Yearly Archives: 2022

My new release, ‘Of Love’, joins ‘Of Joy and Sorrow’ and ‘Of Beauty’ to complete my Three Songs of Kahlil Gibran: https://youtu.be/lOSTD2f8dzs Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931) was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist most famous as author of The Prophet (1923), one of the best-loved and most frequently translated books in history. In it, Gibran distilled wisdom from the great Christian, Buddhist and Islamic religious texts he studied, adding intuitive wisdom of his own. The result is many passages that embody deep and timeless insights into human experience. The section in The Prophet beginning “Then said Almitra, Speak to us of Love” is a profound reflection on what love – real love – does to the human personality. “Love is for your growth,” [...]

The latest release of my music is a recording of the first performance of Siciliano for harp, beautifully played by Tijana Kozarčić in the rich acoustics and visual surroundings of the Auburn Uniting Church, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia: https://youtu.be/jDe0jAKS6q4 Many thanks to Peter Lamshed of Salvage Films (www.salvagefilms.com), who took the videos, and to Alan Chuck and Auburn Uniting Church for the use of the church. Late in the afternoon, at the very end of our recording sessions, Peter asked Tijana to play it through one more time so he could experiment with different camera angles. This is the result, "take 2", a perfect performance in one take, a slightly different interpretation of the music and some great close shots and views from the hand-held [...]

“‘The peacock’s tail makes me sick!’ said Charles Darwin. That’s because the theory of evolution can’t explain why nature is so beautiful… Taking inspiration from Darwin’s observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have an innate appreciation of beauty” (back cover blurb on his 2012 book Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution). Our innate appreciation of beauty has led humans (and some animals) to create beautiful art for many centuries – until the 20th century. In modernist and postmodern art and philosophy, the very concept of beauty has been denied and disparaged. Artists, in all the arts, now very often deliberately create ugliness, carefully avoiding any manifestation of beauty (of course, if [...]