EOSTRE TRIDUUM : A TRIPLICATE OF HARES (1984)

Some intuitive sense in me finds hares remarkable; something of the totemic occult familiarity which underlies, I suppose, my general country cunning which (some say) puts me in the guise of the solitary hedge-witch, keeping an eye on signs and potents as the year turns day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, with respect of other moveable feasts.

Chief amongst these is, of course, Easter : most central to the Christian Year and yet evidently the most pagan - named, as is supposed, after an Anglo-Saxon Hare Goddess and celebrated on the first Sunday after the first Full Moon following the Spring Equinox.

Easter is a time of renewal, a time of rebirth and resurrection, and a time of hares : the animal that no one dare name, appearing out of nowhere to congregate and caper in all their Mad Marchness over the chill yet fecund furrows, inspiring a wealth of wonder, both with respect of natural history and general folklore, though even here the lines blur as naturalists ponder the ways of this most elusive yet iconic component of the fauna of the British countryside.

About hares, they simply do not know.

It was photographing the so-called Green Men in the pretty church of Saint Andrew's in the picturesque Devonian village of Samford Courtenay some years back that my eye was caught by two roof-bosses which featured the device of three hares capering widdershins, their ears arranged in a triangle, so that, whilst there were only three, each animal had two.

Locally, they are known as The Tinners' Rabbits and the device is to be found in other churches in and around Dartmoor though the meaning is, like that of the attendant Green Men, lost in the mists of time. But this is to assume such images were ever imbued with such a thing as meaning, and that meaning was integral to each manifestation of the device.

Looking around at the carvings themselves, one detects an ingenuity both naive and sophisticated as each time the vocabulary is repeated, it changes, a theme is transfigured afresh by way of a purposeful renewal, itself down to the craft and cunning of the sculptor.

Who could want more meaning than that? The medium is the message.

Intriguingly, there are analogues, for hares rendered in triplicate have been found in the ancient Orient - in China and India - causing many to speculate on origin. Yet the Devonian Hares aren't so very ancient in themselves - late medieval at best, on the very cusp of the reformation.

Unlike the Green Men, they know their place on roof bosses, without migrating to misericord and bench-end or else corbel and column capital. For sure, I have heard of no stone ones, though I do hear of a tile in Chester Cathedral, and a piece of stained glass somewhere in Yorkshire.

All of which has what to do with the music?

Inspired by the photographs from Sampford, I made each piece as a meditation on the nature of renewal; of Easter, of Eostre, of the fecund fauna of the countryside and the ancient things we find carved above our heads in English Country Churches about which there is more speculation than actual knowing.

It's good to get out though, out and about, and bring some of that home with you to enrich the soul with silent wonder, the very nature of which is, as ever, the very stuff of life.

As for the music, once begun, it takes on a life of its own.

Hermione Harvestman (Easter 2002).