International Music Day 2026 - Four Songs, One Thread
For today's International Music Day, I chose four musical pieces that could hardly be more different: Carlos Paredes's Verdes Anos , from Paulo Rocha's 1963 film; Paradise Lost's The Last Time from Draconian Times ; Ethel Ennis's Dreamer Dreamer from Lullabies for Losers ; and Hildegard von Bingen's Ave Generosa . Hildegard is one of my main inspirations and central to The Polymath from the beginning. Her image is part of its visual identity, her music is part of its atmosphere, and her life embodies something at the heart of what The Polymath is about. Hildegard lived across music, writing, medicine, natural history, language and visionary thought. She composed, wrote, taught and travelled at a time when the space available to a woman to do such things was very different from what it is now. Ave Generosa transcends time, place, origin. The music is Medieval, but not remote. It has a strange luminosity, austere and intimate at the same time, a...
