The Gnostic Corpse (1972) and The Piping of Summer Elves (1979)

 (NB - Click on images for soundfiles)

One of the things Miranda and I loved most about Medieval Catholicism (is there any other sort?) is its obsession with mortality as a source of an essentially anti-human neurosis. Basic fears and concerns are stripped to the bone and personified in a multiplicity of imagery from Transi Tombs to the foliate face of The Green Man and other 'memento mori', all of which serve to underline the belief that this life is but a gateway to the next, thus justifying all manner brutality and atrocity in the name of religious truth. Death features as a character in The Durham Pilgrims; the medieval landscape is strewn with corpses of the victims of crime, pestilence, poverty, war and hostile nature, of winter and wolves. He joins them in this opening scene in which a gibbet looms ominously out of the mists on an otherwise deserted shore...

Hermione Harvestman - 2003

Stage direction by Miranda Hardy:

Scene One : A group of Pilgrims come upon a gibbeted corpse on a bleak blasted foggy headland. Though severely decomposed, the corpse begins to speak, urging them to turn back from their journey and make the most of life, the aftermath of which is assured oblivion.

Pilgrims! Listen to one who knows!
There is no heaven, nor even God;
This life is all; and this earth is hell, or heaven
as you choose.

The Church is corrupt, unworthy of your time and devotion.
So go back to your loved ones e'er time slays them
The time you waste in devotion is far better spent in love.

Love is all that life allows. There is no greater joy
than the warmth of the living flesh.
So Husbands, go back to your Wives;
Mothers return to your Children
Least they be as I am when you return!

Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus!
As I am now, so you must be; as you are now so once was I!

Several are convinced by the corpse's pleas, and begin to turn back; seeing this THE PRIEST insists they take the gibbet down from the gallows and burn it as a heretic. As the pilgrims look on, the corpse howls in the flames: Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus! Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus! until all is consumed and silent once more whereupon the they go on their way - only now DEATH is one of their number...

As a child I saw elves I'm sure. They came out on summer evenings, in the wild places I frequented in a state of perfect joy and innocence, entirely untroubled by the business of the human world back in the house which I never much understood or cared for. I confess to being heavily under the influence of Rackham, whose vivid illustrations convinced me of the reality of the Little Folk as much as did the stories they attended, or not, as the case might be. I grew up immersed in such lore, be it in book form, or on the lips of the various storytellers who worked below stairs, keeping me entertained with the truth of their vivid recountings, though that wasn't, of course, their main vocation.

Our cook was particularly wise in such matters, as was a rather pretty young scullery maid called Dinah who spoke of The Piping of Summer Elves, which she likened to birdsong only with a more human melody to it. I suppose the outbreak of the war changed that world forever, however much I clung to it for the duration, but by 1945 I was fifteen and had other things on my mind. There are times it has returned to haunt me, and over the years I swear I've heard their piping of a summer evening as something rustles in the monochrome Rackhamesque twilight, though I often wonder what Dinah meant by 'a more human melody'. Perhaps it was the otherworldly notes of the Lydian Mode, played F to F on the white notes of a piano, on on the synthesiser, as I do here, communing with my inner child who once heard such things without asking.

Hermione Harvestman (Notes to Self, 1999)

A Dreaming of Ditches (1977) & Splendor Solstice (1975)

Not drainage ditches - rather ancient earthworks, vestigial lines of whatever purpose in the landscape, betokening a continuity and enduring sense of lingering strangeness. I think I've been at my most joyful walking in the English countryside, looking for ancient things marked on various maps of various counties. In my walking I took the pictures which I later responded to with music, using the images as means to a richer communion which then imprints itself on the music, as is the case here. The ditch in question was an earthwork in deepest darkest Norfolk. A special time for me, with friends, striking out on my own as was my habit back when I was young enough to do so. There is no greater joy than just to sit a while and enjoy the silent mystery of the fields that even moved my pen to poetry...

Norfolk Field, March 1977

the robin flits
from ditch to thorn
deepest dark touched
in there
where I can not follow

spring is waiting
for ash to bloom
whilst the sun scowls
low from
cold clouds dark with bright rain.

a scatter of
feathers but no
skull. A fox calls
into
silences redefined.

