HERMIONE HARVESTMAN : THE VERNAL HOURS (April 1978)

1) This music was all made in REAL TIME. Not only that, but it is also 100% improvised - each piece ORGANICALLY unfolding as though from a seed uniquely as such things must and do. There are are no over-dubs, neither are there edits : nothing had been added nor yet taken away; all is heard exactly as it was played.

2) It is not 'free improvisation', rather it is played with respect of a certain convention derived, somehow (intuitively? instinctively?) with respect of monophonic modal & rhythmic structures analogous to (say) Indian Raga or Scottish Piobaireachd. The PRINCIPLES are as ancient and primal as the urges and impulses whilst the INTENTIONS are as idiosyncratic as the technology allows.

3) Thus we have, essentially, two elements throughout. Firstly is the SOLO INSTRUMENT and secondly is its ACCOMPANIMENT, the latter here manifest as both OSTINATO and DRONE. Each element has its own initial space determined by entirely independent 'paths' of echoes, delays, tape loops, filters and flangers by which to further modify the respective sonic parameters as an integral part of the performance of each piece that are then brought together in some woodland glade where pathways meet 'neath blossomed boughs in the blazing sunshine. Or so it seemed to me when I was playing them.

4). Each performance is a revelation of mystery. Each a journey into the organic unknown of PURE SPONTANEOUS PROCESS. Each is a playful communion with the notion of the DIVINE as COSMIC AWE and JOYFULNESS. Of that which simply is, without the need of the extraneous suppositions of FAITH and BELIEF. Here we find TRUTH which is true regardless - the truth of that which just is, empirically so, where nothing is more SUPER than NATURE.

5) Emerging from long months of winter and illness I tentatively began the process of playing again. My studio had been dismantled in the January to allow for certain building work to be carried out and remained in bits until the April when I at last felt well enough to begin the process of putting Humpty back together again. Like the music, this process is a matter of certain intuition that manifests itself organically as seeds are planted, nurtured and allowed to grow of their own accord even in accordance with Blake's dictum of WHERE (WO)MAN IS NOT, NATURE IS BARREN.

6) The studio is my garden and these things aren't going to connect themselves. So the focus, initially, as I say, is on but TWO of the various synthesisers at my disposal - the SOLO and its DRONE and their respective pathways of 'effects' which actually meet in the REVERB SPACE of the MIXING DESK and thence find their way, conjoined, to the TAPE MACHINE where REAL TIME becomes TAPE TIME which is, hopefully, what you are listening to here : the product of organic process rather than the process itself.

7) Nature is everything. In the agonies of my winter illness I dreamt only of the vernal greening of spring; the forests of my ancient soul in which I might stride once more gaily attired in the blazing warmth of the sun as my body and soul rejoices in the ancient abundance of it all. Timeless were my visions, my dreams and revelations of earth, sea and sky of which I am part, as divine as the spark of life and the perception that allows me to feel the awe, the Mysterium Tremendum, that underlies all human spiritual experience for there is - as I say - nothing more SUPER than NATURE

8) All in all I recorded fifteen pieces in this way over a period of two weeks gentle convalescence under the watchful eye of the friends and neighbours who had kept an eye on me when I was ill. Such are the delights of the rural community, even though my nearest neighbour lives maybe half a mile away. Her yard light is one point in my constellation of the nighttime fell. It shines to say : all well! As does my own. And in the morning her cottage has golden windows.

9) The total duration of The Fifteen is in the region of TWO HOURS FIFTY-FIVE MINUTES - so three hours near as damn it. When it came to sequencing them they fell neatly and almost chronologically into three five piece clusters of 58.54, 58.08 and 58.55 which had a nice symmetry to it, so this is what you have here. I did think of having it as three separate 'albums' but three-in-one it becomes a triptych, each element part of the whole; an echo of the trinity impulse, spinning ever and onward through the cosmos and the mythos thereof. The first NINE pieces are interleaved with the final SIX, which were more more rhythmically modal in nature, so each of the three 'VERNAL HOURS' gets two of these. The first of them - the tenth piece actually recorded - is the first in the entire sequence by way of an overall prelude, however so brief. The last of the six, the last recorded (and the longest by two seconds) is the final piece here by way of suitable closure. So - three hours. Listen to it sparingly.

