SKU: HL.48180968

Twenty Lessons in Harmony by Olivier Messiaen is a book in which the author describes his perceptions of colours in music and the importance of the fusion of sound and sight. Often depicting chords as precise colours and shades, he explains how he perceived harmony through a visual prism. This description is completed by these twenty lessons for SATB to help controlling the harmonies. Twenty Lessons in Harmony has shown itself very helpful for a better understanding and interpretation of Messiaen's music. Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was a French organist and composer passionate about ornithology and one of the most important composers of his century. Inspired by Japanese music, he had a very special way of composing and his work can be identified by its complexity, its diatonic aspect, its harmony with limited transposition, its colour and its additive rhythms. He composed many works related to ornithology and birdsong, including the Bird Catalogue in 7 volumes and the Treatise on Rhythm, Colour and Ornithology in 7 volumes.

SKU: BT.MUSM570367917

Thomas Simaku's  La Leggiadra Luna  arranged for choir a capella. The music begins with a song-like expression introduced at a slow pace, as if emerging from the remoteness of time itself. It is clearly based on the musical utterance of the 'white modality', but these modal segments are constantly surrounded by chromatic inflections throughout the work. Each section of the choir pursues its own path, but during a compositional process of ‘zooming in and out’, as it were, their individual qualities are highlighted. It is as if the initial sound object - which to begin with was far away- is brought nearer to us, in time and space. A variety of shortsegments, predominantly modal, but stemming from different chromatic ‘locations’, are often superimposed. The task of filtering out this 'amourphous' texture and giving its constituent elements - be they melodic or harmonic, or a combination of both - a renewed identity, becomes an essential compositional aim, through which the process of crystallization occurs. The main strategy of the piece is thus exploring the interrelationship between these two sound-worlds (modal and chromatic) and their temporal qualities (ancient and modern), musical or otherwise.