From wikipedia -

Gerrard Winstanley (1609 – September 10, 1676) was an English Protestant religious reformer and political activist during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Winstanley was aligned with the group known as the True Levellers for their beliefs, based upon Christian communism, and as the Diggers for their actions because they took over public lands and dug them over to plant crops.

Not a great deal is known about Gerrard Winstanley’s early life. We do know that he was baptised in 1609 in Wigan, then part of the West Derby (hundred) of Lancashire, and that he was the son of an Edward Winstanley, mercer. His mother’s identity remains unknown and he could have been born anywhere in the Parish of Wigan ^[1]. The parish of Wigan contained the townships of Abram, Aspull, Billinge-and-Winstanley, Dalton, Haigh, Hindley, Ince-in-Makerfield, Orrell, Pemberton, and Upholland, as well as Wigan itself ^[2].

He moved in 1630 to London, where he became an apprentice and ultimately, in 1638, a freeman of the Merchant tailors‘ Company or guild. The English Civil Wars, however, disrupted his business, and in 1643 he was made bankrupt. He had married Susan King, the daughter of London surgeon William King, in 1639 and William King helped Winstanley move to Cobham in Surrey, where he initially worked as a cowherd ^[3].

English Civil Wars

There were many factions at work during the period of the three related English civil wars. They included the Royalists, who supportedKing Charles I; the Parliamentary forces, called “Roundheads,” who later emerged under the name of the New Model Army led by Oliver Cromwell; the Fifth Monarchy Men, who believed in the establishment of a heavenly theocracy on earth to be led by a returning Jesus as king of kings and lord of lords; the Agitators for political egalitarian reform of government, who were branded “Levellers” by their foes and who were led by Freeborn John Lilburne; and the Christian communists, who called themselves the True Levellers for their beliefs but who were branded “Diggers” because of their actions. The latter were led by Gerrard Winstanley. Whereas Lilburne sought to level the laws and maintain the right to the ownership of real property, Winstanley sought to level the ownership of real property itself, which is why Winstanley’s followers called themselves “True Levellers”.

The New Law of Righteousness

Gerrard Winstanley published a tract called The New Law of Righteousness, which advocated a form of Christian communism. The basis of this communistic belief came from the Book of Acts, chapter two, verses 44 and 45, which speaks of common property. Winstanley argued that “in the beginning of time God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over another.“

Winstanley took as his basic texts the Biblical sacred history, with its affirmation that all men were descended from a common stock, and with its scepticism about the rulership of kings, voiced in the Books of Samuel; and the New Testament‘s affirmations that God was no respecter of persons, that there were no masters or slaves, Jews or Gentiles, male or female under the New Covenant. From these and similar texts, he reinterpreted Christian teaching as calling for what would later be called communism, and the abolition of property andaristocracy.

Winstanley wrote: “Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have caste out Charles our Norman oppressour, wee have by this victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoake.“

His theme was rooted in ancient English radical thought. It went back at least to the days of the Peasants’ Revolt (1381) led by Wat Tyler, because that is when a verse of the Lollard priest John Ball was circulated:

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman [a]

The Diggers

In 1649, Winstanley and his followers took over vacant or common lands in Surrey, Buckinghamshire, Kent, and Northamptonshire and began cultivating the land and distributing the crops without charge to their followers. Local landowners took fright from the Diggers’ activities and in 1650 sent hired thugs to beat the Diggers and destroy their colony. Winstanley protested to the government, but to no avail, and the colony was abandoned.

After the failure of the Digger experiment in Surrey in 1650 Winstanley temporarily fled to Pirton in Hertfordshire where he took up employment as an estate steward for the mystic aristocrat Lady Eleanor Davies. This employment lasted less than a year after Davies accused Winstanley of mismanaging her property and Winstanley returned to Cobham.

Winstanley continued to advocate the redistribution of land. In 1652 he published another tract called The Law of Freedom in a Platform,in which he argued that the Christian basis for society is where property and wages are abolished. In keeping with Winstanley’s adherence to biblical models, the tract envisages a communistic society structured on patriarchal lines.

