Ghostly Psalms sprang from the recurring anxiety dreams of an ex-chorister. But not the usual ones of being left behind on tour, singing a spectacular false entry, or holding the music upside down in front of a paying audience. This memorable one, from 1982, was about crawling uphill through a rocky desert with a crystalline trickle of clear water flowing uphill, entering a fortified mediaeval village (like Conques, perhaps) on the hilltop through a culvert, and walking into the abbey while voices played all around. The ceremony highlighted several ways of parsing the universe and making sense of how it all worked: through pure harmonic number ratios, dynamic ecosystems, vibration, brain activity, memory, order, and chaos: organic, mechanical, mystical.

Ghostly Psalms and Spiritual Songs (1539), by fellow Cantabrigian, Myles Coverdale, was the first printed collection of metrical psalms in the vernacular. My own effort is more ghostly than psalmy, and is a concatenation of nearly three decades worth of compositional approaches to spiritual metaphors. Charles Ives had his Universe Symphony, my Ghostly Psalms might be dubbed a "Universe Cantata" or at least an "Ode to the Mysteries."

Why are ruined abbeys and temples generally more evocative than intact ones? As architectural structures return to the living earth whence we forced them, we witness the merging of hierarchical and dynamic systems, the piles of carved debris suspended between decay and becoming. Imagine Ghostly Psalms at Rievaulx, or Fountains abbeys, Tikal or anywhere that the roof is open to the sky and moss grows underfoot. Listen to it loud and immersively. Squint your ears from time to time.

Multifarious strings are featured throughout: recordings of my wind-powered fishing-line harps, Ellen’s 80’-long Long-String Instrument, Vietnamese Dan Bau, bowed cello harmonics... Each vibrates in different modes and adds up to a whole world of string theories.

Voices come and go, in chorus and solos, always articulating text – some intelligible, some not: compositional linguistics — language as music and music as language. The human voice, carrying with it the persona of an individual, means something different when singing, speaking, in unison, clusters, or spatially separated (here around 40 performers standing around the audience). How each vocalist relates to the whole group — with private thoughts in a public setting, inward and outward, in an ever-changing crowd — is a social dynamic emblematic of many human interactions.

Handbells play a cantus firmus — the Old Hundredth, “All People That on Earth Do Dwell” — stretched over nearly an hour, displaced beyond recognition; eviscerated so each bell is an event unto itself, loosely but inevitably tethered to the next.

Organ duets form three tropes, reflective interludes. The organ was once a machine to make noise and excite the resonance of a large sacred space. Liberated organ pipes also appear, one per nun, playing in Rhythmicon style (where the harmonic series determines not only the tones but their relative speed: low/slow, high/fast, proportionately). The Chinese Sheng and Thai Khaen mouth organs complete the tribute to all things organic.

2 JUNGLE LITANY
(Featuring conch shell trumpet, magnetic snake eggs, balloon flute, dismembered qeej, turtle shell, chorus, soprano-Maria Jette, speakers-Donald Engstrom, Carrie Henneman Shaw)

The jungle (a living, breathing architecture if ever there was one) is a pharmacy, a supermarket, and a home improvement center, depending on what you are looking for. There are no weeds in this ecosystem, everything affects the growth of everything else. Everything has its niche, a harmony developed over evolutionary timescales. A living lesson in orchestration.

Names speak volumes. They describe the namer as much as the named. You can infer a thousand stories in their everyday poetry. Jungle Litany brings together five naming systems or languages (English, Spanish, Creole, Mayan, and Latin) for the ‘same’ list of 95 Belizean vascular plants. Are they really the same? What do they tell us about why different people go to the wilderness and what they do there? While we are jabbering away in different tongues, what is happening to our forest home? What is the sound of an ethnobotanical requiem? Sung in the language of plants? An herbal tonic. The conch calls us to order and the invocation begins.