After I had finished my rehearsal in Rye Church in East Sussex the other day, I was standing outside the church waiting for the rain to stop, and my eye fell on the War Memorial commemorating local men who had given their lives in the World Wars of 1914-19 and 1939-45.
What evocative surnames some of [...]

I yield to no-one in my devotion to The Guardian, which I read every day, but I’ve been struck recently by what seems to be a disturbing policy of excluding classical music from discussions of ‘music’. A few weeks ago the paper published a 50-page guide to summer music festivals. 49 and a half pages [...]

I’m off to the Florestan Festival in East Sussex today. I always enjoy imagining people setting off towards Peasmarsh from many different compass points. Most of our rehearsals have happened to the accompaniment of pouring rain, so we can only hope the spell of wet weather is almost over. The festival takes place in a [...]

Saw a quietly beautiful Italian film, Le Quattro Volte, directed by Michelangelo Frammartino. It was inspired by Pythagoras’s belief that each of us contains four interlinked lives: human, animal, vegetable and mineral. ‘Man is made of mineral, because he has a skeleton; he’s a plant, because he has blood flowing through his veins like sap; [...]

On Monday, Mark Lawson wrote in the Guardian about how politicians are averse to being associated with ‘high art’ because they don’t wish to be seen as ‘élitist’. In today’s paper there are several letters in reply, one of them from me.

//