Athlantis

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Free Music Notes for Athlantis

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Athlantis Poster

As a teenager, I played in the youth orchestra, as well as played bass in some top 40 bands. I listened to a lot of classical music, as well as stuff like Prince, Bad Brains, etc. I moved over to Seattle in the early 90s, where I met the jazz violinist Michael White, who was an enormous influence on me. At Cornish college I went to talks by John Cage, Lou Harrison, Toru Takemitsu, which made a strong impression. In '98 I studied with the great violinist Dr. N. Rajam in Mumbai, which really changed the way I heard music. I'm interested in "sound", and in all the musical traditions that treat of it. I've met a lot of great musicians and learned from them.

I played viola with different bands, like Bill Frisell and Secret Chiefs, and created string arrangements for a lot of other artists, Laurie Anderson, Blonde Redhead, Laura Veirs, the Stares, and many more. It's great to collaborate with musicians, to see how it works, from different points of view, how it sounds, how they do it, what one listens to in sound. I don't believe you can know an objective music with notes, tempos, etc; rather, it's mostly about the process which is intersubjective. At the same time, when the thought of music appears, I bring it out. The CDs that I've recorded, 7 NADEs and Theater of Mineral NADEs, the Story of Iceland, Live Low to the Earth in the Iron Age, Virginal Co-ordinates, are mostly about the thought of music, the idea that you get, when you think of a sound, which triggers a memory, for example, which makes you feel a certain way.

I always love to read Renaissance era literature and philosophy, so writing the choral piece Athlantis was a great chance to interact with one of my favorites, Giordano Bruno. The book that I worked with is called Cantus Circaeus. I went to the Ritman library in Amsterdam and held the original edition in my hands; I went through it page by page. Surprisingly, it was a very small book, sort of like those moleskin notebooks that people carry around these days. While composing, I sometimes felt that I was sharing a kind of joke, or riddle, with Bruno, that we were almost laughing together. I don't know why, but I was compelled to combine his text with some obscure poems from Bishop Marbode of Rennes, and some lines from the Hungarian epic Planctus Destructionis.

The piece is something like an oratorio, with the incredible singers Mike Patton and Jessika Kenney on the main parts. I studied and set the text; I did the ground work and created the musical space. All of the singers, choir and soloists, came in and inhabited it and made it their own."

- Eyvind Kang, 2007

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