Seeking a harmonious life
Not sure if many people have seen the BBC programme ‘Classic Goldie’, where he rises to the challenge of composing a piece of music for an orchestra to be performed in the PROMS at the Albert Hall.
Goldie has been one of my hero’s for a long time. Not only because he is a legend in the ‘drum and bass’ genre of music for most of my adult life, but because creativity liberated him out of children’s homes and a really tough life. He initially started with being a graffiti artist in New York before entering into electronic music production and DJing. He is often in the club Fabric in London, which used to be a favourite haunt.
What impressed me in the TV programme, is his creative searching, which is inherently spiritual. He talks about this search for him being liberating, as he searches increasingly to find a harmonious life. I interpreted this to be meaning an ‘integrated’ life, a life that brings depth and a yearning for synergy of the mind, body and spirit. One commentator talked about Goldie’s music being dark yet hopeful, and I think this is true.
Goldie’s piece Sine Tempore (inspired by Augustine’s work on how creation occurred when there was no time and by implication that creation and evolution occurred in timelessness, see here for more on this) a musical expression of creation, evolution and the future. It remained Goldiesque, but more moodful and touching than I was expecting. I was struck by the sense that the music was strong when looking back and formed with highs and lows, but as it looked forward, there was a vulnerability, a lost-ness, a sense of unknowing. I think this point of the music expressed something of a collective consciousness, of hope, but the challenge of a future where we are killing the planet, with out a sense of the presence of the divine, or an acknowledgement of the divine. In the first show, I was struck how one commentator talked about music coming out of the interaction with religion or engagement with God, now it emerges out of the eternal individual. Maybe music like this, is a representation of humanity reaching out again tentatively out of the delusion of individualism and autonomy to the divine, again seeking transcendence and seeking the spiritual, but with a complete reframing of religion.
