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Friday 04 July 2008
Listen Now - 04072008 |
Sometimes called the Gregorian chant of Japan, shomyo is Buddhist ritual chant that goes back more than 1000 years. The two major schools of shomyo, Shingon and Tendai, were transmitted by Japanese priests from T'ang dynasty China in the 9th century. Beautiful and hypnotic, shomyo is the voice of a 1000 years. We'll also hear the Japanese bamboo flute, the shakuhachi, played by two masters currently in Australia for the World Shakuhachi Festival, Kaoru Kakizakai and Christopher Yohmei Blasdel. And one of Japan's greatest living shakuhachi players, Katsuya Yokoyama, will explain some of the Zen concepts underlying the honkyoku, the sacred music of Zen.
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Friday 27 June 2008
Listen Now - 27062008 |
A celebration of the voice this week with choirs great and small, from the valleys of Wales to the green hills of Alabama where the tradition of Sacred Harp Singing lives on. Sometimes called 'shape note singing' because the musical notation uses special shapes to help the singers, Sacred Harp Singing is a Protestant style of four-part singing that takes its name from a famous hymn book published in America in 1844 called The Sacred Harp. The sound is raw and intense and after decades in decline has undergone a revival in the United States, and around the world, partly due to the success of the soundtrack to the film, Cold Mountain, which featured Sacred Harp Singing.
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Friday 20 June 2008
Listen Now - 20062008 |
Download Audio - 20062008
With his long grey hair and weathered face, Don Conreaux looks a lot like Willie Nelson. But he's no country singer. Don Conreaux is the Gong Master. "The Gong Master of Ceremonies", he adds. "Most everything that we do is a ceremony." Don is Artistic Director of the Mysterious Tremendum Sacred Tone Ensemble which travels the world providing social rites of passage. These events which might take place in a concert hall, in a desert or at Stonehenge combine sacred conch playing, overtone chanting, Himalayan Singing Bowl improvisations and gong performances. But these are no ordinary gongs. They are massive disc-shaped Tam Tams, one metre wide, made of copper, tin and nickel and struck with a felt-covered mallet. According to Don, the gong is directly descended from the Bronze Age 5000 years ago when they were used as a spiritual technology for healing by shamans. It's a lineage he happily accepts.
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Friday 13 June 2008
Listen Now - 13062008 |
Lake Wobegon is a small town in the American state of Minnesota that exists only in the mind of humorist and writer Garrison Keillor. In a rambling reminiscence that may or may not be true, Keillor explains the difficulties of keeping a music director at the nearby Holy Trinity Lutheran church.
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1.35pm AEST