Quaker

By 1654 Winstanley was possibly assisting Edward Burrough, an early leader of the Quakers, later called the Society of Friends (see Friends House Library, London, William Caton MS 3 p.147). It is apparent that Winstanley remained a Quaker for the rest of his life as his death was noted in Quaker records (R. T. Vann ‘From Radicalism to Quakerism: Gerrard Winstanley and Friends’ Journal of the Friend’s Historical Society, XLIX (1959-61) pp.41-6). However, his Quakerism may not have been very strong as he was involved in the government of his local parish church from 1659 onwards. He may have been buried in a Quaker cemetery.

Later life

In 1657 Winstanley and his wife Susan received a gift of property in Ham Manor, near Cobham from his father-in-law William King. This marked Winstanley’s renovation in social status in his local community and he became waywarden of the parish of Cobham in 1659, overseer for the poor in 1660 and churchwarden in 1667-68. He was elected Chief Constable of Elmbridge in October 1671. Although these offices conflicted with Winstanley’s apparent Quakerism, the Quakers had not yet become the quietist religion of later centuries.

When Susan died in around 1664 Winstanley was paid £50 for the land in Cobham by King. Winstanley returned to London trade, whilst retaining his connections in Surrey. In about 1665 he married his second wife Elizabeth Stanley and re-entered commerce as a corn chandler. Winstanley died in 1676 vexed by legal disputes concerning a small legacy owed to him in a will (see James Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley’s Later Life’ Past and Present no.82 (1979) pp.73-81 and J. D. Alsop., Gerrard Winstanley: Religion and Respectability’ Historical Journal Vol.28, No.3 (September 1985) pp.705-709)

Related Works

1975 saw the release of Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo‘s film Winstanley. [1] As with the duo’s previous film, It Happened Here, it had taken several years to produce with a very low budget. Winstanley was based on a book by David Caute entitled “Comrade Jacob”[2] and was produced in a quasi-documentary style, with great attention to period detail- even to the point of only using breeds of animals which were known to exist at the time. [3] .pdf

Quotation

From A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England:

• “The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land.”

The song, “The World Turned Upside Down,” by English folksinger Leon Rosselson, weaves many of Winstanley’s own words into the lyrics.

References

1. ^ Bradstock, Andrew (2000) Winstanley and the Diggers 1649 – 1999 Frank Cass, London p.20;
2. ^ GENUKI
3. ^ Alsop, JD (April 1989) Ethics in the Marketplace: Gerrard Winstanley’s London Bankruptcy, 1643 Journal of British Studies no.28 p.97-119;

An older song said to be written by Gerrard Winstanley was recorded by the English group “Chumwabamba” on their “English Rebel Songs 1381-1914″ in 1988.

As the lyrics are Winstanley’s, they paint a better picture of the time period in song.

The Diggers’ Song

You noble Diggers all stand up now, stand up now! You noble Diggers all stand up now! The wasteland to maintain, seeing Cavaleers by name, Your digging does maintain and persons all defame, Stand up now, stand up now!

Your houses they pull down stand up now, stand up now // (means, repeat line as in verse one) Your houses they pull down, to fright your men in town, But the gentrye must come down, And the poor shall wear the crown, Stand up now, Diggers all.

With spades and hoes and plowes, stand up now, stand up now // Your freedom to uphold, seeing Cavaliers are bold, To kill you if they could and rights from you to hold, Stand up now Diggers all.

Theire self-will is theire law, stand up now, // Since tyranny came in they count it now no sin To make a gaol a gin, to starve poor men therein. Stand up now, Diggers all.

The gentrye are all ‘round, stand up now… // The gentrye are all ‘round, on each side they are found, Theire wisdom’s profound; to cheat us of our ground, Stand up now, stand up now.

The lawyers they conjoyne, stand up now… // To arrest you they advise, such fury they devise, The devill in them lies, and hath blinded both their eyes, Stand up now, stand up now.

The clergy they come in, stand up now…. // Thc clergy they come in and say it is a sin, That we should now begin our freedom for to win, Stand up now, Diggers all.

