A Year I Remember
A Year I Remember is a piece of music that Delia created for A Silence filled with Greek, which appears to be a one-off programme by Michael Ayrton, produced by Douglas Cleverdon[1]. Its script is dated 17 Jan 1967[2]
In the programme,
British painter, sculptor and author Michael Ayrton offers a picture of his first experiences of Greece.[3]
and Ayrton is quoted as saying
I'm not, by the way, a sober and scholarly figure nervously divorced from my own time or in love with the past. I like street noises. I am as much committed to twentieth-century politics as Pericles insisted Athenians should be in the fifth century. Furthermore, the two parts--or the many parts--of my illusions are indivisible. When I am nailed by the gods and my insides are drawn into the intestinal maze of Daedalus, my feet remain firmly in the present and I am aware of what is around me.
[...]
[I am] a sort of human truffle-hound nosing for some hidden or disguised meaning in landscape long inhabited. I don't mean that I am an archaeologist or a historian, but rather that I am a sort of trawling tourist, equipped with an echo-sounder.[4]
and it may include a taped conversation with Basil Wright.[5]
Douglas Cleverdon's papers include several works entitled A Year I Remember:
- A Year I Remember - 1913, by Rose Macaulay. June 4, 1950[6]
- A Year I Remember - 1939, by Frances Watson. Dec. 30, 1964[6] produced by Douglas Cleverdon.[7]
A Year IR is mentioned in Delia's handwritten list of pieces that she was thinking of reusing for the Brighton Festival.[8]
Availability
- Broadcast on the 17th January 1967 at 7:30pm on the BBC Third Programme.[9]
- Broadcast on the 10th February 1967 on the BBC Third Programme.[10]
- Broadcast on Sunday March 24th 1968 at 8:30 in Kingston, Jamaica, on radio station JBC.[3]
- The BBC Sound Archive tape TRW 6568: A Year I Remember is not to be found.[11]
References
- ↑ University of Delaware Library catalogue for BBC Third Programme Radio Scripts 1940-1969, Manuscript Collection Number 332, Item F134, cat.no. TLO 50/DA495.
- ↑ The catalogue of Box 20 of the archive of Douglas Cleverdon's scripts at the Lilly Library
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Programme guide in the Kingston Gleaner Newspaper Archive: March 24, 1968 - Page 61
- ↑ Jacob E. Nyenhuis, Myth and the Creative Process: Michael Ayrton and the Myth of Daedalus, the Maze Maker (2003), p.74 on Google Books.
- ↑ Notes to p.287 of Justine Hopkins' Michael Ayrton: A Biography (1994) on Google Books.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 The Lilly library's index of Cleverdon Manuscripts, box 22.
- ↑ BBC Third Programme Radio Scripts 1940-1969 at The University of Delaware, item F101.
- ↑ DD082814
- ↑ The White Files' rwslib.pdf
- ↑ The Listener, volume 77, p.243, 16th February 1967 on Google Books: "Michael Ayrton in 'A Silence Filled With Greek' (Third Programme, February 10) spoke of that 'special dimension of immortality' that the Greek landscape possesses [...]'".
- ↑ The Tape Library List's entry for TRW 6568.
