February 11–18, 1999
disc quicks
Michael Atherton
Ankh: The Sound of Ancient Egypt
(Celestial Harmonies)
Atherton's Ankh is a work of astonishing beauty and imagination. As a professor of music at the University of Western Sydney, Atherton was seduced by an exhibition at the Australian Museum on life and death in ancient Egypt. Looking at the myriad millennia-old representations of music and dance, Atherton was naturally inclined to dream of what that music may have sounded like. He started with the ancient instruments still played in the Middle East like the nay (flute) and tar (frame drum) and worked backwards. His detailed liner notes explain how he made his decisions for imagining a music that has vanished, leaving no clues.
The result—incorporating drums and percussion, flutes and reeds, stringed relatives of harps and lutes—is ethereal and serene, not at all tainted with a new-age stain. One section rings of the oud and drum combinations of modern Egypt. Other parts are haunting minimal explorations that have as much to do with Japanese temple music as they do with taqsim. Mina Kinaridis' riveting soprano gives voice to ancient hieroglyphs for perhaps the first time in centuries. Atherton borrows from many traditions, in one instance even suggesting Gregorian chant. The sections shift too frequently to use Ankh as a trance/meditation disc, but the sheer beauty of the simple compositions are guaranteed to inspire.