The tithes they yet will have, stand up now…. // The tithes they yet will have, and lawyers their fees crave, And this they say is brave, to make the poor their slave. Stand up now, Diggers all.

‘Gainst lawyers and ‘gainst Priests stand up now… // For tyrants they are both, even flatt against their oath, To grant us they are loath, free meat and drink and cloth, Stand up now, Diggers all.

The club is all their law, stand up now…. // The club is all their law, to keep all men in awe, But they no vision saw, to maintain such a law, Stand up now, Diggers all.

The Cavaleers are foes, stand up now, // The Cavaleers are foes, themselves they do disclose By verses not in prose to please the singing boyes. Stand up now, Diggers all.

From the National Portrait Gallery website: “Promoted as ‘the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’, Clare spent much of his life as a poor agricultural labourer before mental illness condemned him to an asylum in 1837. His intensely detailed poetry reflects his love of his native countryside. It also movingly describes the hardship suffered by the rural poor living in a landscape being destroyed by enclosure. Clare enjoyed a brief London vogue with his Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) and The Village Minstrel (1821). In 1827, he published The Shepherd’s Calendar a more political verse in which man shapes the landscape and is defined by it.”

From This Land Is Ours, by Dave Featherstone, reprinted here in full -

John Clare and ‘The Tragedy of the Enclosures’

The Mores

Far spread the moorey ground a level scene
Bespread with rush and one eternal green
That never felt the rage of blundering plough
Though centurys wreathed spring’s blossoms on its brow
Still meeting plains that stretched them far away
In uncheckt shadows of green brown, and grey
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky
One mighty flat undwarfed by bush and tree
Spread its faint shadow of immensity
And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds
In the blue mist the horizon’s edge surrounds
Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours
Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers
Is faded all – a hope that blossomed free,
And hath been once, no more shall ever be
Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave
And memory’s pride ere want to wealth did bow
Is both the shadow and the substance now
The sheep and cows were free to range as then
Where change might prompt nor felt the bonds of men
Cows went and came, with evening morn and night,
To the wild pasture as their common right
And sheep, unfolded with the rising sun
Heard the swains shout and felt their freedom won
Tracked the red fallow field and heath and plain
Then met the brook and drank and roamed again
The brook that dribbled on as clear as glass
Beneath the roots they hid among the grass
While the glad shepherd traced their tracks along
Free as the lark and happy as her song
But now all’s fled and flats of many a dye
That seemed to lengthen with the following eye
Moors, loosing from the sight, far, smooth, and blea
Where swopt the plover in its pleasure free
Are vanished now with commons wild and gay
As poet’s visions of life’s early day
Mulberry-bushes where the boy would run
To fill his hands with fruit are grubbed and done
And hedgrow-briars – flower-lovers overjoyed
Came and got flower-pots – these are all destroyed
And sky-bound mores in mangled garbs are left
Like mighty giants of their limbs bereft
Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease
Each little path that led its pleasant way
As sweet as morning leading night astray
Where little flowers bloomed round a varied host
That travel felt delighted to be lost
Nor grudged the steps that he had ta-en as vain
When right roads traced his journeys and again -
Nay, on a broken tree he’d sit awhile
To see the mores and fields and meadows smile
Sometimes with cowslaps smothered – then all white
With daiseys – then the summer’s splendid sight
Of cornfields crimson o’er the headache bloomd
Like splendid armys for the battle plumed
He gazed upon them with wild fancy’s eye
As fallen landscapes from an evening sky
These paths are stopt – the rude philistine’s thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
But paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’
And on the tree with ivy overhung
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung
As tho’ the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go
Thus, with the poor, scared freedom bade goodbye
And much they feel it in the smothered sigh
And birds and trees and flowers without a name
All sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came
And dreams of plunder in such rebel schemes
Have found too truly that they were but dreams.

