There is no more apposite coalescence between Ronald Stevenson the musician and Hugh MacDiarmid the poet than in those lines (a lyric from the long philosophical poem-sequence To Circumjack Cencrastus), which Stevenson set around 1975 as The Song of the Nightingale. There are few singers in today's world, even though there is much left to sing about. But the singer – if he can be found – is of necessity a solitary: an individual (nay an individualist) whose pipings, heard perhaps in Eden, are now all too often swamped in the chaotic noise of what passes in so many areas, not least in music (where noise is at least a concomitant) as the hallmark of progress.