![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2eDXax9:
spoliamag:
by Lydia Brotherton, from our Virgo issue of Spolia
In November of 2012, as the last crazed election in the United States was coming to a close, I was on a train from Berlin to Namur, Belgium, to sing alongside six other women on a recording of music by the abbess (and poet, mystic, visionary, healer, saint) Hildegard von Bingen.
Our rehearsals for the recording took place in an old church along a busy commercial street in Namur, conveniently across from a Le Pain Quotidien. The church’s sanctuary was a wide expanse of unheated, ancient stone, lined on three sides with ornately carved wooden confessionals of a later period that hid frightening metal grates in their shadows. Freezing, we huddled in plastic chairs arranged near the altar, bordered by those dark, secret spaces; we learned the music together and in our breaks spent too much money on fancy sandwiches, chocolate croissants, and coffees. At night, we ate roast chicken and fries in a sort of agreed upon quiet. Or we spoke and maybe it just seemed like we were all on mute when we weren’t singing.
After rehearsals we began to record, in a church on an estate deep in the countryside, a place called Franc-Waret. Every morning we gathered into a van and set off from our hotel in Namur to the estate, where the French engineer and his assistant waited for us in a small stone room incongruously filled with recording equipment. In our breaks we wandered through pastoral scenes from 17th century Belgium: there was frost on the grass, sunlight sparkling off the church windows. We were served lunches in the basement of the chateau opposite the tiny church, under arching, crumbling, very cold white walls. According to the recording company, the church was chosen for its acoustic – a crystal warmth wrapped ideally in quiet countryside. And yes, the acoustic was beautiful out there, but I think the idea was rather to somehow record the isolation of our voices, to get down on tape how the six of us women had enclosed upon ourselves like nuns.
Keep reading
spoliamag:
by Lydia Brotherton, from our Virgo issue of Spolia
In November of 2012, as the last crazed election in the United States was coming to a close, I was on a train from Berlin to Namur, Belgium, to sing alongside six other women on a recording of music by the abbess (and poet, mystic, visionary, healer, saint) Hildegard von Bingen.
Our rehearsals for the recording took place in an old church along a busy commercial street in Namur, conveniently across from a Le Pain Quotidien. The church’s sanctuary was a wide expanse of unheated, ancient stone, lined on three sides with ornately carved wooden confessionals of a later period that hid frightening metal grates in their shadows. Freezing, we huddled in plastic chairs arranged near the altar, bordered by those dark, secret spaces; we learned the music together and in our breaks spent too much money on fancy sandwiches, chocolate croissants, and coffees. At night, we ate roast chicken and fries in a sort of agreed upon quiet. Or we spoke and maybe it just seemed like we were all on mute when we weren’t singing.
After rehearsals we began to record, in a church on an estate deep in the countryside, a place called Franc-Waret. Every morning we gathered into a van and set off from our hotel in Namur to the estate, where the French engineer and his assistant waited for us in a small stone room incongruously filled with recording equipment. In our breaks we wandered through pastoral scenes from 17th century Belgium: there was frost on the grass, sunlight sparkling off the church windows. We were served lunches in the basement of the chateau opposite the tiny church, under arching, crumbling, very cold white walls. According to the recording company, the church was chosen for its acoustic – a crystal warmth wrapped ideally in quiet countryside. And yes, the acoustic was beautiful out there, but I think the idea was rather to somehow record the isolation of our voices, to get down on tape how the six of us women had enclosed upon ourselves like nuns.
Keep reading