Remembrances

Summer pleasures they are gone like to visions every one
And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on
I tried to call them back but unbidden they are gone
Far away from heart and eye and for ever far away
Dear heart and can it be that such raptures meet decay
I thought them all eternal when by Langley Bush I lay
I thought them joys eternal when I used to shout and play
On its bank at ‘clink and bandy’ ‘chock’ and ‘taw’ and
ducking stone
Where silence sitteth now on the wild heath as her own
Like a ruin of the past all alone
When I used to lie and sing by old eastwells boiling spring
When I used to tie the willow boughs together for a ‘swing’
And fish with crooked pins and thread and never catch a
thing
With heart just like a feather- now as heavy as a stone
When beneath old lea close oak I the bottom branches broke
To make our harvest cart like so many working folk
And then to cut a straw at the brook to have a soak
O I never dreamed of parting or that trouble had a sting
Or that pleasures like a flock of birds would ever take to
wing
Leaving nothing but a little naked spring
When jumping time away on old cross berry way
And eating awes like sugar plumbs ere they had lost the may
And skipping like a leveret before the peep of day
On the rolly polly up and downs of pleasant swordy well
When in round oaks narrow lane as the south got black again
We sought the hollow ash that was shelter from the rai n
With our pockets full of peas we had stolen from the grain
How delicious was the dinner time on such a showry day
O words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away
The ancient pulpit trees and the play
When for school oer ‘little field’ with its brook and wooden
brig
Where I swaggered like a man though I was not half so big
While I held my little plough though twas but a willow twig
And drove my team along made of nothing but a name
‘Gee hep’ and ‘hoit’ and ‘woi’- O I never call to mind
These pleasant names of places but I leave a sigh behind
While I see the little mouldywharps hang sweeing to the wind
On the only aged willow that in all the field remains
And nature hides her face where theyre sweeing in their
chains
And in a silent murmuring complains
Here was commons for the hills where they seek for
freedom still
Though every commons gone and though traps are set to kill
The little homeless miners- O it turns my bosom chill
When I think of old ‘sneap green’ puddocks nook and hilly
snow
Where bramble bushes grew and the daisy gemmed in dew
And the hills of silken grass like to cushions to the view
Whe n we threw the pissmire crumbs when we’s nothing
else to do
All leveled like a desert by the never weary plough
All vanished like the sun where that cloud is passing now
All settled here for ever on its brow
I never thought that joys would run away from boys
Or that boys would change their minds and forsake such
summer joys
But alack I never dreamed that the world had other toys
To petrify first feelings like the fable into stone
Till I found the pleasure past and a winter come at last
Then the fields were sudden bare and the sky got overcast
And boyhoods pleasing haunts like a blossom in the blast
Was shrivelled to a withered weed and trampled down and
done
Till vanished was the morning spring and set that summer
sun
And winter fought her battle strife and won
By Langley bush I roam but the bush hath left its hill
On cowper green I stray tis a desert strange and chill
And spreading lea close oak ere decay had penned its will
To the axe of the spoiler and self interest fell a prey
And cross berry way and old round oaks narrow lane
With its hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again
Inclosure like a Buonapar te let not a thing remain
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill
And hung the moles for traitors – though the brook is
running still
It runs a naked brook cold and chill
O had I known as then joy had left the paths of men
I had watched her night and day besure and never slept agen
And when she turned to go O I’d caught her mantle then
And wooed her like a lover by my lonely side to stay
Aye knelt and worshipped on as love in beautys bower
And clung upon her smiles as a bee upon her flower
And gave her heart my poesys all cropt in a sunny hour
As keepsakes and pledges to fade away
But love never heeded to treasure up the may
So it went the comon road with decay
Composed c. 1832 First published 1908

mouldywharps – moles

To a Fallen Elm

Old Elm that murmured in our chimney top
The sweetest anthem autumn ever made
And into mellow whispering calms would drop
When showers fell on thy many coloured shade
And when dark tempests mimic thunder made
While darkness came as it would strangle light
With the black tempest of a winter night
That rocked thee like a cradle to thy root
How did I love to hear the winds upbraid
Thy strength without while all within was mute
It seasoned comfort to our hearts desire
We felt thy kind protection like a friend
And pitched our chairs up closer to the fire
Enjoying comforts that was was never penned

