Author: Suzy Robinson

Singer, writer, mother, corgi enthusiast

A Musical Advent Calendar

Without all the carol services and cheering Christmas music to look forward to, a group of freelance musician mothers decided to create an online musical advent calendar showcasing their talents. It is a joyous thing.

Musical Miniatures: recording workshop

Philomel is back with some socially-distant workshop-recordings of newly written musical miniatures. Stay, O Sweet from Virelais is a setting of words by John Donne by Canadian-born Glasgow-based composer Emily Doolittle. Recorded in Richmond Unitarian Church, August 2020. Suzy Robinson, Janet Oates and Michael Keen perform. Stay O Sweet (video) Emilydoolittle.com Philomel.co.uk

A painful silence

All on my own in Lockdownland, I can’t recreate the sound that I and my fellow choristers make on Maundy Thursday when we begin Duruflé’s sinuous and reflective setting of the Tantum Ergo; or when we lean together into the achingly plangent suspensions of ‘Jerusalem desolata est’ in Byrd’s Civitas Sancti Tui

Birth Day: trauma and gratitude

Today it is my darlingest daughter’s 7th birthday. I don’t think I could ever love someone more than I love her. 

Most years I find myself staying on high alert throughout the night before her birthday in a kind of post-traumatic vigil, a retrospective anticipation of her birth. The body holds trauma in such a way that it can’t tell past from present, and an anniversary or a reminder can whisk one back to the event itself which seems still to be happening, or to a replaying of the narrative.