John Izod, professor of screeen analysis at Stirling University, chronicles the start
of autumn in 2004

Friday 3 September
To Edinburgh Playhouse for Rambert Dance Company with the RSNO and performances of three song cycles by Mahler. In the auditorium, Kim Brandstrup's 'Songs of a Wayfarer' is the most accessible. Working against a backdrop of luminous panels – their colour changes with the music's mood – the soloists dance a love triangle, painting the topography of their emotions in scintillating abstract shapes. A roar of delighted gratitude from the audience for this.      However, the final piece receives subdued but prolonged applause. Andrew Tudor's 'Dark Elegies' (1937) exploits the stately courtesies of rural folk dance, winding the performers into a human dial. But their chronometer is fractured by grief as the community dance their mourning for the death of its children in a disaster. We get home to news of mass slaughter in Beslan. As Jann Parry writes in Sunday's Observer, the piece has lost none of its prescience and it dwells in the mind as the dreadful events in Russia unfold.

Saturday 4 September
Jazz, Champagne, good company. A wedding party high above sun-drenched farms in the Cleveland Hills. The son of one of my friends from undergraduate days has married. Marker of the passage of yet another swathe of time.

Sunday 5 September
Princes Street, for the fireworks closing the Edinburgh Festival. Four Chinese couples with small children spread a tarpaulin in front of us and snack on hardboiled eggs. Meanwhile the men take digital pictures of their kids. People shouldering past to find the best vantage point are intrigued by the happy scene and give them space. An announcer calls for a minute's silence for the grieving of Beslan and the huge assembly stills. Scotland at its best.

SR autumn 2004