Downloads
There are Four Sides to the Night • Seven Icons of Sleep
There are Four Sides to the Night
 |
Richard Moult
There are Four Sides to the Night
Four songs to poems by Mary Webb
A Hawthorn Berry • A Night Sky • Like a Poppy on a Tower • The Spirit of Earth (for Jo)
A Hawthorn Berry > (2’26’’; 2.2 MB)
A Night Sky > (3’14’’; 2.9 MB)
Like a Poppy on a Tower > (1’11’’; 1 MB)
The Spirit of Earth > (2’29’’; 2.2 MB)
Clicking on the links above will enable you to listen to the tracks using your system’s music player. The method of downloading the sound files will depend on your operating system and browser, although in general terms, Mac users will need to control-click (PC users right-click) on the links and then from the resulting menu, choose ‘save as’, ‘download’ or ‘save to disk’ etc.
Click here to download a larger version of the artwork that can be added to iTunes.
Tracks 1 & 2: Stephanie Day (soprano); Jonathan French (piano). Live at St George’s Church, Clun, Shropshire, 4 May 2003. Recorded and produced by Peter G Howell.
Tracks 3 & 4: Kathy Taylor-Jones (mezzo-soprano); James Taylor (pianos). Live at Harborough Bank, Worcestershire, 2 February 2004. Recorded by Richard Haigh; remixed by Peter G Howell.
Stephanie Day and Jonathan French appear courtesy of the Birmingham Conservatoire.
Cover image: detail from ‘Memor’, © Richard Moult. Design by Paul Jackson.
Vis Medicatrix Naturæ
© Richard Moult/Mary Webb 2003 & 2004
Gaze Tree EP001
A Hawthorn Berry
How sweet a thought,
How strange a deed,
To house such glory in a seed—
A berry shining rufously,
Like scarlet coral in the sea!
A berry, rounder than a ring,
So round, it harbours everything;
So red, that all the blood of men
Could never paint it so again.
And, as I hold it in my hand,
A fragrance steals across the land:
Rich, on the wintry heaven, I see
A white, immortal hawthorn-tree.
A Night Sky (1916)
The moon, beyond her violet bars,
From towering heights of thunder-cloud,
Sheds calm upon our scarlet wars,
To soothe a world so small, so loud.
And little clouds like feathered spray,
Like rounded waves on summer seas,
Or frosted panes on a winter day,
Float in the dark blue silences.
Within their foam, transparent, white,
Like flashing fish the stars go by
Without a sound across the night.
In quietude and secrecy
The white, soft lightnings feel their way
To the boundless dark and back again,
With less stir than a gnat makes
In its little joy, its little pain.
Like a Poppy on a Tower
Like a poppy on a tower
The present hour!
The wind stirs, the wind awakes,
Beneath its feet the tower shakes.
All down the crannied wall
Torn scarlet petals fall,
Like scattered fire or shivered glass
And drifting with their motion pass
Torn petals of blue shadow
From the grey tower to the green meadow.
The Spirit of Earth
Love me—and I will give into your hands
The rare, enamelled jewels of my lands,
Flowers red and blue,
Tender with air and dew.
From far green armouries of pools and meres
I’ll reach for you my lucent sheaves of spears—
The singing falls,
Where the lone ousel calls.
When, like a passing light upon the sea,
Your wood-bird soul shall clap her wings and flee,
She shall but nest
More closely in my breast.
Mary Webb (1881–1927)
 |
Paul Jackson and I have produced an ebook entitled ‘Seven Icons of Sleep’, which is available as a free PDF download. The book features seven images from ‘The Dreaming’ collection which I felt would benefit from being viewed in a larger format. The cover features a previously unseen image: ‘Other Dreams, Other Fields’.
PDF file; 1.4 MB. Download >
(Requires the free Acrobat Reader program)