HH.

In June 1975 I was staying with a dear friend in his cottage that was blessed by distant views of the medieval city of Durham to the south along the Wear Valley. The Summer Solstice fell on the 22nd that year - a Sunday - which found us lazing in the garden with red wine, Greek salad, home made bread and the finest gold seal Charas, and all to the accompaniment of the cathedral bells drifting in the still warm morning air.

Impressions are, perhaps understandably, vague. I was staying with Jolyon following the death of his cat, Pluto, which resulted in an emotional crisis compounded by his prodigious drug intake as other issues left unresolved since childhood came to the fore. So it wasn't the easiest of times, nor yet the happiest, but when the clouds parted we found ourselves blessed, as we were on that Solstice Sunday.

I remember the muted sound of the bells, and the position of the noon-day sun over the city, and how this reminded us of the famous illustration from Splendor Solis that Jolyon had as a poster on his kitchen wall above the Aga. It was he who renamed it Splendor Solstice in a state of great excitement, however so manic and short-lived as, in young Jolyon's mind, the solstice marked the beginning of Sol's great decline. The Solar Wheel was in recession and with it his state of mind.

Come the Equinox he would be in The County Hospital following a complete nervous breakdown, Come the Winter Solstice, he would be dead, haven taken his own life by driving his car off the cliffs at South Shields. I made this piece for his funeral, as a memory of almost-happier times in the life of one of my dearest friends, Jolyon James Deacon, poet, alchemist and theologian, 1952-1975.

On a musical note, I have returned to the sound of church bells on several occasions over the years, including the piece 'Illa Viridis Visio Compello Mihi Tantum Meus Nex' I composed for Sabrina Eden's short film of the various foliate grotesques in Tewkesbury Abbey in 2005. In that case I used an actual sample of the Tewkesbury bells and realised the organ part using a computer, which was a novelty.

Hermione Harvestman. October 2005.

Psalm Tone (1973) & The Nun's Erotic Epiphany (1972)

I have a quiet passion for the modality of devotional psalmody which represents the oldest traditional of music making in Western Culture. I say quiet passion because it is intuitively responsive rather than compulsively obsessional, as many latter chanters are. I listen in a reverie of joy and, somehow, this becomes reflected and realised in my musical psalmody, which operates in the same minimal parameters as that of ancient psalm tones, at least analogous parameters, the analogy being very personal.

Alongside this, of course, are the images of the medieval psalters, such as the famous Luttrell Psalter, which I make a point of visiting whenever I'm in London. What does one make of such grotesque juxtapositionings? Where the sacred texts are framed by all manner of hideous 'babewynn' or else earthly scene of seasonal labour? No doubt there will be a plentitude of theory on this, but to me it seems obvious enough; a dichotomy born of a very fundamental duality between our aspirant spirituality and the material realms within which we dwell, and dream, and take delight, and make the most of; here in this all too brief temporal realm in which we hurry towards our deathly conclusion.

Rarely, however, do I have a particular psalm in mind; I might read Common Prayer for oblique poetic inspiration (the Grail Translations are ghastly) but I prefer these things in Latin so the literal weight of the words doesn't interfere with the lightness of their deeper poetical meaning.

Hermione Harvestman - Note for 'Psalm Tones & Liturgies Volume 1'

According to Miranda, she had a number of strange visionary experiences during her Roman Catholic upbringing which were exacerbated by the deaths of her parents when she was 12, which resulted in her becoming more devout with a view to becoming a nun herself. She rejected the notion wholesale when she fell met and in love with the young son of a member of a band of travelling Druids in the West Country and ran away from her convent school to join him when she was fifteen, much to outrage of her teachers, but seemingly to the general indifference of her disinterested guardians who couldn't see what the fuss was about. She reported to me that it was the experience of losing her virginity on Glastonbury Tor after taking several magic mushrooms (Psilocybe semilanceata) in the autumn of 1967 that effectively severed her allegiance to Catholicism for the next three years. There's little doubt, therefore, that the sequence of The Nun's Erotic Mushroom Epiphany is entirely autobiographical.

