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An Italian Ground
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Thomas Morley, An Alman
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The Air of the Andes
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David
Kettlewell - gut-strung Irish harp
Kjell Persson - theorboed guitar
Karin Skoglund - Swedish chord-zither
Recording - Kjell --- Production - David
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- four tracks, 11-18 minutes each -
One track, the Alman, is also on the the sampler CD Music for an Historic Church
The whole album is available for downlaod or listening on-line, in Flash format .swf, Mac audio .aiff or PC audio .wav, here
Christopher Simpson is best known today as the author of a major book about the Viola da Gamba - The Division Viol (London, 1667 etc.). But, in his own time he was a famed more as composer, as a teacher and as an improviser; and together with Agostino Agazzari, Michael Praetorius and Diego Ortiz, he is one of four sensitive and inspiring men of genius, from four different countries, who tell us how improvisation worked in Renaissance times: and he did it so effectively and affectively that we can use his approach unchanged today, to produce a music which is urgent and fresh, while retaining the sense of order which is so healing in the earlier kinds of music. The first three tracks show how it can work in practice.
The Air of the Andes is rather different. I was invited to work in Argentina, helping teachers discover how a view of the whole person, honouring the emotional side of things as well as the intellectual, could enhance learning. In Mendoza in the Andes foothills, a gang of student-teachers had organised a conference - 400 of them, declaring unanimously that through music, poetry and drama, English was ALIVE! Somehow this was linked with a process in me, where I gradually was able to grow from playing melodies all the time, and simply play what I felt at the moment, something which I do more and more, and which has a very particular emotional effect on those who listen - or draw, or visualise - to it...