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‘My dear friend, all theory is grey – life's golden tree alone is green.’* – Goethe Not so long ago, we who were brought up in western cultures were taught to believe that nature was ruthlessly competitive, that ‘survival of the fittest’ operated at all levels of life, from species to individuals. These ‘grey’ theories (as Goethe would surely have called them) became the dominant paradigm in western thinking, supported and reinforced by our emphasis on individualism and interpersonal competitiveness, and by our veneration of science that abstracts itself from life and love and only deals with what is measurable and (allegedly) rational. Eventually, however, anthropologists started to realize that humanity’s ability to cooperate might have been more important to its survival than competitiveness, psychologists [...]

https://youtu.be/o-XOBAJksgQ This video is a brief introduction to my latest composition, a double concerto for cor anglais and bassoon. I’ve titled it ‘Kin’ because of the obvious kinship between these two instruments – both woodwinds played with a double reed, both occupying the mid-to-lower part of the full orchestral range, and, especially in the two octaves where their ranges overlap, both having somewhat similar although distinctive timbres. Despite their superficial kinship, however, the cor anglais and bassoon have different family histories, the cor anglais having developed historically from the oboe, the bassoon from earlier bass double-reed instruments such as the dulcian. The cor anglais is also played by oboists who relish its lower range, not bassoonists who yearn to go even higher than the already enormous [...]

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 [...]

My latest release is ‘Half-Heard’, a song that is (I think) about Tasmania. To decide for yourself whether that’s true or not, read on – but first watch and listen to the song: https://youtu.be/XDyFCpyhGFM   A song about Tasmania? Australian author Christopher (C. J.) Koch (1922 – 2013) is best known for novels such as The Year of Living Dangerously, but his first published work was in fact a small poem called ‘Half-Heard’. For a brief time in the mid 1990’s Chris and I were next-door neighbours in Launceston, Tasmania. During our discussions of music and writing he introduced me to his poetry, and when I expressed admiration for 'Half-Heard' he encouraged me to set it to music. Life intervened, however, and I had to [...]

Video and audio recordings of a new performance of my song The Lay of the Last Survivor have now been released – its first professional performance and the first time it has been performed the way I originally intended. Janneke Ferwerda (soprano) and Tijana Kozarcic (harp) sang and played beautifully in the rich acoustics and visual surroundings of the Auburn Uniting Church, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia:https://youtu.be/8t_qfd4Q_isHigher quality audio recordings of The Lay of the Last Survivor than in the video are now available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon etc.:  Spotify  Apple Music  Amazon  YouTubeThe Lay of the Last Survivor is a passage in the ca. 8th century Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, the lament of the last remaining member of a society whose “heroes” [...]