The class Nelson goes to is on religious education and the teacher quotes a passage from the bible with its lines, "a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to wear down and a time to build...a time to mourn and a time to dance..." The school is the religiously named St John the Baptist and the time for dancing that Nelson has half-seen and half-understood was a baptism of sorts if we take it colloquially to mean an initiation. Nelson may not quite know what that means for a couple of years more but it is one of those events that can seem more consequential retrospectively than at the time, as the boy will come to understand his mum is a sex worker on anti-depressants, while he is well-aware of being a truant with a squint eye. It is a story full of pathos but MacLaverty's achievement is to allow us to view it too as a tale of two hypocrites who want to keep from each other what they do with their days. MacLaverty asks us not to judge but to allow the sadness to seep in Honestly! John and Abby are seen by everyone around them as the perfect married couple. They have been married for 22 years and have no idea how to communicate??? What have they been doing in all that time? I recognize that people can grow apart, but these two never make any attempt to actually talk to each other. They just make accusations and suffer hurt feelings. I wouldn't say I have a perfect marriage, but we do TALK to one another, and there is mutual respect, meaning we listen to the other point of view, even if we don't agree. Is that actually a rare thing in the world? Choral societies are hungry beasts and there are only so many Rutter Glorias they can consume. With A Time to Dance Roth has provided a serious alternative—a contemporary work of real character and energy. I spent a considerable time researching and assembling the text, whittling down over one hundred poems to the final choice of twenty-nine, drawn from a wide variety of sources ranging from Ovid to Aphra Behn. The choice was made not just by the suitability of the texts, but also by how they speak to each other. I followed my usual practice of taking the poems for a walk, listening to their melodies and rhythms, and learning how they might dance. Apart from the text, however, the main influences on the music of A Time to Dance were Shakespeare, Bach and Skidmore. Impressed by the quality of Bernadette's essay, he helps carry the winning vote for her. It wasn't until a little later in the story that he meets Bernadette for the first time to congratulate her for winning the top prize, and by degrees, their relationship grows and deepens.

The two temporal cycles, Times of Day and Seasons of the Year, are favourite subjects for poets, as they offer such rich possibilities for metaphor when dealing with the human condition. There was no shortage of material; I simply had to spend a lot of time (well over a year) searching and sifting. A strong quartet of soloists move through the seasons: Grace Davidson is bright, spring soprano, Samuel Boden sensuous, Brittenish summer; Matthew Venner’s countertenor is autumn and bass Greg Skidmore completes the year as winter. All come together with the massed forces of Ex Cathedra (on typically fine form) for a stately Globe-style jig, bringing this immensely attractive cycle to its exuberant close. The descriptions - though at their best in doing so - don’t always cover the sex and love between the couple but also incorporate the narrator’s (and I presume Bragg’s) love of the Lake District. They're the perfect couple—envied by their friends, cherished by their children, admired by their peers. But John and Abby Reynolds know they're just pretending to be happy. In fact, they're waiting for the right time to tell the kids they're going to divorce. The music of A Time to Dance is designed so that it can be played either on modern instruments or (as in this recording) on period instruments. But apart from the instrumentation I have not made any borrowings from Bach, although I have done something to which he himself was partial—borrowing from Vivaldi, as you may hear on four pertinent (not to say seasonable) occasions, some more obvious than others. I love how Bach’s music dances and I hope that mine does too, although where Bach might move to the rhythms of the gavotte, minuet or bourée, mine are more likely to be milonga, kuda lumping or disco.

17/01/2023

For me, music is rooted in the body – in song and dance. When we are deeply affected by music, we say we are moved by it. For music to happen, something has to move to set the air vibrating: bow; string; lips; tube; hand; drumhead; breath; vocal cords. In the lovely imagery of the final poem in A Meh. This was a Christian cheating story with very little physical cheating (kissing - witnessed by wife!!), but full-on emotional cheating. I haven't lived through infidelity, so I can't accurately predict what my own red line would be in such a situation. In this relationship, the H had all but admitted to falling in love with the OW and the couple was actively pursuing a divorce. Plans were in place for the H and OW following the divorce. Their public interactions were drawing suspicions, gossip, and frequent phone calls to the weary wife. The H's status as a Christian married man (and waiting on his perfectly pure, innocent, and devout Christian daughter's wedding) seemed to be the only barrier from turning their emo love story into a physical one. I understood how and why his wife turned into a shrewish harpy. There's quite a bit of Christian scripture-based monologue, so if that's not your thing, this isn't your book. I didn't buy the ending. I don't think there's a chance in hell that the wife could move past her H's lusting and pining for the OW. This is a well-written, beautifully evocative story of an illicit, thinly veiled relationship between a retired bank manager and an 18-year old young woman in the North of England in the late 1980s. And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances.

profit has the worker from that in which he labors? 10I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. 11He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. Composer Alec Roth may be UK-based and of Irish/German descent, but it’s America that provides the musical heritage for his 2012 cantata A Time to Dance, recorded here for the first time by Ex Cathedra. The music is richly melodic, twitching with rhythmic energy, with wide harmonic vistas conjured up by even more widely spaced modal harmonies; Copland lies on the horizon of so much of its vibrant directness, shaded by the occasional bluesy nod to Gershwin and even Sondheim. This may be a rather unfair question to ask a composer about their own work, but do you have a favourite movement from this cantata?Well, it’s clear that the years I spent in the study and practice of Javanese gamelan music have been a huge influence. What interests me is adapting the deeper structures and compositional principles of gamelan music to Western resources. Steve Reich put it quite neatly: "one can study the rhythmic structure of non-Western music and let that study lead where it will, while continuing to use the instruments, scales and any other sounds one has grown up with". One of the most formative things I grew up with was singing, so I feel very much at home composing vocal/choral music. But when I come to work in a new medium, I take time to study with a master in that form. So when I was commissioned to compose a string quartet, for example, I spent a lot of time listening to Haydn. A Time to Dance is my first attempt at a cantata. I’m keen to do more, and so I’m now spending a lot of time listening to Bach. Here young Nelson is in the first year of secondary school - or would be if he turned up. Much of the time he is skiving, a continuation it seems of his primary school avoidance where his mother almost went to court over his absences. The story doesn’t make much of this avoidance, butwe can glean from itthat Nelson is a solitary child with poor sight, who has to wear a patch to protect his eyes. MacLaverty doesn’t tell us the disease but we can work it for ourselves based on the name of the patches he has to wear: Opticludes which are worn when people have amblyopia, weak vision in one eye, or basically a squint. If Oedipus blinds himself late in life realising that he has slept with his mother and killed his father, Nelson has poor eyesight early in life but, in a way, this is Oedipus Rex retold. Bernard MacLaverty is an Irish writer with a “Belfast accent, which has never left him, despite having lived and worked in Edinburgh, Glasgow and, remarkably, Islay in the Inner Hebrides.” (The Irish Voice) He may have lived for many years in Scotland but much of his work has focused on Ireland or alludes to the country, including his fivenovels, Cal , Lamb , Grace Notes , The Anatomy School and Midwinter Break . MacLaverty is still very much seen as an Irish writer rather than a Scottish one and yet a story like 'A Time to Dance' manages to capture the city, Edinburgh, in which it is set while also making clear the main characters are very much from elsewhere.