Skip to main content

The Beatitudes




A new (for me) sacred minimalist: Vladimir Martynov.

It is a family resemblance of music making that has deeply enriched the landscape of the last quarter of the last century and the first of this.

Compellingly it is a 'phenomena' deeply rooted in 'Eastern' Europe either by birth (Gorecki, Martynov, Part) or adoption (John Tavener) and it is a true gift of a music that transcends emotion into feeling.

I recall Metropolitan Anthony, the long running and wonderfully holy Russian Archbishop in London, describe how his choir had finally realised the difference between allowing their music to express the reality of feeling, a reality that sang through them, and imparting their emotion to the music that they were singing. The former came from a place in themselves that was beyond their egos, the latter was singing from their moods, their egos.

At their purest, the sacred minimalists allow the music at the heart of things to sing through the musicians and you glimpse time held in eternity.

As Henry Vaughan would say....

I SAW Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
              All calm, as it was bright ;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
                      Driv'n by the spheres                                  
Like a vast shadow mov'd ; in which the world
                      And all her train were hurl'd.
The doting lover in his quaintest strain
                      Did there complain ;
Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,                        
                      Wit's sour delights ;
With gloves, and knots, the silly snares of pleasure,
                      Yet his dear treasure,
All scatter'd lay, while he his eyes did pour
                      Upon a flow'r.                                          

...only replace seeing with hearing...chiming spheres rather than rings of light...or perhaps chiming spheres as rings of light!

Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 20, 2013 at 4:46 PM

    This is quite lovely, delightful and spiritual that allows the Soul to ascend and to Be for a few moments.
    Metropolitan Anthony, whom I knew, is so right to point out the difference between sound from the true self:the whole being as against sound from the lower self ego. It is the same with speaking and preaching. Peter Dewey (Mystic Heart of the Scriptures)

    ReplyDelete

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

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Beckoning Land that is within

In spite of the fact that all three of Rowena Farre's books were in a certain measure autobiographical, she remains a mystery. The place of her birth, her real name, and ancestry, whether her first book was an autobiography, in fact, or fiction? It is, on reading her last book, a matter on which, beyond a certain notional interest, I find myself wholly and happily agnostic. Whoever she was, she was a person out of sorts with the world she was born into and on, an ever more consciously realized, spiritual quest. In this way, the book leads on from her earlier one about her life with Roma and Traveller communities. There she was following a nomadic impulse that ran in parallel to 'ordinary life' whilst here she is following a nomadic life that enfolds and transforms 'ordinary' life.  https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2018/07/on-hopes-realities-and-shadows-of-being.html In this her third book, she returns to places associated with her childhood, Hong Kong, Ceylon, a...
Post a Comment
Read more