John Dowland’s Hermetic Tears

Images of Melancholy: John Dowland’s Hermetic Tears

with Angela Voss

Jenny Bliss Bennett ( voice)

Yair Avidor ( Elizabethan lute)

This year is the 400th anniversary of John Dowland’s death. So this festival is an ideal opportunity to introduce you to his music and also explore what lies behind his famous melancholic persona, because a great deal of his music is profoundly, but exquisitely, sad - and many of his songs are about weeping, darkness and despair. But there is far more to it than just an artistic theme. Dowland was associated with the revival of the Hermetic philosophy in the English Renaissance, and this leads us to investigate some very esoteric and arcane territory around melancholy as a spiritual path, and his music as holding a key to initiation through weeping.

Angela studied and taught western esoteric philosophy, astrology and Renaissance music for forty years, and taught on and directed MA programmes at the Universities of Kent, Exeter and Canterbury Christ Church. She is now on a different kind of journey in Glastonbury, having had quite enough of the constraints of the academic world.

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Host or Publisher Palema Rose