David Kettlewell died, of heart disease, in April 2011. As he wished, this website is being maintained in memory of his ideas, and his influence on the people he met and taught. All contact details containing his name are null and void, of course, but further details on any of the pages can be obtained from his brother pkettlewell@skynet.be. Throughout, texts have been left in the present tense, as he wrote them.
--------------------------------------David Kettlewell was born in England, lives in Sweden, and has been a guest-professor at Tartu University in Estonia. He has also travelled in many countries playing the harp and training teachers in whole-person education, showing how - when you create the right conditions and atmosphere - 'ordinary' people can do extraordinary things.
He has a diploma in management, a music degree with conducting as his major study, and a PhD in musicology. He also plays harpsichord, organ and synth, transcribes old music manuscripts, writes calligraphy and creates fonts, paints on sheepskins, bakes bread and spins wool, always preferring to share these skills and insights with others. Having had a period living with sheep and goats and working with their products, these days he produces music, film and web-sites with his Macintosh computer-studio from his kitchen table in the red-timber forest farm-house in Little Leaf-Sea in the north of Sweden.
The common thread in everything he does is that people should feel good - about themselves and about those around them: music-making as a way towards personal development, musical thinking as a model for human harmony. It’s a question of identifying what feels good - consonance - and what doesn’t - dissonance - and finding the resolution between them: musica humana, the Renaissance approach to human harmony: integrating a variety of different skills and showing how every individual is needed for the unique talents which he and she bring to every situation, weaving the diverse threads into one unified whole tapestry - whether the project is painting the walls like a renaissance manuscript, putting on an opera with indians and pirates, or making a film about a mediæval church.
