Meeting Is Over

SKU: PR.164002480

UPC: 680160038237.

This work is my second for a solo woodwind and a solo percussionist, following Firewing: The Flame and the Moth for oboe and percussion by nine years. The earlier piece followed a specific story line, and pitted the oboe against the percussionist as both adversary and lover. In Spirit Realms, my aim was not only to juxtapose the very different sounds of flute (plus alto flute and piccolo) against a large array of percussion, but also to attempt three different meditative spaces, each named for a different type of spiritual practice. The musical means of expression is very different for each of the three movements (as is the instrumentation), although they share a common scale-source: the looped pentatonic scale I have been developing over the last several years.   The first movement is called Prayer Tunnel, and is named for the Eskimo practice of solo meditation within a tunnel of ice blocks. This is said to be a means of overcoming demons within, and in my musical rendering it takes the form of an unaccompanied alto flute solo. The flute begins rather angrily, full of tension, but in the course of the solo passage manages to slowly unwind. The percussionist then plays the exact same music the alto flute had played....on seven tuned cymbals. Toward the end, the alto flute re-enters, its original meditation having fused with its mirror.   Kiva represents the circular, subterranean pit in which the Anasazi practiced their religion, a form of which still can be found in the Hopi tribes of the American southwest. These are not spaces for solo meditation, but rather a group meeting place in which only the sanctified are permitted. After an introductory invocation (dove call), the music begins. At first, it is flowing, in a repetitive double-five meter. It then traces several sections, with metric shifts forcing the pulse to race faster and faster, until it halves itself in the coda and returns to the exact pulse of the beginning. The flutist here uses the C flute, and the percussionist plays on both pitched (marimba) and unpitched instruments (various drums and struck sources).   Zendo is the meditation room used by Zen Buddhists. My music begins with another invocation (wind chimes, temple cup gongs, and temple blocks), then moves on to a slow subject stated by the flute. The subject is taken up by the vibraphone, and after several modulations and tempo changes, the flutist takes up the piccolo. The music continues higher and higher, and faster and faster (Zen meditation is NOT all about becoming lost!) until it breaks free at the very end. The percussionist is put through his paces in this movement, having to reach a staggering number of instruments in a short time.   Spirit Realms was commissioned by, and is dedicated to, the Armstrong Duo. -- Dan Welcher.

SKU: GI.G-VHS-478

The astonishing adventure of Taizé can best be understood when we learn what has marked the life of its founder, Brother Roger. This video, which provides a kind of in-depth encounter with him, has no commentary. It is Brother Roger himself who tells his story and that of Taizé. Intense experiences in childhood, an adolescence marked by doubt and the rediscovery of prayer, the beginnings of a vocation, risks taken in the midst of war during the early years in Taiz?, the beginnings of the community and its deepest inspiration, meetings with Pope John XXIII-these are some of the steps that Brother Roger retraces here.

SKU: HL.14030676

ISBN 9788759863879. Danish.

The 'Ten short piano pieces' with the title Sommerferie i Blekinge (Summer Holiday in Blekinge) (1916) have not been preserved in their complete form. The only existing source is a manuscript in Rued Langgaard's hand that lacks the first and last pages with sections of the music. This means that the entire first piano piece with the title Paa rejse (Travelling) is missing as well as most of Piece II, Mode (Meeting) (only the conclusion of this piece has been preserved). A large fragment exists of Piece X, Aften med Dans (Evening with Dancing), but the conclusion is missing. The manuscript is to be found at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen (RLS 83,2). On the first page,Langgaard has merely written 'Piano Pieces 1916': the real title and titles of the movements in the first two pieces derives from other sources. In 2008, the Rued Langgaard Society asked the Danish composer Niels Marthinsen (b. 1963) to add to the work, the aim being to create a 'performance version'. Marthinsen composed a complete new first piece - Paa rejse (Travelling) - and allowed it to merge with the preserved concluding fragment of Langgaard's second piece, Mode (Meeting). Niels Marthinsen further composed a conclusion to the incomplete Piece X, Aften med Dans (Evening with Dancing), and in it incorporated a reference to the first piece, so that his additions came to form a frame round what hasbeen preserved of Langgaard's work. This supplemented version was given its first performance by Berit Johansen Tange in 2008. The overall title and titles of the individual pieces refer to a summer stay in 1913, i.e. three years before the work was composed, when the then 20-year-old composed was on holiday in Kyrkhult in Blekinge (Sweden).

SKU: GI.G-VHS-479

In Rooted in Love, Brother Roger told of what had inspired the foundation of Taizé and the beginnings of the Community. Servants of Trust is given over to the welcoming of young people, it leads Taizé's founder to talk of the life of faith, of prayer, listening, and of the challenges facing Christians today. For the last thirty years, young people from all over the world have been coming to Taizé in ever greater numbers. Why? How did the Community come to open wide its doors and to travel the world, gathering hundreds of thousands of young people into its Pilgrimage of Trust on Earth? Brother Roger responds here to these questions, as he did in Part One.

SKU: BT.AMP-106-130

Everyone will instantly recognise this great patriotic hymn that is often thought of as the second English national anthem. This brass band arrangement by Philip Sparke is sure to be used over and over again at your band’s performances. Your audience will not be able to help themselves from joining in with this rousing song everytime you use it as the final item in any concert.

Bachs Anstellung im Jahr 1723 als Kantor der Thomaskirche in Leipzig brachte die Verpflichtung mit sich, für jeden Sonntagsgottesdienst eine neue Kantate zu schreiben. Der Choral Jesus bleibet meine Freude umfasst beide Teile der Kantate und ist ungewöhnlich kunstvoll ausgearbeitet, mehr wie eine der Arien denn eine Kantate. Philip Sparkes Transkription dieses beliebten Kantatensatzes ist eine wahre Bereicherung Ihres Repertoires.

Sir Hubert Parry (1848-1918) set William Blake’s Preface to Milton to music for a rally of the ‘Fight for the Right’ movement in the Queen’s Hall, London, in 1916. It became more generally known as ‘Jerusalem’ when Parry conducted it in 1918 at a concert to mark the final stage in the Votes for Women Campaign, after which it was adopted by the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (and is still sung at meetings of WI Groups all over Britain). Sir Edward Elgar added his orchestral accompaniment in time for the Leeds Festival of 1922, since then it has become a popular national hymn. The theme is uniquely English and there is an undertone of 19th century politics. Thisarrangement by Philip Sparke is sure to be used over and over again at your band’s performances.