Miranda fetched up at Durham in 1970 to do her degree, and, being a country girl at heart, she moved out into the dales in her second year, happy to commute to university in her 2CV. It was around this time she re-discovered the comforts of her faith whilst writing the script for her play The Durham Pilgrims, which she first showed to me in 1971. I was so impressed by her literary imagination (if not several of the details) that I agreed to help her with its eventual production and provide the musical score. I must add that whilst I didn't agree with several aspects of the play (not least those aspects I thought might shock the intended audience) I gave Miranda 100% support in its realisation. Throughout our friendship Miranda's relationship with the faith of her childhood remained ambiguous. She confided in me that whilst she was an atheist, the child in her (the 12-year-old presumably) was still a visionary novice intent on taking Holy Orders.' - Hermione Harvestman, note for 'The Durham Pilgrims).

Stage direction by Miranda Hardy:

Scene Three : THE NUN sits down to rest in a meadow. Here she notices several strangely pointed mushrooms growing in the grass. Hungry, she begins to pick and eat them. After a while she experiences a great euphoria and visionary state of bliss in which the world comes alive in such colours and patterns as she has never seen before. (NOTE : I imagine spiralling projections of INDIAN MANDALAS). In this state she meats THE BOY, the lazy ne'er-do-well of folk-tale, the ever-wandering JACK. He plays music upon his pipe; she dances in a frenzied delirium; she undresses and they make love. Exeunt The Boy, leaving The Nun sleeping in the meadow. When she wakes she finds she no longer has any need of God or Religion, much less pilgrimage. She burns her habit, hair shirt, scapula, veil and wimple and dances away laughing, symbolically naked (FLESHINGS!) into the rising mists.

Uranus (1971)

I must have done a hundred 'Planet Suites' in my time - it's an ongoing obsession with me, seeking the correlation between mythology and cosmology. Uranus is Ouranos the Greek God of the sky and heavens, imagined by the Greeks in terms of brass spheres but opened out by science into something far more wondrous - and rather quite terrifying too : as The Pink Floyd once sang 'Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten'. How true! God knows they certainly terrify me! So I seek sanctuary in mythology in which some measure of immediate order is established by way of personable (ie all too human) pantheon. Of course the actual planet Uranus wasn't discovered until the late 18th century, which ties in nicely with classical revivalism and a sort of enlightenment as the old world begins to give way to the new. I don't know. I'm no expert. I just glean things, intuitively, as is my nature. As in life, then so in music. I am weary of prescription and I despise pedantry (as any true artist must, though heaven forfend that I am a true artist). Pedantry is the antithesis of Poetry; Poetry is wrought from that point in the soul that connects us to the commonality of creative genius. Nothing the individual does can be done without what has gone before. That is the process by which all art is CONTINUOUS - and every human word and action is an ancient one. The more immediate the creative impulse, so the truer it is to that continuity, which begins with the earliest humans seeking to understand the world into which they have suddenly sprung, and it ends with us, for now, still seeking to understand it.

I think that's what I'm trying to get at in this piece, which is part of a sequence of nine I named after the planets of our nearby star, which are themselves named after Greek Gods, but not in same way our days are named after Norse ones, or our months named after Roman ones or Easter is named after a Saxon one. It begins with Solar Winds sweeping across the night sky as seen from the moors, which are windy enough in themselves. Imagine a winter scene in which the hapless wanderer is held spellbound by the night sky and a myriad of stars and thinks to herself 'Which one is Uranus?'. Thus she is caught between the personal reality of her ignorance and the delight she takes in being able to go home and open her books and find out. To sit in her study by a roaring fire and read about them over a tawny port and several cigarettes. Better that than to stand out on the moor gazing in awe upon the unknowable, because even when you do know, it's hard to connect that knowing with the pure empiricism of star gazing. That's when the music happens.

Hermione Harvestman, note to Uranus from 'Nine Planets of a Nearby Star' (1971).

