I've been nominated to post 20 album covers in 20 days to Facebook. The FB posts should be posted without explanation or commentary. But I've been a little distracted lately. So I've failed the deadline. However, this seems a suitable distraction. The 20 album covers represent music that has had a significant impact on my life. No explanations or commentary is expected. However, this blog seems a suitable place to make a few comments and explanations on the album.
I can't remember where I first heard this album. Here are two possible sources and one memory - it's possibly faulty but possible.
A friend gave me three albums. This was one of them. She didn't explain why she gave them to me. She thought I'd like them.
Katy's mother had this album on vinal.
I think I first heard Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis at my cousin's bedroom. It was late. We were ready for bed. I was on the floor on a mattress. Jeff got out of his bed and put on this piece of music. I didn't know what it was called but I remember hearing a sudden rain of violins, followed by a pause, a plucked bass and then gradually drifting into sleep as the strings wove in and out. Lulled me into sleep.
I've been nominated to post 20 album covers in 20 days to Facebook. But I've been a little distracted lately. So I've failed the deadline. However, this seems a suitable distraction. The 20 album covers represent music that has had a significant impact on my life. No explanations or commentary is expected. However, this blog seems a suitable place to make a few comments and explanations on the album. This was the last album posted to the 20 albums in 20 days challenge.
One day Stephen came home with me from work. He was probably going to stay for dinner. The house was empty. Katy, Iona and Arran were out somewhere. They weren't going to be back for a while.
We wanted to listen to the new CD I'd bought. Stephen knew this music. I was a stranger to it. I'd been introduced to it and was gradually getting to know it.
Stephen suggested we play the music loudly and lie down on the floor to listen to The Well-Tempered Clavier.
So we made ourselves comfortable, lay down and closed our eyes in front of the speakers and heard the whole piece from beginning to end. We didn't talk. Heard the music in our ears, felt the music pulsating through the floorboards.
It was an electrifying experience.
Click here to watch and hear Glen Gould play a brief extract from the piece.
This was a joy to read from the beginning to the end. It's a mixture of literary history, biography and memoir.
Adam Nicolson follows - literally - in the footsteps of Coleridge and William and Dorothy Wordsworth on their year-long retreat - from the summer of 1797 to June 1798 - to the Quantock Hills in Somerset. It covers probably one of the most important events in the development of English poetry.
This is the year the poets wrote the poems that were to become the Lyrical Ballads. A book that transformed English poetry from strict adherence to form and stylised language. Poetry dominated by intellect and reason.
Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote poetry plugged directly into the natural world, it was elemental, sensory and emotional. It captured the voices of real people and their struggles with the world. It was alive and vital. It celebrated the imagination.
So Nicolson walks where they walked - day and night, season by season. He reads what has survived of their letters, notebooks and journals during this time.
Nicolson observes the same landscapes the poet's visit. He visits the same woods and villages. He writes as they write - with a poets eye for detail and the mythological. The Quantocks appear to us as a sacred place. England is transfigured first by the poets and then again by Nicolson.
The book also presents us with character portraits of the two on the brink of their success. The solitary Wordsworth and the sociable Coleridge. He traces the arc of the relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth. At first intense and positive and later fraught with tensions and conflicts.
And all the time Nicolson reminds his readers of the wider context - the war with France and the British authorities locking down the country, terrified of protest and the growing threat of revolution.
This is a book that beautifully evokes, reminding us - both readers and poets - that we are the cultural children of these men and women of genius.
Click here to buy the book online.
I'm watching
clouds playing jigsaw
with the sky
