July 2009: The Day After Tomorrow...

In the next few weeks Pensive and the musicDNA team will be submitting a

taster app to the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store - called musicGPS.  It's a

very simple app, allowing you to record the soundtrack of your life - that

is, whatever you listen to on your iPhone/iPod touch - and where you were

when you were listening; and then to navigate a timeline and add your own

notes etc.  It's just the beginning of what looks like a much bigger

musicDNA project.  We hope to have a small number of copies of musicGPS to

give away pretty soon (even before it makes it to the App Store) - if you'd

like to put your name down for one, please get in touch as soon as possible.

A Golden Radio production for BBC Radio 3 (90-93FM in the UK)

and on the web at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/radio3/

At the back of the Bible hides perhaps the most misunderstood but profoundly

influential little book of them all: the Apocalypse of St John, also known

as the Book of Revelation.  The Apocalypse - which means "unveiling" - is a

breathless and intense sequence of visions given to the exiled John on the

Aegean island of Patmos, 70 miles or so from Ephesus in what is now Turkey,

at the end of the first century of the Christian era.  Although it's

well-known for being a challenging read, Revelation compensates right from

the start with an explicit blessing on both reader and listener.  Thereafter

its twenty-two chapters are packed full of pictures and patterns that have

inspired artists and composers (not to mention scientists, kings, and

politicians) down the nineteen centuries since it was written: seven seals

and seven trumpets, a beast with seven heads and ten horns, a woman with a

crown of twelve stars on her head, and a Hallelujah chorus!

As, however, the book also ends with a curse on anyone tampering with its

text, this hour-long radiophonic version sagely presents the complete text

from mysterious beginning to epic end - in a communal reading from a number

of translations old and new (including echoes of New Testament Greek as well

as Mandarin, Arabic, Persian, and Urdu).  And decorating and hopefully

illuminating the sacred text as it unfolds is an historically-wide array of

music including iconic fragments from Handel's Messiah and every movement of

Messiaen's wartime Quartet for the End of Time, as well as choral music by

Hildegard of Bingen and Antony Pitts.

Executive Producer Jeremy Summerly suggests listening with a Bible to hand; 
the text (King James Version only) is here, along with music details:
http://goldenradio.co.uk/AWirelessRevelation.pdf 

"For bare-faced cheek no one can touch him and if now he says he'll give us

Roget's Thesaurus on a bus ticket I'll believe him... this was serious

radio."  So said The Observer back in 2000 about The Unfinished Symphony,

and perhaps the entire Book of Revelation in under 60 minutes is an

appropriate response to the challenge.  A Wireless Revelation is the

extraordinary sequel to Radio 3's ground-breaking broadcast A Passion 4

Radio (in which all four Gospel accounts of the Passion were read side by

side) - and is "one of the most challenging programmes I've ever made", says

producer and composer Antony Pitts.  "It's a bit like being an icon-maker -

trying to create a stylized, clear 'window into heaven' based directly on a

given sacred text.  Heard aloud, the structure and rhythm of the text become

a carrier wave for layers of meaning that are all the more powerful without

any textual commentary."

John's compelling narrative appears to encompass the Alpha-to-Omega of

history, most obviously centering on the rise and final destruction of the

Roman Empire, as well as providing an eschatological iconography and

timeline for the Christian East and West.  The notion of revelation or

divine inspiration was common to Abbess Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th

century and Apostle John in the 1st, while the idea of the chora as a sacred

womb-like space - where revelation takes place - crosses many cultures.  In

a monastery on the top of one of the two hills on Patmos is a magnificent

collection of sacred icons.  Some way down the hill is the cave where St

John is believed to have lived, sheltered from the scorching sun of summer

and the chill and damp of the Aegean winter.  Here the sacred and the

secular, the divine and the temporal are considered to intersect in a unique

way.

The Book of Revelation opens with a theophany, followed by seven letters to

the communities of believers in the western coastal district of Asia Minor

(Turkey) - a horseshoe-shaped trail from arrogant Ephesus to the tepid

springs of Laodicea.  As John was exiled on the island of Patmos these

letters of encouragement and rebuke, along with the rest of the book, would

have been taken by messengers to each of the seven churches in turn.  The

sites today range from the bustling city of Izmir [Smyrna] to obscure

villages with a few glimpsed fragments of the past: in Alasehir

[Philadelphia] four pillars from an early church building remain.  Laodicea

is, like Ephesus, now just a ruin, but one bleakly devoid even of tourists,

and with a natural water supply that is still sickeningly lukewarm - the

adjective applied to the Laodicean readers.

In some of the most poetic passages in the Book of Revelation John describes

cosmic figures both good and evil and a harrowing chase into the wilderness,

ending with a series of seven climactic judgements on the earth.  But

cataclysm is just as much at home on the silver screen - from Independence

Day via the Terminator saga to the Day After Tomorrow - as it also is in the

daily news menu of woe and warfare, tsunami and Tchernobyl.  These images of

ultimate destruction resonate with, and some even have their source in

John's Apocalypse.  And today the idea of the "end of the world" has new

currency among more than a few economists and environmentalists.

Ancient Babylon was Israel's nemesis and came to be a symbol of earthly

oppression: most obviously for 1st-century Jews and Christians a symbol of

imperial Rome; and familiar recently as a Rastafarian term for aspects of

modern society.  Saddam Hussein tried to rebuild the literal Babylon,

modelling himself after Nebuchadnezzar even down to the brick signatures.

Lamented and longed-for Jerusalem, on the other hand, became a symbol of

heavenly order, seen by John at the end of the Book of Revelation in a new

guise - from which, for instance, are derived our vernacular religious ideas

of the "pearly gates".

HSBC Cheltenham Music Festival

Kit Hesketh Harvey (narrator)

Festival Academy Soloists

Richard Baker (conductor)

Michael Zev Gordon collaborated with Eva Hoffman and Antony Pitts on a work

specially written for radio in 2003; uniquely evocative and expressive, this

reflection on memory won a Prix Italia the following year.  The performance

here is the premiere of a concert version commissioned by HSBC Cheltenham

Music Festival.

NCEM, St Margaret's Church

Event 08: The Clerks, Edward Wickham

An unforgettable soundscape of words and music devised by Antony Pitts and

Edward Wickham - integrating the voices of The Clerks with a special audio

collage reflecting the theme of loss and commemoration.  At once

contemplative and celebratory, this programme will break new ground in the

presentation of 'early music'.

Thank you for listening,