| An exquisitely haunting disc of meditative music accompanied by subtle percussion.
--CD Review: The Basic 50 Definitive
World Music Library
The Harmonic Chant is a contemplative musical discipline I founded, named and have been developing with fellow researchers since 1973. From the beginning, I have had just one real aim: to seek out a true, symbolic musical language, simple and universal, which could express the quest for contact with a level of being higher than oneself.
This aim is certainly the heritage of the Harmonic Chant as found in Tibet and Mongolia, where I received my first inspiration. As an experimental filmmaker and musician, I was searching for a 'refracted' or 'prismatic' sound when I came across the sacred overtone chanting of the Gyuto and Gyume monks of Tibet and the traditional 'hoomi' singers of Mongolia, all of whom I worked or studied with thereafter. These singers, and their counterparts in Tuvan Russian, each produce in their chanting several notes at the same time, that is, a fundamental note and one or more soaring harmonics, or overtones, of the fundamental note.
I was inspired -- reminded, one could say -- by the sounds of these monks, shamans and singers to learn to chant in the same way. My aim and inspiration was to bring to life a new, global sacred music emanating from this most basic music universal - the harmonic series - present in all vocal or instrumental sound. The harmonic series is to sound what the color spectrum is to light.
--David Hykes
Hykes is in a real sense a serious composer, reacting to philosphical assumptions behind Western art music and reaching to the East for different models and inspirations.
--Fanfare |
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