10) Empirically, objectively, Nature is everything there is or will ever be. Its possibilities are as boundless as its horizons - it is the font of our every sense of the DIVINE and yet utterly and demonstrably (empirically) Godless. Indeed, to suppose a God - to give Nature something greater, a Creator indeed - is a supreme human arrogance because God is too small, mean and petty a concept to even account for the tiniest part of it. In the infinitesimally small there is a boundless infinity, a law unto nought but itself that defines all laws and our every attempt at understanding its terrible mystery. The reverence of the numinous is the core of this work; giving thanks for simply being alive, for soon, one day, inevitably, I will be simply being - no longer alive in any human sense, but part of the boundlessness of cosmic natural mystery our species has barely begun to comprehend.

11) That we might look upon this mystery and tremble is the very nature of our spirituality. Spirituality is common to all and unique to each of us, like every aspect of our subjective human being - be it our musical tastes or our sexuality - our experience is our very own. By sharing it with others we realise community, fluidity and tradition, but nothing by way of the absolutes that underly religions and pornography that would exploit the transcendent delights of such experience and make us slaves of orthodoxy and dogma. The pure experience of spirituality knows no religion and needs no God; just as nature needs no church.

12) There are two instances in this sequence of unwitting plagiarism. It must be remembered that I was convalescing, and all musical experience is essentially mediumistic anyway, even the basic white-note modality that forms the basis of my own 'system'. Certainly I was not aware of either at the time, and am not overly familiar with the 'prototypes' which only serves to make these instances all the more intriguing - how such things are heard and remembered, and become part our creative processes by way of a wider cultural tradition emerging from the collective unconscious as part of the wider human scheme of which everything we are is somehow a part.

13) The first of these is SNOWSTORM by The Groundhogs, from their 1974 album SOLID, which I can remember hearing once whilst visiting a young friend in her Durham rooms during freezing January of 1975; I recall she was especially taken with the sentiment of the lyrics which in seeking them out by way of research for this programme note seem appropriate to my own experience during my winter illness of but a few years later. As the underlying 'ground' of piece number 11 seems to derive from this song I've given it the name VIRIDI AESTAS NIX TEMPESTAS - Green Summer Snowstorm.

14) The second is THE FLOATING WORLD by Soft Machine from their 1975 album BUNDLES which was one of the favourites of aforementioned young friend upon its release that spring - that track especially which had a dreamy ambience untypical of the dramatic jazz-rock of the rest of the LP. I remember her doing a dance piece which she choreographed to the music, having obtained special permission from the composer to use it. I suggested at the time I could provide her with something similar, and now, however so unwittingly, I have. Thus NATATIO MUNDI.

15) The other titles are vague Latin translations of little bits and pieces of poetry and drawing titles. FOLIO IN OCULUM comes from 'The Leaf in Her Eye', a drawing made by an artist friend of the leaf of my rubber plant reflected in my eye one perfect summer afternoon in 1972. Others are perhaps too personal to go into, though IN VIRIDI UMBRA is a memoir of an affecting instant in which a girlfriend and I became part of a green woodland shadow as we lazed in the verdant splendours of slender youthful Sapphic immortality in the summer of 47. 31 years on, I was certainly feeling the folly of it actually AGED 47, no longer especially slender or youthful and effectively celibate following a winter of Shingles, Post Herptetic Neuralgia and a hefty dose of influenza thrown in for good measure. FLORENT SUB SPINA comes from a poem sent to me by a friend called Beneath the Blossoming Thorn relating to an ascent we made up Glastonbury Tor in the May of 1964 when the hawthorn trees along the approach hung heavy with intoxicatingly fragrant blossoms, the olfactory simulacra of which was not lost on ether of us though up that point our friendship had been, out of some necessity, strictly platonic. When the title here was read by my friend Daniel, a student of Latin, he had it as A BLOSSOMING IN THE SPINE, which I rather liked as an image of the thrilling joy we might feel in the presence of the truly numinous which I certainly was that day in May 1964 dear Muriel (R.I.P) and I made our ascent up Glastonbury Tor - and then some...

16) Looking back on this music now after 25 years, aged 74, I might think what wouldn't I give to be 47 again, but such are the premature follies of middle-age in which the first few creaks of mortality might give us cause to abandon hope as we enter the old shadowy valley of dry bones. These days I have hope, and a happy sense of both mortality and immortality in the sense that, as Dr Sagan puts it, we are star-stuff. It is as star-stuff we have coalesced into life and it is as star-stuff we will go back from whence we came. As long as we're alive, our remit ought to be to simply live, if only for today.

And yesterday, which goes without say.

Hermione Harvestman : Thursday April 29th 2004.