Lammas (1976), by Hermione Harvestman

Lammas (1976)

by Hermione Harvestman

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Lammas 17:07

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Lammas is an old cross-quarter festival that falls around the beginning of August and marks the mid-point of summer - between the June solstice and the Autumn equinox. Its nature is at once liminal, mutable, turning on ancient notions of fecundity, thanksgiving and landscape - as does this music, in a way. Recorded in August 1976, it's all based around ancient pentatonic scales, very much of a Celtic nature, in reverence of those who shaped the land over the aeons in the hope it will still be there in the aeons to come. It is a piece that dares dream of the eternal in the face of brevity; of life in the face of death; of continuity in the face of its imminent demise.

So - just the one piece, seventeen minutes long, recorded in a wistful mood of encroaching solemnity and (dare I say?) maturity. I was 46, and feeling it, I dare say - but not as much as I'm feeling it now. I listen to this today and I think : "...who was that young whippersnapper who dared consider herself old when she barely knew the meaning of the word?" Much less the meaning of the world, which I suppose none of us really do until it's too late. Youth, it would seem, is truly wasted on the young; even those feckless youngsters of 46, who are too busy lamenting lost youth to realise the excellence of what they have in the here and now.

Thus I might think of this piece as a lament, a paean in the truest sense; a piobaireachd rather than a raga, though there are analogies between these two forms of modal, monophonic and essentially improvised classical music. This is all improvised, though hardly classical (perish the thought!) as it dissolves into something feral in the liminal margins of the fields where the wind moves the corn in a chill prophecy of death and, at last, rebirth and renewal, beyond the winter, where all that is left of us is bones.

Hermione Harvestman - August 2011

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released August 7, 2015

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Hermione Harvestman UK

'I feel like Wainwright - we are both hermetic ramblers. He made his books for when he was no longer capable of rambling his beloved fells, and I made my music for when I'm no longer able to ramble the by-ways of Albion - but only to listen, and think "Was that really me? That solitary figure who stood in a landscape dreaming of ages past in dread fear of the future."

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