Name: Jacob and the Stone by Matt Pope
Duration: 4 min 17 s
Description: My cover of 'Jacob and the Stone', from Emile Mosseri's beautiful score for the film 'Minari'. Do watch the movie if you haven't already.

For solo violin, played by Amalia Young and recorded in New College Chapel, Oxford on 13/12/2021

Originally titled 'A'arhiyib'

Composed by Marcello Palazzo

Image: Amalia Young

Sonata (i)

Galactic Ambitions

Portobello Beach, a song to a single day

I didn’t plan to play this. It came out while I thought on a group of close friends I’ve known since I was little and who knew each other long before I was born. What started some time in the ‘90s as a three day NYE trip to the Scottish borders has become a central thread in a collective story, binding us together in ways that are profoundly difficult to express in words.

I have stared out of the car window as a boy, adolescent, and adult, and the sense while driving south of waking from a shared dream is as painful as I approach 30 as it was at 15, and the mystery is both clearer and more obscure. I don’t know if this makes sense, but I hope the piece goes someway there. This piece is about friendship and about time.

If you like it, you can find the track Spotify and other platforms: ‘Innerleithen, or a song for a certain time’ - as well as a video recording of this live performance on YouTube: https://youtu.be/DTFHPevLfAU?feature=shared

Innerleithen, or a song for a certain time

Nothing Ventured

Sitting at my piano
My parents in the kitchen 

Home

Happy to release my second track in this series adapting the words of some of my favourite writers. Here’s ‘Contrarian’, made in dedication to the late journalist provocateur and public intellectual, Christopher Hitchens. You don’t have to agree with everything the ‘Hitch’ said to recognise that he said it well and said it in his own way; as his more recently deceased best friend Martin Amis (see my track ‘Money’) put it: ‘he speaks better than I write.’ I am no longer so aligned with his views, but I hope that I should always hold with one of his last: ‘Always write’.

Contrarian

You can go to Ibiza now and have fun with your friends.

Have Fun With Your Friends

Stories

My cover of 'Jacob and the Stone', from Emile Mosseri's beautiful score for the film 'Minari'. Do watch the movie if you haven't already.

Jacob and the Stone

From my score for Magdalen College School's production of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' by William Shakespeare. This piece underscores the final scene in which Oberon and Titania lead their fellow fairies in a procession while delivering a shared speech, 'Through the house give gathering light'. On finishing the speech Oberon tells the fairies to bless the house and its residents, and to meet him again at break of day. The king and queen remove to the shadows with all but one of their retinue, Puck, who remains to conclude the play:

'If we shadows have offended, 
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.'

Many thanks to Lara Agar and Henry Page for their beautiful work on violin and cello.

Photo credit: David Fisher

Jacob and the Stone

Matt Pope

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