The subtitle of "A Bridge of Dreams," a 2011 album with Ars Nova Copenhagen and Paul Hillier, is "a cappella Music from the Pacific Rim," and it includes the works of composers from Australia, New Zealand, California, and China, all of which draws in part, if not entirely, on non-Western musical traditions. Lou Harrison left the accompaniment for his Mass for Saint Cecilia's Day open-ended and here Andrew Lawrence-King provides a discreet undergirding using medieval harp, psaltery, and hurdy-gurdy. It bears a strong ...
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The subtitle of "A Bridge of Dreams," a 2011 album with Ars Nova Copenhagen and Paul Hillier, is "a cappella Music from the Pacific Rim," and it includes the works of composers from Australia, New Zealand, California, and China, all of which draws in part, if not entirely, on non-Western musical traditions. Lou Harrison left the accompaniment for his Mass for Saint Cecilia's Day open-ended and here Andrew Lawrence-King provides a discreet undergirding using medieval harp, psaltery, and hurdy-gurdy. It bears a strong resemblance to Medieval plainchant mass in its predominantly monophonic, melismatic writing, and its modal character. The modes, though, are Harrison's own, based on traditional Indonesian and Chinese scales. The mass is a beautifully expressive, immediately engaging piece that reveals a fresh facet of the composer's brilliantly expansive imagination. In The Seafarer, Lawrence-King plays psaltery and harp in his arrangement of music from Chinese composer Liu Sola's 2009 chamber opera, The...
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