NEWS FEATURE: REVIEW: Recordings offer many sides of spiritual music

c. 1996 Religion News Service (RNS)-If you’re looking for music with a distinctly spiritual flavor, here’s a sampling of CDs from Catholic, Orthodox and American-communal Christian traditions as well as others that stir the brain cells and alternately soothe and jangle the sensibilities. “Early Shaker Spirituals” (Rounder). American musicians from Aaron Copland to Richie Havens […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-If you’re looking for music with a distinctly spiritual flavor, here’s a sampling of CDs from Catholic, Orthodox and American-communal Christian traditions as well as others that stir the brain cells and alternately soothe and jangle the sensibilities.


“Early Shaker Spirituals” (Rounder).

American musicians from Aaron Copland to Richie Havens have drawn on the simple eloquence of Shaker music. The songs of this communal, celibate sect were “learned” through a kind of epiphany as singers wandered in the woods listening to birds and praying. At their best, tunes like “Simple Gifts” have the power and clarity of childhood dreams.

These recordings were made among the few surviving Shakers in 1963, 1966, 1970 and 1976. The singers are getting on in years, and their voices are neither polished nor assured. But the songs are more important than their singers. Neither entertainment nor an aid to meditation, the 40 short hymns and songs collected here are an invaluable resource for composers, songwriters and singers.

“Masterpieces of Orthodox Spirituality III,” Akafist (Rusa).

This masterful Russian men’s choir has not yet made an album that equals the emotional power of its concerts. This one conveys the profound inward focus of conductor Andrei Malutin and the voices’ instinctive blend. What is missing is immediacy of expression and those spectacular bass notes.

The answer may be as simple as a change in production techniques. The choir was recorded in St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Philadelphia, whose echoing space swallows the basses and reduces ensemble sound to a reverent, reverberent vagueness. Closer miking (particularly at the low end) and a more judicious use of room sound might be less New Age, but those impossible low notes would get right in listeners’ faces, where they belong.

“Spirit of the Zither,” The Carmelite Nun of Lucon (Milan/Jade).

If you check the smallest of this disc’s small print, you will see the name Sister Claire Benedicte listed as the composer of these songs. But nowhere else is her name used, and the cover shows only her hands and the tip of her nose beyond her black-and-white habit. We may be reasonably sure that she is not in this for the money.

With titles like “Peace and Silence,” “Solitude” and “The Light of Midday,” these spacious, echoing meditations might be expected to sound alike. But it is the sister’s gift to bring a separate mood and sensibility to each. Her playing cannot be called brilliant, but it is technically solid. And she brings an unimpeachable moral authority to every note.

“Ole Ole,” Rachid Taha (Mango).

Produced by former Gong guitarist Steve Hillage, this album achieves the oil-and-water combination of ambient dance music, guitar and the synthesized Algerian dance music called pop-rai. Each track occupies its own sonic universe without losing context with the others, and the result is one of the most compelling world-music albums of the year.

Taha is a convincing singer and rapper, and Hillage factors in women’s voices (Kirsty Hawkshaw, Suchitra Pillai Malik) with an eye less to chorus backups than to competing counterpoint. Synthesizers take a back seat to various stringed instruments, including violin sections, and most of the drumming is on actual drums. So the beats define head-bobbing grooves while the “sound” of the beats is rich, varied and organic.


“Gorecki: Three Pieces in Old Style; Good Night; Kleines Requiem, I Fiamminghi,” the Orchestra of Flanders: Rudolf Werthen, conductor (TelArc).

Fans in love with the soaring minimalism of Gorecki’s Third Symphony may be disappointed by the modernist rigor of much of his other work. But this album should both satisfy and stretch Gorecki lovers, its smaller-scaled works combining the tremulous lyricism of the Third Symphony with a slightly more adventurous harmonic palette.

The proto-minimalist “Three Pieces in the Old Style” dates from 1966, while the other two works come from the last few years. “Good Night,” a requiem for soprano, alto flute, three tam-tams and piano, comes the closest in spirit to the Third, while the Kleines Requiem (subtitled “Requiem for a Polka”) flits between increasingly manic Gershwinlike allegros to slow movements of great depth and gravity.

“Like Minds,” Psychograss (Sugar Hill).

This album is not as weird as the cover art, featuring band members in crazed poses and eye-mangling costumes, would lead you to believe. But fiddler Darol Anger (Turtle Island String Quartet), banjo ace Tony Trischka and their cohorts do work up a fine atonal frenzy on Jimi Hendrix’s “Third Stone from the Sun.” And the rest of this all-instrumental collection, while never venturing quite that far out again, features much fine playing. Guitarist David Grier and mandolinist Mike Marshall more than hold their own with Trischka and Anger. Highlights include Anger’s mini-suite “Creaking Tree,” Trischka’s “Garlic & Sapphires” and Marshall’s long-limbed hoedown “Hot Nickels.”

MJP END SPENCER

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