"What is this music?" Fundamentally, it's an exploration of what happens when an improvisatory instrumental voice (saxophone) is placed into the world of early vocal music, which has elements of both improvisation and formal structure. In reality, it's an adventure in which the four male voices of the Hilliard Ensemble travel the 14th and 15th-century territory of Morales and Dufay, visit the ...
The 1978 recording of Reich's seminal Music for 18 Musicians still astounds. Listeners aware of the talents of such bands as Tortoise or Gas or of DJs such as Vladislav Delay or Aphex Twin and fans of Warp records or the click, cut and glitch of recent post-techno could all do with checking out what continues to be vital source material. Lovers of Bach, Satie, Stravinsky, Nancarrow, Cage, ...
This package presents two of Arvo Pürt's most familiar works--already indisputable classics--Tabula Rasa and Fratres. For all of their "minimalist" technique, there's a fathomless--call it timeless, if you will--beauty to these scores the deeper you plunge into their hypnotic sound world. The best place to discover them remains ECM's breakthrough release Tabula Rasa. Unlike ...
It's been six years since these same performers got together to create one of the decade's more unusual experiments in musical alchemy. Beginning with the raw materials of early music and modern jazz, the four male voices of the Hilliard Ensemble joined with jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek to see what would happen when the proper measure of old music and new style were combined, shaped by the ...
It would be impossible adequately to describe the inherent haunting beauty of Pérotin's music, or to fully detail its far-reaching influence in latter-12th-century France. The opening "Viderunt omnes" is a perfect illustration of the surprising vitality and highly charged sense of forward motion that can be obtained with relatively simple rhythmic impulses and harmonic devices. The male voices of ...