Remembering Jeffrey Tate

In my first year at Cambridge there was a small group of friends, all fellow members of Christ's College, who met together most evenings and many afternoons for endless conversation. What we all had in common was a great appreciation of classical music, theatre and of wit. Jeffrey was a powerhouse of all these. His physical affliction ruled out most roles in drama, but his direction/production of Measure For Measure for the ADC (or Mummers? or Marlowe Society?) left an indelible impression on me.

In those days, despite never having had any piano lessons, I was trying to teach myself to play Bach.The second piece I learned was Var.13 of the Goldberg Variations. It took me two years. I used to practice it in a little back room at Christ's One day Jeffrey popped in to see what I was doing.

"Do you play?" I asked.
"A little," said he.
"Please show me how this should go"

Whereupon he sat down and played it so well that I asked him to start from the beginning, and marveled as he sightread the entire Goldberg Variations, his performance being as good as any I had heard. I knew he loved music and was in the college choir, but he was studying medicine, so it was quite a surprise. But in fact, after doing his medical internship, he got a position as a repetiteur for Georg Solti at Covent Garden, and went on to become principal conductor at Covent Garden, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic.and others.

I lost touch with him when I left England for India and, eventually, Japan, but he got in touch when he came to Tokyo for some concerts with the pianist Mitsuko Uchida, and my wife and daughter and I attended the concert and spent the rest of the day with the two of them; he was as fun to talk with as ever,and we were able to catch up a bit on what had become of all the members of our little clique.

Although people with his condition normally have a short life expectancy, this didn't seem to apply to Jeffrey. You may have noticed that conductors generally live to a very advanced age, often doing their best work in their final decades. I don't for a moment doubt that allowing music to flow continually through your mind and body is the closest thing to the Elixir Of Youth available And also, as Jeffrey said,

""There is in the last resort no limit to my physical energy if I know what I'm doing and want to do it."

An introduction to EarthlingZ, the creative community that has grown up around the site in the mountains where my wife Futaba and I settled a few decades ago:

GreetingZ, EarthlingZ!

Most of you know about and many of you have visited The
Greenhouse and Silkhouse , which constitute the physical
basecamp of EarthlingZ in the mountains of Chichibu. It
is a couple of old farmhouses which we have turned into a
place catering to the creative and nature-oriented people
we have come to know through our own activities,
especially those working in the fields of music, dance,
graphics, the healing arts, and the spiritual sciences.

Of course there are countless such people, especially in
and around Tokyo, but our location and the values we
encourage has meant that only those who have discovered
the importance to their creativity of connecting with the
infinite energies of organic Nature will make the effort
to return again and again.

There is very little in urban life today that brings to
our attention our place in the cosmos, or even reminds us
that we are on an actual planet. From the moment we leave
our rooms in the morning we are moving through a creation
of human engineering, a giant warehouse and database
which we navigate in as straight lines as we can towards
destinations determined largely by our material agendas.

We rarely look up, knowing that there will be no stars
visible, and that what's happening in the sky makes
little difference to our work and movements. Even as we
sleep we are bathed in the discordant electromagnetic and
psychic vibrations of the physical and mental activities
of millions, but hardly understand the tensions and
levels of egotism this creates.

If we step out of this and into the real life of the
planet, we find our oppressive sense of separate selfhood
dissolve as we walk through the cool cathedrals of the
cedars, watch the wind ripple over the ricefields, or
hear the voices of birds and animals punctuate the
stillness of the glittering night.

In such an atmosphere, we need no guidance, no teachers
or gurus, to bring us to considering our condition as
humans on the earth. We move without effort towards
wider perspectives, consider our pasts and futures with
at least temporary detachment, and recharge our spiritual
batteries through grounding to the earth while attending
to the heights.

This often leads us to make music, to dance, to centre in
the Here and Now, to show each other the wonders we
discover in so doing, and to rediscover what marvellous
creatures human beings are when they are really Present
and open to each other and their environment.

It was once said by Terence McKenna that "Nature is the
great teacher of metaphysics". People who like to learn
this way we call EarthlingZ, and all the facilities we
have developed here are meant to make this easier.