Old favourite tree thoust seen times changes lower
But change till now did never come to thee
For time beheld thee as his sacred dower
And nature claimed thee her domestic tree
Storms came and shook thee with aliving power
Yet stedfast to thy home thy roots hath been
Summers of thirst parched round thy homely bower
Till earth grew iron – still thy leaves was green
The children sought thee in thy summer shade
And made their play house rings of sticks and stone
The mavis sang and felt himself alone
While in they leaves his early nest was made
And I did feel his happiness mine own
Nought heeding that our friendship was betrayed

Friend not inanimate- tho stocks and stones
There are and many cloathed in flesh and bones
Thou ownd a lnaguage by which hearts are stirred
Deeper than by the attribute of words
Thine spoke a feeling known in every tongue
Language of pity and the force of wrong
What cant assumes what hypocrites may dare
Speaks home to truth and shows it what they are

I see a picture that thy fate displays
And learn a lesson from thy destiny
Self interest saw thee stand in freedoms ways
So thy old shadow must a tyrant be
Thoust heard the knave abusing those in power
Bawl freedom loud and then oppress the free
Thoust sheltered hypocrites in many an hour
That when in power would never shelter thee
Thoust heard the knave supply his canting powers
With wrongs illusions when he wanted friends
That bawled for shelter when he lived in showers
And when clouds vanished made thy shade ammends
With axe at root he felled thee to the ground
And barked of freedom – O I hate that sound

It grows the cant terms of enslaving tools
To wrong another by the name of right
It grows a liscence with oer bearing fools
To cheat plain honesty by force of might
Thus came enclosure- ruin was her guide
But freedoms clapping hands enjoyed the sight
Tho comforts cottage soon was thrust aside
And workhouse prisons raised upon the scite
Een natures dwelling far away from men
The common heath became the spoilers prey
The rabbit had not where to make his den
And labours only cow was drove away
No matter- wrong was right and right was wrong
And freedoms brawl was sanction to the song

Such was thy ruin music making Elm
The rights of freedom was to injure thine
As thou wert served so would they overwhelm
In freedoms name the little so would they over whelm
And these are knaves that brawl for better laws
And cant of tyranny in stronger powers
Who glut their vile unsatiated maws
And freedoms birthright from the weak devours

Composed c. 1821 First published 1920

Background to John Clare and Enclosures

John Clare perhaps one of the most overlooked, misrepresented and misunderstood poets in the English language, is an extraordinary fine ‘nature’ poet. He was the most striking of a number of poets who were seized upon by the early nineteenth century literary establishment as illustrating the authentic voice of th e English peasant’ just as that vocation and the landscape that went with it were being banished and razed forever- this representation has startling parallels in the green movements sentimentalised invocation of shifting cultivating tribes in places like Papua New Guinea in a similar epoch of destruction and reinvention of (the idea of) nature. His poems, despite the ways that they have been represented distinctively go beyond the narrow limits of the pastoral, of the idea of the existence of a harmonious uncontested countryside, and show they are much more than the mad incoherent ramblings of a ‘rhyming peasant’ (he ended his life in an asylum).

The poems that made him ‘amusing to Dukes’ in London’s literary scene were generally inferior to his later work – much of which remained unpublished until long after his death. He grew up in the small fenland community of Helpstone in Northamptonshire, and ‘the green language’ running through his poetry forms beautifully sensitive description of that area’s creatures and people. ‘Remembrances’ and ‘To a Fallen Elm’, are two of the finest examples of the elegies he wrote to the fields and woods which he grew up in as they were destroyed and razed by the brutal progress of enclosure. Although the enclosure of ‘common land’ was not a ‘new’ process in early nineteenth century England- it had been going on before Gerrard Winstanley’s time- but the virulency of it was new – and through it the vicious inequality of English rural society acquired a ‘terrible visibility’.

