The front of the shop is roomy and serene, fitted out like a relaxing garden room, with plants, a dozen glass-topped tables and cushioned wicker chairs.
But this one is all feeling, born from New Orderish tinkerings with primitive music software on an Atari computer before growing into a handsomely serene wig-out somewhere between Tindersticks and Billy Ocean's Red Light Spells Danger.
It arises not out of serene detachment but out of striving, labouring, producing.
Guests prepare their own meals in a big, well-appointed kitchen — the most bustling spot in the otherwise serene grounds — then spread out through the lodge, or sit under a grape arbor.
Yet it was the Jupiter Symphony, K551, in C Major, that stood out, both serene and noble, flowing with a vital energy that lent its own impetus to the finale where the fugal writing – who better than Gardiner to demonstrate Mozart vying with Bach? – had a brilliant precision.
Villages of colorful streets and brightly painted wooden houses dot the islands, and serene, sandy coves stretch out along its shores.
"We so desperately want a map that lays out in serene pastels the paths our lives are supposed to take that we create them, we gravitate to them, we embrace and internalize them, all to no good end, for as my friend Gordon Livingston says, 'When the map does not comport to the ground, the map is wrong".
The novel is also a longer, more attentive, more serene, and better-thought-out interrogation of the world.
It subsides in the final gallery of late work, where a wall of shadowy, wonderfully awkward works on silk provide a serene yet majestic fade-out.
(His music keeps surging and shifting, but it's also smoothed-out and serene; some of the group language shared among Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter finds its way in there).