Pastorale : Jennifer on Horseback

Jennifer was one of my closest neighbours. She lived about a mile away with her mother in a similar sort of bohemian small-holding to my own so we'd often swap notes and seedlings and recipes and advice and gossip . Her mother was a journalist looking for the good life - raising her daughter wild and free and quite unfettered by such 20th century concerns as school. Often I'd see young Jennifer riding quite naked through the early summer's dawn - a vision of Pre-Raphaelite loveliness - although by 1978 after a bad experience with a boyfriend, she cut all her hair off and 'gone punk'. In 1979, she moved to London where she broke her mother's heart I'm sure, though I don't suppose Hilary ever said as much - not until 1983 by which time Jennifer was a fully fledged Thatcherite yuppie, which broke it even more. I made this music for Jennifer's 21st birthday in 1984 by way of romantic remembrance of those misty morning glimpses circa '75/77 - when she was happy to be a vision cantering on the fells without a care in the world.

Hermione Harvestman (note from 'Darkly the Summer Glimpses' - click image to hear the music).

The Soundcloud Page : Edits & Gew-Gaws

 

This Soundcloud page (click above image) is devoted to the work of outsider minimalist / experimental electronic composer & improviser Hermione Harvestman (1930 - 2012).  As prolific as she was (wilfully) obscure, her music resides in its meticulously archived abundance, unheard by all but a few close friends and members of the congregation of a small Roman Catholic church in rural Durham where she played the organ between 1967 and 1995, regularly featuring one of her sacred 'Concrete Psalm Tones' in lieu of organ music during Holy Communion or The Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday.  She also composed music for several amatuer theatrical productions - the best of which being the starkly evocative & exquisite medieval miniatures she produced for 'The Durham Pilgrims' in 1972 which takes its cue from Chaucer.  A devout Roman Catholic all of her life (up until her illness and death), Hermione nevertheless incorporated elements of Folklore, Medievalism, Paganism, Astrology, Earth Mysteries and Cosmology into her world view, viewing her compositions in terms of personal devotions to the various aspects of her life, the vast majority of which were never meant for public consumption.  In her own words: 

'It may sound conceited, but no other music appeals to me as much as the music I make on my own. Therefore I do not seek an audience for it, nor do I do it purely for pleasure.  Music is a necessity I face on a daily basis - I think of it mostly as a curse - it haunts my dreams, and insists on being made corporeal.  The only way I can get it out, is to record it.  Recording is part of the musical process.  Recording is an exorcism.  Recording is the containment of demons so I might keep them like imps in jars and revisit them, at a distance, once the trauma of their creation has passed.

'It would, I feel, be supremely arrogant to expect anyone else to listen to my music when I have so effectively rejected the music of others.  I have listened to medieval music, folk music, classical music, popular music. experimental music - but only in passing, as part of the general ambience of the culture in which I find myself.  I have studied music in theory and practise and upon graduation I rejected it wholesale as being of no interest or relevance to me whatsoever, and yet its influence and inspiration persists in my life to such an extent I can't help but respond to it.  In my life I have haunted folk clubs and libraries of both Folk Song and the sacred and secular music of the middle ages, always seeking the pure heart of the thing, as might the Theologian, digging as deep as one can to touch the very bedrock of this thing we call music.'

A classically trained concert pianist from the age of four, she abandoned the piano at 26, when, in 1956, she was introduced to the Clavivox - an early sequencer-cum-synthesiser keyboard invented by Raymond Scott.

'This was my epiphany - it one stroke it solved all my problems with regard to Western Tonality.  Increasingly, I was drawn to monophonic music and modality, but I was ill prepared to join the elite who called themselves Folk Musicians or Early Musicians; bourgeois sub-sects striving for an authenticity so enamoured of a certain mindset which I'd never been able to relate to.  Neither was I too enamoured of Atonal Experimentalism.  The music I heard in my heart was far richer than that, somehow - at least it was to me.  I dreamed of hurdy-gurdies - of drones and monophonic keyboards playing parallel 3rds, 4ths and 5ths.  In reality, hurdy-gurdies sounded ghastly (with significant exception).  On hearing the Clavivox I heard the music that dreamed of astrological continuities between ancient music and future possibilities; it touched the essence of what music was at its most primal - that of both the planets of the Pyramids; that of the stars and Stonehenge.  To do this, I had to stop practising and forget everything I'd ever learned by way of conventional keyboard technique.  Unlearn the underlying philosophy of Western Classical Music and open myself to other realms and impossibilities and eliminate any trace of it from the sound environment I began to create.  Or was it creating me?'

