Welcome to the John Kersey Foundation
Thank you for your
interest in the Foundation and the work of John Kersey. This
official website
provides information on the organisations and projects
supported by the Foundation, with links to further sites where
applicable. It also provides information on John
Kersey and his activities as musician, educationalist and cleric. Work
Independent scholar and polymath John Kersey has been internationally recognised for his work in several fields.- As a concert pianist, he founded the record label Romantic Discoveries Recordings, which specialises in releasing world premiere recordings of unknown piano music of the nineteenth-century on CD, and which in 2006 released the first ever recording of several incomplete Beethoven piano sonatas.
- As an educational consultant, his firm Marquess Educational Consultants, Ltd., has provided thousands of expert opinions on international educational issues to law firms for use in proceedings.
- As an ordained minister in the Liberal Catholic tradition, he leads the Liberal Catholic Apostolic Church and is also UK representative for two historic ecumenical communions based in the USA.
- He is also president of the educational outreach of the LCAC, European-American University, and directs the EAU Henselt Library of free-to-download rare scores of nineteenth-century piano music and the EAU Mathew Center devoted to research into the independent sacramental movement.
Background
Beginning in 2005, a series of fortunate circumstances enabled John Kersey to devote himself full-time to creative, artistic and spiritual projects - the groundwork of what has become today's Foundation.
John
Kersey's approach stands as a determined counterblast to the fashions
of the prevailing mainstream. He is a classical liberal and libertarian
thinker who has been an open critic of the subjugation of the arts and
academia to government-led ideologies, and whose theological
perspective of High Church Liberalism has become almost invisible in
the mainstream denominations today. His solutions are based on
individualist, complex paradigms in the place of the current dominance
of authoritarian groupthink and naïve reductionism. To reach them, he
draws on a web of cultural influences that ranges from the
pre-Constantinian church to punk anarchism via the medieval
guilds, Victorian working-class culture and the democratic
education movement.Identified as highly gifted in childhood, John Kersey combined his grammar school education in North London with intensive study of the piano at the Royal College of Music, where he would go on to graduate as the top pianist of his year, taking a First, eleven prizes and a research master's degree. After a period of graduate study at Christ's College, Cambridge, he returned to the RCM to take up a junior fellowship. Finding the aesthetics of the commercially and government-driven musical establishment of the time unattractive, and state-sector academia no more conducive, he developed a broadly-based teaching and management career in independent education while maintaining his musical and spiritual interests and taking a second master's degree in history via distance learning. In time, the same combination of commercial imperative and authoritarian centralisation that he had observed in music cast its influence rather too close to the educational arena for comfort, and it became time to seek a way of life that offered greater opportunities for creative freedom and spiritual fulfilment.
John
Kersey has received recognition for his work from around the world,
with principal honours including the Medal of Honour for Science and
Art of the Österreichische Albert Schweitzer-Gesellschaft, the
Friedrich Silcher Medal in Bronze of the Chorgruppe Aartal of the
Dill-Sängerbund of the Hessischer Saengerbund, Hessen, Germany, an
honorary visiting professorship from the Parthasarathy International
Cultural Academy in Chennai, India, honorary degrees from universities
in Africa and America, and knighthoods from chivalric orders in Hungary
(where he also received an honorary military commission) and
Malta. A Freeman of the City of London and Liveryman of the
Worshipful Company of Musicians, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Arts (elected at age 25), the Royal Geographical Society and the
Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.His interests are a not-always-predictable combination of past and present. Passionate about spiritual jazz of the 1970s, he is also interested in person-centred psychology of the Jung/Carl Rogers schools, Victoriana and Edwardiana of all kinds, London's suburbia, and diverse topics in the worlds of the Gothic, arcane, esoteric and obscure. He is usually to be found clad in tweed and surrounded by piles of books and papers.
>>Formal biography
>>For further information, discography, list of publications etc., please see the links at the top of the page.
