AN INVITATION TO PAUSE: LOOKING BACKWARDS, LOOKING FORWARDS

Sep 18

Sep 18 AN INVITATION TO PAUSE: LOOKING BACKWARDS, LOOKING FORWARDS

The seed has been planted, and gestation is well underway for the 2019 edition of what has quickly grown into “a festival of a new kind, where the reach is not only to entertain elegant people, but where music plays a more global and deeper role with social dimensions”.

In nature there is no time, only rhythm. Nothing is lost, nothing is repeated. What is to come next year will evolve organically from what came to pass this year: twenty world-renowned classical and jazz musicians, five days of improvised workshops attended exclusively by guests of the hotel, a public concert performed in the village church the village by three local choirs, and a five day program curated in harmony with the five elements Fire, Earth, Air, Water and Spirit.

Whereas the ancient Pythagoreans postulated a celestial music produced by the motions of the heavenly bodies, the Elizebethan poet John Davies brought this marriage of music and cosmic consciousness down to earth in his poem Orchestra, which presented a vision simultaneously more elementary and more passionate than the models of classical philosophy. In a passage worthy of Ovid and Lucretius, this contemporary of Shakespeare describes how it is through music and dance that the primal cosmic attraction of Love unites the disparate building blocks of the material universe into harmonious wholes:

"Dancing, bright lady, then began to be, When the first seeds whereof the world did spring, The fire, air, earth, and water, did agree By Love's persuasion, nature's mighty king, To leave their first discorded combating, And in a dance such measure to observe, As all the world their motion should preserve.
Since when they still are carried in a round, And changing come one in another's place; Yet do they neither mingle nor confound, But every one doth keep the bounded space Wherein the dance doth bid it turn or trace. This wondrous miracle did Love devise, For dancing is love's proper exercise.”

If music makes the world go round, it is only natural that we should choose music as a way to say thank you to the Earth, and to recognise ourselves as her children. As Olivier Bellamy aptly observes, making music in a spirit of gratitude and reverence is a natural way to give back to the Earth some of the abundance she so generously showers onto us:

Our instruments are made of your forests, and the manes of your horses. You nourished our voices with your bounty. This is how we made fruitful your gifts, this is what we created with the love you gave.