In her home (a remote small-holding in rural County Durham which she shared with several dogs, cats, pigs, geese and goats) she set up an ever evolving studio which would be regularly upgraded as new technologies came along.  In the last decade of her life, much of her time was devoted to the transfer of analogue tape-stock to the digital mediums she embraced wholeheartedly.

'I feel like Alfred Wainwright - we are both solitary ramblers - he made his books so he could look at them when he was no longer physically capable of rambling his beloved Lakeland Fells.  In a similar way I have made my music as the accompaniment of my dotage - my declining years when I'm no longer inclined to compose, but to listen - as I do - endlessly - surrounding myself with my compositions in an atmosphere of smiling pride.  Did I really do that?  My goodness - the gift becomes all the more precious as I have gifted it to myself.  So transferring all these old tapes and cassettes and copying them onto CD-R, MP3 and i-Pod has become a revelation - but only unto myself and maybe one or two others, but no more.'

Two things about Hermione's music are worth pointing out here.  The first is that, although immersed into various new technologies (in which she viewed redundancy with wry delight), she completely eschewed the idea of multi-tracking.  The second thing is that all of her music is completely improvised.

The music starts with silence, it comes from nothing, I might begin by establishing a drone, or an ostinato, for this I employ a sequencer, tape loops together with various echo, delay and reverb units to effect the landscapes of a particular piece.  The process is as simple and intuitive as it is completely organic.  In this intuitive landscape melody is introduced on the synthesiser.  I might reference melodies from medieval music and folk song, but always intuitively.  I work with monophonic modes, mostly using only the white notes, often using parallel 4ths and 5ths by way of an entirely improvised organum.  I have tried multi-tracking but it lacks the immediate energy for me.  I think of it as Temporal Spontaneity where all things exist in their own space and time.  It's a sort of purity, a way of simplifying music process which to me can sound overly prescriptive, over-wrought and quite terrifyingly bland.  The bland does terrify me - from the machined landscapes of our once beautiful countryside to the culture of reductive normalcy which has reduced us to a nation of cretins.
        

I first met Hermione in 2003 following the minor stroke that landed her in the nursing home where by chance I was doing a short residency in my guise as Storyteller.  It was here, over the space of five days, she slowly opened up to me, letting me in on the secrets of her hermetic world view and the music that was so much a part of that.  I assisted her with the daunting task of digitising her analogue archive for easier access, but she resisted by suggestions of seeking a wider audience for her work for several years until after a second, more serious stroke after which she agreed to permit some of her music to be made available following her death.  To this end she selected 12 albums worth of material edited from her wider archive, from which she edited two hours to be uploaded onto Soundcloud the year after her funeral.

Hermione Harvestman passed away on the last day of May 2012; her funeral was held on the 7th of June.  This page, and its accompanying blog, was begun exactly a year later.  There are no photographs of the reclusive Hermione, though she was a keen photographer, surrounding herself with indistinct images of trees, landscapes, rivers and medieval carvings along with countless postcards gathered from museums and galleries over the years, all of which she used as a visual inspiration for her music.  All the images here are taken from this visual archives.

I hope you find something in this music which, I feel, is as familiar as it is utterly strange; the work of an eccentric, for sure, but such idiosyncrasy is worthy of our enduring attention and, indeed, affection.

Sedayne (Sean Breadin). The Fylde.  June 2013.

PS - The pictures above are linked to the three tracks I've so far uploaded onto the Soundcloud page; they are tangentially relevant to the text.  Further updates will be added in separate posts.