Sweet Airs

Sally takes a swim in the river after a few days’ absence from the boat, reflecting on how her natural surroundings fuel her writing. Her thoughts turn to her mother, who loved music; and she plays a song by Nina Simone, which Sally has often used as a teaching aid in her creative writing classes. It’s an elegiac song, and Sally ponders how songs can help us unpick the difficult narratives of our own lives. At the end of the episode, Sally gets bad news about Philip, an old friend and student. She reaches for a passage from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, an enraptured speech about music and the beauty of nature, and dedicates it to Philip in the final hours of his life.

Further Reading

The passage which Sally reads at the opening and ending of the episode is a rhapsodic speech by Caliban in Act 3, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Caliban is the original owner of the island, having had it bequeathed to him by his mother Sycorax; but Prospero, the Duke of Milan and a magus, has taken over the isle, and enslaved Caliban. Despite his servitude and the brutality of his treatment, Caliban shows he is poetically attuned to the enchantments of the island. Many of the phrases and images in this speech link us to Prospero’s famous reflections in Act 4 Scene 1, on the beauty and the transience of life and the inevitability of death: “our revels now are ended.”

Sally’s mother is a central character in her critically praised memoir (although Sally prefers the term “anti-memoir”) Girl With Dove, published by William Collins. You can find out more about her writing on Sally’s website:

https://sallybayley.com/

Nina Simone was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, and civil rights activist, who recorded more than 40 albums between 1958 and 1974. The song Stars, which Sally analyses, was written and released by Janis Ian in 1974. Nina Simone covered it on the album Let It Be Me in 1987 and sang it live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976.

The melancholy of the live performance reflects Simone’s mourning for the passage of time, the fate of the anti-racism aspirations of the 1960s civil rights movement, and her own decline in popularity and stardom. The song can be found here:

https://open.spotify.com/track/1OXBfwBYtj2AAKi6jom1qT#login

This episode is dedicated to Professor Philip J. Stewart, who passed away shortly after it was recorded. Philip was a remarkable polymath who worked across the arts and sciences; with characteristic modesty, he described himself as a “Jack of all trades and master of none”. He studied Arabic and in the 1960s had a brief career as an Arabist, translating a novel by Nobel Prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz. He then took a second degree in forestry and worked in forest conservation and erosion control in Algeria, before teaching ecology in Oxford and writing widely on topics from chemistry and astronomy to music. When he retired, he dedicated himself to literature, writing a book about ten poets who lived or wrote on Boars Hill where he lived – poets such as Robert Graves, Matthew Arnold and John Masefield - called Oxford's Parnassus (Bothie Books, 2021).

Since this episode was recorded, Sally has heard from Philip’s daughter that she did indeed read Caliban’s speech to him before he passed away

The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com

The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding and the beautiful piano tracks used in the episode are written and performed by Paul Clarke

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