Skip to main content

Balkan Spirit



The fabulous Hesperion XXI offer Balkan Spirit.

Every year the village of Galicnik in Western Macedonia enables one of its children to celebrate a fully traditional wedding ceremony, stretching over three days, accompanied by the engaged eyes of many visitors, including one year myself.

I most remember the music that accompanied each step of the wedding. It was often mesmerising with tunes unfolding in repeated cycles that spun you out of thought, teasing you out of time. There is a quality about traditional music that suggests an intimate relationship not only with people but with place. Its rhythms are that of culture and nature.

I recall stepping out of the village, taking myself out of the throng, walking up one of the hills followed by the strains of receding music yet with it entering the landscape as if the music opened a door to it, the seeing of it, singing you into a place. I do not think I ever been more 'there' present enwrapped in a landscaping.

It was hauntingly strange until many years later, I was listening to the composer, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, on Desert Island Discs describe going for a walk in the Peak District as an adolescent on a mist swirled day and hearing all the music he was subsequently going to compose as if it were waiting for him both enfolded within and yet beyond 'the world'!

His great gift was to translate it, give it a forming (and famously he moved to the Orkney Islands to find a traditional landscape of silence in which better to hear that music). Mine felt like traveling in the opposite direction, led momentarily into its sourcing, to stand in the body of the world of which music is an integral part always waiting to be discovered.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
Read more