Laurence Sterne and His Times in Honor of Melvyn New, ed. W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor and Robert G. Walker (University of Delaware Press, Newark, DE, 2011), pp. 29–46.

William Jackson of Exeter, 1730–1803. The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004).

Northanger Abbey. A dramatisation in two acts of the novel by Jane Austen. First performed by the Broughton Players, Preston Playhouse, Preston, 9–12 May 2001. Playscript published by Jasper Publishing (Hemel Hempstead, 2001).

Review: ‘A thought-provoking and entertaining take on the novel.’ Jane Carroll, Amateur Stage, October 2001, pp. 16–17.

The Art of Shadows: Substance and topos in mid-18th-century England. Illustrated essay (8,000 words), tracing the history of ideas about shadows in art from ancient times to the eighteenth century, before outlining a topical approach to shadows via a reading of paintings by Wright of Derby, Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough. The British Art Journal, 2.1 (Autumn 2000), pp. 35–42. Coauthored with Amal Asfour.

1900 and all that. Illustrated review essay (2,000 words) of 1900: Art at the Crossroads, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 16 January–3 April 2000, curated by Robert Rosenblum.’ The British Art Journal, 1.2 (Spring 2000), pp. 94–5.

Gainsborough’s Vision. Taking a wide-ranging interdisciplinary approach, and incorporating much new research on Gainsborough’s artistic, literary, and religious background, along with his previously ignored relations with British philosophy, this book seeks for the first time to place Gainsborough in his intellectual and cultural context. Gainsborough's Vision provides a comprehensive reassessment of Gainsborough’s achievement with regard to his artistic predecessors and his place in European art. It also represents a new approach to eighteenth-century British art more generally, demonstrating how it moved in a direction that can be described as empiricist and mimetic. Coauthored with Amal Asfour. Liverpool University Press (Liverpool, 1999). Crown quarto, 341 pages, 186 illustrations.

Reviews: ‘Richly informative.’ George Steiner, The Observer, 9 January 2000.

Gainsborough’s Mrs Siddons: The Woman as Artist. An analysis of one of Gainsborough’s most celebrated portraits (8,000 words) that traces its intellectual background in the writings of David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke. The essay discusses late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drama, comparing Gainsborough’s painting with pictures by Reynolds, Dürer and Rubens. Coauthored with Amal Asfour. The British Art Journal, 1.2 (Autumn 1999), pp. 38–45.

Hogarth and the Strangelove Effect. An illustrated essay (7,000 words), arguing for the importance of formalism in Hogarth's work. The article discusses the overlap between Hogarth’s art and other disciplines, including a comparison with Sterne, a discussion of eighteenth-century music theory, and a consideration of Dr Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963), directed by Stanley Kubrick. Eighteenth-Century Life, 23 (1999), pp. 80–95.

Gainsborough in Ferrara; The Fancy Picture at Kenwood House. Review article on two major exhibitions (and accompanying catalogues) that took place in summer 1998. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32 (1999), pp. 391–3.

Splendid Impositions: Gainsborough, Berkeley, Hume. A 15,000-word article that shows how Gainsborough’s art is influenced by empiricist philosophy and eighteenth-century theories of vision. Coauthored with Amal Asfour. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31 (1998).

Gainsborough’s Wit. An article showing how Gainsborough transformed the traditions of eighteenth-century wit and demonstrating his affinities with Sterne and Hume (9,000 words). Coauthored with Amal Asfour. Journal of the History of Ideas, 58 (1997), pp. 479–501.

On Reynolds’s Use of De Piles, Locke, and Hume in his Essays on Rubens and Gainsborough. This 9,000-word article shows how Sir Joshua Reynolds uses De Pilesian aesthetics and ideas deriving from British empiricism to develop a theory of art in response to a kind of painting that demands to be seen as fundamentally mimetic. Coauthored with Amal Asfour. The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 60 (1997), pp. 215–29.

A Second Sentimental Journey: Gainsborough Abroad. Based on a newly discovered letter, this article shows conclusively for the first time that Gainsborough travelled on the continent and thus overturns one of the most basic assumptions about Gainsborough’s life. This new information has important implications for recent approaches to Gainsborough's art. Coauthored with Gertrude Jackson and Amal Asfour. Apollo, 146 (August 1997), pp. 27–30.

Gainsborough and William Jackson of Exeter: Studies in Two Hands. The first publication of newly discovered sketches by William Jackson of Exeter (Gainsborough’s only ‘pupil’ other than his assistant) with additions and corrections by Gainsborough. The purpose of these studies makes them almost unique in Gainsborough’s oeuvre. Coauthored Amal Asfour. Apollo, 146 (August 1997), pp. 31–6.

Ut Pictura Poesis: William Jackson and John Bampfylde on the Teign. This article (4,500 words) presents for the first time a series of sketches done in 1777 on a trip taken by William Jackson of Exeter with the poet John Bampfylde (1754–97). The essay shows how Jackson’s drawings and Bampfylde’s poems share common aesthetic aims. Coauthored with Amal Asfour, Apollo, 146 (August 1997), pp. 37–41.

William Jackson of Exeter (1730–1803). Exhibition Catalogue, for the Jackson exhibition, co-curated with Amal Asfour, staged at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury. The catalogue includes a description of each item exhibited and a bibliography. Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, 31 August–12 October 1997.

William Collins and the Idea of Liberty. A 7,000-word essay showing the way the poet William Collins (1721–59) responded to the influence of James Harris (1709–80), and discussing the aesthetic dilemma created by this union of philosophy and poetry. Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Neglected Texts, and the Evolving Canon of Eighteenth-Century Literature, Festschrift for Professor Roger Lonsdale, ed. J. G. Basker and A. Ribeiro (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996), pp. 257–74.

British Studies: Myths and Mythologies. A review article (4,000 words) devoted to the Britain 2000 conference held at the University of Vienna, 10–12 April 1995. ELT News, 26 (June 1995), pp. 29–38. Published by The British Council, Vienna.

Despite everything, Holiday Camp is clearly a British production with an English bias. Can we be so confident, Professor Frith went on to ask, that Apache Indian's music is British? A partial answer to the problem of what constitutes Britishness in contemporary British culture was provided by three further recordings. Professor Frith is chairman of the panel of judges for the Mercury Prize for British and Irish music, and he played winning tracks by Primal Scream, Suede, and M People, complete with rhythmic movements of the professorial shoulders. A number of points emerged here.

Gray’s ‘Elegy’ and the Logic of Expression. A seminal discussion (12,500 words) of the two versions of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (published in 1751), arguing that the changes made to the poem between the earlier and later versions represent a radical shift from a Christian to a classical framework. In Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays, ed. W. Hutchings and W. Ruddick (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 1993), pp. 39–72.

Reviews: ‘Superb.’ Duncan Wu, Romanticism, 2.1 (1996), p. 123.

John Chalker, Critical Survey, 7.2 (1995), p. 231.

Katherine Turner, ‘Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, in A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake, ed. David Wormersley (Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, 2000), p. 347.

Eric Parisot, ‘The Historicity of Reading Graveyard Poetry’, in Experiments in Genre in Eighteenth-century Literature, ed. Sandro Jung (Academia Press, Ghent, 2011), p. 98.

Michele Turner Sharp, ‘Elegy Unto Epitaph: Print Culture and Commemorative Practice in Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”’, Papers on Language and Literature, 38 (2002), pp. 3–28.

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