Is this music for pianos but not pianists, or hardly music at all? Ever since I'd been writing music I was dreaming of getting rid of the performers. Conlon Nancarrow It is the centenary of Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997) and in turning our attention to his music we are caught, as so often in ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Toby Ferris
How various Towers of Babel can remind us - rather surprisingly - that we shouldn't wish for everything to be translated into the simple and straightforward. It is not hard, these days, to access a polyglot Bible if you find you need one – they’re ten a penny on the Google – but ... Read More...
This week, the embellishment of monastic chant, and why we have been caught for a thousand years in a very pleasant and rewarding but nonetheless insane digression... Not long ago I attempted, in a quarterly online magazine called The Junket, a defence of what we call in Norbiton the Failed Life. The ... Read More...
This week the domestic world is turned inside out as we go looking for wild things in forest rooms. In 1498, at the insistent request of his patron, Duke Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo da Vinci decorated the vault and ceiling of a room of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan with a grove ... Read More...
Whether it's through the drudgery of a yokel or some of the vastest engineering projects ever undertaken, we can't resist messing around with water. It's benefited our gardens, cities, crops and sport - but at what cost? I spend many summer hours watering the plants in my small back garden – ... Read More...
This week, Gerhard Richter and the grottification of cities - it's another extraordinary bulletin from Norbiton... Norbiton is a city of Ideas, not of stone, so on my occasional visits to London, I am struck by how rapidly a stone city can change: set down a crane and over weeks and ... Read More...
This week we consider what the abrupt disappearance of a medieval board game can tell us. To play a game is voluntarily to restrict your own liberty. It is a form of moral discipline. You agree to abide by certain rules which, most likely, you had no part in drawing up ... Read More...
Toby Ferris rummages through the orchestra's changing cast of instruments and finds some half-forgotten but powerful beliefs. The modern symphony orchestra is a ritual instrument of considerable, sometimes alarming incantatory power. In Roumeli (1966) Patrick Leigh Fermor describes the two kinds of flute in use among the Sarakatsani, a dwindling group of ... Read More...
What the Grand Old Man's bizarre reconfiguration of Homer can tell us about our empirically real world. As William Ewart Gladstone recognized from his reading of Homer, much of our mental mapping of the world is fanciful; all of it is provisional. For example, I can recall the brow-furrowing effort I had ... Read More...
Toby Ferris considers the significance of the physical act of writing, from scratching with an old nibbed pen to double-thumbing on tiny virtual keypads. I still occasionally write with a pen – as the draft of this post will bear witness: Writing with a pen is not just a minor feat of ... Read More...
