Beyond ‘genre’, liking and favourites: understanding what isn’t already in your culture is the priority. This blog is a plan to repair a small corner of the tatters of my ignorance of and feel I have some way of understanding the life of Schumann without neglecting the music. This is a blog based on Judith … More Beyond ‘genre’, liking and favourites: I think understanding what isn’t already in my culture is my priority : a blog based on Judith Chernaik’s (2018) ‘SCHUMANN: The Faces and the Masks’.

Ernst Krenek‘s classification, from ‘Studies in Counterpoint’ (1940), of a triad’s overall consonance or dissonance through the consonance or dissonance of the three intervals contained within. Created by Hyacinth (talk) 17:07, 25 September 2010 using Sibelius 5. We can’t get far with this question without reference to music (and I am hampered by a total ignorance of musical … More The fragile harmony of consonance without intervals of dissonance. In praise of the role of conflict.

Currently, I am reading the five volumes of Leonard Woolf’s autobiography. I am on the third crucial volume in which his concern for the oncoming suicide of his wife Virginia is first talked about and explanations that as they increase still don’t suffice to accumulate more than genuine understanding of that tortured, but infinitely great, … More Ageing on its own makes nothing better; if anything, it makes it much more difficult, and in more than one way, ‘harder’ to achieve authenticity as a person aiming for ‘a way to the Better’.

Most teachers are not ‘great teachers’, or not yet great teachers, because most teachers feel they are, or desire to be, satisfied by being seen as a teacher and that alone, their boundaries strengthened by borrowed authority. They borrow this authority from the role description of the teacher – a description of what a teacher … More A great teacher must be a great learner, for a great teacher facilitates learning and teaching everywhere, including in themselves and their great learners.

‘Sing the song of sorrow, but let good prevail’. The terrible beauty of a book that while looking for the ‘perfect therapeutic mantra in the face of suicidal despair’, sometimes finds itself ‘somehow taking over from the central actors the role of communicating a tragic subjectivity and trying to find relief in psychological candour’.[1] This … More Let us practise to ‘Sing the song of sorrow, but let good prevail’. Advice from Edith Hall (2024) ‘Facing Down The Furies: Suicide, The Ancient Greeks, and Me’.