January 2023

Neil2023-01-30T11:17:17+10:00January 30th, 2023|classical music|

Shortly after releasing my song Of Joy and Sorrow, I received news of a new book and podcast that seem to be very much in the same spirit. It’s called Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. According to the author, Susan Cain: There is a deep, bittersweet tradition that has existed for centuries all across the world—you see it in all the different wisdom traditions—that tells us that there is this place where joy and sorrow meet. That is the truth of being human. The similarity with Kahlil Gibran’s words on joy and sorrow (written in 1923) is striking. Here are some of the lines I set to music: The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. [...]

A World Sung into Being

Neil2023-01-10T08:17:41+10:00January 10th, 2023|classical music|

Making music, or making art in any other form, is to me not just self-expression but also an act of giving. What I give, or hope to give, is not something that comes uniquely from me – my style, my intellectual construction, my individual view, my personal emotions – but something that comes through me: beauty, meaning, a sense that there is something greater than me or any other individual human being. That ‘something greater’ might be Nature, God, Love, Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’, Buddha Nature, the Tao, or something even less definable and nameable – but whatever you call it, it’s where beauty and meaning originate, and it’s that that I hope to reflect in my music. Recently I discovered an article about Rabindranath Tagore [...]

Monthly Archives: January 2023

Joy, Sorrow and the Bittersweet

A World Sung into Being