The Blue Notebooks "Shadow journal" was originally released in The Blue Notebooks (2004), the second solo album by German born British composer Max Richter. While classically trained, the musician is also influenced by Rock and Electronic music or by modern minimalists such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich or Arvo Pärt. Max …
Susanna Wallumrød: Who by fire
Released in 2011 on the ECM record label, If Grief Could Wait is a remarkable cross-genre recording featuring indie pop and jazz Norwegian singer Susanna Wallumrød, Swiss Baroque harp player Giovanna Pessi, Italian nyckelharpa (the Swedish keyed fiddle) player Marco Ambrosini and Swiss-based viola de gamba player Jane …
Sam Jackson: The Gramophone
Sam Jackson is a Dublin based pianist, but when I heard "The Gramophone" for the first time on the radio, I mistook it for what could have been a track from an early recording from the Esbjörn Svensson Trio. Sam Jackson's music is of the same calibre. "The feeling I have something to say, the great difficulty …
John Cage: In a landscape
Referring to classical Indian thought and influenced by Gita Sarabhai, the Indian musician he was tutoring in the mid-1940s, John Cage formulated the idea that the purpose of music was to “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences”. Written as a clear homage to Erik Satie, “In a …
About Spellbinding Music
Why is it that a particular piece of music, a tune or a song will move us in such a way that it will stop us in our tracks, send shivers up our spine or give us goose bumps? Spiritual or secular musical traditions such as Sufi music, Gnawa music, plainchant, gospel, blues etc. all imply elements of introspection, …