Post by Philip Ryan

As AI floods us with data we can know more about ourselves and our work than ever before, but it is bloodless. It is difficult to step out of the torrent. We cannot step back in at the same spot. Technology can generate, simulate, optimise and reproduce — faster than any human, at any scale, at almost no cost. What it cannot do is feel. Some of the most important things we do are not done for commercial reward. They are done because they must be done. Because the alternative — not doing them — would be a failure of who we are. This is one of those things: Christopher Tyler Nickel’s STABAT MATER, performed by soprano Catherine Redding with the Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra under Clyde Mitchell . Released 2026 on Avie Records. 🎵 orcd.co/AV2855 You hear it in the music itself — and behind it, the decisions of conductor Clyde Mitchell and the recording engineers in Vancouver and at Windmill Lane Recording Studios in Dublin, all of them pulling in the same direction. At the heart of it all, Christopher Tyler Nickel — whose sophisticated, elegant compositional choices you feel the pulse of before you understand them. Like all great design, the craft disappears into the thing it serves. You don’t hear the architecture. You hear what the architecture is holding. The Stabat Mater is a meditation on a mother’s anguish. To watch your child die is an affront to our biology — to the primal contract of nature, the force that drives us to survive, to evolve, to continue. We exist to protect what we made, what we nurtured, what we believe in, who we are. There is a truth here that should not be litigated. Michelangelo understood this. The Pietà does visually what this recording does aurally — takes that same moment, a mother and her dead child, and renders it with such formal perfection, such controlled craft, that the grief becomes almost unbearable. The restraint is what destroys you. And then there is Catherine Redding. Her voice is crystalline. She lives in the music. She gives it away — to us, completely. It is a gift. Listen to it. #proudhusband #classicalmusic #sacredmusic #humancreativity