This is a live recording* of the music improvised as part of a traditional Easter meditation in our parish church in 1976. It was suggested by Father O'Ryan who felt that it might attract people into this often overlooked piece of Easter-lore, providing a ceremonial focus for the proceedings and perhaps attract some of the more curious members of our village community, especially those from the Alternative Fringe (a colony of whom were readily involved in pricing the locals out of their traditional homes) who he was especially keen to impress. In the parish newsletter it said : 'Meditations with Latin texts** on the Stations of the Cross with Electronic Musical Reflections Freely Improvised by Miss Hermione Harvestman on her Synthesiser'.

The initial idea was for me to play for half an hour whilst Father O'Ryan took his pilgrims on the journey of the cross - from station to station as it were - around the church, intoning the various texts and prayers against an ever evolving wash of electronic ambience. We tried this on the first day, and, whilst it worked just fine, we felt that it fell into an inevitable dreaminess that, whilst rather euphoric in and of itself, didn't quite reflect the solemnity of the occasion. For the following day I suggested the idea of a series of short 5-minute improvisations reflecting on each station as a particular meditation.

This is what you have here - fourteen short improvisations presented as a complete sequence, each one obliquely reflecting on a particular station, creating a musical & ritual continuity by building upon what went before it. The initial half hour improvisation is included here too by way of a supplement - the Fifteenth Station as it were, that of The Resurrection, which at least carries us back into the light, even as the spring is reborn after the winter. This, by the way, is the Pagan heart of Easter, the central festival of the Christian calendar that still carries the name of an Anglo-Saxon hare goddess and is celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon following the Spring Equinox.

Does any of this make it sacred music? In a word - No. Raised as a Catholic, my life has been a struggle towards the light of Atheism. I treat Catholicism, at best, as a sort of community folklore. My interest in it, as with all mythology, is entirely human, for only through humanity do we experience true spirituality and it is only through humanity that we might be lucky enough to catch a glimpse that which we may be moved to consider truly numinous.

In terms of pure myth, I've always been effected by the secular resonances of The Passion - the inhumanity of humanity that stands as an obstacle for even the most optimistic Atheist and yet becomes the core of another level of inhumanity - not just within the bloody history of the Roman Catholic Church, but that of the Abrahamic religions on the whole, replete with barbarism both in their overall mission and in the scriptures they use to justify such atrocity. Some would say The Passion is most barbaric scripture of all, pointing out that in purely human terms it stands for so much that is so effectively belittled by the theological context. But therein, it seems, lies its effectiveness.

The music is, therefore, sacred to the very human source of religion rather than the inhumanity of religion per se, which is entirely and assuredly a construct devised to exploit, divide and anaesthetise us to the fact that the spiritual source is common to us all. It's what unites every single one of us across the 50,000 years of our history on planet earth - it unites us in our suffering, our sorrow, our hope, our fear, our love, our joy, our laughter and our longing. It is as individuals that we are born, it is as individuals that we die, and, it is my most solemn wish, that it is as individuals that we live, our rights and freedoms measured by those of all individuals who are our equals on this earth.

The darkness of the music is, therefore, as the darkness of religion. It is to be judged against the light that is the brilliance of secular life itself : life at its best, life its finest and life at is most glorious, thus making hay as the sun shines as, indeed, we all must, for tomorrow we die.

Hermione Harvestman, Spring Equinox 2001

* The recordings were made via a line into a tape machine, so all that is heard here are the electronics. All too conspicuous by its absence is the warm ambience of the church acoustic which is here approximated by anachronous digital reverb.

** Also absent are the solemn intonations in Father O'Ryan's Irish brogue of the Latin texts of St. Alphonsus Liguori (1696 - 1787) which we agreed upon because it carried greater solemn gravitas than any of the vernacular texts available at the time, or indeed since. As I said to Father O'Ryan at the time - 'Do the text in Latin, then no one will hear how utterly facile the whole thing is'.

In any case, the truth exists beyond the words, which I include here in the hope that they'll be part of any future 'edition' of this music, likewise the images, all but one which are taken from my own photographs of the Stations at St. Mary's, albeit treated in colour drenching from dark earthly hues to the blinding light of the mystery of pure spirit.