Eurythmy West Midlands Performing Groups Home Page

Premiere:

The Project Team:

Paul Robertson (violin) www.musicmindspirit.org Leader of the Medici Quartet and lecturer on music and the mind

Robin Stokoe & Christine Stokoe
Baroque dancing

Maren Stott
Eurythmy

Göran Krantz
Eurythmy director

Alan Stott
Consultant and rehearsal / workshop musician

Peter Bradbury
Project Director

Forthcoming dates:

(date to be finalised) Scientific and Medical Association: workshop and performance at Eton College

June 23 Society for Effective Affective Learning: workshop and performance at their 2003 conference, Keele University

June 29 School of Economic Science, workshop and performance at St James School, London

August 6–9 Cambridge Music Conference and Festival: workshops and performances at venues in Cambridge

PAUL ROBERTSON has been leader of the internationally renowned Medici String Quartet since its inception thirty years ago. For more than twenty years Paul Robertson has collaborated with leading scientists to explore the neurological and scientific basis of music. This work reached a wide public with his highly acclaimed Channel 4 television series Music and the Mind. He is in constant international demand as a speaker and lecturer at scientific and educational conferences and medical and business colloquia. He is a Cultural Leader in the World Economic Forum, and is in regular conversation with business, media and political leaders. Current projects include: an exploration of the use of music in therapeutic settings; a research collaboration with Dr John Zeisel on the relationship between musical structure and the neurophysiology of Alzheimer’s syndrome; and the development of a World Peace Orchestra made up of young musicians from conflict-torn zones who performed at the World Economic Forum’s summit in Salzburg in September 2002.

In 2001 Paul was awarded a fellowship by the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts [NESTA] to explore the musical, mathematical and spiritual foundations of Bach’s work for unaccompanied violin. NESTA has supported some of the core research on which the Bach Project is based.

Rehearsing with Göran Krantz

Review:

Bach and the Dance of Heaven and Earth
Stourbridge, 14th March, 2002

Many people speak of the 'future of eurythmy' with concern and sense of uncertainty. There are attempts to make it 'relevant' to our present times, to 'innovate', and attract a wider public. All this is no doubt commendable and at best may even nudge eurythmy forward as an art with a future, or at least keep it visible in the world. Last night, however, a full house in the Studio Theatre at Glasshouse College, Stourbridge, were fortunate to see what I, for one, experienced as a bolt of lightening, concentrated, focussed, and powerful.

Maren Stott (eurythmy), Paul Robertson (violin), Göran Krantz (eurythmy director) and Alan Stott (advisor) over the last two years have been researching and working towards performing Bach’s Partita in D minor for solo violin. Paul Robertson began the evening by introducing the role that Bach's works have played in his own life. He led us into some of the hidden side of the music’s construction—the latest discovery by Helga Thöne of seasonal chorales underlying the compositions for solo violin, with her further research into the highly sophisticated mathematical codes and ciphers available to the composer in order to express a correspondence with the Christian year. With the D-minor partita we are dealing specifically to the Easter events and, moreover, within that context of the response of Bach’s faith to the death of his first wife by his writing the famous Chaconne. Maren then joined Paul to demonstrate some aspects of the 'hidden voices' and the drama and devotion of the music. This demonstration also highlighted the choreography that Göran Krantz had developed with her in an attempt to do justice to Bach’s conceptions. No elaborate lighting (the lighting design has yet to be created) and costumes to create impact—just an excellent musician and a eurythmist committed to a common task. The meeting with Bach was richly authentic; a revelation. At times I thought of Pythagoras, Abraham, St Paul...

The evening ended with a 40-minute performance by Paul Robertson and Maren Stott. It only served to strengthen my conviction that eurythmy does indeed hold a great future.

John Playfoot