Clare’s poetry gives voice to a ‘tormented customary consciousness’: in his poetry we see the disintegration of a moral economy- an economy which was still held together by a delicate social fabric based and secured by custom, rather than by the vagaries of money and profit: though this ‘moral’ economy could be as brutal and unequal as anything that came after it. What Clare laments is the replacement of this order by ‘new instrumental and exploitative stance, not only towards labour……… but also towards the natural world’. This is important because it shows that the experience of people and nature are not riven and fractured apart, but intertwined. The persistence of fracturing apart people, especially ‘working’ people, from their complex and uneven interrelations with nature is one of the major reasons for the poverty in our understandings of the relationships between people, inequality and ecology. This intertwining of the experience of people and nature is starkly represented in an image like that of the hanging moles in ‘Remembrances’. Here there is a blurring of the distinctive experience of people and nature, since they can stand for each other- the image probably alludes to the labourers hung during the Captain Swing riots and rick burnings that exploded across Southern England during 1830: A period ringing with the echoes of the ‘bloody old Times’ baying for the labourers blood.

The most disabling element that one sees enclosure bringing to the lives of landless labourers in Clare is the way that they were not only dispossesed of ownership, but also of their control of their landscape: they became alienated from it. This new landscape of ‘repression and greed’ that enclosure had stamped upon the land is similarly stamped across the structure of ‘Remembrances’. One feels the fences and exclusions of the new landscape tightening like a torque around the poems beautifully flowing rhythm; particularly in the last line of each stanza which cuts bitterly across the verse’s sprung motion. In ‘To a Fallen Elm’ the fact that Clare no longer has the right to decide the fate of the Elm overshadowing his house becomes an emblem of the erosion of the right to nature- of the right to shape one’s environment. this right is ridden over by a new knavish and empty conception of freedom. Though he sentimentalised the Helpstone of his youth Clare’s writing suggests resources for the emergence of ‘a different kind of freedom’, from this knavish and empty conception- in the r elationships between people and between people and their environments: ‘a different kind of freedom’ which has many resonances for the struggle to prevent the New Right ensuring that we only conceptualise each other and our environments through the grid of financial value and transactions.

Dave Featherstone

Sources

E.P. Thompson ‘Custom Law and Common Right’ in his Customs in Common 1991 Penguin esp p. 175- 184.

John Tripp’s fine poem ‘Greetings, John Clare’ in his Selected Poems published by Seren.

Raymond and Merryn Williams’s edition of John Clare: Selected Poetry and Prose which has fine introduction and critical commentary and is published by Methuen.

Raymond Williams ‘The Country and The City’ published by Chatto and Windus/ the Hogarth Press.

The important phrase ‘Tragedy of Enclosures’ is used by the Spanish writer on ecology and inequality- J. Martinez-Alier in an essay on Latin American ecological history:

‘Ecology and the poor: A neglected dimension of Latin American history’. Journal of Latin American Studies 23.

Volume, pace and pitch summon whole worlds. Intonation is a language in itself. The American philosopher and wit, Sidney Morgenbesser, was in the audience at a lecture given by the American philosopher J.L. Austin at Colombia University in the 1950s. When Austin explained that many languages employ the double negative to denote a positive (‘He is not unlike his sister’), but none employed a double positive to make a negative, Morgenbesser waved his arm dismissively, and retorted: ‘Yeah, yeah.’

With the blast and blare of cinemas, restaurants, concerts, computer games and TV commercials,

– add to these the hydraulic waste-collection truck and the carpenter’s screaming, electric blade saw outside my window as I write -

we live in loud times. A recent study by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds suggested that birds that live near motorways can’t hear each other, leading to difficulties in learning songs and communicating with potential mates. Another study found that 5-year old children who attended nursery developed more voice problems that those who didn’t because of the high noise levels and unsympathetic acoustic environment. What’s the effect on humans when voices are submerged by the din? And how can we create an acoustic space in which this suggestive but perpetually elusive instrument, the human voice, can flourish?

To attune properly to the voice we must develop a keener sensitivity, a ‘deep listening’. To start a real conversation about this most vital talent, we need to hear with fresh ears.

- from Anne Karpf’s The Human Voice (pp.290-1)