Rewilding
Rewilding Therapy
Counselling and Psychotherapy · Archway, North London & Online
INGLENOOK
The inglenook was the seat built into the fireplace recess — the warmest place in the house, and the darkest. The very old and the very young sat there. This was where the stories happened.
The hearth had a goddess. The Greeks rarely gave her a figure: her presence was the flame, not a body.
In Latin, focus meant hearth. Nothing here is background.
An image arrives — a visitor, perhaps a stranger. Some history. The rest is listening.
Painting, sculpture, sound, dream — all image.
One shelf. Not a full range of music. Almost none of it has words you can follow. That is why it is here.
Erik Satie — Gymnopédie No. 1
Three slow chords, and a melody that seems to have been walking for a long time before we hear it. Satie wrote at the top of the score that it should be played lent et douloureux — slow and sorrowful.
It doesn’t feel like suffering. It feels like autumn: something being let go of without struggle, the way a leaf leaves a tree.
Is this sad? Which sadness?
Claude Debussy — Des pas sur la neige, 1910
The title means Footsteps in the Snow. The same small rhythm continues underneath, step after step. It does not leave.
Four minutes of someone not arriving.
Where do your footprints stop?
Bill Evans — Peace Piece, 1958
Two chords repeat through the whole piece. The right hand wanders further and further out, sometimes almost losing the ground, while the left keeps returning to the same place.
Near the end, it doesn’t quite come back. The two chords are still there.
What is holding underneath?
Marcin Wasilewski Trio — Hyperballad, 2005
Björk’s song without Björk. The voice and words have gone, but the shape they made remains. The trio does not reproduce the song so much as remember it together.
You may recognise what is missing before you recognise what is being played.
What words would you speak?
Samuel Barber — Adagio for Strings, 1936
He wrote it at twenty-six, as the slow movement of a string quartet. It begins quietly and rises by degrees, each phrase carrying the last one higher. The music seems to be moving towards something it cannot reach without breaking.
At the height of it, the sound breaks off. When it returns, the ascent is over.
Tōru Takemitsu — Rain Tree Sketch II: In Memoriam Olivier Messiaen, 1992
Takemitsu took the image from a story by Kenzaburō Ōe. A rain tree keeps water in its leaves. Drops go on falling beneath it long after the sky has cleared.
Notes gather, brighten and disappear, leaving spaces in which the piano seems to be listening to what has just happened.
What is still falling?
Arooj Aftab — Mohabbat, 2021
A setting of an Urdu ghazal, sung slowly over almost nothing. The voice arrives without insisting that every word be understood. It bends around the instruments, sometimes leading them, sometimes becoming another sound among them.
The song is intimate without moving closer. It reaches across the distance it preserves.
What is reaching you?
Alice Coltrane — Journey in Satchidananda, 1971
A tambura sounds continuously underneath. The bass repeats its figure. Harp, saxophone and percussion move above them, but the ground does not alter.
Named for her spiritual teacher, Swami Satchidananda, with Pharoah Sanders on saxophone.
It sounds like setting out.
Where are you going?
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra — Promises, 2021
A phrase a few seconds long, repeated for three quarters of an hour. Around it: electronics, strings that arrive and withdraw, and Pharoah Sanders at eighty, playing less than you would expect.
Near the middle, he puts the saxophone down and, briefly, wordlessly, sings. He died the following year.
What made him sing?
John Coltrane — Alabama, 1963
Coltrane wrote the piece after four Black girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The melody is said to follow the rhythm of the eulogy spoken for them.
The saxophone speaks in short phrases, pausing between them. The drums rise and the music gathers force, but it does not move on. It returns to the opening and says it again.
Why does it go back?
Mulatu Astatke — Yègellé Tezeta
Tezeta is both a musical mode and a word: memory, longing, the ache of something recalled. Here it travels through vibraphone, horns and a rhythm that seems both relaxed and unable to settle.
Nothing in the music announces what has been lost. It already knows.
What does it remember?
Hildegard von Bingen — O viridissima virga, ave
The title means, roughly, O greenest branch. Viriditas — greenness — was Hildegard's word for the force running through living things. She used it for sap, for health, for a person who is well.
She was given to the church as a child and enclosed beside a monastery. She stayed, and wrote music, medicine and theology.
One line at a time, women's voices, climbing much further than plainchant usually does.
Sequentia recorded it in a church in Cologne, at the tomb of an empress dead a thousand years.
Did anyone visit you?
from Canticles of Ecstasy, Sequentia, 1994
Dmitri Shostakovich — Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, 1944
The trio begins in cello harmonics, so high that its voice seems to have left its body.
Shostakovich wrote the trio after the death of his closest friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, while news of the Nazi extermination camps was emerging.
The last movement is a dance, played until it stops being one.
Galina Ustvolskaya — Piano Sonata No. 6, 1988
Ten minutes of repeated chords and clusters, some struck with the flat of the hand. The score reaches four fortes. Three were not enough.
She rejected the names repeatedly attached to her: Shostakovich’s pupil; woman composer.
Nothing arrives to soften what is happening. It isn’t hard to understand. It is hard to stay in the room with.
When do you want to leave?
Charles Mingus — Myself When I Am Real, 1963
He was a bass player. Here he is alone at a piano, improvising.
A phrase appears, changes its mind, becomes tender, grand, comic, uncertain, then leaves before it can establish which of these was the real one.
Which one stayed with you?
Julius Eastman — Stay On It, 1973
One cheerful phrase, repeated by a small ensemble for twenty minutes. The ensemble stays on it — until someone does not. Voices call, instruments interrupt, the pulse loosens and the group has to find its way back without pretending nothing happened.
The instruction is both musical and impossible.
Eastman was Black and gay in a largely white avant-garde. Much of his music was lost. Some of what survives has been reconstructed from recordings and other people’s copies.
When would you have stopped?
Éliane Radigue — Kyema, 1988
The first part of Trilogie de la Mort, an hour long, made with one analogue synthesiser and tape. Radigue built it from slowly shifting tones, informed by the Bardo Thödol and its six intermediate states of consciousness.
Soon after she finished Kyema, her son Yves was killed in a car accident. Two weeks later, she began the second part of the trilogy.
At first, it may seem that one sound is continuing without change. Then something inside it moves, and it becomes difficult to say when the movement began.
What is arriving?
What would you bring to the fire?
A few of these are only one movement of something longer.
go out of the house and find the rest.
