Music for These Troubled Times

“Many men are melancholy by hearing music, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth; and therefore (…) it is a most present remedy: it expels cares, alters their grieved minds, and easeth in an instant.”

— Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

These lines from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy were the starting point for this programme and for my first CD, Music for These Troubled Times (2026). Burton lived in a world full of uncertainty and war, not so different from our own, and he wrote these words in the context of the very English repertory that resonates throughout this programme. This music can offer a refuge from melancholy, or deepen it through its own expressive power.