Fergus Currie

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland
November 18, 1961.

Who am I?
I am a chess playing, stargazing, philosophizing, model aeroplane flying, furniture building, tortoise breeding, book reading, and art loving musician who lives and works in Athens, Greece. I am a member of the Greek Society of Philosophical Psychology and Psychoanalysis, and contribute occasionally to Gurdjieff-Steiner comparative writings. I believe in a personal spiritual path for each individual and in the "here and now" as well as the "eternal and omnipresent".
I have a beard which I have only ever shaved of completely once and that was to raise money to stop elephant poaching. I love listening to jazz music and looking at renaissance paintings. If I could combine the two into one integrated activity I would do it! I enjoy immensely the works of Herman Hesse, Umberto Eco and Nabokov. I delight in reading the texts of Richard Feynman, especially at his most lyrical.
My tortoises are all named after thinkers and philosophers. Currently I have Descartes, Spinoza, Newton, Voltaire, Plato and Aristotle wandering around my garden! Next year's baby tortoises will be named Russell, Kant, and Leibnitz. If there's more than three I'll find names for them at the time. I design, build and fly RC balsa wood frame aeroplanes and I have built more than half the furniture in our home.
I own an 8" Schmidt Newtonian telescope and my favorite celestial objects are the Veil Nebula, alpha Librae (because of it's name: Zubenelgenubi!) and, of course Saturn. I was a student of Ninian Perry to whom I owe many thanks as a spiritual and musical inspiration.
I think you now know roughly who I am.

Fettes School, Edinburgh 1975

What do I do musically speaking?
When I start to list my musical activities I wonder if people reading or listening arrange them into a series of priorities or levels of achievement. I'd like to think of all my musical activities as being equally important even if they all have periods of relative inactivity. At the moment I am a composer.
In the past I have been: a classical orchestral musician (with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Camerata in Athens), a jazz bassist (with Swing 80 and my own trio Full Circle), an arranger (for Alexia, the ERT big band and the Mark Crooks Nonet), a copyist and transcriber (I prepared the complex spartito for "The Return Of Eleni" by Thanos Mikroutsikos and reconstructed the entire film score for Serpico by Mikis Theodorakis), and a conductor (of the ERT big band), and probably will be again some point in the future.

What do I think about music?
Music is more than a language; it goes beyond what can be translated into other languages. The meaning of a verbal sentence can easily be transferred from one language to another and almost all modern languages are well enough developed to cope with the most taxing vocabulary and phraseology. Music, on the other hand, expresses something much deeper than verbal communication; music attempts to speak directly to our souls. Emotions can be given titles like joy or sadness but these labels do nothing to convey any actual emotional experience. Music also evokes emotions for which we have no verbal description. What we feel when listening to a Beethoven symphony cannot be expressed effectively in words; these emotions belong to the realm of the soul and have no counterpart in verbal language.

What do I think about life?
If we look around us we see people with expressions of joy, sorrow, boredom, apprehension, ecstasy and a whole bunch of other emotions on their faces. This I believe is a measure of the light we carry within us. This light we see in others is a reflection of the light we ourselves give to them. The more light we give out, the more we see in others. Enlightenment is the state in which we comprehend this light as our true communication with the world and that Paradise or eudemonia is found in such a state of enlightenment. Without art, music, poetry, literature, science, philosophy, and all other expressions of higher thought, we cannot hope to understand where this light comes from or even how to see it. I believe that morality and goodness are intrinsic in the human condition, and their application in everyday life leads us to a state of illumination.
I also believe that we are victims of a limited experience of time and our perception of it is similar to traveling down a road in a fast car. The road does not cease to exist just because it fades into the distance behind us. In the car we simply have a limited perception of the road. All things exist for all time. Why should we be so important to assume that our experience of time is in anyway truly representative of reality? Plato (the philosopher, not the tortoise) tried to explain physical reality in a similar way by stating that our senses only received a poor shadow of reality, rather like seeing the shadows of passers by on a cave wall. He suggests that if we ever manage to turn round and see what's outside of the cave we would be so shocked that we would go mad!
So, what do I think about life? If we are benevolent we are given enlightenment, which leads to eudemonia. Art in all its forms, illuminates us and equips us to be benevolent. This is for all time.