Eternal Light: A Requiem

Musica Sacra sing with a dreamy otherworldly quality exqusite works by all these composers...including an incredible interpretation of Messiaen's towering "O Sacrum Convivium"...but wonderfully matched by the lovely new works by Meredith Monk, Robert Moran, Kim Sherman, and the heartbreaking requiem by Ricky Ian Gordon, "Water Music/A Two Part Requiem." Even Ligeti is represented with his groundbreaking "Lux Aeterna."

Composer, clarinetist, singer and educator Angel Bat Dawid announces the release of a new work, Requiem For Jazz. A 12-movement suite composed, arranged, and inspired in part by dialogue from Edward O. Bland’s 1959 film The Cry of Jazz, the album is a wide-ranging treatise on the African American story from one of its most astute narrators.

The course of my whole life would undoubtedly have been very different if, one October evening in 1955, I had not had been fortunate enough to hear a live rehearsal of Mozart’s Requiem. A few months earlier, on 1st August, I had turned 14, and luck would have it that my teacher, Joan Just (a composer, and the director of the Conservatoire in my home town of Igualada), decided to prepare the work with the choir of the local Schola Cantorum. That evening I was on my way to the Conservatoire to attend my usual counterpoint and harmony lessons with him; for some reason, I didn’t receive the message telling me that classes had been cancelled due to a rehearsal of the Requiem.