Musica Serena

'Keep Calm and Carry On' – that tiresomely ubiquitous slogan (I prefer Churchill's wartime motto, KBO, Keep Buggering On) – has inevitably been given a new lease of life by the Current Crisis. I've written before about the Keep Calm phenomenon, which originated in a wartime poster that was intended for publication in the event of Nazi occupation, and so was never released. 
  However, it seems that, poster or no poster, the phrase was in general use during the war. Here is Alan Garner, in his boyhood memoir Where Shall We Run To? (like The Stone Book Quartet a masterclass in the art of paring down), remembering his parents visiting him in hospital in 1941:
[I] kept asking when I was coming home. And they laughed and my father said keep calm and carry on, which everybody used to say...'
There is is: 'keep calm and carry on'. So the government must have been making use of a phrase already in common use, rather than coming up with an inspired and inspiring new slogan – one that, in the event, refused to die.

One of the most effective aids to keeping calm is surely music, the more serene and peaceful the better. Here is Musica Serena, a beautiful piece by the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks. It's best listened to with the eyes closed – but, if you're watching the video, look out for the composer in the audience, listening intently and shedding a quiet tear...